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The Celebrity We Need David French ONON THETHE ROCKROCK (YES,(YES, THETHE ROCK)ROCK)

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HEATHER MAC DONALD DAVID PRYCE-JONES on on Chelsea Clinton on Recep Tayyip Erdogan

The Celebrity We Need David French ONON THETHE ROCKROCK (YES,(YES, THETHE ROCK)ROCK)

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MAY 15, 2017 | VOLUME LXIX, NO. 9 | www.nationalreview.com

ON THE COVER Page 21 Kyle Smith on Chelsea Clinton The Celebrity We Need p. 30 The Rock is one of the few culturally unifying figures in BOOKS, ARTS American life, and he’s a culturally unifying figure with a & MANNERS message of gratitude and hard work that also happens to be 35 A FAILED URBANISM culturally edifying. At this John Daniel Davidson reviews The New Urban Crisis: How Our time in American life, we Cities Are Increasing Inequality, need points of agreement, Deepening Segregation, and Failing the Middle Class—and and right now tens of What We Can Do about It, millions of Americans by Richard Florida. on both sides of the 37 THE TURE-KENNEDY political divide agree on BLUEPRINT Ike Brannon reviews JFK and The Rock. David French the Reagan Revolution: A Secret History of American Prosperity, by Lawrence Kudlow COVER: NURPHOTO/CONTRIBUTOR/GETTY IMAGES and Brian Domitrovic.

ARTICLES 38 ACTS OF UNDERMINING Ian Tuttle reviews Jonathan Leaf’s 14 THE INQUISITOR’S HEIRS by Kevin D. Williamson Deconstruction. Progressives claim to love science, but what they truly love is power. 40 AN AMERICAN OUTSIDER 16 TAX REFORM FOR THE WORKING CLASS by Henry Olsen on the life and career of Three ideas to meet the needs of new Republican voters. composer George Walker. 17 DICTATOR ERDOGAN by David Pryce-Jones 42 JUNGLE FEVER The dismantling of Turkish democracy continues. reviews The Lost City of Z. 19 A DIFFERENT KIND OF CRISIS by Michael Auslin The standoff over North Korea’s nuclear weapons heads into uncharted territory. 43 THE STAFF OF LIFE discusses the fine art of eating. FEATURES 21 THE CELEBRITY WE NEED by David French SECTIONS Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson unites in a time of division. Letters to the Editor LET THE POLICE POLICE by Heather Mac Donald 2 28 The Week So says Jeff Sessions, but some big-city chiefs disagree. 4 33 Athwart ...... HER CHELSEANESS by Kyle Smith 34 The Long View ...... Rob Long 30 Poetry ...... Len Krisak How to be entitled and boring without really trying. 35 44 Happy Warrior ...... Heather Wilhelm

NATIONAL REVIEW (ISSN: 0028-0038) is published bi-weekly, except for the first issue in January, by N ATIONAL REVIEW, Inc., at 215 Lexington Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10016. Periodicals postage paid at New York, N.Y., and additional mailing offices. © , Inc., 2017. Address all editorial mail, manuscripts, letters to the editor, etc., to Editorial Dept., N ATIONAL REVIEW, 215 Lexington Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10016. Address all subscription mail orders, changes of address, undeliverable copies, etc., to NATIONALREVIEW, Circulation Dept., P. O. Box 433015, Palm Coast, Fla. 32143-3015; phone, 386-246-0118, Monday–Friday, 8:00A.M . to 10:30 P.M. Eastern time. Adjustment requests should be accompanied by a current mailing label or facsimile. Direct classified advertising inquiries to: Classifieds Dept.,ATIONAL N REVIEW, 215 Lexington Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10016 or call 212-679- 7330. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to N ATIONAL REVIEW, Circulation Dept., P. O. Box 433015, Palm Coast, Fla. 32143-3015. Printed in the U.S.A. RATES: $59.00 a year (24 issues). Add $21.50 for Canada and other foreign subscriptions, per year. (All payments in U.S. currency.) The editors cannot be responsible for unsolicited manuscripts or artwork unless return postage or, better, a stamped, self-addressed envelope is enclosed. Opinions expressed in signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of the editors. letters new_QXP-1127940387.qxp 4/26/2017 3:39 PM Page 2 Letters

