THE DECLINE OF DINESH ALICE B. LLOYD

HOW ENTITLEMENTS ATE THE BUDGET YUVAL LEVIN & JAMES C. CAPRETTA

OCTOBER 1, 2018 • $5.99 • WEEKLYSTANDARD.COM Contents October 1, 2018 • Volume 24, Number 4

2 The Scrapbook Hurricane Trump, Beto male, & more 5 Casual J. F. Riordan, buried under tote bags 6 Editorials Nothing More Than Feelings • Run, Mike, Run 9 Comment Trump tries something surprising: self-control by Fred Barnes 5 The (ever slower) march of Time by Philip Terzian Wurst case scenario: Merkel’s coalition calamity by Christopher Caldwell Articles

13 Astroturfing on Capitol Hill by Tony Mecia & Haley Byrd A lot of those spontaneous calls from constituents are the work of lobbyists

16 See Anything, Say Something? by Naomi Schaefer Riley The pros and cons of ‘mandated reporting’

17 The Battle of the Bobs by Ethan Epstein A surprisingly competitive Senate race in New Jersey

19 Great Books—32 Percent Off by Philip Luke Jeffery 6 St. John’s College lowers tuition, a lot

Features

21 A Failure of Responsibility by Yuval Levin & James C. Capretta Washington fiddles while the entitlement problem metastasizes

30 Same As He Ever Was by Alice B. Lloyd In the 1980s, Dinesh D’Souza made his bones with puerile antics at the ‘Dartmouth Review’—American politics has finally caught up

Books & Arts

37 Help Wanted by Caitrin Keiper America’s love affair with amateur advice

41 Fear Factor by John Wilson Are our lives and our politics really dominated by fear?

43 The Retropedestrian by Thomas Vinciguerra The odd tale of the Texan who tried to walk around the world backward

45 Emmy Noether’s Beautiful Theorem by David Guaspari One hundred years ago, she united symmetry and conservation in physics

47 Momma Drama by John Podhoretz Comedy-thriller ‘A Simple Favor’ is memorable despite its forgettable name 30 48 Parody More FBI text messages COVER BY JASON SEILER THE SCRAPBOOK Category 5 Irrationality n Tuesday, September 11, as Mr. Trump is complicit. He plays O Hurricane Florence lumbered down humans’ role in increasing the through the Atlantic toward the Caro- risks, and he continues to disman- tle efforts to address those risks. It is linas, we received a text from a Weekly hard to attribute any single weather Standard colleague asking how long it event to climate change. But there is would take for the hurricane to become no reasonable doubt that humans are political. Somebody would blame priming the Earth’s systems to pro- Trump or the GOP for something—it duce disasters. was just a matter of when. The Scrap- book wagered that it would take at least We have our doubts about claims till Monday before somebody in the that climate change (or global warm- media laid the blame for Florence at ing, as it used to be called) poses an the White House door. Our colleague imminent threat to civilization, and guessed it would be Saturday. Post continued: “If the Category 4 in any case, it’s never been clear to us In fact we were both wrong—it had hurricane does, indeed, hit the Caro- that many of the policies environmen- already happened. That very day, the linas this week” (Florence was a Cat 2 talists propose would do much besides Washington Post published an editorial when it landed, but leave that aside), ruin the industrialized economies titled “The Storms Keep Coming.” “it will be the strongest storm on and empower bureaucrats and trans- The online headline gets right to the record to land so far north.” Then the national elites. But what struck us point: “Another hurricane is about to editors really let loose: most about the Post’s editorial was just batter our coast. Trump is complicit.” this: that if the editors wanted to give “Last year Hurricane Harvey bat- the impression that climate change tered Houston,” the paper’s editors President Trump issued several warn- alarmism is just another convenient ings on his Twitter feed Monday, lamented. “Now, Hurricane Flor- counseling those in Florence’s pro- stick with which to smack Donald ence threatens to drench already jected path to prepare and listen to Trump—or indeed any administra- waterlogged swaths of the East Coast, local officials. That was good advice. tion they happen to dislike—they did including the nation’s capital.” The Yet when it comes to extreme weather, a terrific job. ♦

O’Rourke has circulated a photograph Of course, ridiculing O’Rourke Beto Male of himself as a child wearing a shirt for his name is a bold move for a man obert Francis O’Rourke is run- with the name Beto on it, but the christened Rafael and makes Cruz R ning against Sen. Ted Cruz of Washington Free Beacon discovered an seem a touch mean. We would have Texas. You may know the challenger item in Columbia University’s student advised the Cruz campaign to leave the better by the name Beto O’Rourke. newspaper, the Spectator, dating back nominative tomfoolery to respectable The Scrapbook is generally reluctant to to O’Rourke’s college days there, that outfits like the Free Beacon and, well, bring up the names and nicknames of called him Rob O’Rourke. The Scrapbook. public figures (after what Idaho senator The Cruz campaign has ridiculed Is there more to the story of how Mike Crapo must have O’Rourke for the name Rob O’Rourke the Ivy Leaguer became endured in middle change, most recently Beto O’Rourke the aspiring politician? school, he’ll get no grief with a country-music Will the real Rob, Robert, Beto, or from us!), but the ques- radio jingle: “If you’re Roberto please stand up? ♦ tion whether “Beto” is gonna run in Texas, a genuine family nick- you can’t be a lib- name or the result of a eral man. / I remember Jackpots political makeover has reading stories, liberal and Crackpots dogged the Democratic Robert wanted to fit challenger’s campaign. in. / So he changed his mazon CEO Jeff Bezos, aka Beto (pronounced name to Beto and hid it A the richest guy alive, recently Beh-toe, with a short e) with a grin.” (It sounds announced plans to donate $2 bil- is a Spanish-language better—well, slightly— lion to create a network of preschools.

TOP: TRUMP, GAGE SKIDMORE! BOTTOM: BUCKMAN / AFP GETTY LAURA TRUMP, TOP: nickname for Roberto. What’s in a name? when it’s sung.) “The child will be the customer,” says

2 / The Weekly Standard October 1, 2018 Bezos. Maybe we’re old-fashioned, but the idea of pupils as “customers” doesn’t lead us to believe that Bezos has a firm understanding of the moral complexities of pedagogy or child care. The phrase sounds every bit like the tone-deaf hubris of our Silicon Valley overlords. Maybe the effort will succeed, but we’re not optimistic. Bezos is hardly the first zillionaire to decide he can fix education once and for all by dumping truckloads of cash on it. In 2010, Mark Zuckerberg went on the Oprah Winfrey Show with Chris Christie and Cory Booker—then governor of New Jersey and mayor of Newark, respectively—and promised to donate $100 million to help New- ark’s abysmal schools become “a sym- bol of educational excellence for the whole nation.” In 2015, New Yorker writer Dale Russakoff published The Prize, a painstaking investigation into how that money was spent. His conclusion? Zuckerberg’s millions “enriched seemingly everyone, except for Newark’s children.” The Gates Foun- dation has spent bil- lions on all manner of education grants over the years, but in late 2014 Bill Gates flatly stated that his numer- ous failures here were proof he was “naïve.” A 526-page report from the RAND Corpora- of Philadelphia. Philly schools are still it is undertaking a widespread crack- tion released this summer a mess, but in 2013 Shyamalan wrote a down.” So thundered a Washington noted that a $575 million proj- book about his experience: I Got Post report on August 29. There’s just ect to improve teacher performance Schooled: The Unlikely Story of How a one problem: It isn’t true. in just three school districts—nearly Moonlighting Movie Maker Learned the The practices cited by the Post to half the money came from the Gates Five Keys to Closing America’s Educa- substantiate its claim—increased Foundation—was a failure: “Overall, tion Gap. Lest you think Shyamalan is scrutiny of birth certificates, higher the initiative did not achieve its stated just another filthy rich dilettante, well, numbers of passport denials—pre- goals for students, particularly LIM his book did get a glowing blurb from date the Trump administration. The [low-income minority] students. . . . Newark’s school superintendent. ♦ paper has now appended a lengthy [S]tudent outcomes were not dramati- correction to the report, but the cor- cally better than outcomes in similar rection sidesteps the main problem: sites that did not participate.” The Post vs. the Post The whole point of the story was that Our favorite instance of education he Trump administration is the uniquely dastardly Trump admin- lottery flops, though, comes from ‘Taccusing hundreds, and possi- istration had come up with these poli- M. Night Shyamalan. The filmmak- bly thousands, of Hispanics along the cies. It had not. er’s personal foundation once tried to border of using fraudulent birth cer- One of the many outrageous mis-

TOILET: BIGSTOCK TOILET: improve the schools in his hometown tificates since they were babies, and takes in the Post’s piece had to do

October 1, 2018 The Weekly Standard / 3 wanted to verify some certificates signed by the doctor. Treviño’s office used a typewriter to draw up the cer- tificates with multiple carbon copies, and his signature wasn’t legible on the www.weeklystandard.com bottom copies. It had nothing to do Stephen F. Hayes, Editor in Chief with faking certificates. Richard Starr, Editor Fred Barnes, Robert Messenger, Executive Editors More importantly, reporter Sieff Christine Rosen, Managing Editor might have learned that the State Peter J. Boyer, Christopher Caldwell, Andrew Ferguson, Matt Labash, Department’s inquiries to Treviño’s National Correspondents office began in 2015—under the Jonathan V. Last, Digital Editor Barton Swaim, Opinion Editor Obama administration. Adam Keiper, Books & Arts Editor Kelly Jane Torrance, Deputy Managing Editor Oopsie! Whatevs. Whoopsie. Eric Felten, Mark Hemingway, It gives us pleasure to note that the John McCormack, Tony Mecia, Philip Terzian, Michael Warren, Senior Writers with the case of a doctor who, over reporter who eviscerated the Post’s David Byler, Jenna Lifhits, Alice B. Lloyd, Staff Writers the course of decades, had delivered incompetent journalism and forced Rachael Larimore, Online Managing Editor hundreds of babies in the Rio Grande the capital city’s paper of record Hannah Yoest, Social Media Editor Ethan Epstein, Associate Editor Valley. According to the paper, the to issue a rambling, disingenuous Chris Deaton, Jim Swift, Deputy Online Editors Priscilla M. Jensen, Assistant Editor State Department considered accus- retraction was Roque Planas of the Adam Rubenstein, Assistant Opinion Editor ing the doctor of faking birth cer- Huffington Post. Lefty new-media Andrew Egger, Haley Byrd, Reporters Holmes Lybrand, Fact Checker tificates. The doctor, Jorge Treviño, organizations like HuffPo have com- Sophia Buono, Philip Jeffery, Editorial Assistants Philip Chalk, Design Director has since died, but his family says mitted excesses over the years, to be Barbara Kyttle, Design Assistant the Post’s reporter, Kevin Sieff, never sure, but they are capable, too, of the Contributing Editors Claudia Anderson, Max Boot, Joseph Bottum, contacted them to ask about the State kind of solid journalism that, in this Tucker Carlson, Matthew Continetti, Jay Cost, Terry Eastland, Noemie Emery, Joseph Epstein, Department’s inquiry. If he had, he case, makes the Washington Post look David Frum, David Gelernter, might have learned that State only like a supermarket tabloid. ♦ Reuel Marc Gerecht, Michael Goldfarb, Daniel Halper, Mary Katharine Ham, Brit Hume, Thomas Joscelyn, Frederick W. Kagan, Yuval Levin, Tod Lindberg, Micah Mattix, Victorino Matus, P. J. O’Rourke, John Podhoretz, Irwin M. Stelzer, aperçus are Easterbrook’s thought- Charles J. Sykes, Stuart Taylor Jr. It’s TMQ Season Again provoking comments on a wide vari- William Kristol, Editor at Large friendly reminder from The ety of current topics. For instance, MediaDC Ryan McKibben, Chairman A Scrapbook that the return of why do former officials hang on to Stephen R. Sparks, President & Chief Operating Officer the football season isn’t just a boon their security clearances? Kathy Schaffhauser, Chief Financial Officer Mark Walters, Chief Revenue Officer for fans: Gregg Easterbrook’s terrific Jennifer Yingling, Audience Development Officer “Tuesday Morning Quarterback” col- Former CIA director John Bren- David Lindsey, Chief Digital Officer nan has protested loudly that Trump Matthew Curry, Director, Email Marketing umn returns as well, and that’s a boon Alex Rosenwald, Senior Director of Strategic Communications revoking his security clearance some- Nicholas H. B. Swezey, Vice President, Advertising for readers, even those not heavily T. Barry Davis, Senior Director, Advertising how impedes his freedom of speech. Jason Roberts, Digital Director, Advertising invested in the NFL. This week we This is preposterous. Brennan con- Andrew Kaumeier, Advertising Operations Manager tinues to say whatever he pleases. Brooke McIngvale, Manager, Marketing Services Advertising inquiries: 202-293-4900 Loss of his clearance may impact Subscriptions: 1-800-274-7293 his income, by reducing what he can charge to corporate clients for speak- The Weekly Standard (ISSN 1083-3013), a division of Clarity Media Group, is published weekly (except one week in March, one week in June, one ing engagements. Loss of his clear- week in August, and one week in December) at 1152 15th St., NW, Suite ance may reduce his billable hours at 200, Washington, DC 20005. Periodicals postage paid at Washington, DC, and additional mailing offices. 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Canadian/foreign subscribers may call 1-386-597-4378 for Bay’s Clay Matthews for “rough- subscription inquiries. American Express, Visa/MasterCard payments cials of his administration—includ- accepted. Cover price, $5.99. Back issues, $5.99 (includes postage and ing” Minnesota quarterback Kirk ing him—lose their clearance on the handling). Send letters to the editor to The Weekly Standard, 1152 15th Cousins when all Matthews did was day their term ends. Street, NW, Suite 200, Washington, DC 20005-4617. For a copy of The Weekly Standard Privacy Policy, visit www.weeklystandard.com or write to tackle him—gently, too, by NFL stan- Customer Service, The Weekly Standard, 1152 15th St., NW, Suite 200, dards—and so turn what should have You can read the TMQ column Washington, DC 20005. Copyright 2018, Clarity Media Group. All rights reserved. No material in The Weekly been a Packers win into a 29-29 tie every, ahem, Tuesday at weeklystan- Standard may be reprinted without permission of the copyright owner. that soured fans of both teams. dard.com (or type TWS.IO/TMQ The Weekly Standard is a registered trademark of Clarity Media Group. TOP: FIGURE, BIGSTOCK TOP: And mixed in among the gridiron directly into your browser). ♦

4 / The Weekly Standard October 1, 2018 CASUAL

and the Hoover Institution is a Not With a Bang, but a Tote Bag nice way of encouraging people to enquire whether I have met Milton Friedman or George Shultz (I have). I have bags from book conferences that suggest my writing bona fides. seem to recall an essay by There is a hierarchy to tote bags that I have one that declares “We Can Ralph Waldo Emerson in is more subtle than the kind of car Change the World,” a claim whose which he predicts that the you drive. Tote bags can brag with- sincerity I don’t doubt, but about world will be subsumed not by out your ever having to say a word. whose particulars I am somewhat Ifire or flood, but by an overwhelm- They are signaling mechanisms to skeptical. Perhaps my favorite is my ing mound of common pins. It announce your affiliations. niece’s gift, a utilitarian lightweight hasn’t happened so far, but that may The local grocery store gives out “Totes Ma Goats” bag in which I be because we have shifted the cul- a flimsy, paper-thin canvas wine carry my own books (especially my tural weight, as it were, to a far more bag when you purchase more than 2016 novel The Audacity of Goats) for voluminous enemy: the tote bag. one bottle. It’s okay if you leave that publicity events. My husband is on the But of all the tote bags, festival circuit. He goes the most exclusive are to exotic and beauti- those presented as swag to ful places like Maui and attendees of various high- Aspen, cavorting with level conferences, like the celebrities and beauti- Aspen Ideas Festival. We ful people, while I stay now have three or four home with the dogs. It’s Aspen tote bags. One is not as bad as it sounds, beautifully made from really, and it has the military grade canvas with advantage of enhancing leather handles and repre- spousal appreciation, but sents philanthropy to a vet- it does have a curious erans group. A bag from an byproduct. Every time exclusive corporate philan- he returns, he presents thropic retreat has a lovely me with a tote bag. insulated pocket under- Tote bags are nothing neath to carry your prop- new. They have been the erly chilled bottle of New mainstays of museum gift Zealand sauvignon blanc shops and the low-cost or possibly a can of bug premium for subscrip- spray that wouldn’t mix tions to magazines and well with the potato salad. public television for decades. Envi- one behind at your friend’s house. I Does Davos have a tote bag, I won- ronmentalists made them important have a beautiful well-made canvas bag der? Do Davos attendees ever do any- by urging us to pile our groceries into with a painting of the Flatiron Build- thing that requires the use of a tote their bacteria-infested depths week ing that I purchased in a museum bag? Or do they bring them home as a after week, rather than wounding the gift shop. It is sturdy enough to carry bonus gift to their nannies? earth with the clean, fresh, disposabil- books and signals my cultural sophis- As my husband’s spoils of conquest ity of plastic or paper grocery bags. tication. This may have slightly more accumulate in the hall closet, and the I love the earth. But I have ques- cachet than the thin fabric WNYC door becomes harder to close, I have tions about tote bags. tote that seems to suggest that I am begun to feel the need for some form of I have never had a statement a donor (I am not) or that I am part triage. How many tote bags does one handbag, but then, I live in the of the East Coast intelligentsia (I am family require? I ought to sort through, Midwest where things like that are most definitely not). I have a bag from choose the most exclusive, and chuck considered ostentatious. I do find, the American Enterprise Institute, the rest, but I’ll probably keep the nice however, almost against my will, proving that I am “Fighting for Free- plastic one from the now-defunct local that I have begun to select the tote dom, Opportunity, Enterprise.” That bookstore. It’s easy to disinfect. bag I want depending on where sounds nice. The TaxPayers’ Alliance

BRITT SPENCER I’m going and who I will be seeing. signals my support for fiscal restraint, J. F. Riordan

October 1, 2018 The Weekly Standard / 5 EDITORIALS Nothing More Than Feelings arely have we witnessed so many people pre­ ings on Barack Obama’s third Supreme Court nominee, tend a controversy was about one thing when it Merrick Garland. Yet in mid-2007, Democratic major­ R was so obviously about another. Since Septem­ ity leader Chuck Schumer had vowed to hold no further ber 16, when the name of Supreme Court nominee Brett hearings on George W. Bush’s nominees. And in any case, Kava ­naugh’s accuser became known—Christine Blasey McConnell’s strategy didn’t involve defamation. Ford, a California psychologist, alleges that he sexually The Democrats’ original strategy for delay—request­ assaulted her in 1982—Democratic politicians and most ing thousands of documents, then claiming they didn’t have of the mainstream news time to read them, then cav­ media suddenly seemed to iling about what could and care deeply whether Kava­ couldn’t be made public— naugh behaved reprehensi­ failed badly. That’s when bly when he was 17. Feinstein threw the pro­ If that’s what they are cess into confusion with the concerned about, we gladly anonymous accusation, and join them. We hope Ford someone leaked the accus­ will accept Senate Judi­ er’s name to the media. ciary Committee chairman The behavior Ford then Charles Grassley’s invita­ described to the Washing- tion to testify, either pub­ ton Post isn’t just boorish licly or privately. Her claim or inappropriate but crimi­ should be taken seriously. nal—an attempt to rape An anti-Kavanaugh sit-in in the Hart Senate Office Building And although we have some her. If it is true, Kava­naugh apprehensions about the practice of probing an adult’s would have to withdraw his name from consideration for youthful history in search of culpable behavior, Kava­ the Court. But the circumstances adduced are so distant naugh has now categorically denied the accusation—evi­ and hazily recalled that conclusive proof or disproof of dence corroborating her claim would mean he spoke falsely them is nearly impossible. There is no contemporaneous and so shouldn’t be elevated to the Supreme Court. corroboration—Ford told no one at the time—and since But from the moment on September 14 that Califor­ she can’t remember specifically when and where the inci­ nia senator Dianne Feinstein issued a statement that an dent took place, Kava­naugh can’t produce an alibi. unnamed person had made some allegation about Kava­ In support of her claim Ford produced notes from naugh—she wouldn’t say who or what—the truth of what a 2012 therapy session and a 2018 polygraph test—all did or didn’t happen was irrelevant. Feinstein had had a 30 years or more after the alleged encounter. It’s very plau­ letter conveying the charge for more than a month, but sible that she is mistaken. Three other people supposedly waited until after Kava­naugh’s hearings were concluded. present—Mark Judge, Patrick Smyth, and Kava­naugh— She claims she wanted to preserve Ford’s request for ano­ have denied the allegations. nymity and that “the media outed her.” But how, we won­ Cristina King Miranda, who attended the same school der, did the media “out” her if not by Democrats leaking as Ford, set the media aflutter with a Facebook post claim­ her identity? ing the incident was widely discussed at the time—contra­ Since the Democrats don’t control the Senate and, dicting Ford’s claim she had told no one until 2012. Now thanks to former senator Harry Reid, they can’t filibuster King refuses to speak further about it on the grounds that judicial nominees, their strategy from the instant Justice “I do not have first hand knowledge of the incident.” Vir­ Anthony Kennedy announced his retirement was to delay ginia Hume responded on Twitter: “I also graduated from confirmation hearings until after the midterm elections: Holton -Arms in 1983. I have no recollection whatsoever of They would capture the Senate and block all Trump nom­ any discussion in or out of school of the alleged incident. inees. Democrats and their most enthusiastic supporters As I’ve said previously, I knew Brett in high school and justified this strategy by equating it to the Senate GOP’s never heard anything untoward about him.”

refusal in 2016, at Mitch McConnell’s behest, to hold hear­ Ford’s recollections to her therapist are inconsistent on BILL CLARK / CQ ROLL CALL

