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CommentaryFEBRUARY 2016 Bob Woodward’s Sins of Omission JAMES ROSEN The University We Need WARREN TREADGOLD I’m OK, You’re a Rage-a-Holic IS A NEW REPUBLICAN CHRISTINE ROSEN F O R E I G N P O L I C Y The Bernie Sanders EMERGING? Blackout Commentary MATTHEW BY MAX CONTINETTI BOOT Letters on FEBRUARY 2016 : VOLUME 141 NUMBER 2 141 : VOLUME 2016 FEBRUARY ‘The Jewish Future’ $5.95 US : $7.00 CANADA $7.00 : US $5.95 February 2016 Cover.indd 1 1/14/16 4:08 PM Start Spreadin’ the News HIS MONTH’S cover boys, Donald Trump and decided he was unacceptable. As I write, national Ted Cruz, were duking it out after Trump ques- polls have Trump leading the field with 35 percent to T tioned the constitutionality of Cruz’s presidential Cruz’s 19 percent in the wake of Trump’s seven-month bid when Cruz mounted a surprising counterattack. run at the top of the charts and what must be judged “Donald comes from New York,” Cruz said dismissively, the most spectacular primary bid of our time. These “and he embodies New York values.” polls are problematic, but at the very least what they New York values? There was a time, not too long suggest is 65 percent of the Republican electorate ago, when the United States was awash in admiration is actively opposed to Trump. They know he’s pro- for “New York values”—the qualities of perseverance and choice, they know he supports Democrats, they know equanimity that characterized the city’s reaction to the he’s crude and ugly and insulting, and they know September 11 attacks. We were all New his foreign-policy views are at best Yorkers, it was said. The Republican inconsistent. Party even staged its convention in From the Editor The base doesn’t need the “New Manhattan in 2004. Rudy Giuliani was John Podhoretz York values” dog whistle Cruz is blow- for years the most popular figure in the ing in its direction. The base is politi- GOP. I can recall traveling throughout cally and ideologically literate. Which the country in the years that followed 9/11 and having means, maybe, Cruz and everybody else have had it people practically demand the right to buy me a drink entirely backwards. The Trump voter is a challenge to the simply because I had come to their towns from New York. Republican base as we’ve understood it since the Reagan Cruz was betting that this view has faded to era, not a member of it. Indeed, the Trump voter may rep- such a degree that he could implicitly (and maybe resent a potentially new Republican base—and one that consciously, as he is knowledgeable about pop culture) embraces Trump’s version of “New York values.” echo Woody Allen’s famous New York-centric line Those values aren’t the ones Woody Allen was teas- from Annie Hall and have it resonate with the voters ing. Nor are they the values of 9/11. They are the values of he’s trying to reach: “The rest of the country looks the New York of caricature—the Walter Winchell–Ralph upon New York like we’re left-wing Communist Jew- Kramden–Archie Bunker–Andrew Dice Clay–Spike Lee ish homosexual pornographers. I think of us that way New York, the city of pushy, obnoxious, informal and sometimes, and I live here.” unpretentious loudmouths who get in your face and “tell After months trying to remain in Trump’s down- it like it is.” draft so that he might quietly pick up the frontrunner’s Donald Trump is the apotheosis of the carica- supporters along the way, Cruz found his own rising for- ture—he’s the zillionaire with the guts to say what tunes had placed him in Trump’s gun sights—and that he the average Joe says, the guy in the $10,000 suit who was no less vulnerable to the man’s sniping than anyone prefers hot dogs to caviar and doesn’t like losers or else had been before him. And so, belatedly, Cruz sud- cripples or captured soldiers, the world leader with denly wanted the GOP rank-and-file to know what every the outerborough accent who loves a winner even if other wounded candidate has wanted the GOP rank-and- the winner is a monstrous dictator. Jeb Bush released file to know—that Trump is not one of them, not one of a commercial in January openly calling Trump a jerk. us. He is a man with “New York values,” not our values. Like Cruz, Bush seems to have misread the Trump ap- The idea is that once the Republican base really knows peal. An ad like that is an ad for Trump. A great many the truth about Trump, the base will take him out. people in America in 2016 appear to think that an out- Cruz is operating from a false premise here. and-out, unapologetic jerk from the Big Apple is just In point of fact, the base has had months to evalu- what this country needs. After all, as the song says, if ate Trump, and one can argue that the base long ago he can make it there, he’ll make it anywhere.q Commentary 1 EDITOR.indd 1 1/14/16 3:24 PM February 2016 Vol. 141 : No. 2 Articles Max Is a New Republican Foreign Policy Emerging? 