MAY 15 ISSUE; PRINTED APRIL 27

EDITORINCHIEF Richard Lowry Senior Editors Rock’s Other Pioneer Richard Brookhiser / / Jay Nordlinger / David Pryce-Jones Managing Editor Jason Lee Steorts I have only one quarrel with Andrew Cline’s “Founding Rocker” (April 17). Literary Editor Michael Potemra Vice President, Editorial Operations Christopher McEvoy There is another iconic rocker who should also be considered—Little Richard, Executive Editor Roving Correspondent Kevin D. Williamson circa 1955, with his testosterone-laden “Tutti Frutti” and “Lucille.” Wop baba National Correspondent John J. Miller Senior Political Correspondent Jim Geraghty loo bop a wop bam boom! Art Director Luba Kolomytseva Deputy Managing Editors Nicholas Frankovich / Fred Schwarz Warren Frederick Production Editor Katie Hosmer Assistant to the Editor Rachel Ogden San Marcos, Calif. Research Associate Alessandra Trouwborst Contributing Editors Shannen Coffin / Ross Douthat / Daniel Foster / Arthur L. Herman / Lawrence Kudlow Vinyl Survival Mark R. Levin / / Rob Long Mario Loyola / Jim Manzi / Andrew C. McCarthy Andrew Stuttaford / Robert VerBruggen David Harsanyi seriously harshed my mellow with his “In the Groove” (April NATIONALREVIEWONLINE 17) when he mentioned his remaining collection of around 20 records but failed Editor Charles C. W. Cooke Managing Editor Katherine Connell to identify which albums survived the liquidations of time, space constraints, Deputy Managing Editor Mark Antonio Wright Senior Writer David French and changing taste. What gives, man? Don’t leave us hangin’: Who are the Critic-at-Large Kyle Smith National-Affairs Columnist authors of these holy grails? Reporter Associate Editors Molly Powell / Nick Tell Digital Director Ericka Andersen John C. Kaspar Technical Services Russell Jenkins Web Editorial Assistant Grant DeArmitt Lebanon, Ohio Web Developer Wendy Weihs Web Producer Scott McKim EDITORS- AT- LARGE / John O’Sullivan DAVID HARSANYIRESPONDS: Now that you ask, I’m not sure why these records NATIONALREVIEWINSTITUTE THOMASL. RHODESFELLOW survived six moves over the past 20-odd years. I definitely lugged around the Ian Tuttle Replacements’ discography for sentimental reasons. Let It Be—their third BUCKLEYFELLOWSINPOLITICALJOURNALISM and best album—was the soundtrack of my teen years. The same impulse Alexandra DeSanctis / Austin Yack probably led me to hold on to discs such as Meat Puppets’ Huevos, Hüsker COLLEGIATENETWORKFELLOW Paul Crookston Dü’s Zen Arcade, and Dinosaur Jr.’s You’re Living All Over Me. Others I sus- Contributors pect were a visual choice: There’s the Velvet Underground’s Loaded, an orig- Hadley Arkes / James Bowman / Eliot A. Cohen inal from 1970, with its smoky subway entrance, and the Ramones’ first Dinesh D’Souza / Chester E. Finn Jr. / Neal B. Freeman James Gardner / David Gelernter / George Gilder album, with the scruffy band defiantly staring out at me. Then again, I can’t / Kevin A. Hassett / Charles R. Kesler David Klinghoffer / Anthony Lejeune / Alan Reynolds tell you exactly why I held on to Herb Alpert’s Tijuana Brass’s Whipped Tracy Lee Simmons / / Vin Weber Cream and Other Delights. The music was always outside my palate, so I sus- Vice President Jack Fowler pect I was being ironic (though throwing it on recently, I could appreciate its Chief Financial Officer James X. Kilbridge Accounting Manager Galina Veygman lounge-y cheerfulness). The USSR State Symphony Orchestra’s recording of Accountant Lyudmila Bolotinskaya Business Services Alex Batey Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5—released by the state-owned Melodiya Circulation Manager Jason Ng label—is most definitely not cheerful, and most definitely not something I Advertising Director Jim Fowler Advertising Manager Kevin Longstreet enjoyed listening to as a teenager. It’s one of my favorites now. Not only is it beautiful and haunting, it reminds me that my record collection outlasted the PUBLISHERCHAIRMAN Garrett Bewkes John Hillen . FOUNDER William F. Buckley Jr.