6 / The Weekly Standard October 1, 2018 the matter of how many people she now says were involved Ford’s treatment 36 years ago insisted that Kava­naugh’s in the alleged assault. The notes also do not name Kava­ nomination to the High Court must be either slowed or naugh, though her husband told the Post she did mention blocked because—well—men do bad things to women. A Kava ­naugh at the time of the session and expressed con­ classmate of Ford’s told a sympathetic Jim Acosta on CNN cern he could become a Supreme Court nominee. “If a that she backs Ford because many women in her class had Republican, any Republican, wins in November, his most “similar experiences. . . . Not with Brett Kava­naugh, but likely first nominee to the Supreme Court will be Brett with other boys in our community.” Philip Rucker, the Kava ­naugh,” concluded a March 2012 New Yorker profile Washington Post’s White House bureau chief, remarked of Kava­naugh. Ford concedes that she had been drinking on Twitter that “During Brett Kava­naugh’s time as an at the alleged party. undergrad at Yale, his fraternity, DKE, marched across Perhaps the strongest evidence for taking Kava­naugh’s campus waving a flag woven from women’s underwear.” denial seriously, however, is that no other women have Kava ­naugh was in no way connected with the story, but come forward to testify of similar treatment by him. Men no matter. who attack women in the manner in which Ford describes We’re put in mind of James Nolan’s 1998 book The are almost always serial offenders. Others may still come Therapeutic State. Nolan chronicled the way in which, forward, but a week after Ford’s explosive claim went over the course of the 20th century, justifications for pub­ public, none has, while many women have testified to his lic -policy decisions drew increasingly on the subjective decent and honorable conduct. language of therapy. A hundred years ago, a public offi­ Making Ford’s claims even more suspect is the way in cial might base an important decision on what was true which their revelation happens to align with the strategy or patriotic or in line with public virtue. By the end of of Senate Democrats. They don’t so much want to per­ the century, the official would base the decision on what suade moderate Republicans to vote No as to delay the “feels right” or what will “bring healing” or because he or vote—and so, it would appear, does his accuser. At first she “cares” so deeply. she expressed, through her attorney, a desire to testify. We’ve arrived at the ludicrous conclusion of the tran­ Then a reluctance to do so. Then an insistence that an sition Nolan described. A good man with an impeccable FBI investigation be carried out first—this despite the reputation and a stellar record may be denied a seat on the fact that the FBI has carried out no fewer than six com­ nation’s highest court and defamed as a sexual aggressor. prehensive background checks of Kava­naugh and found Why? Because important people feel he probably did some­ nothing akin to the conduct alleged by Ford. On Sep­ thing terrible. They just feel he did it. ♦ tember 20, as we write, Ford’s attorney sent an email to Judiciary staffers requesting a conference call to discuss the terms under which Ford might agree to testify. More delay. More diversion. The demand for a time-consuming investigation quickly generated arguments about whether the FBI inves­ Run, Mike, Run tigates allegations of long-ago local crimes. Democrats argue that the bureau investigated Anita Hill’s charges; Republicans argue that was because they had to do with ichael Bloomberg, the former mayor of New a federal employee’s conduct in a federal building, not a York City, is yet again considering a run for 36 -year-old act by a teenager in a private home. M the presidency. In other words, 2020 is just two What Republicans making such arguments fail to grasp years away. He has openly toyed with presidential runs in is that for most Democrats, what matters isn’t evidence or each of the last three cycles. But these quadrennial flirta­ truth. For them, what matters is the defeat of Kava­naugh’s tions can’t go on forever. He is 76. nomination and their further self-identification with vic­ This time, he wants to run as a Democrat on the tims of harassment and assault. Hence the mind-numb­ grounds that “I don’t see how [I] could possibly run as ingly idiotic statements by Senate Democrats. “Guess who a Republican.” A fair point. Bloomberg is a solid liberal, is perpetrating all of these kinds of actions?” asked Mazie but he is famously noncommittal on partisan affiliation. Hirono of Hawaii. “It’s the men in this country. I just want He was a Democrat in the 1990s, ran and won as a liberal to say to the men in this country: Just shut up and step up.” Republican for mayor of New York in 2001, then switched New York’s Kirsten Gillibrand asked (via Twitter), “The to independent in 2007, during the second of his three fundamental questions we must answer right now: Do we terms. In the early 2000s he gave hundreds of thousands value women? Do we believe women? Do we give them the of dollars to the New York GOP. This year he pledged opportunity to tell their story? To be heard? Will we ensure $80 million to help Democrats take control of Congress they get the justice they deserve?” How about: Is it true? in the midterm elections. When he’s talked about presi­ Across the media, Democrats pretending to care about dential runs in the past, he’s variously said he would run

October 1, 2018 The Weekly Standard / 7 as a Republican, as a Democrat, and as an independent. consigned it for decades. He was not afraid to risk the ire We have unbridgeable differences with Bloomberg on of the city’s powerful and easily provoked race-grievance policy, but we hope he’ll run all the same. industry. We regard his fixation on gun control as deeply He has liabilities, to be sure, and not just owing to his misguided, but it’s popular with the Democratic base he ideological incongruities. Bloomberg’s record as mayor must now pursue. was not a stellar one. He ran as an education Consider, too, the state of the Democratic reformer, but overall student performance in bench. A recent poll of registered Democrats New York City did not improve much dur­ on who the party should nominate in 2020 had ing or after his three terms. Property taxes Joe Biden in first place with 32 percent, Hil­ skyrocketed during his mayoralty, and other lary Clinton in second with 18 percent, and taxes went up, too. He was famous for pur­ Bernie Sanders running third with 16 percent. suing idiotic economic-development boon­ Joe Biden, 75, is almost as old as Bloomberg doggles, like the mercifully failed West Side but more familiar and less interesting. The Stadium project, which would have given the thought of the candidate who couldn’t beat New York Jets a $2 billion facility in Manhat­ Donald Trump running again in 2020 fills tan. Bloomberg also increasingly gave in to a Michael Bloomberg us with horror and delight. Bernie Sanders is kind of fundamentalist nanny-state lunacy: unelectable because, unlike Barack Obama, he banning flavored tobacco products, trans-fatty foods in is honest about what he believes. restaurants, loud music, sodas larger than 16 ounces, and Nor are the younger 2020 contenders any more impres­ many other innocent enjoyments. sive: California senator Kamala Harris is as offputting as she Still, no three-term mayor of New York City can be eas­ is extreme, and New Jersey senator Cory Booker, aka Sparta­ ily dismissed. cus, can’t stop talking long enough to hear sensible advice. Bloomberg managed to keep in place the crime policies Maybe an unpredictable liberal could find the middle of his predecessor, Rudy Giuliani, and so kept the city from way between aged-out establishmentarians and ambitious returning to the chaos to which left-liberal shibboleths had hucksters in 2020. Run, Mike, run. ♦

Better Policies, Better Economy

THOMAS J. DONOHUE 4% mark, a 100% increase from the that would undermine our economy, PRESIDENT AND CEO 2% rate we muddled through for our businesses, and investor confidence. U.S. CHAMBER OF COMMERCE so long. Unemployment is at a For example, we need to build a remarkable 3.9%, layoffs are at a competitive workforce. We need people Not long ago some of the nation’s 50-year low, investment is climbing, to keep the growth going. That means most prominent economists and wages are finally showing signs of rising, improving workforce training and politicians were telling us that anemic manufacturing employment is up, and retraining, strengthening our education 2% growth was the “new normal,” small business confidence is at an all- system, and adopting a commonsense that manufacturing and blue collar time high. In fact, the Q3 MetLife & U.S. immigration system that attracts and jobs were never coming back, and Chamber of Commerce Small Business Index welcomes talent at all skill levels. that increasing wages was a nearly indicates that 70% of small business We also need to fight back against impossible task. owners have a positive outlook about dangerous trade policies. The single Turns out that the weakest recovery their companies and the small business biggest threat facing our economy in American history that followed the environment in the U.S. right now is the trade war escalating financial crash 10 years ago had more Income gains are strongest among to the point that it saps business to do with anti-growth policies like Hispanic households (3.7%), while poverty confidence. If businesses feel forced to distortive taxes and stifling regulations— rates for blacks and Hispanics have fallen pull back on their capital expansion, it as well as a “you didn’t build that” to 21.2% and 18.3%, respectively, the will erode much of the benefits from mentality—than alleged new economic lowest rates since at least 1972. In fact, tax reform and regulatory relief. fundamentals. employers are scrounging for workers, The lesson of the last two years is The economy is firing on all cylinders with job openings hitting a record high that good policy makes a difference— thanks to better public policies, including of 6.9 million in July. in jobs, growth, opportunity, a dramatic reduction in regulations— The economy is going gangbusters confidence, and the lives of everyday which removed substantial burdens and right now, but like all those prospectuses Americans. Let’s keep it up. uncertainty for American businesses— warn, “Past performance is no guarantee and powerful pro-growth tax reform. of future results.” We need to maximize Learn more at Second-quarter growth hit the elusive pro-growth policies and oppose those uschamber.com/abovethefold. KEVIN MAZUR / GETTY

8 / The Weekly Standard October 1, 2018 COMMENT

FRED BARNES Trump tries something surprising: self-control

yebrows were raised in Wash- Virginia governor, Ed Gillespie. Hard an actor really came in handy in poli- ington when President Trump as he tried, he couldn’t escape being tics. It made him a natural politician. E responded to an allegation identified with Trump, which was the Trump’s populism is different. He of sexual assault against Supreme kiss of death in the Old Dominion. was a bit of an actor as the host of a Court nominee Brett Kava­naugh. Trump draws large crowds. His TV show, The Apprentice. But it hasn’t The president didn’t mention the political base appears to get as big a made him a natural politician. He’ll accuser. He said the Senate Judiciary kick out of his appearances as they have to work at that. Committee would go through “a pro- did two years ago. They’re not jump- Trump has three rules of the politi- cess and hear everybody out [and] ing off the Trump Train. But millions cal road. When you’re right, you fight. I’d like everybody to be very happy.” of soft Republicans and indepen- Controversy elevates message. Never Trump’s remarks were apologize. The president is going to “unusually sober,” the Wash- have to reverse all three of those ington Post declared in a page- Millions of soft to build his influence in the midterm. one headline. That was high Fighting is what he needs less of in praise from an archenemy. Republicans and 2018. Everyone knows he’s a counter­ White House aides got credit independents who puncher. It’s what a populist does. The for recommending the mild rule should become: When you fight, response, if only because the backed Trump in make sure you win. Being right doesn’t press doubts Trump is capa- 2016 have drifted matter. Political leaders win. It keeps ble of getting a grip on his them out of jail. emotions without help. Yet away. This year, These days message elevates con- that’s what he did. Trump needs troversy. Trump is a better politician When facing a political when he focuses on his message. For crisis—and the threat to the to woo them one thing, it’s easy to understand. Pro- Kava­naugh confirmation is personally. posing to build a wall to keep illegal a crisis—Trump has often immigrants out will keep the issue stayed cool and ration­al. alive and controversial. Trump has True, he seems to enjoy erupting dents who backed him in 2016 have already put this into practice. more. It’s more fun. But he’s the one drifted away. The promise of conser- The hardest change for Trump to who decides whether to blow his stack. vative judges attracted them before. make is to begin apologizing. He has Believe it or not. But this year, Trump needs to woo long felt that apologizing shows weak- We saw this in the 2016 campaign. them personally. ness. He loathes saying he’s sorry. It When his raunchy comments on the He can’t do it by being vulgar or doesn’t come naturally. I assume that’s Access Hollywood video put his chance mean. He needs to be likable. Folks because he’s seldom sorry in real life. of winning the election in jeopardy, he who spend time with Trump love to But it’s one of the keys to likability. became a paragon of self-discipline. talk about how likable he is. In 2015, Trump can’t help Republican can- He read speeches from a text. He mini- Rick Perry, the former Texas governor, didates unless he starts apologizing. mized the ad libs. and I visited with him in his Trump He’ll have plenty of material to work Now, with the midterm election Tower office. Trump was a genial host. with. There are all those humiliat- six weeks away, it’s time for Trump to He showed us his collection of sports ing nicknames he’s given to political tighten his grip on his emotions again, memorabilia, including Mike Tyson’s rivals. Sorry! The actors he’s called limit any distractions, and act like a heavyweight-champion belt. I asked overrated or worse. Sorry! The media gentleman. He has a big incentive to how he got it. “Tyson owed me money,” types he lumped together as enemies do so. If Democrats win the House by Trump replied. of the people. Sorry! The list of eli- a big margin—40 or more seats is pos- Our country is hardly overrun with gibles for apologies is endless in sible—he will face impeachment. likable politicians. Ronald Reagan Trump’s case. Trump is the main man in the over- stands out. Trump is a pale copy. Rea- The president won’t like saying all election. GOP senators and House gan’s conservatism appealed to mil- he’s sorry to people he dislikes. But members are at his mercy. In 2017, lions of voters, his likability to millions there’s a dividend. Winners apolo-

LIKENESSES: DAVE CLEGG LIKENESSES: DAVE Republicans had a fine candidate for more. He explained that having been gize. Losers refuse to. ♦

October 1, 2018 The Weekly Standard / 9 COMMENT ♦ PHILIP TERZIAN “The American Century” (1941) still makes for useful reading—and in the 1950s his magazines were politely hos- The (ever slower) tile to Sen. Joseph McCarthy. As often happens, however, at pre- march of Time cisely the moment when the empire seemed most formidable—signified n a bookcase in my office later brilliantly parodied by the New by Elson’s comprehensive history— here at The Weekly Stan- Yorker’s Wolcott Gibbs—would find cracks had begun to appear in the O dard may be found a an audience. But Time was a huge and façade. This might have had some- well-thumbed copy of a volume unexpected hit and, after Hadden’s pre- thing to do with Luce’s own gradual entitled Time Inc.: The Intimate His- mature death in 1929, Luce proved to withdrawal from the field but was tory of a Publishing Enterprise, 1923- be an entrepreneur of genius. largely a reflection of changing times 1941 (1968) by Robert T. Elson. Among many successful offshoots and markets. Television essentially put It is the authorized Life out of business—it “suspended” account of the world’s first Journalists at Time weekly publication in 1972—and (and by far most successful) Newsweek had long been nipping at “weekly newsmagazine” have sought to Time’s heels. and was commissioned Something of the old Luce touch by Time’s surviving co- adapt to changing was reflected in the Time-Life corpo- founder, Henry R. Luce. times by publishing a ration’s debut of the celebrity chroni- As it happens, Luce didn’t cle People in 1974, but the advent of live to hold a copy of Time magazine congenial cable TV, digital technology, and the Inc. in his hands since to the editorial staff. Internet hastened Time’s “melancholy, he died the year before it long, withdrawing roar.” came out. But it was pub- It’s a slow-motion These reflections are prompted by lished in the year I gradu- journey on the road the news last week that Time has been ated from high school purchased from its latest owner, Mer- and, saving my pen- to obsolescence. edith Corp., by a software executive nies, I purchased a copy named Marc Benioff, co-founder of ($10) as soon as I could afford one. and enterprises, Luce invented a Salesforce, and his wife, Lynne. Mere- I concede that in the annus horri- monthly magazine featuring business dith, a media conglomerate that bought bilis 1968 the notion of an adolescent (Fortune, 1930), an oversized revue Time Inc. last November, has been try- eagerly scooping up the corporate his- largely dependent on photographs ing in the intervening months to sell tory of what was then regarded as a (Life, 1936), and a weekly journal about off such individual properties as For- Republican press empire—and very sports (Sports Illustrated, 1954). tune, Sports Illustrated, and Time—but much anathema in my parents’ house- Partly because he has no contem- with little success. The sale price of hold—must seem unconventional. But porary equivalent, it’s difficult to Time to the Benioffs ($190 million) puts I had already settled on journalism as a describe in 2018 the ubiquity and it beyond the reach of the casual buyer, livelihood, and while I had no aspira- influence of Henry Luce at midcen- but it’s surely a bargain compared with tion ever to work at Time—indeed, at tury. Of course, in those days, pub- the likely cost in Time’s heyday. a distance, it seemed a little unpleas- lisher-proprietors considered it a right It is worth noting as well that Mr. ant—my scientific interest in the tribal and privilege to influence the editorial and Mrs. Benioff purchased Time for rites of the East Coast/Ivy League/ tone and decisions of their properties; themselves, not as a Salesforce acqui- WASP world personified by Luce and and while some (William Randolph sition. This is the same financial his enterprise made it a must-read. Hearst) were more prone to inter- arrangement under which Amazon’s I should pause, at this juncture, to vention than others (Arthur Hays Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post explain that Time—a weekly digest/ Sulzberger), Luce’s hand was com- in 2013 with his personal funds and compendium of news and middle- paratively light but unmistakable. Steve Jobs’s widow, Laurene Powell brow culture—was the bright idea of Luce was very much a Republican Jobs, acquired a majority stake in the two well-heeled Yale graduates (Luce of the pre-Goldwater school and, as Atlantic last year. As of this past Febru- and Briton Hadden) who managed the son of Presbyterian missionaries in ary my own onetime employer, the Los to raise enough capital among friends China, a partisan of Chiang Kai-shek Angeles Times, is now the property of a and family to commence publication long after Mao Zedong had chased wealthy South African-born transplant in 1923. Few anticipated that a rewrite him to Taiwan. Still, in the 1930s and surgeon, Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong. of the previous week’s events in a ’40s he was an ardent internationalist To be sure, as a lifelong member breathless, singularly wiseacre style— when the GOP was not—his essay on of the guild, I am thankful for these

10 / The Weekly Standard October 1, 2018 various philanthropic gestures. The COMMENT ♦ CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL survival of publications is preferable to the alternative, and both the Times and Post have lately been spending money and hiring staff. But the operative word Wurst case scenario: here is “philanthropic.” In the midst of the digital/cable revolution, it’s difficult Merkel’s coalition calamity to avoid the impression that these are charitable, not business, investments. very so often, one of the Mid- name of her own (once-conservative) The long-term prospects of print publi- dle Eastern migrants Chancel- Christian Democrats. People gave cations remain unclear, and who knows E lor Angela Merkel invited to both parties historic drubbings at the what the Benioff and Soon-Shiong Germany in the autumn of 2015 com- polls last fall, with the Social Demo- heirs will think of weekly newsmaga- mits a horrible crime, and headaches crats falling to barely a fifth of the vote. zines and venerable daily newspapers? for her coalition government ensue. The result was a narrower majority In that sense Time—and for that There ought to be nothing surpris- for Merkel, a much bigger role for the matter, its moribund competitor News- ing about this: About a million and a Social Democrats (who then had to week—is a case in point. My own view half people, most of them young men, be bribed with cabinet posts to agree is that, especially since the eclipse of drifted into Germany after the Luce tradition, the journalists at Merkel’s appeal. Even if they Time, like their brethren in the news- committed crime at German Germany has a paper business, have sought to adapt to rates, you could expect a mur- basic problem. As changing times not by appealing to the der a month and several sexual people who purchase their product but assaults. But when a 35-year- one columnist put it, by publishing a magazine congenial to old local carpenter was stabbed the editorial staff. It’s a slow-motion to death at the end of August, the country cannot journey on the road to obsolescence. allegedly by a pair of Middle decide whether it Nowadays, reading Time is a lit- Eastern migrants, in the city of tle like picking up an issue of the Chemnitz, Germans suddenly has more to fear Nation with corporate advertising. lost their inclination to take from Ausländer For a long time the enormous circu- such things in stride. Chem- lation and diversified wealth of Time nitz, formerly Karl-Marx- (foreigners) or Inc. made this possible and certainly Stadt, filled up with thousands Ausländerfeinde insulated Time from the vagaries of of anti-immigration marchers, the market. But the sands are run- some of them making Hitler (xenophobes). ning out of that particular hourglass, salutes and harassing foreign- and the market forces currently looking people. These incidents were to renew an arrangement that had so throttling daily newspapers are, like captured on video, and the fallout damaged them), and a veto on almost market forces generally, inexorable— brought Merkel’s government to the all policy for one of the rare conser- and distinctly unsentimental. ♦ verge of collapse. vatives in Merkel’s cabinet, interior Germany has a basic problem. minister Horst Seehofer of Bavaria’s As the columnist Berthold Kohler Christian Social Union. put it, the country cannot decide Seehofer has powerful allies in the Worth Repeating whether it has more to fear from Aus- government, and that is what brought from WeeklyStandard.com: länder (foreigners) or Ausländerfeinde about Merkel’s latest crisis. (xenophobes). The public is firmly Native Germans have often felt Earlier, I estimated that of the former view. The government like an afterthought in the years if the Democrats won the is invested in the latter. Eventually since Merkel threw open their coun- House popular vote by the public will win, because it has an try’s gates. The post-Chemnitz dec- laration by her spokesman, Steffen seven points, they’d be internal logic and Merkel’s coalition does not. In three out of the four most Seibert, did not reassure them. “We even-money favorites to recent elections, neither of the tradi- don’t tolerate such unlawful assem- take the House. Right now, tional establishment parties has been blies,” Seibert said, “and the hound- they lead by nine points. able to muster a governing majority. ing of people who look different or So the two have formed a “grand coali- have different origins, and attempts —David Byler, ‘What Would a tion,” which Merkel has held together to spread hatred on the streets.” House GOP Win Look Like?’ by pursuing the agenda of the (once- That was a reasonable point, as socialistic) Social Democrats in the long as the murder, too, was being