11 Boot James Bob Woodward’s Sins of Omission 18 Rosen His new book raises fresh questions about the role of America’s most famous journalist in the scandal that made his name. Warren The University We Need 27 Treadgold Reforming higher education requires the founding of a new institution of learning. Stephen The Disastrous New Urban Disaster 33 Eide Unable to spend their way into a progressive future, Democratic mayors have turned to regulation as a panacea. Tara Why Hamilton Matters 37 Helfman The Broadway triumph is the antidote to our identity-obsessed culture. Fiction Joseph Epstein The Bernie Klepner Show 41 Contents.indd 2 1/14/16 12:58 PM Politics & Ideas Naomi Don’t Take Me to Church 49 Schaefer Riley Soul Mates, by W. Bradford Wilcox and Nicholas Wolfinger Sohrab A Reformer Reformed 52 Ahmari Until We Are Free, by Shirin Ebadi David Unto the Generations 54 Wolpe The Pater, by Elliot Jager Culture & Civilization Terry Tap, Look, and Listen 56 Teachout The decline of a great American art. Fernanda This Was a Man 60 Moore The Complete Works of Primo Levi, edited by Ann Goldstein Matthew Mediacracy: 64 Continetti The Bernie Sanders Blackout From the Editor 1 The Way We Live Now: I’m OK, You’re a Rage-a-holic, by Christine Rosen 4 Letters 6 Contents.indd 3 1/14/16 12:58 PM I’m OK, You’re a Rage-a-holic S THERE any trope in American life more endur- women’s reported anger is slightly higher than white ing than the “angry white male?” He is a staple of men’s (53 percent versus 44 percent). Democrats are I pop culture from Archie Bunker and Taxi Driver angry, too. A recent Rasmussen Report on the “Angry in the ’70s to Michael Douglas’s Falling Down in the American Voter” concluded: “A lot of voters are angry. 1990s to Clint Eastwood’s Gran Torino in 2008, and Very angry. In fact, a lot of voters have been angry for A recent editorial indulged in a standard more recently he has been fueling the fever dreams some time. The phenomenon that we call ‘negative of liberal political pundits. The New York Times’s Gail partisanship,’ antipathy on the part of Democratic and bit of outrage-peddling by blaming Collins frets about how Donald Trump has “cornered Republican voters toward the opposing party and its ‘years of overheated antigovernment the anger franchise” while her col- leaders, has been on the rise since league Frank Bruni calls Trump the 1980s, and today it is arguably statements by right-wing politicians and and Senator Ted Cruz “unabashedly The Way We the most salient feature of the po- media figures’ for ‘outbursts’ such as the mean.” David Von Drehle, of Time, litical scene in the United States.” writes with barely concealed glee Live Now Nor is anger exclusively an current standoff between local ranchers that the GOP finds itself “in bed be- American problem. Writing in Christine Rosen and law-enforcement agents in Oregon. tween a bombshell and a kamikaze.” Bloomberg View, John Micklethwait So dire is the anger of these an- notes, “There’s also plenty of evi- gry white men that the Canadian writer Stephen Marche dence that across the Western world, voters are furious even sensed hostility in a Midwestern man’s facial hair. with the established parties and choices—and much In a piece for The Guardian, he described one white male more willing to consider extreme solutions, especially Trump supporter he spoke to as Angry Mustache: “Angry when put forward by politicians who ‘tell it like it is’ and Mustache quoted a statistic, which I later check and seem genuine.” The Man of the Moment says so, too. turns out to be bullshit, that all congressmen become There is “a great anger out there,” quoth Donald Trump. millionaires by the time they’ve been in office for a year,” “A lot of people say that my campaign has picked up on Marche wrote, as if he’s just exposed a terrorism plot. that, and I didn’t do that intentionally.” Angry Mustache isn’t the only one nursing a As always, present-day intensity can blind us to grievance.