PATRONSANDBENEFACTORS Correction Robert Agostinelli Dale Brott Mr. and Mrs. Michael Conway In the book review “The Powerhouse on Fifth” (April 17), John Hughes was Mark and Mary Davis James referred to as a cardinal. In fact, he never attained that rank; he was an archbishop. Christopher M. Lantrip Brian and Deborah Murdock Mr. & Mrs. Richard Spencer Mr. & Mrs. L. Stanton Towne Peter J. Travers Letters may be sub mitted by e-mail to [email protected].

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n In Trump’s first 100 days, “Tough on China” became “Tough on Canada.” Now that’s tough.

n Shattered: Inside ’s Doomed Campaign, by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, is gripping reading, chock- full of juicy, revelatory reporting about the Democratic nomi- nee’s campaign—reporting one wishes had been offered up See page 6. during the election season. The Clinton campaign was per- ceived to be an experienced, well-funded, well-organized, well-oiled machine, brimming with dozens of offices in swing states and possessing a proven ground game. The reality, as Allen and Parnes reveal, was less impressive: Ten writers, con- sultants, and aides had a hand in writing Clinton’s muddled announcement speech; her Wisconsin volunteers lacked basic resources such as campaign literature to distribute while door- knocking; campaign manager Robby Mook chose not to spend money on polling, relying instead on analytics surveys; and by late October, aide Jake Sullivan “believed there was a reason- able chance Hillary would lose the election, and he began pressing Mook and others to abandon efforts to expand the Electoral College map in favor of locking down states that added up to 270.” In other words, quite a few people knew that Hillary Clinton’s campaign was a paper tiger, but the usual political con- siderations kept them from speaking publicly and honestly about it. If any journalists had been able to run this story before the described himself as personally opposed to abortion and sup- election, maybe the results of the 2016 election wouldn’t have ported such mild measures against abortion as a ban on it at 20 been so stunning. weeks after conception. Pro-abortion groups attacked Perez and Sanders for betraying women. Perez quickly folded, saying that n For a week or so, Jon Ossoff was the great Democratic hope. every Democratic candidate should support “reproductive health The former congressional aide was going to win the special elec- care.” Sanders has not yet folded, though, and Pelosi said that tion to replace Tom Price, who left the House to become secre- pro-lifers could be Dem o crats. A recent Marist poll for the tary of health and human services. While the Georgia district has Knights of Columbus showed that most Democratic voters have long been Republican, many of the Republicans in it were unen- some views on abortion to the right of Mello’s. For a party that thusiastic about Trump. Better still, multiple Re pub li cans were finds itself shut out of government nearly everywhere to turn its running in the first round of the election, letting Dem o crats con- back on them is certainly an interesting move. centrate on getting Ossoff an outright majority that would obviate a second round. Ossoff fell two percentage points short and now n On the campaign trail, repeatedly promised— faces a runoff that he is expected to lose to conservative “a solemn vow,” he called it—to label China a currency manip- Republican Karen Handel. Both parties started spinning, but each ulator and hit Beijing with retaliatory sanctions. Trump’s has cause for concern. The vote pattern largely mirrored that of concept of a solemn vow is elastic, and he has for the moment the Trump–Clinton race, which could mean trouble for Re - abandoned the idea; he says that he has just learned that China publicans in similar districts. At the same time, the election may is no longer manipulating its currency. In reality, there has been have shown the limits of a Democratic campaign based purely on no major policy change in Beijing for several years. But even “resistance” to Trump. Republicans have no reason to be compla- after sharing warm words and a slice of cake with Xi Jinping, cent, even as Democrats return to despair and rage. Trump has China on the brain, and he has ordered a federal investigation of whether Chinese firms are “dumping”—another n Bernie Sanders and Nancy Pelosi, of all people, have emerged flexible term—steel in U.S. markets. The regime in Beijing is as voices of reason on, of all things, abortion—or, at least, on how guilty of any number of horrifying crimes: It is a government Democrats should treat members of the party who have moderate that murders men and women for their political and religious views on the issue. While on a unity tour with Democratic views and then harvests their organs for profit. If conspiring to National Committee chairman Tom Perez, Sanders held a rally sell Americans things they want at low prices is a crime at all, ROMAN GENN for Heath Mello, a candidate for mayor of Omaha. Mello has it is the least of China’s transgressions.