October 1, 2018 The Weekly Standard / 11 kept in mind. Early this month one Democrats. Whether out of principle, or Kabinettsangelegenheitenabteilungs­ of Seehofer’s most powerful allies pride, or panic, the new Social Demo- direktor, but Germans care passionately stepped forward to say that it was not. crat leader Andrea Nahles told Merkel about the protocol of the organizational Hans-Georg Maassen had a bone to that Maassen would have to go. pyramid. Staatssekretär turns out to be pick with one viral video that seemed Nahles’s means were not adequate a plum title. In article after article, you to show non-Germans being hounded. to her ambitions. Maassen could not could read that Maassen’s bureaucratic “There is no proof,” he said, “that be forced to go. Seehofer’s Christian status would be upgraded from B9 to the video about this alleged incident Social Union, a strictly Bavarian party, B11, entitling him to a monthly raise that’s getting forwarded around the is set to fall well short of a legislative from 11,577.13 to 14,157.33 euros. Internet is authentic. There is good majority in state elections next month. This fit neither Germans’ expec- reason to think that it is piece of mis- The CSU has always been a right-wing tation of their bureaucracy nor pro- information that aims to distract the regional pillar of Merkel’s coalition, gressives’ expectation that winning public from the murder in Chemnitz.” but the CSU’s voters no longer trust a political battle means humiliating Maassen is a gifted investigator that the party is right-wing enough and destroying your adversary. B9 to on security matters who in the 1990s to defend them against a wave of B11! The Social Democrats thought wrote an impressive, if hardline, dis- migrants. They are defecting in droves the deal Nahles had negotiated sertation on asylum law. Two years ago to the AfD, which now draws 14 per- was too clever by half. On Septem- he arrested a Syrian refugee named cent of the vote in Bavaria to the CSU’s ber 19, the day after the change was Jaber al-Bakr—in Chemnitz, as it hap- 36. This could present the CSU with made, the deputy party leader and pens—who allegedly plotted to blow a choice between making common the leader of the party’s youth wing up an unnamed transport hub with cause with the AfD or surrendering denounced it. By the next day, even triacetone triperoxide, or TATP, the power for the first time since the war. Nahles was attacking the deal made same explosive used in the killings in Seehofer’s successor as minister at her insistence. This probably won’t Paris in the autumn of 2015. People president of Bavaria, Markus Söder, be the last such intracoalition battle. well informed about the workings of has been trying to win back the Bavar- What most unites the Merkel forces the interior ministry describe three ian right with the Kreuzpflicht—a now is their worry that the more radi- men there as so out of sympathy with requirement that crucifixes be placed cal the AfD gets, the better it seems Merkel’s refugee policy that they con- at the entrance of every public build- to do in the polls. This view, which stitute something like a “resistance,” ing in the traditionally Catholic land, is widely held, is creating a cascade to use the term beloved of Trump which has been filling up, like the rest of radicalization across other parties. opponents. According to press reports, of Germany, with Muslim migrants. The less popular the CSU becomes these are Dieter Romann, chief of the It doesn’t seem to be working. Söder with its voters, the more it must tack federal police; Gerhard Schindler, for- has also warned that he would put cer- away from those who are loyal and mer chief of the Bundesnachrichten- tain members of the AfD under sur- towards those who have abandoned dienst (Germany’s equivalent of the veillance for extremism. That hasn’t it. The less popular the Social Demo- FBI); and Maassen himself, who since worked, either. Under the circum- crats get, the more they feel entitled to 2012 has been head of the Bundesamt stances, Seehofer could hardly turn make demands in exchange for keep- für Verfassungsschutz (BfV). his back on Maassen, one of the few ing the Merkel coalition alive. Those That was the problem. Verfassungs­ conservatives in the Merkel cabinet. who declared in 2015 that Merkel’s schutz means “defense of the con- What a predicament! If Maassen welcome to migrants would shape her stitution.” The BfV is the main law stayed, Nahles would leave the coali- legacy were correct. It is not looking enforcement body responsible for tion and the government would fall. like the legacy she anticipated. ♦ keeping Germany from ever turning If Maassen left, Seehofer would leave fascist again. It has authority to moni- the coalition and the government tor demonstrations, surveil political would fall. Merkel came up with an parties, and infiltrate radical groups. extraordinary compromise. Maassen Find out what all the kids And yet here Maassen was, repeat- would lose his post at the head of the are talking about. ing what sounded like the boilerplate BfV, but he would receive a new one of conspiracy theorists: that outside as a so-called Staatssekretär under See- actors were somehow responsible for hofer. This looked like a very clever the excesses witnessed at right-wing arrangement, albeit one that gave real gatherings. It emerged that Maassen concessions to Nahles and only face- had met earlier in the summer with saving ones to Seehofer. members of the Alternative for Ger- That was not how Germans saw it. many (AfD), the new anti-immigrant Really, you’d think it wouldn’t mat- party that, in large parts of the country, ter much whether people called you At weeklystandard.com/podcasts is now more popular than the Social Kabinettsangelegenheitenabteilungsleiter

12 / The Weekly Standard October 1, 2018 The Center for Individual Freedom is based in Alexandria, Va., and iden- Astroturfing on tifies itself as a free-market advocacy organization. Early this year, as an alternative to net-neutrality legisla- Capitol Hill tion, telecom companies were pushing for a bill that would also place con- sumer restrictions on search engines and social-media companies. Hudson, A lot of those spontaneous calls from constituents are a three-term Republican, sits on the the work of lobbyists. by Tony Mecia & Haley Byrd House Energy and Commerce Com- mittee. No bill ever emerged. very day on Capitol Hill, the at making organized lobbying efforts Carroll was appalled to learn that phones ring inside legislators’ appear to be spontaneous. It is an exam- special-interest groups call people and E offices. Young staffers answer, ple of what is known as “astroturfing,” then connect them to Congress. It cre- and there’s usually a constituent on the practice of making an advocacy ates a biased sample, he thinks, and the other end expressing an opinion campaign look like a grassroots reac- distorts the public’s actual opinion. on the news of the day: the Kavanaugh tion (and so hiding the sponsor). “It’s dangerous in my book,” he says. confirmation, border security, “It’s someone with an agenda government spending. that selects who they are going Phone calls to Congress are to connect to their congress- one of the main ways individual man, and only the people who citizens can influence federal agree with their agenda get policy. Congressional offices connected. It’s a scary thing if keep tallies of support and oppo- you think about how it could sition to pieces of legislation. be used.” Hudson’s office and Representatives use that infor- the Center for Individual Free- mation to gauge the sentiments dom did not reply to requests of the folks back home. to comment for this article. By nearly all accounts, calls The recording of “Debo- to Congress have risen since rah” trying to connect Carroll the 2016 election, as they to his congressman was made often do in the initial years of What’s that? You agree that communications should be private? by the Jolly Roger Telephone a new presidency. Yet many I’ll put you through to your senator right now. Co., a paid service that deploys of those calls are not merely artificial intelligence to thwart organic expressions of a newly ener- On February 8, just before 1 p.m., telemarketers by wasting their time gized electorate. Rather, they are being the phone rang at Douglas Carroll’s (bots give vague, preprogrammed engineered by interest groups. The home in Mount Pleasant, N.C. On the responses to queries and so keep the practice, little-known outside of the line was a telemarketer. But she wasn’t calls going and going). The company Capitol, is known as “transfer calling” selling anything. Instead she wanted was part of a January article in these or “patch-through calling.” It involves to talk to Carroll, a 53-year-old execu- pages about technological startups specialized firms placing telemarket- tive at a medical device startup, about fighting telemarketing. Jolly Roger’s ing calls in search of people who agree Internet privacy. “Deborah” said she owner, Roger Anderson, says he iden- with their clients’ causes. When they was calling on behalf of the Center for tified 11 other calls to his customers find one, they connect that person to Individual Freedom, and she wanted originating from a Washington D.C. his or her representative to express to know if she could connect Car- area code that wound up connected what is meant to sound like an authen- roll to the office of his congressman, to congressional offices. The record- tic and firmly held opinion. Richard Hudson. ings document telemarketers’ conver- The strategy has been around for “Are you willing to call Rep. Hud- sations with the Jolly Roger voice bot years, and it is impossible to know son and urge him to support a law to and the subsequent confused conver- how many calls to Congress are manu- protect consumers online?” she asks sations between the bot and a congres- factured in this manner. What’s clear, on a recording of the phone call. “If sional staffer. though, is that interest groups are you are, I can patch this call through, The advocacy groups in the record- becoming increasingly sophisticated and you can leave a message with his ings represent issues across the politi- office and let them know you support a cal spectrum. Callers identified Tony Mecia is a senior writer and Haley Byrd consumer bill of rights to protect your themselves as affiliated with groups

a reporter at The Weekly Standard. online usage.” including the Environmental Defense PHOTOS / GETTYFOX

October 1, 2018 The Weekly Standard / 13 Fund, which was seeking support for undo net-neutrality rules, it received persuading a particular member of an Obama-era rule by the Bureau of millions of comments that were later Congress to cosponsor a bill. Land Management regarding methane determined to be either form letters John Jameson offers a wide range leaks; the Wilderness Society, which or bot-written messages. of such services to clients. The presi- was opposing the Interior Depart- “There has been a long-term dent of the D.C. political-advocacy ment’s appropriations bill; New increase in efforts to gin up political firm Winning Connections, he puts American Economy and the ACLU, mobilization,” says Matt Grossmann, together campaigns of get-out-the-vote supporting the so-called “dream- a political science professor at Mich- phone calls, digital ads, and social- ers” who came to the country ille- igan State University who studies media posts. If the client is trying gally as children; Free Our Internet, interest groups and influence. “The to influence legislation, though, one which favors Internet privacy protec- firms that do it are a little bit secre- of the most powerful tools Jameson tions; and Fair Courts Now, opposing tive, but there is enough in the public pushes is patch-through calling. efforts by North Carolina “The phones are Republican legislators to particularly effective change how judges are because it’s difficult for selected in the state. people to do,” he says. A spokesman for the “For 95 percent of vot- Wilderness Society says, ers, calling their legisla- “Nothing we do is rocket tor is an unnatural act. science. But I confess Elected officials pay that we do use the tele- attention if it’s a con- phone as well as email, stituent who knows what Twitter, Facebook, [and] she’s talking about.” the U.S. mail to inspire Winning Connections Americans to care for works primarily with their public lands and progressive organizations protect them for future and nonprofits to influ- generations.” An ACLU ence legislation. It also spokeswoman says, “Our has an elections arm that followers asked for ways focuses on Democratic to fight for immigrant At lower left, a staff member for Republican senator Rob Portman politicians and ballot youth, and calls to mem- of Ohio answers the telephone as protesters occupy the senator’s office initiatives. The value of bers of Congress is one in Washington, D.C., July 17, 2017. using phones to connect of the tools we deploy to constituents to lawmak- make it easier for activists to engage domain to show that there are firms ers, Jameson says, is “you can scale in our democracy.” The other groups that do this full-time that you can them. You can have dozens or hun- did not respond to attempts to con- hire to try to stimulate grassroots sup- dreds or thousands of them calling tact them. port for your cause.” in support.” Political calls are largely Those efforts aren’t certain to suc- exempt from federal rules restricting ransfer calling is just one tactic ceed. A representative’s party and ide- telemarketing. His firm uses publicly T groups use to apply pressure to ology tend to be far better predictors available information, such as voter legislators. Other strategies include of voting patterns than public opin- lists, to target people who might be forming issue-oriented front groups ion, whether real or perceived. No sympathetic to a cause and willing to to drum up citizen interest, commis- amount of phone calls, for instance, take action. But finding the right per- sioning public-opinion polls, script- would have flipped Republican sup- son can be a slog, sometimes requir- ing op-eds or letters to the editor of port for tax cuts or persuaded Dem- ing 25 or 30 calls to find someone who local papers, and encouraging follow- ocrats who have supported abortion answers the phone, agrees with the ers to weigh in on social media and rights for decades to abandon that message, and is comfortable articulat- with texts and emails. Phone calls can position. But deployed strategically, ing it to a congressional office. be more effective at influencing leg- grassroots appeal on a position can Jameson says the calls provide islators, though, because it is harder have an effect, Grossmann says. It “air cover” for clients whose lobby- to judge the authenticity of messages can make more of a difference if the ists are conveying similar messages originating from newer technologi- support is overwhelmingly one-sided, directly. He argues that while the call cal platforms. In one well-publicized if it is on an obscure issue, and if it centers his company uses help guide example, when the Federal Com- connects with the interests of constit- constituents in what to say, there’s munications Commission last year uents. Often, those efforts are aimed nothing fake about this means of com-

solicited comments on its proposal to at lower-profile committee votes or munication with lawmakers: “We MARK WILSON / GETTY

14 / The Weekly Standard October 1, 2018 are mobilizing citizens to take more 94 percent said in-person visits from Foundation, which works with advo- action.” He says his firm has done constituents could be influential in cacy groups on civic engagement, says “some Kavanaugh work” and has persuading a lawmaker on issues where controlled forums such as call-in town helped increase federal funding for the no firm decision had been reached. halls are more likely to produce posi- National Institutes of Health, but most Other effective strategies were indi- tive interactions between legislators of the action nowadays is at the state vidualized email messages (92 percent and their constituents. “The current level. The company’s website notes said they were influential), individu- situation of bombarding Capitol Hill it used patch-through calling to beat alized postal letters (88 percent), and with hundreds of calls and emails is back a West Virginia effort that would phone calls (84 percent). not conducive to a healthy democ- have required prescriptions for medi- The interns and young staffers who racy,” he says. “Members of Congress cines that contain key ingredients answer the phones on Capitol Hill are can’t separate the signal from the noise. used in making methamphetamines. often aware when they are targeted in Constituents don’t feel their voices are It also credited patch-through calls patch-through campaigns. Sometimes being heard. The members are not for the success of an effort to expand they can hear the telemarketer on the communicating effectively with con- Medicaid in Montana. line connecting the call. Or they notice stituents. There’s fault on both sides.” Other D.C.-based firms point to the volume of calls spiking on certain But in Washington the debates their state-level triumphs, too. Stones’ issues and hear the same talking points remain fierce, and interest groups and Phones touts its work helping to defeat over and over. Occasionally, the con- constituents want to weigh in. The a Texas bill that would have required stituent on the line will admit that an phones will keep ringing. ♦ people to use the restroom that aligns interest group told him or her what to with the sex listed on their birth cer- say. One staffer remembered a constit- tificates—a measure opposed by trans- uent saying, “Somebody called me and STATEMENT OF OWNERSHIP, gender advocates. “Stones’ worked told me to tell you not to pass tax cuts, MANAGEMENT, AND CIRCULATION with our partners in Texas to deploy but I actually like tax cuts.” (Required by 39 U.S.C. 3685) patch-through calls to successfully stop In other cases, staffers recall callers Publication Title: The Weekly Standard Publication No.: 13911 the bigoted and dangerous ‘bathroom who seemed baffled about why they Filing Date: 09/20/18 bill,’ ” its website says. It claims the were talking to a congressional office. Issue Frequency: Weekly except one week in March, one week in June, one week in August, one week in December. campaign reached nearly 300,000 Tex- “It’s pretty comical sometimes,” says Number of Issues Published Annually: 48 Annual Subscription Price: $119.00 ans and transferred more than 21,000 Scott Blakeman, who worked as a leg- Complete Mailing Address of Known Office of Publication: calls to Texas lawmakers. The bill died islative assistant for Rep. Doug Lam- The Weekly Standard, 1152 15th Street, NW, Suite 200, Washington, DC 20005 in the state legislature last year. born (R-Colo.) for four years. “You’d Complete Mailing Address of Headquarters or General Business Office of Publisher: The Weekly Standard, 1152 15th Street, NW, The Stones’ Phones website also just be polite, courteous: ‘Oh, I’m sorry. Suite 200, Washington, DC 20005 describes successful patch-through I think you may have the wrong num- Full Name and Complete Mailing Addresses of Editor, and Managing Editor: Editor: Stephen F. Hayes, The Weekly Standard, 1152 15th St., calling efforts to persuade Maryland ber, maybe? This is the congressman’s NW, Suite 200, Washington, DC 20005; Managing Editor: Richard Starr, The Weekly Standard, 1152 15th St., NW, Suite 200, legislators to approve a casino, prevent office. Did you have a question?’ And Washington, DC 20005 pension reform in Michigan, and kill they’d be like, ‘I’m sorry, no.’ And we’re Owner: Clarity Media Group, LLC, 555 17th St., Suite 700, Denver, CO 80202 right-to-work legislation in Ohio. The like, ‘Okay, have a nice day.’ So you Known Bondholders, Mortgagees, and Other Security Holders Owning or Holding 1 Percent or More of Total Amount of Bonds, company did not return calls asking kind of figure it out after a little bit.” Mortgages, or Other Securities: none for comment. Many legislators and citizens Extent and Nature Average No. Copies No. Copies of Circulation Each Issue During of Single Issue American Directions Group bills believe the existing system of interac- Preceding 12 Months Published Nearest itself on the website of the American tions between constituents and law- to Filing Date Association of Political Consultants makers is broken. Communications Total No. Copies 66,398 59,384 Paid and/or Requested Circulation as “one of the largest and most expe- have turned uncivil and even ugly. Paid/requested outside-county mail subscriptions stated on form 3541 50,255 43,686 rienced research and advocacy firms “When I have a caller who tells a young Paid/requested in-county in the country” in large part because staffer in my office who does case subscriptions stated on form 3541 0 0 Sales through dealers and carriers, street of its network of U.S.-based call cen- work that he hopes she is raped and vendors, counter sales and other non-USPS paid distribution 1,925 1,460 ters. “If a legislator gets a call,” the impregnated, we have really reached Other classes mailed through the USPS 0 0 company claims, “chances are ADG a new low,” Senator Susan Collins Total paid and/or requested circulation 52,180 45,146 Free Distribution by Mail (Samples, patched it through.” ADG’s chief mar- (R-Maine), a key vote on the Kava- complimentary, and other free) Outside-county as stated on form 3541 0 0 keting officer said in an email that the naugh confirmation, told the Bangor In-county as stated on form 3541 636 577 company does not speak to the media. Daily News in September month. Her Other classes mailed through the USPS 0 0 Free Distribution Outside the Mail office has received threatening letters (Carriers or other means) 13,132 13,211 about the nomination and more than Total Free Distribution 13,768 13,788 awmakers and their staffs tend to Total Distribution 65,948 58,934 L be receptive to hearing what con- 3,000 wire coat hangers, a reference to Copies not Distributed 450 450 Total 66,398 59,384 stituents think, and patch-through illegal abortions. Percent paid and/or requested circulation 79.1% 76.6% calls exploit that openness. In a 2017 Bradford Fitch, president of I certify that all information furnished above is true and complete. survey of congressional staff members, the Congressional Management Richard Trocchia, Circulation Director

October 1, 2018 The Weekly Standard / 15 stories about bad priests, teachers, and coaches if such laws had been in place See Anything, in the past? And yet the law is a blunt instru- ment. Our desire for a fail-safe mech- Say Something? anism to prevent abuse and coverups will be incompatible with a host of other goods. When we devise new laws or expand old ones, we can The pros and cons of ‘mandated reporting.’ expect a clash of values as well as by Naomi Schaefer Riley unintended consequences. There are valid reasons some groups are exempt from reporting their suspicions about abuse and neglect. Requiring clergy to act as mandated reporters, for example, might discourage victims from seek- ing counseling, or violate the sacred- ness and privacy of confession. And more legal requirements for man- dated reporting means putting more people into potential legal jeopardy, both those accused of abuse and those who fail to report their suspicions. Penalties vary by state but in Massa- chusetts, failure to report by a man- dated reporter can result in a fine of up to $5,000 and imprisonment of up to two and a half years. As Walter Olson of the Cato Insti- A protest of clerical sex abuse outside the Roman Cathedral in Los Angeles, June 2003 tute notes, increasing the number of mandated reporters could “incen- n Catholic parishes around the encouraged to tell the authorities if tivize” people “to resolve uncertain, world, at elite private schools they believe a child is being harmed, gray areas in favor of reporting.” It I such as Phillips Exeter Acad- is not required on pain of punishment will multiply “investigations based emy and St. George’s School, and in to do so. on hunches or ambiguous evidence institutions such as the U.S. Olympic But these recent cases suggest we which can harm the innocent, trau- Committee, people who knew about can no longer rely on people’s con- matize families, result in CPS [child longstanding sexual abuse of children sciences to protect children. Marci protective services] raids, and stimu- and teenagers ignored it or covered it Hamilton, chief executive of CHILD late false allegations,” he says. up. A rash of “good people” did noth- USA and one of the attorneys lead- The concern isn’t unfounded. Just ing, and evil prevailed. ing the charge on behalf of sex abuse last month, parents across the country One way to try to prevent this from survivors in the Catholic church and were outraged by news that a Chicago- happening in the future is to legally elsewhere, tells me every organization area mother was reported to police require that employees of any child- that deals with young people should and investigated by the state for let- serving organization report their sus- adopt two rules. The first, she says, ting her 8-year-old walk a dog around picions about abuse to authorities. is that “if anyone has suspicions it is the block by herself. Lenore Skenazy, Most states already mandate that peo- their obligation not just to tell their founder of the “free-range” parent- ple in certain professions—doctors, superiors but to call the authorities.” ing movement, who happens to have members of law enforcement, public The second: Protect these whistle- grown up in the same well-to-do sub- school teachers, and social workers, blowers from recrimination. urb, wrote, “This was all because of for instance—report suspected abuse Hamilton’s reasoning is that cov- the ridiculous assumption that one or neglect. But everyone else, while erups would be far less likely if the must leave no stone unturned when it law required clergy, private school comes to children’s safety.” Naomi Schaefer Riley is a visiting fellow at employees, and sports officials to serve Skenazy and the free-rangers are the American Enterprise Institute and a senior as mandated reporters. Would we still not wrong to see hysteria and nosi-

fellow at the Independent Women’s Forum. be unearthing decades-old horror ness behind some abuse and neglect ANGELES TIMES / GETTY ANNE CUSACK / LOS

16 / The Weekly Standard October 1, 2018 reports. After all, crime rates in most of the country are lower than they have been in decades, and the likeli- The Battle hood that a child would be in dan- ger walking a dog around a suburban block is minuscule. According to the of the Bobs University of New Hampshire Crimes Against Children Research Center, physical assaults against children ages 2 to 17 was down 33 percent between A surprisingly competitive Senate race 2003 and 2011, and rape (attempted in New Jersey. by Ethan Epstein or completed) of children was down 43 percent in the same time period. Summit, N.J. Chesney concert at Met Life Stadium, Of course, these statistics are not he Northeast’s soggy late the Labor Day parade in South Plain- incompatible with the kind of long- summer led to the last-minute field, and the St. Patrick’s Day party at term, secret sexual abuse that has T postponement of the premier Murph’s Tavern in Totowa (this was a gone on in many religious and edu- social event of the golden-ager cal- few days after the pre-Saint Patrick’s cational institutions. And increasing endar in this part of New Jersey: the Day Parade Brunch in Wall Town- the number of mandated reporters Bergen County Senior Citizens Pic- ship, which he also attended). Even for will certainly result in unwarranted nic. And so instead of shaking hands shut-ins, there’s been no escaping the charges that upend the worlds and and scarfing hot dogs, Bob Hugin is candidate. Hugin, running a largely violate the rights of some adults. holed up in the back of a sushi restau- self-financed campaign, has been on Whenever any teacher or pastor sees rant in this upmarket town 25 miles television since February, blanketing an odd picture drawn by a first-grader west of Manhattan. this pricey state in advertising. or overhears an inappropriate-sound- New Jersey is in ing snippet of conversation between the midst of an unex- 12-year-olds, he or she will feel obli- pected battle of the gated to call the police or child pro- Bobs. Incumbent Bob tective services or both. Menendez, a senator One need only recall the McMar- since 2006, a member tin preschool cases of the 1980s in of the House of Repre- Los Angeles, or the similar Amirault sentatives for 13 years cases in Massachusetts—false and fan- before that, and a mayor tastic accusations of sexual abuse that and state representative resulted in unjust prison sentences— before that, was badly to realize just how serious the con- weakened by legal tra- sequences of a wrongheaded report vails over the past sev- might be. eral years. Though he’s But a few states are moving in that running as a Democrat direction. In the wake of the abuse Bob Hugin after announcing his candidacy in February in a state that hasn’t scandal at Pennsylvania State Uni- been kind to Republi- versity, the state expanded mandated Hugin, the Republican nominee for cans running for national office for the reporter categories to include clergy Senate here, is mounting what many last three decades, he finds himself in as well as a long list of others (such as cast as a quixotic battle in this heav- a tough spot. librarians) who regularly come into ily Democratic state. His strategy thus Menendez, 64, was indicted in 2015 contact with children. far has been to attend every gather- for corruption. The charges stemmed When the pope himself has been ing of, oh, three or more people. Not from the senator’s relationship with credibly accused of protecting sexual just the senior citizens’ picnic: Since a Florida doctor, Salomon Melgen, abusers, it’s clear that society could be announcing his candidacy in Febru- with whom he forged an unusually doing more to prod institutions into ary, the Summit resident has shown close friendship. Criminally close, the greater transparency and account- up at the Dominican parade in Pater- Department of Justice argued: Melgen ability regarding transgressions. The son, the Puerto Rican heritage parade lavished Menendez with gifts (trips on price is indeed high, but after a seem- in Jersey City, the Ecuadorian Parade his private plane, free nights in swanky ingly endless stream of scandals from and Festival in Newark, a Kenny Paris hotels) and in turn, the senator our most trusted institutions it is one allegedly did his bidding on a num- that devastated families across the Ethan Epstein is associate editor ber of matters, including securing U.S.

ED MURRAY / THE STAR-LEDGER / AP / THE STAR-LEDGER ED MURRAY country are probably willing to pay. ♦ of The Weekly Standard. visas for Melgen’s many girlfriends and

October 1, 2018 The Weekly Standard / 17 attempting to pressure the Health and high local taxes like New Jersey, New I’m going to be very clear about those Human Services Department to change York, Maryland, and California. Filers things,” he says. its Medicare billing practices in a way used to be able to deduct the entirety of Hugin’s approach is working, if that would help his friend. their local property and income taxes; the polls are to be believed. In April, Late last year, Menendez’s trial now they can deduct only the first Menendez led 53 to 32, accord- ended in a hung jury—he was not $10,000. Hugin wants to raise the cap. ing to Monmouth. By late August, exonerated—while Melgen was con- Indeed, in many ways, Hugin the incumbent’s lead had shrunk to victed of Medicare fraud and sentenced sounds more like a gubernatorial can- 43-37. Hugin’s campaign spokesman to 17 years in prison. (Melgen was didate than one running for national tells me that their internal polls show found to have subjected his patients to office. “I’m going to talk about a “dead heat.” unnecessary and often painful medi- every issue,” he says. “Whether it’s And Menendez acts worried: cal tests simply to bilk Medicare.) The a state issue, municipal issue, local Rather than have the candidate press Department of Justice later announced issue.” He deplores the outmigration the flesh, his campaign has released that it wouldn’t be refiling a series of advertisements charges against the senator. targeting Hugin’s record at After his indictment, Celgene. He’s also painted Menendez stepped down as too close to Trump. from the Senate Foreign Hugin, for his part, says Relations Committee, but he will continue to be any- the party gave him the all- where and everywhere— clear following the mis- “I’m not afraid to answer trial, and he continued in questions,” he says. “I’m not his reelection bid. Voters, running away from my past, however, seem less thrilled I’m running towards every- than the party bosses: In the thing I’ve done in my life.” June Democratic primary, Menendez has agreed to Menendez took only 62 meet Hugin for one debate, percent of the vote against scheduled for October 24. a no-name challenger who Even if Hugin comes up barely campaigned. Perhaps short, one New Jersey politi- conscious of his swoon- Bob Menendez speaking in Brick, New Jersey, August 6 cal observer points out that a ing popularity, he has now weak showing from Menen- adopted the “barely campaign” strat- from New Jersey, which he blames on dez could have knock-on effects for egy himself. Rarely making public high living costs. He laments the mas- Democrats’ hopes of taking the House appearances in New Jersey, he’s stuck sive fiscal problems that have piled of Representatives. Democrats are close to Washington this summer. up in Trenton, especially the pension aiming to take up to five GOP-held Hugin, also 64, sensed an opening debts. “In Trenton, higher taxes and New Jersey House seats this Novem- after Menendez’s mistrial. The New higher spending have been [seen] as ber, including Leonard Lance’s and Jersey native, retired Marine, and the solution, as opposed to the prob- Tom MacArthur’s. But depressed chairman of Celgene, a NASDAQ- lem,” he says. Democratic turnout, with Menendez listed pharmaceutical company that While he’s never been a politician at the top of the ticket, would make he used to run as CEO, began to com- before, years in the public eye as the that more difficult. mission polls, he says. He only wanted CEO of a publicly traded company Should he win, on the other hand, to run if he had a real shot at winning, have trained Hugin to stay on message. Hugin seems likely to join the list of and the polls gave him that confi- He declines to comment on the perfor- once-optimistic citizen-legislators dence, he recalls. mance of New Jersey’s other senator, who end up stymied by the gridlock, Hugin, gray-haired and gravel- Cory Booker, for example. (“My race is partisanship, and emphasis on arcane voiced, announced his candidacy in Bob Hugin versus Bob Menendez,” he procedure that define the contempo- February and has run a relentless, says.) And he’s careful on the subject rary Senate. The upper chamber, after locally focused campaign ever since. of the president, who remains unpop- all, has demoralized many a would-be Over lunch, he begins by bemoaning ular here. “The American people had hard-charging “doer.” And being 1 of the limits on the state-and-local tax a choice in 2016, and they elected 100 senators is far different from being deduction included in last year’s GOP [Trump]. And in 2020, they’re going one CEO. But for now that seems like tax bill. While that law represented to have another choice. And there are a problem Hugin is eager to confront. a tax cut for most Americans, the SALT a number of people who do things in a On September 25, he plans to attend deduction limitation meant a tax hike way that I don’t like. There are things the rescheduled Bergen County Senior

for many wealthy filers in states with that he does that I don’t like. And Citizens Picnic. ♦ IMAGES / LIGHTROCKET GETTY MICHAEL BROCHSTEIN / SOPA

18 / The Weekly Standard October 1, 2018 contained in the texts. Freshmen sci- ence students might sketch magnolias Great Books— and sophomore math students parse Ptolemy’s calculations of planetary motion. The purpose? Cultivating close 32 Percent Off attention. As Annapolis campus presi- dent Panayiotis Kanelos says, “Forcing students to slow down and to look, or to listen, or to pay attention to things that St. John’s College lowers tuition, a lot. are sometimes micro-details” applies by Philip Luke Jeffery across every discipline at St John’s and is “one of the things that are top priori- Annapolis, Md. board of visitors and governors asked ties of the college.” n September 12, St. John’s Scott Buchanan and Stringfellow Barr, As Bryan Luther, who came to St. College, the Great Books veterans of newly created Great Books John’s in 2015 from Concordia, where O school with campuses in courses at the University of Chicago he taught nuclear physics and chaired Annapolis, Md., and Santa Fe, N.M., and the University of Virginia, for the physics department, observes, announced that it is slashing annual help reorganizing the college. The “The science and math curriculum at tuition from over $52,000 to $35,000. new program Buchanan and Barr pro- St. John’s is quite rigorous.” In an effort to make a great books education more acces- ntense focus on the books sible to more families, the I leaves little room for dis- college plans to accompany cussions of context. One this 32 percent reduction in alumnus told me a story tuition with a massive capital (likely apocryphal, he admit- campaign expected to raise ted) about former St. John’s $300 million by 2023. dean Jacob Klein, who is said This announcement bucks to have remarked, “If my the prevailing trend for col- students graduate thinking lege tuition across the coun- Dante wrote in Greek, I will try—average tuition has have done my job.” more than doubled for both Historical and biographi- private and public institu- cal background informa- tions over the past 30 years, tion about the texts and thanks in large part to their authors might distract ever-expanding university Johnnies in seminar in 1940 from the ideas and conversa- administrations and “pres- tions they contain, the argu- tige pricing” practices that imply a posed required every student to take ment goes. Kanelos acknowledges relationship between high tuition the same set of classes and made every that context can be important—“we costs and high-quality education. course a great books course. The col- live in context,” he says—but at St. It’s difficult to imagine anyone cut- lege survived, eventually opening a John’s, “We really try to remove the ting tuition these days, much less by second campus just outside Santa Fe experience from thinking about it $17,000 per year. in 1964. as contextualized in particular his- It’s the kind of thing that could “The Program,” as it is called, con- torical moments or cultures. So even only happen at St. John’s. The tinues all but unchanged to this day. though we read chronologically, school’s unique curriculum encour- Every student takes a seminar, science we’re really reading author-to-author, ages institutional innovations lab, math tutorial, language tutorial, idea-to-idea.” unimaginable elsewhere. and music class. Each course relies on But of course the curriculum too Although St. John’s is the third a reading list of great works, and pro- “lives in context”—a context that it oldest college in the United States fessors (or “tutors,” as they’re known permeates in almost every way on (founded in 1696), the curriculum at St. John’s, with the understanding campus. Intramural sports, student for which it is best known wasn’t that the real teachers are the authors of publications, and clubs all exist at St. launched until 1937. Struggling to get the books) teach every subject. John’s, but the majority of students’ through the Depression, the college’s This extends beyond the humani- social lives are bound up with the great ties; science and mathematics classes books they read. As a tour guide who Philip Luke Jeffery is an editorial assistant at St. John’s ask students to replicate works with the admissions office told

at The Weekly Standard. many experiments and calculations me, “The only students who struggle / THE LIFE PICTURE COLLECTION GETTY ALFRED EISENSTAEDT

October 1, 2018 The Weekly Standard / 19 here socially are the ones who don’t campus, before launching into an 60 percent of their own costs, with do the work.” In the seminar-style explanation of how the Greeks under- the college making up the difference classes at St. John’s, students quickly stood mathematics. through fundraising and alumni dona- notice who has bought in to the St. Though administration and teach- tions. The college’s newly announced John’s experience and who hasn’t. One ing blend at St. John’s, it’s clear that “Freeing Minds” campaign has alumnus reminisces about the kinds the latter is the priority. As a result, already raised $183 million. of parties he regularly attended while faculty members have a uniquely But the school’s recent history has a student at St. John’s: “On Saturday important role on campus, as Gold- also been somewhat turbulent. When nights we used to get together. . . . We Kanelos’s predecessor, Christopher would drink wine and try to translate Nelson, who led the Annapolis cam- Xenophon until 2, 3 a.m.” pus for over 25 years, announced his For good or for ill, “Johnnies,” as retirement, the board considered sig- students refer to themselves, aren’t nificantly restructuring the college. subject to some of the habits that One proposal involved merging the define others in their age cohort. leadership of the two campuses under Kanelos says that when he walked Mark Roosevelt, president of the from his office to the student coffee Santa Fe campus, which prompted shop one day, he counted 37 students, several commentators, including most of whom were either reading or Roger Kimball in Real Clear Politics, discussing that day’s reading; only to express doubts about Roosevelt’s one was looking at a phone. commitment to The Program. Another contemporary student Roosevelt also angered some habit conspicuously missing at St. Johnnie alumni when he appeared John’s? Protest. “There are no hostile on Fox’s Tucker Carlson Tonight pro- activist groups at SJC of any stripe,” gram. “There was “a huge backlash says one recent graduate, explaining against [Roosevelt] among alums that the small community, the rig- and students,” a former student tells orous curriculum, and the ability to me. “Tears were shed, donations channel disagreement in seminar dis- were canceled.” cussions left little room for political But a 2017 letter from the col- discontent. “I never saw a protest of Annapolis campus president Panayiotis Kanelos lege’s board of directors to alumni any kind at SJC.” with a first-edition copy of Hobbes’s Leviathan was optimistic. “We are well posi- tioned to survive the convulsions in lso conspicuously absent at St. berg explains: “Governance of the pro- higher education,” the board wrote, A John’s—and one reason it can gram and curriculum itself is strictly “but we will not do so by crossing our afford to be nimble about tuition in the hands of the tutors.” fingers and hoping for the best. We costs—is a monstrous bureaucracy. The curriculum has a more compli- will thrive by questioning the status Whereas other institutions of higher cated effect on the college’s finances. quo everywhere we see it.” learning support department-specific Its near-exclusive reliance on seminar For his part, Kanelos remains con- administrations, development offices, classes means that the college can’t fident that alumni interest and vigor- student life offices, multicultural take advantage of the economies of ous fundraising efforts will carry the affairs offices, and armies of provosts scale that come with corralling stu- college to its goal and secure the future and deans, St. John’s has fewer than dents into regular lecture courses. The of this unique institution. If the stu- a dozen administrators across both of seminar structure also forces St. John’s dents I talked to are any indication, its campuses. to maintain a low student-to-faculty Kanelos’s confidence is justified. “We do not even speak of having ratio, which requires a relatively high St. John’s is “the last real education an administration as such, and a num- number of full-time faculty, and unlike in America,” one alumnus tells me, ber of so-called administrators actu- most colleges and universities, St. adding, “No one is doing [education] ally have faculty designation,” says John’s refuses to hire adjuncts to ease as deeply and as truly as St. John’s.” Robert Goldberg, a tutor at St. John’s. the teaching load. There’s an enduring bond Johnnies Luther makes a similar observation: This all adds up to a per-student share that keeps them interested in “St. John’s has much more faculty cost to the college of about $60,000 the college’s well-being even after they and administration collaboration than per year—which makes the recent graduate. “You don’t feel as if you can anywhere else I have worked.” “I wear announcement about tuition all the deeply communicate with anybody about five different hats around here,” more remarkable. Starting in 2019, who doesn’t have that same founda- says Joe MacFarland, dean of academic the college is committing to hav- tion,” he says. “I think most people

affairs and a tutor at the Annapolis ing students each pay no more than love St. John’s as much as I do.” ♦ JOHN’S COLLEGE COURTESY OF ST.

20 / The Weekly Standard October 1, 2018 A Failure of Responsibility Washington fiddles while the entitlement problem metastasizes

By Yuval Levin and debt would not be a priority for his administration. & James C. Capretta And sure enough, since his inauguration the govern- ment’s fiscal outlook has eroded substantially, mainly due ho says there is no bipartisanship in to new legislation championed by Trump and a Republican the age of Trump? When it comes to Congress. The administration has yet to present a realistic federal deficits and debt, the parties budget plan that could reduce future deficits and actually have never been more aligned. For pass, and congressional Republicans have given up any pre- most of the last two decades, Republi- tense of wanting entitlement reform. The Democrats, of cansW insisted they wanted to reform the federal entitlement course, only propose to spend more—and increasingly even programs to avert a painful fiscal crunch. suggest that the nation’s immense health- In the George W. Bush years, they pro- entitlement programs should serve as posed Social Security reform. In the models for aggressive new spending. Obama years, they pushed for changes to The consequence of this bipartisan Medicare. And all the while, Democrats determination to borrow and spend is a insisted there was nothing to worry about fiscal outlook that has never been more except Republicans who wanted to deny dire. The Congressional Budget Office seniors their benefits—or at least nothing (CBO) projects the federal government that higher taxes on the wealthy couldn’t will begin running annual deficits exceed- solve. But Donald Trump has put an end ing $1 trillion in 2020 and run a cumula- to the fighting by simply refusing to face tive 10-year deficit of $12.4 trillion from the problem altogether, in effect denying 2019 to 2028. These large deficits are on that any solution is needed at all. He has the order of those racked up immedi- taken the Democrats’ denial a step fur- ately after the Great Recession, but they ther, and Republicans have been all too are now in the offing when the economy willing to follow his lead. is strong, employment is high, inflation President Trump didn’t create the fis- and interest rates are low, and the busi- cal mess our country now confronts, of ness cycle is likely near its peak. If we course. But together with Congress, he is faced another recession today, we would well on his way to making it much worse. be starting from a baseline of extremely During the 2016 campaign, Trump paid high deficits and growing them further. lip service to cutting deficits by trim- We also confront these projections ming wasteful spending, but he presented no plausible just as the aging baby-boom generation begins to exert max- plans for actual restraint. Moreover, he promised voters imum pressure on entitlement spending. CBO projects that big tax cuts, no changes to entitlement spending, and a sig- under plausible assumptions (such as permanent extension nificant reinvestment in the military. With that combina- of the 2017 tax cuts), the government’s cumulative debt will tion of commitments, he signaled that restraining deficits grow from 78 percent of GDP this year to 148 percent in 2038 and to 210 percent of GDP in 2048. Debt at such high Yuval Levin is the vice president and Hertog fellow levels would be unprecedented in the nation’s history (let at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. James C. Capretta alone in peacetime), and if CBO’s assumption that we will

is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. face no major wars or severe economic crises in this period JASON SEILER

October 1, 2018 The Weekly Standard / 21 An Untenable Future Federal debt as a percentage of U.S. gross domestic product,1790-2048

160% 160%

140% 140% Historical Projected 120% 120%

100% 100%

80% 80%

60% 60%

40% 40%

20% 20%

0% 0% 1790 1810 1830 1850 1870 1890 1910 1930 1950 1970 1990 2010 2030 SOURCES: Historical data, Office of Management and Budget; projections, Congressional Budget Office should prove too rosy, then the debt will only grow higher. out. Once that invisible line is crossed, interest rates In 2008, before the full effects of the financial crash had can spike, raising borrowing costs even more, which can driven up federal spending and suppressed tax collection, quickly spark a serious crisis. It is one of the core respon- federal debt stood at 39 percent of GDP. sibilities of public officials to avoid avoidable calamities There is a broad consensus among economists that and to refrain from creating risks of significant harm and large and persistent deficits slow economic growth by low- disruption for citizens. Our leaders are failing miserably in ering savings and investment. Workers are less productive this regard with respect to federal debt. than they would be otherwise and have lower incomes. Even assuming the United States is fortunate enough In fact, the recent run of stagnant wages is likely owed in to avert a rupture in its ability to readily borrow, the explo- part to inadequate investment in productivity growth due sive growth of federal spending over the coming three to high deficits, and thus low national savings rates, over decades will create enormous economic pressure that will many years. lower growth and incomes. The usual justification for Large and persistent deficits also raise somewhat the borrowing is that it enables investment in the future. But risk of a genuine economic crisis. It is easy to become com- today’s federal budget is heavily biased toward supporting placent about this threat, given the size and strength of the the current consumption of the mostly elderly beneficiaries U.S. economy. But there’s no way to predict what would of government programs, which leaves less and less room happen if America’s public finances remain on their cur- for investments in infrastructure or commitments to new rent course, which is far out of line with historical experi- basic scientific endeavors that might increase the standard ence. Countries get into trouble when servicing their debts of living of future generations. becomes near-impossible given the size of their govern- All of this is straightforward. Our elected officials all ments’ other commitments and the upper limit on revenue know it. They also know that taking steps to avert the imposed by citizens unwilling to tolerate confiscatory tax danger will only get more difficult the nearer it is allowed rates. The United States is likely to have more room for to approach. But the very unpredictability of the conse- borrowing without facing these most dire consequences, quences of such unprecedented peacetime deficits and debt,

but no one can know for sure just when its luck will run combined with a longstanding pattern of failure to think STANDARD THE WEEKLY

22 / The Weekly Standard October 1, 2018 clearly about medium-term risks, has meant that the dan- and nondefense combined) was just 6.3 percent of GDP, ger has been permitted to grow. down from 7.7 percent in 2008. President Trump’s budget Politicians have long been in the habit of describing proposes to take that spending down to just 3.9 percent of these problems as somewhere off in the distance, so that GDP in 2028, including only 1.5 percent of GDP for non- worrying about them is a matter of not burdening our chil- defense discretionary spending. This is the category of the dren and grandchildren. That used to be true, but it isn’t budget that funds everything from the National Institutes of anymore. The 2030s are as close to us now as the 2000s. It’s Health to the FBI and the National Park Service. It is very no longer about our distant descendants. Today’s younger unlikely that funding for these activities will fall anywhere and middle-aged workers will experience the fallout from near as low as the administration’s proposals suggest. And the unprecedented deficits and debts the CBO projects. given the many security risks facing the country, it would And some of the solutions that might have been adequate be irresponsible in the extreme to plan for deep cuts in the had we taken them up a decade or two ago will no longer nation’s military and national-security programs. But even suffice even if we suddenly find the will. if such unrealistic proposals could be Gradual, responsible, politically plausible enacted, growing entitlement spend- solutions would need to be started soon. Large and persistent ing would still eat up the savings and But Washington has proven less and less then some. able to take the problem seriously. deficits raise the risk The inescapable conclusion of a genuine economic from the historical budget data ENTITLEMENTS crisis. There’s no way and all plausible projections is that ARE THE PROBLEM to predict what would entitlement spending will continue o take the problem seriously happen if America’s to be the primary cause of the fed- would mean, first of all, under- public finances remain eral government’s fiscal problems. T standing its causes. Democrats Entitlement spending therefore would like Americans to believe that the on their current needs to be the primary focus of any nation’s fiscal problems stem entirely course, which is attempted solutions. from a Republican obsession with tax far out of line with Entitlement spending growth cuts. They are right that reducing federal historical experience. is concentrated in three very large revenue certainly makes deficits bigger. programs: Social Security, Medi- But tax revenue could never keep up with care, and Medicaid. And all three federal spending on its current course. The real problem is are heavily influenced by the nation’s shifting demographic the unrelenting growth of entitlement spending, which has profile. In 1965, when Medicare was created, there were been underway for more than four decades and will con- roughly five workers for each beneficiary of that program tinue uninterrupted in the current century if reforms are and of Social Security. Today there are about three, and as not put in place. the baby boomers rapidly exit the workforce over the com- Historical data and CBO’s long-term projections tell ing years the number will continue to decline. This aging of the story. Over the 50-year period between 1968 and 2017, the population also affects Medicaid, as about a fifth of that average annual federal tax collections equaled 17.4 percent program’s money is spent on seniors, particularly on long- of GDP. That hasn’t changed. CBO projects that if the 2017 term care. tax cuts are extended, revenue would still be 17.4 percent of For Social Security, this demographic transformation GDP in 2028 and 17.9 percent of GDP in 2038. Meanwhile, is the essence of the problem. It means that the payroll entitlement spending grew from 5.5 percent of GDP in tax intended to fund the program has proven increas- 1968 to 10.4 percent in 2008. Today, it exceeds 13 percent. ingly insufficient over time. The cost of the program has CBO projects that federal spending on just Social Security, exceeded its income every year since 2010, but the differ- Medicare, Medicaid, and Obamacare subsidies will amount ence has been made up by income earned from interest to an additional 4.6 percentage points of GDP in 2048, on the reserves built up in Social Security’s trust funds in compared with today. better times. Last year’s report of the Social Security trust- The Trump administration and some Republicans in ees estimated that this interest income would prove insuf- Congress would like to implement deep cuts in appropri- ficient starting in 2022, when the program would have ated spending to help ease the budget crunch, but that is to start drawing on its reserves. But that quickly turned as inadequate a plan for fiscal discipline as the Democrats’ out to be overly optimistic, and in this year’s report the dream of balancing the budget by raising taxes on the trustees note that the line has already been crossed, four wealthy. In 2017, discretionary federal spending (defense years early. Social Security’s total cost will exceed its total

October 1, 2018 The Weekly Standard / 23 income (including interest income) this year, and if the The fiscal prospects of Medicaid, which provides program is not reformed it will continue to do so every health coverage to lower-income Americans, are simi- year from now on. larly influenced by the rising cost of care and have been Social Security is living off its reserves, and the trustees transformed over the past decade by a massive expan- expect those reserves to last until 2034. But even if they are sion of the program under the Affordable Care Act. The right, this does not mean we have that long to address the ACA increased Medicaid enrollment by nearly 30 percent, problem. As former trustee Charles Blahous has noted, if to roughly 70 million Americans. The federal portion of we were to wait until 2034, even denying benefits entirely Medicaid will cost taxpayers $383 billion this year, accord- to newly retiring seniors at that point (which, needless to ing to CBO, and over the coming decade that number is say, could never happen) would not be enough to enable projected to rise to more than $650 billion a year. the program to keep providing benefits to those already But Medicare and Medicaid are not simply victims of getting them. Some reforms must come well before that, rapidly rising health-care costs. They contribute heavily to and the longer we wait the harder they will be to enact. rising costs through their very design. Medicare in particu- Social Security’s core old-age and survivor benefit pro- lar is a major reason why American health care is weighed gram will spend $834 billion this year, according to CBO, down with rampant waste and inefficiency. It is the primary and that number will rise to $1.5 trillion per year by 2028. regulator of the American health-care system. Because it is Reforms will have to take place against the backdrop of the biggest payer in the system, its vast and arcane system of enormous fiscal pressures. rules for paying hospitals, physicians, and other service pro- Medicare is also an old-age benefit program and so is viders heavily influences how care is delivered to all patients, similarly exposed to the aging of our society, but it has not just the elderly. Above all, Medicare creates powerful other troubles besides. Medicare has never been fully incentives for excess service provision by paying providers funded by a payroll tax and has not built up reserves any- on a fee-for-service basis while tightly capping prices per ser- where near those of Social Security. The one portion of vice. That means providers make more by providing more Medicare that resembles Social Security’s structure is its services rather then offering more value, which makes for hospital-insurance trust fund, which does draw its fund- a less efficient system. Medicare’s administrators have long ing in part from a payroll tax. But that part of the program, understood this problem, but attempts to address it have just like Social Security, began to draw on its reserves this mostly proven counterproductive. Value-driven Medicare year, about five years sooner than the program’s trustees reform is therefore essential both to the fiscal health of our expected even a year ago. Its reserves are projected to be government and to keeping health-care costs under control depleted well before Social Security’s, in 2026. more generally while providing seniors with the care they The other parts of Medicare (most notably its physi- need and want. cian and outpatient services) are already funded largely Medicaid is a smaller player in the system but still a mas- by general tax revenue, so they don’t face an insolvency sive one, and it also includes incentives that drive up costs. A date, but they are a massive draw on federal resources and fundamental problem is the split financial responsibility for becoming more so all the time. The scope of this spending the program. The federal government pays for about 60 per- is underappreciated. Federal taxpayers will be providing cent of all state Medicaid spending, with no upper limit. an astonishing $4.4 trillion in subsidies for these parts of This means states can give their residents a dollar in ben- the program over the next 10 years. More than 15 percent efits while spending only about 40 cents themselves, which of federal revenue is now spent on Medicare, and that fig- creates incentives for some kinds of over-spending even as ure is expected to balloon as more and more baby boomers the overall benefit is often inadequate. A web of federal rules retire—growing much faster than the economy, inflation, imposed on the states has not solved this problem but has or any plausible increase in federal revenue. made the system even more complex. The sad irony of Med- This is not entirely because of demographics, of icaid is that its costs are so high that many states are strug- course. Social Security provides age-based cash bene- gling to finance their programs, even as the beneficiaries fits to a growing elderly population; Medicare provides who rely on the program are too often underserved and pro- health insurance, which means its costs are rising both vided with an unacceptably low quality of care. because of a growing base of beneficiaries who live longer In both cases, we find the federal government worsen- and because of health-care costs that have grown signifi- ing the problem of rising health-care costs and then paying cantly faster than inflation for decades. CBO expects net a heavy price for it. Health-entitlement reform is therefore federal spending on Medicare (after subtracting premi- imperative both for fiscal reasons and to enable the Ameri- ums paid by enrollees) to be $590 billion this year and to can health-care system to provide more people with access rise to $1.3 trillion per year over the coming decade. to affordable coverage and care.

26 / The Weekly Standard October 1, 2018 All three of our major federal reform should also make the pro- entitlements cry out for reform. How Entitlements grams work better for the benefi- Without it, a painful fiscal crunch Ate the Budget ciaries who rely on them. In each will grow increasingly unavoid- Components of federal spending case, reform would have to begin able. That doesn’t make the politics by distinguishing means from of improving these programs any Defense Social Security ends and thinking about how to more palatable. But it means there Nondefense Health achieve the purpose of the pro- is no excuse for avoiding the prob- discretionary entitlements gram rather than how to preserve lem or for exaggerating the difficul- its current design. ties involved in addressing it. Social Security serves two primary purposes. First, the pro- gram requires all workers to set PATHS TOWARD REFORM aside a portion of their pay dur- he debate over entitlement ing their working years in return reform suffers from two for its partially meeting their T kinds of hyperbole. Oppo- retirement-income needs when nents of change, generally on the they grow older. In a modern left, often charge that any modifica- 1968 and wealthy country, citizens tion to the benefit rules of the major do not want the elderly to live entitlements would be the first step without sufficient means when toward their elimination. But some they are no longer able to pro- proponents of reform, especially vide for themselves through their on the right, reinforce these scare own earnings. Many people will tactics by claiming that their ideas set aside sufficient reserves to will lead to a wholesale remaking finance their own retirements, of these programs (if not of Ameri- but some won’t, which means can government more generally), some workers will be asked to when in fact realistic proposals 1988 pay for the retirements of oth- would make gradual changes in ers as well as for themselves. To incremental ways. minimize this burden, Social The truth is that the nation has Security compels all workers built a vast and expensive social to participate in a system that safety net supporting the income provides a minimum level of and health of retirees, and the goals retirement support. It’s a pay-as- of this safety net are deeply estab- you-go system, so the money isn’t lished on all sides of our political actually invested and set aside culture. They are not going any- until a worker retires. Instead it where. What is being debated is 2008 is used to pay for the benefits of how to modify and adjust the enti- current retirees, and the worker tlement system to ensure it con- earns credits that he will draw on tinues to provide the protection when he retires. taxpayers expect while being afford- The second purpose of Social able and consistent with the eco- Security is to provide additional nomic dynamism and growth that financial support in retirement pay for it. The challenge, which is to workers who earn low wages a core challenge facing every lib- in their working years and are eral society, is how to balance dyna- therefore unable to save enough mism, security, and social cohesion. for their retirements. The pro- 2028 The focus of reform must nec- (projected) gram’s benefit rules are weighted essarily be budgetary in part, to to provide a greater replacement reduce the fiscal risks in the paths rate for low wages than for high SOURCE: Congressional Budget Office

THE WEEKLY STANDARD THE WEEKLY these programs are on today. But wages, which has the effect of

October 1, 2018 The Weekly Standard / 27 boosting the retirement incomes of workers with low life- with the needs and dynamics of the modern economy time earnings. and result in a program better suited to meeting its orig- Combining these two purposes with other social ben- inal goals while avoiding fiscal ruin, helping the needi- efits (such as assistance for spouses, survivors, and depen- est most, and encouraging growth. dent children) has made the current program impossibly Medicare also has two basic purposes, so a sensible opaque to workers. Very few Americans understand the reform of Medicare would be analogous in some ways to rules sufficiently to know what to expect from the system the one proposed for Social Security, but for slightly differ- when they retire. ent reasons. Andrew Biggs of the American Enterprise Institute has Medicare’s first goal is to provide a guaranteed insur- developed a reform plan for Social Security that would bet- ance benefit for all retirees 65 and older at a premium that ter serve the two purposes of the current program, and in does not vary based on the health status of the beneficiary. a way that is both more progressive and more supportive This is a highly valued benefit of Medicare because in a of work. He would address the two pur- fully deregulated private market poses by creating two distinct elements retirees in poor health would find of Social Security. The first would pro- it hard—maybe impossible—to vide a universal, flat retirement-income Combining Social get insurance at an affordable payment to all eligible retirees. This Security’s two primary premium. Older people are in benefit would be tied to the poverty line purposes with other poorer health as a general matter, and ensure that all retirees who con- social benefits (such as so Medicare serves an important tribute sufficiently into Social Security assistance for spouses, purpose (and even makes possi- would be guaranteed an income that is ble a competitive insurance mar- at least equal to the poverty line. This survivors, and dependent ket for younger Americans) by provision would raise the benefits of children) has made giving the elderly access to guar- approximately one-third of all Social the current program anteed coverage. Security beneficiaries who today get impossibly opaque The second purpose of benefits that are below the measure of to workers. Very few Medicare is redistribution from poverty—and by so doing it would put current taxpayers to retirees. an end to poverty among retirees. In Americans understand Medicare beneficiaries pay pre- this way, the reform would be more pro- the rules sufficiently to miums for their enrollment gressive than current law. know what to expect into coverage for physician ser- The second part of Social Secu- from the system when vices and outpatient prescrip- rity would be a fully funded, earnings- they retire. tion drugs, but these premiums related savings program, financed by cover only a small part of over- the remainder of the payroll tax not all program costs. The very large needed to finance the universal flat benefit. All workers balance is paid from the general fund of the Treasury, would set aside a portion of each paycheck in a personal meaning it effectively comes out of income-tax payments savings account that would help finance their retirements. from individuals and corporations. The more a worker earns, the more he would set aside in his Medicare reform should separate these purposes, to allow retirement account. for better targeting of financial support to those beneficiaries Redesigning Social Security in this manner would who truly need the most assistance and to bring greater mar- allow for the elimination of several current rules that penal- ket discipline to the provision of medical services. ize work. The universal flat benefit would be available to In a redesigned program, everyone who reaches the age all retirees above a certain eligibility age (based on the of eligibility (also calibrated to reflect lifespans) would be expected lifespans of beneficiaries). Past that age, workers eligible for enrollment in Medicare at the same premium. would no longer be required to pay the payroll tax or be In addition, like Social Security, Medicare would provide penalized with lower benefits if they continue to work. In a universal premium-support payment to all beneficiaries, fact, the more they work, the greater their benefit because financed from the payroll taxes individuals pay during their they would continue to contribute to the second, earnings- working years. This universal benefit would finance only a related portion of the program. portion of the total premium. Workers who have sufficient This kind of reform, designed to take effect gradu- lifetime earnings would be expected to pay the balance of ally and without creating major disruptions for older the premiums out of their retirement incomes and savings. workers and retirees, would better align Social Security Workers with lower lifetime wages would get additional

28 / The Weekly Standard October 1, 2018 subsidies beyond the base level of support. As with the financial contribution while the states serve as program Social Security reform described above, the idea would be designers and regulators, and beneficiaries themselves are to provide a base benefit to all and additional help for those empowered to make more choices in coverage and care. with lower incomes in a way that aligns the means with the The common thread linking these approaches to the program’s two distinct ends. largest entitlement programs is a desire to distinguish It is essential to the effectiveness of this reform that means from ends so that the misguided designs of our the premium support provided by Medicare be under the entitlements today are not confused with their appropri- control of the beneficiaries. They would be given choices ate goals. By thinking through the goals while understand- each year for enrolling in competing coverage options, ing the immense fiscal pressures these programs create, we including one administered by the federal government. might see our way to an entitlement system that could be Their premium-support payments would be calibrated made sustainable in 21st-century America, could particu- based on a weighted average of the total premiums of the larly help those who need it most while providing a baseline various competing options, including plans offered by of support for the elderly in general, and could avoid under- private insurers and the traditional, government-admin- mining the country’s capacity for growth and prosperity. istered fee-for-service program. Beneficiaries would have That combination of goals, rather than a commitment to incentives to enroll in cost-effective plans because they ignore enormous and obvious oncoming problems, ought would be required to pay added premiums for enrolling to serve as a basis for some bipartisan consensus. in the more expensive options. This design is crucial for bringing into Medicare a strong incentive for cost-cutting TAKING RESPONSIBILITY and value-seeking. hese are, to be sure, only the outlines of reforms to But this would not be an unprecedented innovation. our major entitlement programs. But they draw It would work a lot like today’s Medicare Advantage pro- T upon many years of work and scholarship, espe- gram, which a third of seniors already choose over the cially by right-leaning experts, and are available to poli- fee-for-service program, but would enable competition cymakers in various forms that can be adjusted to meet among insurance providers and the traditional program fiscal, practical, and political necessities. to more directly restrain program spending. This kind of Attempting any such changes would involve expend- premium-support reform might by itself have gone a long ing political capital. And Republicans should also be way to addressing Medicare’s fiscal challenges if it had willing to trade some such changes for modest tax been enacted over the past decade. That window is likely increases that Democrats might demand in return for behind us, but premium support must still be part of any their assent—especially if these are tailored to minimize effective reform of the program. the obstacles they pose to growth. The spending side of the Reforms to Medicaid must be similarly geared to ledger is where the real problems are, but revenue matters enabling a more competitive and consumer-driven health too, and no particular tax rate is sacred. sector. The core structure of the program—in which states What should be nearly sacred to policymakers is their are reimbursed by the federal Treasury for the money they obligation to avoid avoidable disasters and to reduce the spend on behalf of beneficiaries—creates incentives for risk of crisis. Such basic responsibility is essential to lead- overspending and inefficiency. A more effective and sus- ership, and there is no excuse for shirking it year after year. tainable Medicaid program would be divided into its two That such recklessness is now thoroughly bipartisan only distinct beneficiary groups—able-bodied adults and their makes it more dangerous to the country. And the fact that children on the one hand and the disabled and elderly on similar irresponsibility abounds at the state and local lev- the other. The federal government would then make fixed, els (where many pension plans are one market crash away per-capita payments to the states based on historical spend- from catastrophe) makes it all the more so. ing patterns for the program’s two population groups. The Trump era has distracted many politicians and States would be given a lot of room to manage the pro- citizens from these problems, as it has from many other gram within those bounds. Ideally, able-bodied adults and perennial challenges of governing. On the right in particu- children who are eligible for Medicaid would receive their lar, many people who seemed genuinely concerned about benefits as a credit for buying health insurance in the pri- deficits and debt 10 years ago now pretend these chal- vate insurance market. And states would be allowed to lenges don’t exist. But ignoring them doesn’t make them implement major changes in the structure of the program disappear. In fact, it makes them worse. Viable, politically to address their distinct needs and priorities without requir- tolerable solutions are still possible, but they only grow ing cumbersome prior federal approval. In essence, the fed- more difficult as the years pass. It’s time to take deficits, eral government would act as the provider of a set, defined debt, and entitlement reform seriously again. ♦

October 1, 2018 The Weekly Standard / 29 Same As He Ever Was In the 1980s, Dinesh D’Souza made his bones with puerile antics at the ‘Dartmouth Review’—American politics has finally caught up

By Alice B. Lloyd wasn’t like this.” D’Souza, 57, sees himself as a pioneer of the puerilizing of political discourse. Responding recip- t was the summer of Dinesh. rocally, he says, to the “gangsterization of the left” by On the last day of May, the right-wing populist “treating them like gangsters,” he helped pave the way Dinesh D’Souza was pardoned by President Don- for Trump. I’m surprised, therefore, when he tells me he ald Trump, joining that most exclusive club of for- doesn’t know what “trolling” is. mer felons. His latest book, Death of a Nation, came We meet on a Sunday morning in July at a hotel in Iout in late July, and the tie-in documentary hit theaters in Midtown Manhattan. Though we’ve spoken on the phone, August. Both compare his emancipator to the emancipator, this is our first meeting. After his pardon, he’d texted Abraham Lincoln. Critics found me a picture of the cake served them unconvincing. But D’Souza, at an impromptu party. It bore a a grateful guest at the White House printed-on photo of D’Souza sit- and on Trump’s favorite cable- ting on the Oval Office’s Resolute news programs, seems only to Desk in an orange frog-suit, next grow bolder with every rebuke of to a picture of President Trump his work. When a history professor gazing fixedly into the middle took to Twitter to parse the inaccu- distance and saying via cartoon racies of Death of a Nation, D’Souza talk-bubble, “You’re Pardoned!” challenged him to a live debate Surrounding the image, in icing, and called him a “coward” when the triumphant words: “Dinesh he declined. The strategy here, he Unchained.” He appears in the says, is to undercut his ideological lobby wearing a pastel polo shirt enemies with his ever-readiness and a jovial smile. Over coffee and to scrap. When they go low, you go mineral water, he talks at a fast clip lower?, I ask. “When they go low, I and tends to flit between defenses. don’t run away,” he prefers. “My Twitter persona is differ- D’Souza’s rhetorical tactics ent,” he tells me, back on the sub- may be perfectly suited to the Age ject of trolling, and emits a small of Trump, but he learned them self-conscious sigh. In the week long ago: at Dartmouth College leading up to our meeting, he’d in the early 1980s, where he led retweeted a fan’s use of the hashtag the Dartmouth Review, the coun- “burntheJews,” later saying he try’s best-known conservative cam- A portion of the ‘Death of a Nation’ poster hadn’t noticed the hashtag and was pus paper. “American politics has simply trying to promote his own caught up with Dartmouth,” he tells me. The Review’s movie trailer—which itself happens to be rife with images undergraduate antics—outing the officers of the Gay- of Nazis. He retweeted “#bringbackslavery” too. And ear- Straight Alliance, printing an affirmative action op-ed in lier this year, profoundly tasteless tweets about the Park- Ebonics, hosting a lavish luncheon alongside a fast for land shooting earned D’Souza a disinvitation from CPAC, world hunger—readied him for Trump: “For 20 years, I an event not short on controversial speakers. wasn’t doing it. Because for 20 years, American politics His early training at the impish and often outrageous Review may have equipped him for public life outside the Alice B. Lloyd is a staff writer at The Weekly Standard. confines of normal decency. But he was once, and not so

30 / The Weekly Standard October 1, 2018 long ago, widely regarded as one of the cleverest polemical conceal his disgust when describing, in gratuitous detail, journalists on the right. He graduated from Dartmouth in conditions in the urban ghetto. In a chapter sneeringly 1983 and the next year published a critical biography of titled “The Content of Our Chromosomes,” he flirted with Jerry Falwell, arguing that the Moral Majoritarian did reli- a biological explanation of inferiority. Elsewhere, he con- gion no favors with his overtly political agenda. His next sidered an historical one and defended slavery: “In sum- political salvo was no less portentous: Coauthored with mary, the American slave was treated like property, which Dartmouth Review founder Greg Fossedal, My Dear Alex: is to say, pretty well,” he reasoned and fur- Letters from the KGB (1987) purports to be a series ther argued that “Africans were not of lessons from a Soviet disinformation expert uniquely unfortunate to be taken instructing a protégé in the art of manipulat- as slaves; their descendants ing the American media. D’Souza spent a year were uniquely fortunate to be in the Reagan White House as a domestic- born in the only civilization policy analyst and in 1989 joined the in the world to abolish slav- American Enterprise Institute as a fel- ery on its own initiative.” It low. He was one of conservatism’s ris- was a bestseller, but panned ing stars, and with 1991’s Illiberal by critics and abhorred in Education, D’Souza won broader fame. polite circles. “I would not A deeply reported exploration of the take back even a word from excesses of campus culture wars, it was that book back then,” he a hit with critics—touted by Andrew tells me. In many ways, Death Sullivan’s New Republic, serialized in the of a Nation picks up where The Atlantic, heralded by C. Vann Woodward End of Racism left off, only now, in the New York Review of Books. D’Souza uses the plantation as an Our universities’ commit- analogue for the Democratic party. ment to diversity and multicul- Last year, his Big Lie: Exposing the turalism, D’Souza argued, had Nazi Roots of the American Left was tag- proven a force for iniquity lined “There is a fascist threat in Amer- and disharmony. Through ica—but it’s not Donald Trump. The real field interviews and con- threat is from the Democratic Party.” But vincingly drawn case stud- the new book is “a little different,” he assures ies, he showed the dangers me. The difference? “I link the Nazi brown- many campus observers shirts and the KKK, eerily similar groups,” had helplessly witnessed he leans in and lowers his voice to a whisper, and worried over for years— lest the nearby brunchers mistake him for mostly quietly, lest their con- the sort of person who casually proffers Nazi cerns offend anyone. The book analogies. But, more important for sales, he liberated reason from oversensitiv- links the KKK to the pre-Civil Rights-era ity. Tom Wolfe called D’Souza “one of Democrats as an answer to the problem of the true fearlessly iconoclastic writers Trump’s association with white national- around, as opposed to the fake a.k.a. fash- ism. “Would you have written this book ionable iconoclasts.” The success of Illib- if Trump weren’t so often compared to eral Education, of course, made D’Souza Hitler?” I ask. “No, my books always suddenly quite fashionable. His new begin as a refutation of something,” he fame even threatened to fix him firmly says. “And then in the process of refut- among the establishment, but with ing a narrative, I always think it’s impor- the follow-up, the Dartmouth Review-er reared his head. tant to produce a reconstructed narrative in its place.” In The End of Racism (1995), D’Souza took the inferi- He doesn’t whisper when he cops to the mercenary ority of the black race for granted in service to the thesis nature of his support for Trump. Back during the 2016 that “racism is not the main problem facing blacks in the primaries, he and his second wife, Debbie, a Republican U.S.—their own dysfunctional culture is.” What disturbed activist, favored Ted Cruz, whose father married them that readers just as much was his knowingly provocative year. (They met on Twitter in 2014: She DM’d him clips

DAVE CLEGG DAVE approach to a subject of profound complexity. He did not of Bill Ayers, and he asked her for help getting his movies

October 1, 2018 The Weekly Standard / 31 screened in Texas public schools.) D’Souza prefers to avoid about the unfairness of his case and rebuked him from the publicly backing any candidate and to keep his focus on bench, “I’m not sure, Mr. D’Souza, that you get it.” antagonizing the other side. “I was making a movie on Hil­ D’Souza’s defenses often reflect Trump’s, and the par- lary, right? And I thought, I’m not going to get into an inter- don could be interpreted as a shot across Robert Mueller’s necine Republican debate.” But Hillary’s America did only bow. “I don’t think there’s any connection at all,” he told $13.1 million at the box office where 2016: Obama’s Amer- me the morning of the pardon and paraphrased the pres- ica had managed $33.4 million in 2012. D’Souza saw the ident: “As Trump said, ‘I knew from the beginning that writing on the wall. “I completely jumped on the Trump you got’—his word was—‘screwed.’ ” Trump thought the bandwagon after he was the nominee,” he says. It was a FBI treated him unfairly, D’Souza says, and the president solid business play: The Big Lie was a big bestseller. wasn’t alone in believing he deserved a pardon. “Sena- There was reason to hope the pardon would bring an tor Cruz pushed it to Trump,” and this, D’Souza insists, added bonus. (As it happened, Death of a Nation earned only proves the injustice of his conviction. “I think it’s particu- a fraction of what all his other films had made.) D’Souza larly commendable given Cruz and Trump were rivals for wasn’t surprised by Trump’s announce- the nomination,” he said. “They ment. “I talked to him yesterday,” he told did it just because it was the right me the morning of the president’s fateful So why’d he violate thing to do.” tweet, weighing at the time whether to But why did D’Souza do it? unleash a tweet storm of his own. “I got federal campaign- Predictably, Dartmouth played the call midday yesterday. The operator finance laws? ‘This a part. Wendy Long worked at the put Trump on the phone.” Trump, never was a Dartmouth Dartmouth Review with D’Souza, one for under-embellishment, described fight,’ D’Souza and Gillibrand is a Dartmouth D’Souza to reporters as being physi- says, ‘and almost a alumna, too. Five years their junior, cally overwhelmed by gratitude when the Blue-Dog-Democrat-turned- he called: “He almost had a heart attack surrogate for our old progressive-feminist reminded when I told him.” clashes.’ There’s little these friends of the humorless lib- a Dartmouth Review-er erals they’d razzed at the Review. relishes more. “Wendy goes, There’s this Dartmouth DECLINE WAS A CHOICE woman—you know what I mean,” efore the pardon came the fel- D’Souza says. “This was a Dart- ony. D’Souza’s started with anti-establishment mouth fight, and almost a surrogate for our old clashes.” B antics and ended with characteristic hubris. In There’s little a Review-er relishes more. Long, who ran 2014, he pleaded guilty to having circumvented campaign- again in 2016, readily accepted his apology for the awk- donation limits in the 2012 New York Senate race. He’d ward scandal, she tells me. “When you run you keep ask- directed his mistress and his personal assistant to donate ing people for help,” Long says. “Maybe he just took it $10,000 each to Wendy Long’s longshot run against to heart. He kept saying, I’m really sorry, Wendy.” She also Kirsten Gillibrand and reimbursed them. Following an doesn’t mind my, and every other reporter’s, calling her investigation and a heated hearing in New York’s south- campaigns “quixotic.” In New York, “Republicans don’t ern district, he received a sentence of eight months’ “com- really have a chance statewide,” she admits. But Long ran munity confinement”—in which, free to spend the days anyway, against absurdly unbeatable odds, for the same at home, convicts return each night at eight to a lockup- reason D’Souza illegally donated over the limit: the love like halfway house—plus a $30,000 fine, community of the old fight. “I felt like I had to stick my head out and service teaching English as a second language, and court- contribute to the movement as Dinesh and Laura had,” mandated psychotherapy sessions, which D’Souza says he she readily admits. “They motivated me, absolutely.” spent primarily on the subject of his recent divorce. Laura is Fox News host Laura Ingraham, who both “I knew that causing a campaign contribution to be dated D’Souza at Dartmouth and followed him as Review made in the name of another was wrong and something editor. They are the embodiment of the paper’s success. the law forbids,” D’Souza told Judge Richard Berman. Four young conservatives, troubled by their inability to “I deeply regret my conduct.” But his protestations in a support Ronald Reagan in the campus daily, founded the televised interview earlier the same day—that he was Dartmouth Review in 1980: Gregory Fossedal, Gordon Haff, the victim of a “witch hunt”—clashed with his attempts Benjamin Hart, and Keeney Jones. Haff, now a software to telegraph compunction. During his sentencing, Ber- consultant, is the only one still active on the Review’s board. man played an interview D’Souza gave to Newsmax TV He sees D’Souza’s and Ingraham’s stardom as anomalous.

32 / The Weekly Standard October 1, 2018 “Most people, they have a family, a job outside politics, reception of Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.’s The Disuniting and they stop engaging,” Haff says when I ask what sets of America, “a liberal restatement of Illiberal Education,” these two apart from other alumni. What he means is that per D’Souza’s reading. Schlesinger presented a patriotic at some point most of them just grew up and moved on. case against factious identity politics in 1991, the year of Jones, who wrote the infamously tasteless Ebonics op-ed Illiberal Education’s publication. It was a case for Ameri- attacking affirmative action, is now a Catholic priest in a can unity that liberal elites could get behind, and yet, “it small town in Connecticut. Hart—whose Dartmouth pro- barely made a ripple,” D’Souza says. “The futility of try- fessor father Jeffrey was a prominent conservative thinker ing to do that hit me—the waste of time.” Why write for and the Review’s early connection that narrow cross-section of con- to national Republicans—is a mar- scientious Americans? “I said to keting consultant and competitive myself, I could do that, and I could breakdancer in Illinois. Haff hasn’t keep doing it. Or I can realize that heard from Fossedal, who founded there is a large audience out there and ran a small think tank of his that wants to learn, but their only own for a time, since they quarreled sources of knowledge right now over tech policy 10 years ago. “Of are the liberals.” the old cohort, most of our thinking He would indeed find a zealous has evolved,” Haff says, particularly audience for his “reconstructed” when it comes to those fraught areas narratives. Books of sensational- of debate where the Review’s report- ism like The Roots of Obama’s Rage ing earned them the most enemies. (2010), 2016: Obama’s America “If you work in the milieu of hav- (2012), America: Imagine a World ing strong, provocative opinions, Without Her (2014), and Hillary’s it usually doesn’t behoove you America (2016) topped bestseller to second-guess yours too much. lists despite near-universal disdain George Will has been able to, but in serious circles. The movie ver- he’s more established.” sions did even better. The author of Illiberal Educa- tion was, until he changed course, on track to be himself so estab- EX-FRIENDS lished. For D’Souza, decline was lenn Loury, the black con- a choice. He could still be writ- servative economist, was ing serious books, he insists, and G probably the first to see enjoying the friendship and favor through D’Souza—and resigned of the conservative elite. “I miss from the American Enterprise that, I miss that,” he says when I Institute over its support of The ask whether his mind ever wan- End of Racism in 1995. Loury says ders back to the days of D.C. D’Souza’s January 2014 mug shot, above, he still sees much to admire in dinner party debates and chess and a mocking photo with his wife that Illiberal Education and agrees as matches against conservative he tweeted out later much as ever with The End of Rac- luminaries. He’s lost in thought for a moment, but recov- ism’s suggestion that the black community’s redemption ers. “I moved to California in the year 2000, and by doing must come from within. But Loury condemns its broader that I took myself out of the D.C. camp, which I was very argument and tone: D’Souza’s partial defense of slavery—it much a part of.” Living in San Diego, a long way from his had little to do with race, he argued—and his demeaning new base at the Hoover Institution at Stanford, he found descriptions of black culture were distasteful context for his himself adrift. “I lost that social circle. That was my social less objectionable arguments. Apparently eager to offend circle.” But the way D’Souza sees it, he had to leave behind the standards of decency, he elevated archaic profiles to the world of Washington at some point. persistent types: “The sullen ‘field nigger,’ the dependable “There’s no use talking to the whole country,” he’d Mammy, the sly and inscrutable trickster,” D’Souza wrote, realized. “There’s a pointlessness to expending a lot of could be found in today’s ghettos. energy to get a liberal to concede a point without con- “What it’s lampooning is a cartoon,” Loury recalls. “It’s

BOTTOM: VIA TWITTER ceding anything beyond it.” The catalyst was the tepid not serious.” In a devastating review of the book, published

October 1, 2018 The Weekly Standard / 33 in one of the first issues of this magazine, he got D’Souza’s at Hoover, where Robinson remains a fellow—although number: “If one were to adopt the voice used by D’Souza they’d meet for a meal on D’Souza’s occasional visits to throughout the book, one might speculate that he actually campus. “It pains me to remember the last time Dinesh longs to hear those ‘triumphant roars,’ from black and white crossed my mind,” Robinson says. “It was a movie poster racists alike, because such vitriolic discussion sells books.” for a coming attraction, and there was a big, larger-than- Decades later, Loury still lives rent-free in D’Souza’s life-sized face: Lincoln spliced with Trump to convey that head. “Let me tell you something about Glenn Loury,” Trump is a second Lincoln.” Robinson wandered on to he tells me over coffee in Manhattan, suddenly electrified. his movie, some light summer fare, but the image—adver- “This guy is in the same place that he was in 1991, and tising D’Souza’s Death of a Nation—stuck with him. “I he’s talking about the same things—if we literally took thought to myself, Oh, Dinesh . . .” his old article and put a new date on The breaking point for it. To me this reflects a level of intel- Hoover was The Enemy at Home lectual stagnation.” Loury sees himself (2007). D’Souza had at first quite differently, saying he’s evolved ‘The streets are irrigated seemed to settle into the West since his departure from AEI and finds with alcohol, urine, and Coast bastion of conservatism. himself far removed from the partisan blood,’ former D’Souza His What’s So Great About frontlines. He attributes this widening colleague Glenn Loury America (2002) caught the distance in no small part to his conser- quotes a gallingly national mood in the aftermath vative colleagues’ intolerable tolerance of 9/11. D’Souza now calls it a of Dinesh D’Souza. In the ever-grow- sensational piece of scene- mercenary nod to patriotism— ing league of public denouncers, setting from D’Souza’s “The American tribe came Loury’s Cassandra status grants him The End of Racism. It’s together, and it seemed only unrivaled seniority. the first line of a chapter natural.” But his higher calling “The streets are irrigated with alco- that goes on to claim black is to American disunity, which hol, urine, and blood,” Loury quotes has led him to write less and a gallingly sensational piece of scene- ghettos as empirical proof less like a scholar. The Enemy setting from The End of Racism. It’s of racial inferiority. Loury at Home opens, “In this book the first line of a chapter that goes on calls the book ‘snide, I make a claim that will seem to claim black ghettos as empirical gratuitously provocative, startling at the outset. The proof of racial inferiority. The book arrogant’—an assessment cultural left in this country is was “snide, gratuitously provocative, responsible for causing 9/11.” arrogant,” Loury says, serving up an that fits D’Souza’s later For D’Souza, the clash of assessment that fits D’Souza’s later works as well. civilizations is as much inter- works as well. He wasn’t surprised, he nal as external. In the book, he tells me, after The End of Racism to see imagined an alliance between D’Souza brazen his way onward to thinner treatments of the American political left and radical Islamic terror- broader subjects. ism. “These two forces have formed a strange coalition— Peter Robinson, another Dartmouth Review-er, worked a kind of alliance of the vicious and the immoral—and with D’Souza in the Reagan White House. Journalism, they are now working together against us,” he concluded. Robinson recalls, was a better match for D’Souza’s tal- “The only way to win the war on terror is to win the cul- ents than toiling away in near-anonymity as a West Wing ture war. Thus we arrive at a sobering truth. In order to policy wonk: “I can’t remember anything he did in the crush the Islamic radicals abroad, we must defeat the administration,” Robinson admits. But he remembers enemy at home.” The book was so provocative and lightly his articles and his fearless reporting, particularly a 1986 researched that his fellow Hoover scholars, several of article for Crisis magazine. After a pastoral letter condemn- whom publicly critiqued his claims, couldn’t bear the ing the administration’s defense and economics policies, association any longer. In 2007, D’Souza resigned. D’Souza called around to various bishops asking elemen- His next role was, by his own admission, the unlikeli- tary economic questions—which none of them could est of all: In 2010, he became president of the evangeli- answer. “Dinesh as a journalist was extremely clever, dev- cal King’s College in New York City. D’Souza was raised astatingly funny,” Robinson says. In those days, “He was a Catholic, but his first wife, Dixie, exposed him to evangeli- polemicist and a true journalist.” cal Christianity, and as he alienated the conservative think- The two men were close in Washington, less so later tank circuit, he started addressing packed mega-churches,

34 / The Weekly Standard October 1, 2018 debating famous atheists, and authoring apologetics with 2012. The magazine’s exposé brought D’Souza’s personal ambitious titles like What’s So Great About Christianity; Life life—specifically, his love life—into the public realm. After Death: The Evidence; and Godforsaken: Bad Things “The World magazine article was written in such a way to Happen. There’s a rabid audience for confident and con- suppress all the facts,” D’Souza vents. “And made it look frontational defenses of Christianity, which D’Souza was like I took up with another woman.” Yet he doesn’t deny happy to provide. This audience also proved just as hun- that he did take up with another woman, and a married gry for partisan rage-making. woman at that, while he was still married himself. From a sales perspective, the move made sense. But evangelism was not his calling. And success on the evan- THE ‘MASTER OF LIES’ gelical speaking circuit is not particularly good training er name is Denise Odie Joseph, and she hasn’t to lead a flock of scholarly young Christians. According to spoken publicly about D’Souza since before students and professors who remember D’Souza’s tenure H their affair. “I thought the right thing to do was at King’s, he talked about his extracurriculars oddly often. stay quiet,” she says. “Did I make the right choice?” She “When he lectured the student has doubts even now, because body, he’d talk about Obama, avoiding the press meant never slam Hillary Clinton, and plug correcting what she calls a his new movie,” one former “gross mischaracterization” student recalled. “Everyone got of who she is and what role free tickets at least,” English she played in D’Souza’s life. professor Ethan Campbell says In reporting on the story of of D’Souza’s film 2016: Obama’s his infidelity, his ouster from America. Although there were King’s, and then his arrest for fewer than 30 of them, D’Souza campaign-finance fraud, the rarely met with faculty: “He’d media, she says, treated her breeze in and say a few words “like some sort of bimbo.” This maybe one or two times a year,” portrait of Joseph as a starstruck remembers Campbell. And groupie turned homewrecker while his fundraising power recirculates every time D’Souza could have made up for his hits the news. She bristles but administrative shortcomings, proclaims a Zen-like accep- it didn’t. “I found it frustrat- D’Souza with Ronald Reagan, 1988 tance. “This stuff makes you ing to hear he’d secured donors bitter,” she admits, and she for his movies while the college was struggling financially,” chooses not to dwell on it. “You understand people who’ve Campbell says. Students and faculty all describe D’Souza as had to face a beast. You become a much more understand- a predominantly absent president. ing person. I’ve become closer to my God. I’m glad for it.” “It was a very strange kind of turn for me,” D’Souza Joseph, 34, has homes in Palm Beach, Manhattan, and admits, “because obviously I hadn’t been a college admin- New Orleans. She’s a lawyer specializing in art advisory, istrator. I hadn’t been a provost.” His Christian apologet- and her husband is the chairman of the psychiatry depart- ics tour—including splashy debates with Christopher ment at a Florida hospital. She met D’Souza in 2010 and Hitchens—had made him a hero of the evangelical com- wrote about him on her blog before they struck up a rela- munity. And the business-minded King’s College board tionship. She was seen at various events with him while they loved D’Souza even while the academic faculty worried courted, and people at King’s assumed she was his daughter. about his inexperience and lack of an advanced degree and D’Souza claims Marvin Olasky knew his marriage to feared that his public persona would tarnish the school’s Dixie was not on stable ground and suggests World mag- reputation. The provost, Marvin Olasky, resigned in pro- azine took advantage of their geographical separation— test at the appointment. “I was not a fan of his candidacy,” Dixie stayed in California while their daughter finished Olasky tells me. But the board had great hopes for the high school—to fish for a story on his extramarital pur- high-profile hire. suits. “My relationship with Denise developed in the Olasky left King’s for World, a popular biweekly evan- wake of a serious crisis that had been caused by my wife,” gelical magazine—and it was a World reporter who broke he says. “That’s kind of what makes the whole thing so the news that D’Souza introduced a married woman as his unfair. Because this was known to me, known to King’s,

COURTESY OF THE REAGAN LIBRARY fiancée at an evangelical conference in South Carolina in and known to Marvin.” “That’s not true,” counters

October 1, 2018 The Weekly Standard / 35 Olasky. The departing provost and incoming president whether their marriage had essentially ended before he left never once discussed anyone’s marriage, he maintains. San Diego for King’s College, as D’Souza claims, she says, Olasky declined to discuss D’Souza further, citing the like- “No,” and affirms the contents of her letter—which alleged lihood his comments will only inflame the situation, but, abuse, manipulation, extreme narcissism, and a deep and he insists, D’Souza “never confided to me.” abiding compulsion toward dishonesty—urging the court The King’s board drew a line at an adulterous pres- to hit him with the harshest possible punishment: “I stand ident. They asked D’Souza to resign in October 2012. by my letter to Judge Berman because it is true,” she says. It’s a blessing that cause for his dismissal came when it “Dinesh is the Master of Lies,” she later texts me. did, Ethan Campbell says. “If they hadn’t,” the King’s professor believes, “they would’ve had a revolt on their hands.” D’Souza had already begun to alienate the col- DINESH UNCHANGED lege community, insisting in a 2012 New York Times sk Dixie and she’ll say she now sees her ex-hus- interview, “We don’t teach Christian doctrine,” and out- band for the man he was all along. But one ques- lining his intention to produce conservative foot sol- A tion still haunts his former-admirers: Was D’Souza diers who would enter the ranks of global finance and fooling us all along, or did he lose himself just as he lost us? American politics, where “they Ask D’Souza, and he’ll tell you will be even more dangerous.” The he’s been fighting the same battles, scandal that precipitated his ouster and in the same way, since college. confirmed what many at the col- Ask D’Souza, and he’ll The Dartmouth Review’s regular lege already knew or suspected: tell you he’s been fighting scraps with the college whose name His hiring had been a mistake. the same battles, and it bore reflect his failed fights with D’Souza involved Joseph and in the same way, since the establishment. “It was just a her husband in his most conse- college. The Dartmouth small example of the kind of aggres- quential mistake—using them as sion which I now see on the national straw donors to Wendy Long’s cam- Review’s regular scraps scale,” he tells me of the liberal Dart- paign. The ensuing legal entangle- with the college whose mouth community’s disapproval of ments—the federal investigation name it bore reflect the alternative paper in the 1980s, that ensnared them both two years his failed fights with which prints fortnightly to this day later—prevent Joseph from dis- the establishment. and has never shaken its association cussing the felonious side of their with D’Souza. “I’m different than affair. But she does say of D’Souza, I was then, but some of that sense “It’s pretty clear, even if you don’t know him, that he’s not that, Look, something is very wrong here at a basic level of fair- sorry. He hasn’t learned anything.” ness has stayed with me from my Dartmouth days.” While Joseph has moved on, Dixie D’Souza’s anger His federal trial didn’t humble him, either. “I was stu- endures—proportional to the commitment a wife of pid,” he says. “There are many legal ways to give.” He decades has made. In a searing letter to Judge Berman, wishes, for instance, that Long had set up her PAC by the she described a marriage of ceaseless lying and physical time he wanted to donate. And he is unrepentant. He’s abuse. “In one instance, it was my husband who physi- still thrilled by Trump’s acting on his case. “There’s more cally abused me in April 2012 when he, using his purple to the pardon than not having to do community service or belt karate skills, kicked me in the head and shoulder, getting to travel without permission,” he says, calling it a knocking me to the ground and creating injuries that “profound relief ” from a punishment intended to humili- pain me to this day,” she wrote. “I was married to Dinesh ate. “I got to see the constipated expression of my prosecu- D’Souza for more than 20 years and together with him for tor on CNN,” he adds, with a crooked grin. When Preet over 26 years. I know Dinesh better than anyone and can Bharara held forth on cable news the day of the presiden- attest to his flawed character and lack of truthfulness.” tial pardon, D’Souza tweeted a storm of spite and glee: She contests her ex-husband’s version of events at “Karma’s a bitch,” he summed up. almost every turn. “The dissolution of our marriage came The sophomoric spirit shines on. “Since I’m a public when Dinesh became engaged to a newly married woman, figure, the left was able to hang the ‘felon’ label on me, and Denise Joseph, when we were married,” she tells me. “He it became their automatic go-to epithet.” Now, when they was president of a Christian college and found sleeping in a trot out the old insult, Hey, aren’t you a felon?, he has his hotel room with a married woman. He and all his mistresses own handy go-to: “Actually, no, I’m not. I’m an ex-felon.” know who they are during our 20-year marriage.” Asked He smiles, relishing the riposte. ♦

36 / The Weekly Standard October 1, 2018 Books&Arts

Pauline Phillips, who wrote the ‘Dear Abby’ column for nearly five decades, poses for a homey publicity shot with a reader’s letter in 1963. Help Wanted

America’s love affair with amateur advice. by Caitrin Keiper

I am obsessed with advice a Friend, she uses this largely Ameri- columns and I cannot tell you Asking for a Friend can phenomenon to better understand :why. This is not very respect- Three Centuries of Advice on Life, Love, a people inventing itself, discarding Q Money, and Other Burning Questions able, is it? But why are they old institutions and sources of author- from a Nation Obsessed so compelling? by Jessica Weisberg ity. The displacement of these forms A: Gentle reader, you are most certainly Nation, 304 pp., $27 of social guidance by a do-it-yourself not alone. “Make sure your paper has approach is a vision of democracy, with an advice column. Everybody claims to all its virtues and vices. hate ’em, but everybody seems to read of shame,” writes Jessica Weisberg, A minority of the self-appointed sages ’em,” a video-store manager named but catnip for readers. Is it because, Weisberg profiles are advice columnists Dan Savage once told a friend who as a biographer of Ann Landers put per se; her motley crew includes advice- was starting a magazine. The friend it, “everybody reads her column with givers of other sorts, such as a celebrity thanked him for volunteering. one hand over the answers to see if psychotherapist, an astrologer, founders Sure enough, Savage Love and its they can come up with better advice”? of popular courses on how to improve equivalents at every conceivable type of Because we are essentially voyeurs, as your career or marriage, several doctors publication are considered “undigni- the founder of the website Quora dis- with extramedical pronouncements, fied reading material” carrying “a whiff covered from his users’ behavior? and a posthumously bestselling social For Weisberg, advice columns are a climber whose entire contribution to Caitrin Keiper is a senior editor rich source of anthropological insight. parenting his son was a set of letters that

at the New Atlantis. In her fascinating first book Asking for he never meant to be published at all. CBS / GETTY

October 1, 2018 The Weekly Standard / 37 Q: What qualifies this group for the posi- tur to a wide range of unrelated issues. the Martha Beck Institute. Beck, who tion of beacon to the masses? In Dr. Spock’s first baby book, the one hates the term “life coach,” has “done A: Not a blessed thing. Some pre- that made his name, he “said to listen to more than perhaps anyone to legiti- tended to more expertise than they yourself; but, in person, political rallies, mize life coaching” and has produced had, such as John Dunton. Before and his other books,” Weisberg writes, literally thousands of them. Beck trains Weisberg’s story migrates to America, “he turned into the kind of expert who the trainers of the trainers—that is, she it begins with this 17th-century Eng- invites eye-rolls, who says, listen to me.” educates the master coaches who teach lish founder of the “Athenian Society,” the new coaches who help everybody advertised as a body of more than two Q: With the democratization of expertise, else live their lives with an extra-spe- dozen learned men who in the pages why do people feel the need for all these cial dose of empathy, all part of a plan of a little magazine rendered judgment new authorities with massive followings? to bring about “a global transformation on readers’ questions ranging from A: It’s often about something closer to of human consciousness.” But all it what angels really are to how to give a really is, says Beck, is paying someone proper kiss. In reality, it was just Dun- to substitute for a good friend. ton himself—a bookseller and hardly Like certain kinds of therapists and an authority on any matter of philoso- life coaches, columnists can come to phy or morals—and three questionable feel like friends. They’re there in your in-laws and hangers-on. Still, despite newspaper or browser window every the fraud, he deserves our attention morning, sorting out the most per- three centuries later for creating not sonal situations and drawing you into just a new genre of publication but a an exchange so intimate that it seems it new mode of social intercourse. “For could only be among friends (but actu- a penny, readers could pick up a copy ally so intimate that it could only be and know there were other people out among strangers). The care and atten- there with the same strange questions,” tion they pay to letter-writers seem like Weisberg writes. “And, for a minute, they could be yours by extension. You they might feel a little less alone.” learn to anticipate what they are going Perhaps more revealing are the to say. writers who pretended to less exper- These feelings of psychic connec- tise than they really had. The accom- Dorothy Dix’s column ran in 273 papers. tion may extend into the realm of, well, plished Ben Franklin, writing as the psychics. People read advice columns dundering Poor Richard, was a popu- the bone. A strong subtheme of Weis- for the same reason they read their list American counterpoint to Dunton berg’s book is women’s increased cul- back-page neighbors, horoscopes, who set the tone for the new nation’s tural influence, both cause and effect of says Weisberg—“because everyone tradition of self-help and social level- the explosion in advice columns. Sev- craves reassurance and because they ing. And for more than half the 20th eral of the female figures she describes address our ambitions and fantasies, century, the financial columnist Syl- took the helm of a column because it the subjects that quietly consume us via Porter was admired by tens of was one of the few careers open to but that our daily lives often require millions of Americans for translating them. And as they became more popu- us to ignore.” Forging deeper into the economic “bafflegab” into sensible lar, they created more space for public comparison, Weisberg also connects it information—but to retain their trust, shows of empathy. “My heart bleeds to women’s changing place in culture she felt she had to conceal her back- for you,” said a typical response of the with this expansive, arresting claim: ground and education in economics, “sob sister” Dorothy Dix at the turn of “The occult and the pseudo-religious, pleading feminine ignorance on such the 20th century. Although her sym- across its many iterations—astrol- basic tasks as balancing a checkbook. pathies lay with the nascent feminist ogy, tarot, yoga, and so on—are among Dr. Benjamin Spock both claimed movement, she did not much use her America’s longest-running matriarchies. the expert’s mantle where he had none platform to advance radical changes in Their citizens and many of their leaders and disavowed it where he did. He society, her chief contribution being a are women who have grown so tired of rose to popularity by assuring parents shoulder to cry on. It wasn’t common competing with men for social power that the answers were already within knowledge before her that this was that they opt to chase another kind of them; his role as a trained pediatri- something a newspaper would need, power instead: they concede the world cian was essentially to validate their but she opened the market for it. to men while they focus on controlling instincts, and he remained pleasantly A century later, this deceptively pas- the universe.” neutral on the big baby-rearing ques- sive quality is so central to our values That said, the most hardheaded tions about which people can get so that it powers entire enterprises, such of the book’s figures, the economist sanctimonious. But as he came to be as the “liberal arts course in empathy” Sylvia Porter, anchors the other end

nationally adored he lent his imprima- (Weisberg’s description) offered by of the esoteric spectrum for her sex, BETTMANN / GETTY

38 / The Weekly Standard October 1, 2018 with Miss Manners and others not far gifts as a storyteller: a radar for the her conversations with dying patients behind. Male or female, it is certainly peculiar and the ability to unpack it about death as actively harmful. Denial true that, as Weisberg notes through- with warmth and sympathy, thus mak- seemed a perfectly good stage to park at; out, many such sources of advice devel- ing this out-there episode of American they thought it offered the most peace oped as replacements for traditional political history relatable from both of mind. religious guidance. perspectives. Throughout the book, When she codified her findings into she reports events largely as partici- four stages beyond denial (anger, bar- Q: Comparing advice columns to astrology pants understood them, such as her gaining, depression, and acceptance— does not seem like a great bid for respect- passing observation that Elisabeth not necessarily sequential, contrary to ability. Are you sure you want to go there? Kübler-Ross’s deceased patients hung popular belief), that turned out to be A: The point here is less about the around her for years after their deaths something doctors could work with. But nature of the advice and more the and “even left little notes on her desk.” with a lack of trust and respect on both insight into its seekers and givers. Also, sides, the distance between her and the astonishing story of Joan Quigley is clinical medicine widened. She took simply too good to leave out. Old politi- her show on the road, holding work- cal hands will remember, but the gen- shops around the country that evolved eral or younger reader may not know, to include folk-religious rituals and that Nancy Reagan spent her husband’s paranormal encounters. “Kübler-Ross presidency in close consultation with had an open relationship with scientific this San Francisco astrologer, often put- convention, toggling between academic ting in hours a day on the phone with research and conversations with ghosts her and filtering the president’s entire and fairies,” writes Weisberg. schedule through her predictions. “At this time in my life, I was open Quigley had offered Nancy her coun- to anything and everything,” said sel to give Ronald’s 1980 campaign a Kübler-Ross in her memoir. Openness leg up, moving on when he took office was what she craved—open and hon- as the Reagans tried to shed the trap- est conversations, an open door to the pings of their Hollywood past for a beyond. She made meaningful contri- more stately image. But following the butions to the space just this side of it, March 1981 assassination attempt, fundamentally changing the language Nancy turned in terror back to Quig­ of grief and death and helping instigate ley, who assured her that her star the hospice movement. As to what lies charts could have predicted that event Joan Quigley, Nancy Reagan’s astrologer over the threshold, a whole career peer- and could protect him going forward. It ing through it did not yield any new or was an open secret among White House Q: Say what? newly reliable information. staffers, unknown to the public until for- A: Kübler-Ross, famous for defining When Weisberg was 6, she had an mer chief of staff Don Regan published the “five stages” of dying, had wanted existential crisis over the realization a tell-all, that every event was to be run to become a physician “to find out that everyone, including her, will even- past this mystery person via Nancy. the purpose of life.” She was another tually die. When she became physically Quigley’s concentrated advice to one woman who wanted more than the ill and plagued by nightmares, her par- person was for the benefit of everyone, path set before her (to become a sec- ents invited over a family friend to chat a patriotic duty she undertook without retary) and found adventure rebuild- who had no particular credentials other hope of recognition. The secrecy was ing European villages after World War than “that ineffable quality that makes understood to be part of a noble sacri- II. More than the practical assistance, you want to tell her things.” Kathy fice. But she believed Nancy would ulti- “the best thing we gave those people offered the most unassuming responses mately express gratitude in some way was love and hope,” she realized. to the most unanswerable of questions. proportionate to her service and the This and many similar experiences “She told me that it was sad when some- intimate trust placed in her. Instead, convinced her that what people most one died, especially when it was some- Regan’s memoir broke the story, the needed was to be heard. one you loved. She told me that death women had an ugly and humiliating Later, as a psychiatrist at the Uni- scared her, too. She also said that it’d be breakup, and Quigley sought comfort versity of Chicago, she was recruited tragic if I spent my life so distracted by by looking for acknowledgment from to interview terminally ill patients so death that I missed the many joys that the rest of the world: granting inter- that seminary students could learn to came before it.” Lacking any special views to every major network and pen- serve them better. She quickly came answer but, like Kübler-Ross’s patients, ning her own book. to believe that it was medical profes- feeling heard, Weisberg found her The Quigley chapter in Asking for sionals who really needed this lesson, nightmares went away. When she later

ERIC RISBERG / AP a Friend exemplifies Weisberg’s twin but the medical establishment viewed asked Why Kathy?, her mother’s answer

October 1, 2018 The Weekly Standard / 39 was Why not? “What did anyone else passed glib judgment on other people’s one between the twins. Eppie was the know about death that Kathy didn’t? relationship failures for years, crashed first to land a column; “Popo” followed She was as much an expert as anyone.” on the shoals of hard reality when her a few months later, and from that point own husband left her. The experience on the sisters were at war. The two doy- Q: Well, but here’s what I really want to revealed a layer of humanity often pre- ens of 20th-century advice feuded for all know: Where can I find love? How do I viously buried under pat decrees. When the world to see, getting in digs at each identify my soulmate? How to make it last? he broke the news, her first impulse other’s incomes, insecurities, and syndi- Does the collective intelligence have any was to trot out to buy him socks and cation numbers. Eppie once tested “off- takers on this one? groceries, worried about his ability to the-charts” aggressive on a psychologi- A: Why, yes. By my tally, only a few of take care of himself without her. “The cal profile; her identical twin displayed the advice-givers romantically admit lady with all the answers,” she wrote, similar qualities. their ignorance and bow before the force “does not know the answer to this one,” As they guided and traveled with of destiny. Most are more pragmatic, their readers from the 1950s to the suggesting that success in love is a prod- end of the century, they changed their uct of maturity, willpower, and rational positions on divorce, women in the how-tos. “There is not just one person workforce, interfaith and interracial on the planet whose soul can mate with marriage, homosexuality, all the usual- yours,” writes Amy Dickinson. suspect social issues—and each other. At the extreme end of this perspective The sisters eventually reconciled, and are Harville Hendrix and Helen Hunt, in their final years, on July 4 they founders of the Imago workshop series, always used their columns to wish which offers the tools for any two peo- each other as well as their country a ple to rescue their relationship. Oprah happy birthday. anointed Hendrix the “marriage whis- perer.” Their own therapist described Q: Then many happy returns to America, them as “the couple from hell.” her sages, her scolds, her quacks, her pursu- In the wake of a failed marriage each ers of happiness. And what’s the pursuit of and equally unsuited for each other, anything without a healthy dose of curiosity? they made a last-ditch effort to abol- A: Like many of America’s children, ish negativity from their relationship the advice column wasn’t born in the and found that there was nothing left United States, but it migrated here to to talk about. “We had a silent love,” flourish. It gave people trying to find Hunt said. They filled the void sys- their bearings empowering instruction tematically with compliments, validat- and emotional support. No two advice- ing dialogue, and methodical bonding Martha Beck, coach to the life coaches givers pointed in precisely the same activities, talking “about laughter the direction—heck, no one advice-giver way other people talk about vitamins,” and devoted four inches of blank col- remained entirely consistent—but that as Weisberg puts it. umn space as a “memorial to one of the is their democratic appeal. To catch Weisberg attends one of their semi- world’s best marriages that didn’t make these daily glimpses into other people’s nars and is both skeptical of and moved it to the finish line.” lives and troubles, and the best efforts of by the interactions she witnesses. From the starting line, it was clear someone else to help them, is to patch One woman reports feeling respected theirs would be no ordinary marriage. together a big picture out of infinite, for the first time ever. Listless people Esther Pauline Friedman, the woman conflicting details. doing a cheesy exercise suddenly have who would become Ann Landers, was The book itself is a mosaic. Despite a moment. The validating dialogue, wedding-veil shopping with her twin Weisberg’s best attempts to draw out though stilted, seems to help. Simply Pauline Esther Friedman, the woman organizing themes and theses, I found the opportunity to spend time with who would become Dear Abby, when these contradictory and hard to follow. a partner all day, with child care and she met the man she was going to marry. The strength of her book is in its sto- lunch provided, is a major draw. Weis- The sisters, inseparable since birth, rytelling—apropos for an anthropology berg concludes that Imago “might not were both engaged and planning their of a people writing their own story. As be an ideal model, but amid the eternal double ceremony. The sales clerk asked seen in Weisberg’s profiles, that story uncertainties of love and partnership, “Eppie” out, almost immediately sup- is as likely as not to be aimless, kooky, people are eager to have a model at all.” planted her prior fiancé, and the wed- and fractured. But that is the American Over long careers, some prominent ding went on as scheduled on the girls’ experiment. We have the right to be advice-givers with once-held certain- 21st birthday. wrong. With it comes the promise—or ties about love and marriage have been As this bond would later be sun- at least the hope—that we’ll have unlim-

chastened. Ann Landers, who had dered, so was the nearly supernatural ited chances to set ourselves right. ♦ LARRY MARANO / GETTY

40 / The Weekly Standard October 1, 2018 Of course, those words weren’t B A “invented,” as suggested here; that’s not & how language evolves. But never mind. If you tell people you are reading and thinking about fear, be prepared to Fear Factor hear quoted, ad nauseam, that perhaps inspiring but undeniably fatuous pro- Are our lives and our politics really dominated by fear? nouncement by FDR. As an antidote, by John Wilson I’m reminded of Lee Clarke, who wrote a book a dozen years ago, Worst Cases, arguing that we ought to be worrying a ost of you reading this lot more about events that are not likely piece have not yet The Monarchy of Fear to occur but that are possible and that reached the age of 70, A Philosopher Looks at Our Political Crisis would surely be devastating, should by Martha C. Nussbaum as I did earlier this year Simon & Schuster, 249 pp., $25.99 they come about—for instance, the M(though some of you will have passed threat of asteroids devastatingly strik- that milestone long ago). You ing the planet or the accidental no doubt have a vague set of release of chemical weapons notions about what it will be from military facilities where like, should you not die prema- our Cold War stockpiles are turely—and, of course, one size being destroyed. (I should add does not fit all. Still, it’s safe to that Worst Cases includes one of say that until you have actually my all-time favorite sentences, attained that age, or approached in the form of a quotation from it, you will have only a feeble Scott Sagan, an expert on risk grasp of what scholars like to assessment: “Things that have call the “lived experience.” never happened before happen For instance? All right: all the time.”) Clarke wasn’t Everything reminds you of recommending a perpetual something else. The word paralyzing anxiety but what “digression” becomes close to you could call a thoughtful meaningless; thought simply is fear, one that prods us to plan digression. (That sounds a bit appropriately for the possibil- like a riff on Derrida, which ity of terrible things while rec- reminds me—but no, not now.) ognizing that ultimately there For at least six months, I’ve been Kennedy assassination freaks, ufolo- are severe limits to what we can con- thinking about fear—or, more precisely, gists, and other such lost souls. trol—a humbling realization. Perhaps thinking about what various people Of course, just like you, I know about “fear” can be healthy as well as destruc- might mean when they talk about fear firsthand. If there really are any tive. Please hold that thought. “fear.” It’s not that I never thought “fearless” people, I’m the other kind. about this before! But over these But “fear” is a slippery notion when re we living in an “Age of Fear”? months I’ve been thinking about it in a deployed as an explanation for Every- A Are Americans today more fearful more concentrated way. thing. One of the best accounts of fear than they were in the 1960s, say? The I’m aware that this may come across that I know comes in a book called The 1950s? The 1940s? The 1930s? How as a po-faced declaration (as if I had Long Shadow of Temperament by Jerome would we know? (By the way, how long in mind one of those 1950s-vintage Kagan and Nancy Snidman: is an “age” nowadays? Ten years? Five black-and-white magazine ads for pipe years? Two years? Ages aren’t what they tobacco, featuring a clean-cut professo- The English words fear and anxiety, used to be.) rial type evidently thinking seriously like terms for most human emotions, One thing we do know for certain: were invented centuries ago to name about something). But I want to warn a person’s interpretation of a family A lot of people are talking about fear. In you: If you plunge into this subject, of feelings associated with thoughts of July in these pages, I reviewed Matthew you’ll encounter trails leading every- an unwanted experience. It is unlikely Kaemingk’s important book Christian where; you may never be seen again, or that these words, which fail to con- Hospitality and Muslim Immigration in you may find yourself lumped in with textualize their origins and targets, an Age of Fear. Around the same time, are more useful as scientific concepts than a host of other words in the pub- Eerdmans published Believe Me: The John Wilson is a contributing editor to lic vocabulary, such as smart, arrogant, Evangelical Road to Donald Trump, in

the Englewood Review of Books. stubborn, crazy, or debauched. which the excellent historian John DURANTELALLERA / SHUTTERSTOCK

October 1, 2018 The Weekly Standard / 41 Fea offered a “short history of evan- mary, getting its teeth into us very early perspective. This book was the result. gelical fear” as an explanation for the and then coloring the rest of our lives to Nussbaum here draws on and mess we find ourselves in. In July, a greater or lesser degree.” expands the argument of her 2004 Vox critic Alissa Wilkinson (who is Nussbaum, who has taught for book, Hiding from Humanity: Disgust, on my always-must-read list) posted a many years both in the department of Shame, and the Law. That was a full- piece on the fictional Gileads of Mar- philosophy and the law school of the dress academic work, though clear and garet Atwood and Marilynne Robin- University of Chicago, has been called readable, as Nussbaum always is. The son. “You’d have to be extraordinarily America’s most prominent philosopher Monarchy of Fear, by contrast, is much blind,” Wilkinson wrote, “to not know of public life. Her new book, Nussbaum shorter, addressed to a wider range of that fear is a dominant, if not the domi- explains at the outset, was inspired by readers, more conversational in style nant, feeling in 2018.” (Oh, no. On (occasionally she begins a paragraph top of all my other problems, I’m by saying “Okay, . . . ”), perhaps draw- extraordinarily blind!) And then ing on her interactions with students. there’s Bob Woodward’s Fear: Trump But at the core of the new book is the in the White House. claim made in Hiding from Humanity Many instances of what we might that we humans must learn to over- call the discourse of fear depend come our “fear of our animal bodies.” on a rhetorical sleight of hand: We hide from our humanity when we To describe those you are arguing pretend that we are not fundamen- against as being driven by fear is tally animals and when we suppress thought to be effective, even as you self-knowledge of our mortality. “But are appealing to fear of the outcome this distancing from what Nuss- should these fearful types get what baum regards as the bedrock reality they want. In his recent remarks of human existence,” as I wrote in a on the Trump administration, a cri- review back in 2004, “comes at a great tique in many respects persuasive, cost. It leads me to distance myself former president Barack Obama from other people who remind denounced “the politics of fear,” me of my vulnerability—indeed, as he had while he himself occu- to define myself by my disgust for pied the White House. Never mind them. You stink, therefore I am. You that President Trump’s critics have are deformed, I am normal.” (It fol- themselves routinely waxed apoca- lows, as I wrote back then, that this lyptic. Lisa Sharon Harper, a widely unmastered fear “may also lead me to respected African-American evan- accept all kinds of crazy, dangerous gelical speaker, writer, and organizer, notions—the notion, for instance, tells us that “majority conservative that there’s a God, and that when I rulings have already whittled back Martha Nussbaum die I’ll go to be with him in eternal civil rights protections, leaving this bliss.” I’m just not tough enough.) generation’s children as vulnerable to the election of Donald Trump as presi- There’s much to chew on in The a new Jim Crow as my great-grandpar- dent of the United States. On elec- Monarchy of Fear, but I would draw your ents, who fled for their lives from the tion night, she was in Kyoto to accept attention in particular to the beginning terror of the Jim Crow South,” a warn- an award. (The author’s bio inside of Chapter 2, titled “Fear. Early and ing clearly intended to inspire fear the back flap of the dust jacket tells Powerful.” Here’s how it begins: and dread. us that “the Kyoto Prize in Arts and You are lying on your back in the dark. Does such argumentation by fear Philosophy . . . is regarded as the most Wet. Cold. Hunger and thirst throb prove that fear really is pervasive, prestigious award available in fields not and throb. They are you, and you are bone-deep, or does it rather suggest eligible for a Nobel.” Good to know.) nothing but pain. You try to scream, the perceived advantage of employing She describes, as many others have and you somehow make a sound come a particular rhetorical strategy? done, how, as “the election news kept out—but nothing happens. coming in,” she felt “increasing alarm This paragraph continues for several artha Nussbaum’s The Monarchy and then, finally, both grief and a deeper more sentences in the same vein. M of Fear is deeper and more subtle fear, for the country and its people and Then the second paragraph begins: than many current accounts of fear, but institutions.” So far, so familiar. But “This is the stuff of nightmare.” at the same time (as the title suggests) then, she writes, “I was aware that my Indeed. But then, the punchline: It it is even more sweeping in its assertion fear was not balanced or fair-minded, “is also the unremarkable daily life of of fear’s role in our common life: “It is so I was part of the problem that I wor- every human baby.”

both chronologically and causally pri- ried about.” That’s not so common a I do not exaggerate when I say that PRESS / GETTYROBERTO SERRA / IGUANA

42 / The Weekly Standard October 1, 2018 over a period of weeks I reread this Plennie L. Wingo opening and the following several pages in April 1931, at least 10 times. The words were clear as his reverse trek began enough, but how were we to understand them? For me it was difficult to believe that Nussbaum (for whose incisive intellect I have great respect) intended us to take this account seriously. As a satire, intended to jab at idealized ren- derings of infancy, it might be seen as darkly funny, but that reading doesn’t seem to have any purchase here. And so I went back and read those pages again and they seemed as grotesque and ludi- crous as they did on first acquaintance. I thought of the infant I currently know best, our youngest grandson George. Did Nussbaum’s version square with my firsthand observation of this 1-year- old? Of course, I couldn’t read George’s mind. Does Nussbaum have that power? Does the road to becoming a Trump voter, and to all manner of other instances of “the monarchy of fear” in our lives, really begin in the nightmar- ish helplessness of our infant selves, as Nussbaum argues at length? Maybe, as I warned earlier, think- ing too much about fear can be danger- ous. But even readers (like me) who are unconvinced by Nussbaum’s account of the origin and extent of fear in our common life can agree with her that at this present moment, as ever, we have a pressing need to nurture and prac- tice hope, faith, and love, as she argues B A in her concluding chapter. “Christian & thought,” Nussbaum writes, “tradi- tionally links these three, and Saint The Retropedestrian Paul adds that the greatest of the three is love. Martin Luther King Jr. follows The odd tale of the Texan who tried to walk Christian teaching by linking the three by homas inciguerra attitudes, albeit not in a theistic and around the world backward. T V theological way, but in a this-worldly way that embraces all Americans.” Set ot long after the Crash aside, for now, the anti-theological read- of ’29, when such zani- The Man Who Walked Backward ing of King and the dubious assump- ness as goldfish-swallow- An American Dreamer’s Search for Meaning tions underlying Nussbaum’s phrase ing and flagpole-sitting in the Great Depression by Ben Montgomery “a this-worldly way that embraces all Ncould still distract a desperate nation, Little, Brown Spark, 291 pp., $28 Americans”; let’s focus on the exercise 35-year-old Plennie L. Wingo (his real of faith, hope, and love, as Nussbaum name) had an idea. His restaurant in encourages us to do, adding this wis- Abilene, Texas, had gone under. So he embarked on an attention-grabbing dom from Saint Paul: “But the fruit of and, he hoped, moneymaking stunt of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, Thomas Vinciguerra is the author of his own. He would walk around the kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gen- Cast of Characters: Wolcott Gibbs, E. B. world backward. tleness, self-control; against such things White, James Thurber, and the Golden Wingo figured he would cash in

PAT LEFORS DAWSON PAT there is no law.” ♦ Age of ‘The New Yorker.’ with endorsements and pledges from

October 1, 2018 The Weekly Standard / 43 local businesses and chambers of com- Baxter Springs, Kansas, a jealous hus- grand narrative. Instead, he unleashes merce. He would sell postcards of him- band threatened to kill the weird ex- torrents of historical recitation. Hence, self. The press and newsreel publicity restaurateur merely for talking with his when Wingo journeys through the would be priceless! He would write wife. Wingo himself beat the hell out Great Plains, we get about 2,880 words a book! Equipped only with a cane of a chiseler who failed to pay him for on regional topography and wildlife, and a pair of sunglasses that sported walking backward along the top ledge broken Indian treaties and massacres, small side mirrors—created for use by of an Art Deco building in Elizabeth, and the awfulness of the Dust Bowl. motorcyclists and sports-car drivers— New Jersey. He spent three weeks in a Montgomery chokes you with not Wingo set out east from Fort Worth on hospital after breaking his ankle near especially fascinating statistics (did you April 15, 1931. Canton, Ohio. In Pittsburgh, a cop told know that when Wingo arrived in Jop- He ultimately didn’t trot the whole a frightened Wingo that he was tick- lin, Missouri, it had 7,468 telephones, globe. He made it to Boston and then eting him for “mopery in the second 42 churches, and a library filled with sailed for Hamburg. But after retro- degree”—only to reveal, laughing, that 56,708 books?). During these asides, grading through Central and Eastern he just wanted to have some fun with Wingo virtually disappears. Europe, he was collared at the Turkish him. Wingo laughed along. And unlike its subject’s footsteps, the border. The police, the Chicago Tribune book is badly balanced. Montgomery reported, “couldn’t decide whether takes more than 200 pages to set down he was coming or going.” Following By the time Plennie Wingo’s personal story and his odys- his release from jail, the U.S. consul sey until he reaches Germany. Yet he convinced him to abandon his kooky Wingo had walked devotes only a dozen or so pages to Win- scheme. Not only was Wingo becom- backward through go’s trek through Czechoslovakia, Aus- ing an annoyance and even a threat tria, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and to public safety, he was entering some 16 states, his Greece, and a mere nine to his 1,450- pretty dangerous territory. musculature had mile California-to-Texas leg. Perhaps So Wingo came home and settled this was unavoidable—maybe there just for walking with his rearview specs become so reversed aren’t many good documentary sources across his native land. Starting from that his calves were at describing those parts of Wingo’s trip— Santa Monica on August 13, 1932, he but the lopsidedness is striking. returned to Fort Worth two-and-a- the front of his legs. Montgomery’s attempts at philoso- half months later. Altogether, author phizing (“It’s funny what a fella thinks Ben Montgomery writes, he had back- about when he’s alone”) are as graceless walked for “one year, six months, nine This is welcome color in a sloppy as his rat-a-tat-tat sentences (“Prices days, four hours, and twelve minutes,” book. Montgomery’s introduction dropped. Dropped fast. Dropped hard. logging more than 5,000 miles (or stresses that his documentation is Dropped vertically.”). Sometimes more than 7,000, depending on your accurate. I believe him. But the book’s he sins simultaneously (“Cities fall. source). In the end he made all of four subtitle is An American Dreamer’s Empires fade. History favors the per- dollars, wore out 12 pairs of shoes and, Search for Meaning in the Great Depres- sistent.”). And oh, the clichés! “With- while on the road, was sued by his wife sion, and Wingo simply doesn’t do a lot out missing a beat,” “vim and vigor,” for divorce. of dreaming. Ultimately he’s just a guy “between a rock and a hard place,” In this odd book about an odd little with a gimmick. “With the whole world “the jig was up,” “old hat,” “the college (5-foot-5) man, Montgomery, a veteran going backwards,” our hero reflects in try,” “fuel for the fire,” and “hand over of the Tampa Bay Times, doesn’t skimp later life, “maybe the only way to see it fist” are typical. on trivia and anecdotage. Wingo, it was to turn around.” That’s as deep as Plennie Wingo quickly became a turns out, intended only to walk back- his introspection gets. footnote in the memory of the his and ward between towns. By the time he got If Wingo ever found a greater sig- later generations. More than 30 years through 16 states (and Washington, nificance to his antics, Montgomery after his outlandish gambit he finally D.C.), his musculature had become only occasionally divines it. More published his book, inaccurately titled so reversed that his calves were at than once, Wingo entered towns that Around the World Backwards, to little the front of his legs. In Lemont, Illi- squinted at him as a dubious outsider, notice. He appeared on The Tonight nois, he amused onlookers by eating with suspicions fueled by financial jit- Show in 1976 and that same year made an entire meal in reverse, beginning ters, recent crimes, simmering racial $500 by walking 400 miles backward with his dessert and finishing with his tensions, and similar unpleasantness. to end up at the Ripley’s Believe It or soup. Setting out for Hamburg, Wingo Happily, he also found kind strang- Not! museum in Santa Monica. In walked backward on the gangplank; in ers who fed him, cheered him on, and 1993, he died in poverty and obscurity Germany, he backwalked a dozen miles even took him in. at the age of 98 at his home in Wichita or so in the wrong direction. But Montgomery rarely analyzes Falls. It’s not clear if he was carried There’s memorable drama, too. In and integrates this material into any out feet first. ♦

44 / The Weekly Standard October 1, 2018 some commonsense qualifications: B A Experiments in the room down the hall & might differ because the room is over- heated, bombarded by radiation, shaken by passing trains, and so on.) Laws are Emmy Noether’s time-symmetric if they apply in the same way at all points in time—so that, again roughly, it doesn’t matter whether Beautiful Theorem I do an experiment today or tomorrow. Galileo proposed that experiments One hundred years ago, she united symmetry performed inside the cabin of a ship, so long as they don’t refer to anything and conservation in physics. by David Guaspari outside the cabin, could never distin- guish between a ship resting at anchor his year is the centennial of or one moving smoothly straight Noether’s theorem, which is across the sea. For example, something often called the most beauti- dropped will be seen to fall straight ful result in mathematical down. A ball rolled across the floor will Tphysics. Developed by Amalie Emmy travel in a straight line along the direc- Noe­ther (1882-1935), the theorem tion in which it was released. resolves questions about the general The right way to express this kind of theory of relativity and has helped to symmetry mathematically depends on shape the way physicists think about our assumptions about space and time. their subject and continues to be an Under the commonsense belief that essential theoretical tool. time and distance mean the same on a A consensus first-ballot Hall of smoothly sailing ship as they do on Famer—Einstein called her “the an anchored one, the math is simple most significant creative mathemati- and defines what has come to be called cal genius thus far produced since the symmetry under “Galilean transforma- higher education of women began”— tion.” Einstein pondered deeply the fact Noether is famous among mathema- that while Newton’s laws have this sym- ticians primarily as one of the archi- metry, the laws of electromagnetism do tects of modern abstract algebra. Her not. The result was the special theory eponymous theorem, which seems of relativity. It preserves both Galileo’s almost a sideline in a very productive proposal and the laws of electromagne- career, establishes a fundamental con- tism by adopting a different understand- nection between conservation laws, ing of distance and time, which leads such as the law of conservation of to a different mathematical formula- energy, and “symmetries,” a term that tion of Galileo’s idea (symmetry under needs some explanation. Emmy Noether “Lorentz transformation”). The laws of In ordinary usage we say that an electromagnetism and a modified ver- object is symmetrical if it looks the have a variety of such symmetries. (A sion of Newton’s laws are both symmet- same when reflected about an axis, as nontrivial theorem says that so far as ric under that. when we talk about the symmetry of symmetry is concerned, there are pre- Noether’s theorem applies to laws faces. We might also, in a more tech- cisely 17 different kinds of wallpaper.) that are formulated in a particular way nical sense, say that an object is sym- Noether’s theorem concerns the sym- and therefore to a particular way of metrical with respect to some change if metries not of objects but of physical thinking about nature. In Newtonian the change leaves it looking the same. laws, transformations that leave the laws physics, bodies interact by exerting on A perfect sphere looks unchanged themselves unchanged. For example, one another forces that compel their after it’s rotated, so it is “symmetric” laws are symmetric under translation motions. It’s a bottom-up view that is with respect to any amount of rotation. if they don’t distinguish one point in easy to imagine simulating on a com- Wallpaper may look identical after it’s space from another. Roughly speaking, puter: Based on where the bodies are slid a certain distance right or left, or such laws predict that whether I do an and how they’re moving now compute if it’s reflected in a mirror, etc. It may experiment here or there—that is, after where they’ll be and how they’ll be translating the experimental appara- moving a fraction of a second later; David Guaspari is a writer tus—I expect the same results. (This is repeat ad infinitum.

in Ithaca, New York. speaking “roughly” because it requires An alternative is to describe physical ALAMY

October 1, 2018 The Weekly Standard / 45 processes not as if they are pushed from same results as the bottom-up applica- Hilbert wanted to keep her at Göttin- the past but as if pulled from the future, tion of Newton’s laws (and in many cir- gen with an academic appointment, an as if acting in order to produce a cer- cumstances, much more easily). But it attempt that led to a famous exchange tain outcome. In the first centurya .d., has also provided an immensely help- in the faculty senate. A (nonmathema- for example, Hero of Alexandria noted ful roadmap for discovering and devel- tician) member objected, “What will that some properties of light—the way oping theories in other domains— our soldiers think when they return it is reflected by a mirror, the fact that for example, the so-called Standard to the university and find that they it travels through air in straight lines— Model of particle physics that gives an are expected to learn at the feet of a can be explained by supposing that light account of the known elementary par- woman?” Hilbert’s reply—which, alas, proceeds from place to place by taking ticles and their interactions via three did not carry the day: “I do not see that the shortest possible path. That prin- of the four known fundamental forces the sex of the candidate is an argument ciple can’t explain refraction, the fact (gravity being omitted). Much of its against her admission as a privatdozent. that a straight stick partly submerged development proceeded by propos- After all, the senate is not a bathhouse.” in water appears to bend at the water ing symmetries and investigating the Some years later she did get a modest line. In the 17th century, Pierre de Fer- corresponding conservation laws, and appointment, with modest pay, and in mat managed to incorporate refraction the meantime gave lectures by means by generalizing Hero’s idea, proposing of a ruse: Hilbert would announce a that light follows a path that takes the From string theory to course and she would be his permanent shortest possible time. If light travels dark matter, many of substitute. Hermann Weyl, a promi- more slowly in water than in air, it saves nent Göttingen mathematician who time by making a bit more of its journey the furthest-reaching also tried and failed to get her a position through the air and a bit less in water stretches of cosmology commensurate with her talent, wrote than if it were to proceed directly— to a friend, “I was ashamed to occupy hence the stick’s apparent bend. and theoretical physics such a preferred position beside her Further generalizations were investi- today depend in some whom I knew to be my superior as a gated intensely during the 18th century mathematician in many respects.” and reached their modern form in the way on Noether’s (Several web pages and at least one 19th with Hamilton’s principle (named popular science book wrongly attri- for William Rowan Hamilton, an Irish 100-year-old theorem. bute this remark to Hilbert.) mathematician). It tells you how to Weyl described her personality as express the dynamics of a classical Noether’s theorem has been an essen- “warm like a loaf of bread.” She was an physical system by defining a quantity tial part of the toolkit. Many of the inspiration to her students—through called action and postulating that the furthest-reaching stretches of cosmol- passionate conversations, not her lec- system will evolve in such a way as to ogy and theoretical physics today, from tures, which were poor. “She had a very minimize it. Pierre Louis Maupertuis, speculation about string theory to the clear understanding of what she was generally credited with originating this hunt for dark matter, depend in some saying,” said one colleague, “but she line of inquiry, regarded it as testimony way on Noether’s theorem. didn’t have a clear idea of what to God’s wisdom in achieving His she was going to say.” Shortly after the effects by the most economical means. o who was Emmy Noether? There Nazis came to power in 1933, she—a Noether’s theorem applies to systems Sseems to have been only one short Jew and a pacifist—was dismissed from described using Hamilton’s principle. scholarly biography so far. Her father the university. In this dark time, Weyl It defines precisely what constitutes a was a distinguished mathematician at said, “her courage, her frankness, her “continuous symmetry” of laws that are the University of Erlangen in Bavaria, unconcern about her own fate” were “a defined by an action and, importantly, which didn’t admit women; she did, moral solace.” from each such symmetry derives a however, audit classes; after the rules The Rockefeller Foundation helped conservation law. So translational sym- changed she enrolled and, in 1907, fund a professorship for Noether at metry implies that momentum is con- obtained a Ph.D.; she worked with- Bryn Mawr. (The recommendation served. Time symmetry implies that out pay at the Erlangen Mathematical from Einstein couldn’t have hurt.) In energy is conserved. Rotational sym- Institute until 1915, when she moved 1935, after surgery to remove a uterine metry—all directions are the same; it is to Göttingen, an important center for tumor, she died, age 53, from a postop- irrelevant which way the experimental mathematics. David Hilbert, then erative infection. apparatus faces—implies that angular arguably the world’s greatest mathema- It was not a tragic life. Noether was momentum is conserved. tician, asked for her help investigating not deterred or embittered by indigni- Hamilton’s principle was devised conservation laws in general relativity. ties from academic bureaucrats. She for classical mechanics, the physics of This is what led to her formulating was, and was recognized as, a peer of planets and pendulums and springs the theorem that bears her name, first towering intellects. And she did her and billiard balls. There it gives the described in an article in August 1918. work, by all accounts, with joy. ♦

46 / The Weekly Standard October 1, 2018 the house’s mortgage is underwater, her husband hasn’t written a word in a B&A decade, and she works at a job in the city that she hates to support him and a way of life they cannot afford. Dry sarcasm Momma Drama oozes from her every pore, as does the sense that Emily has literally seen and Comedy-thriller A Simple Favor is memorable done it all. despite its forgettable name. by John Podhoretz The gorgeous Blake Lively is a sin- ister comic revelation in the role. It’s a terrific part and Lively seizes it just as Emily seizes the friendless and lonely Stephanie and begins to use her as unpaid help by pretending to be her best friend. One day, Emily asks for the ump- teenth time if Stephanie will take her son home from school and watch him until she gets off work—and then sim- ply doesn’t show up, leaving Stephanie with two children to take care of because Emily’s husband is in London tending to his sick mother. Days pass. A body is found in a lake in Michigan. It’s Emily. Anna Kendrick as Stephanie and Blake Lively as Emily Or is it? This is a corker of a little movie, but new movie called A Simple at Gothic manses straight out of Jane I fear it was doomed from the start com- Favor is a funny, twisty, Eyre. By the end, when a staged murder- mercially because of a terrible decision surprising blend of mys- suicide is interrupted by a moment of Feig and his studio made—the deci- tery and light social sat- bonding between a stay-at-home mom sion to retain the name of the Darcey ire.A It’s never believable, not even for and a working-outside-the-home mom, Bell novel on which it is based. I am not a moment—but then, what comedy- we’ve long passed from the dark uni- kidding when I tell you that I found it thriller ever is? The whole verse of Gone Girl to the impossible to recall the movie’s title conceit of the comedy- more amusing precincts when I was searching for tickets to it on thriller is weird when you A Simple Favor of Feig’s Bridesmaids. Fandango. “A Simple Favor” has a flat Directed by Paul Feig think about it; someone A Simple Favor is about and toneless quality that simply does usually dies horribly in Stephanie (Anna Kend- not resonate. the course of such a movie, rick, wonderful as usual), Indeed, it’s not supposed to reso- and yet the overall mood the single mom so par- nate, because the title is intended as is supposed to remain peppy and light. ticipatory and overeager that she has to an ironic comment on the proceedings A Simple Favor sets its insouciant tone be told by her first-grade son’s teacher therein. What Emily is asking turns immediately with a dazzlingly new-old- not to put her name down for every out to be the very opposite of a simple fashioned credit sequence that evokes volunteer job on the sign-up sheet. Her favor. But the irony is only manifest the great early-1960s titles designed by desperate desire to pitch in is matched when you’ve seen it—and even then, I the Hollywood master Saul Bass. The in intensity by the insistently chipper have to confess, I found it difficult to screen seems to dance as it splits and tone of the YouTube vlog she produces summon up the title after I returned splits again, alternating images of high daily with cooking and organizing tips home from the theater and tried to fashion and suburban motherhood, for other moms. Stephanie’s fellow recommend the movie to a friend. all set to the rhythm of a French pop parents in their tony Connecticut sub- “What’s it called again?” she said. And song. Director Paul Feig is telling us at urb 90 minutes outside New York City for the life of me, I couldn’t remember. the outset that his movie is a jape and watch her vlog to mock her. Titles are weird. They shouldn’t mat- that we’re not to take what happens all Her son makes friends with a boy in ter, but they do. When a title gives off that seriously—even though there are his class whose mother is never about. a generic vibe, it makes you think the disappearances and corpses and fires When Emily does show up, she turns movie will be generic as well. A Simple out to be a 10-foot-tall haute-couture Favor is anything but generic. And trust John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, bombshell living in a designer house me on this—it should have been called

is The Weekly Standard’s movie critic. and married to a famous novelist. Only Charity. You’ll know why if you see it. ♦ LIONSGATE

October 1, 2018 The Weekly Standard / 47 “Mr. Trump also ordered that text messages from senior Justice Department and FBI officials be made public without redactions. Those PARODY officials include former FBI director James Comey, former deputy director Andrew McCabe, former FBI agent Peter Strzok, former FBI lawyer Lisa Page and Justice Department official Bruce Ohr.” —Wall Street Journal, September 17, 2018

October 1, 2018