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THE WEEK

n The same day that President Trump and Xi Jinping had din- Jus tice Department of threatening American national-security ner at Mar-a-Lago, with first daughter Ivanka in attendance, in ter ests, contrary to the White House’s public assurances— China approved three new trademarks for Ivanka’s jewelry, the administration “dropped charges and international arrest bags, and sauna services. The Chinese make a big deal of warrants against 14 other men, all of them fugitives.” Several of them were wanted for alleged roles in helping to funnel ma - té ri el to Iranian-backed terror outfits, such as , or for participating in the global network to procure components for Iran’s nuclear program. One was believed to have helped to supply Shiite militias in Iraq with a particularly deadly type of IED—one that killed “hundreds” of American troops. Presi - dent Trump has declared, on more than a few occasions, that when it comes to dealings with foreign powers, he will aim to put American interests first. His predecessor has left him with an object lesson in how not to do that.

n Americans wondering what the next step will be in the “princelings”—the children of muckety-mucks, who are being Left’s ongoing fight against the First Amendment need look groomed to take their places, and showered with favors mean- no farther than to former Vermont governor Howard Dean, while. Must we ape Chinese customs in return, by acting as who has been quietly laying out the blueprint. Having passive participants? Ivanka Trump put her business in a trust, claimed incorrectly that “hate speech is not protected by the but she still profits from it. Her status as a formal adviser to her First Amendment,” Dean quickly scrabbled around for a father makes the deals all the more unseemly. If she wants to justification. In the course of that adventure he contrived count her earnings, let her stay home and do it. If she has the some novel theories about speech in American jurispru- president’s ear, let her hold a fire sale. When Henry Lee asked dence. He has claimed, for example, that the “fighting first Treasury secretary for an inside tip, words” doctrine laid out in Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire Hamilton replied, “Remember the saying with regard to Cae sar’s can somehow apply to conservatives giving lectures on col- wife.” Cc: Caesar’s daughter. lege campuses; that the rules that apply on the public air- waves are transferable to the public square; n When President Trump told on April 11 that the and that the likes of U.S. was “sending an armada” to the Sea of Japan to deter fur- might be guilty of “incitement” ther North Korean aggression, the news flashed around the simply because the likes of Dean Pa cif ic Rim. Trump was referring to the aircraft carrier USS disapprove of her speech. Con - Carl Vinson and her strike group, which had left Singapore a servatives tempted to laugh at few days before. But as tensions rose, news reports across Dean’s ignorance would do East Asia trumpeted the impending arrival of the U.S. fleet, well to recoil instead. and the Kim regime threatened to sink the carrier, the Carl For now, we are seeing Vinson was actually steaming in the opposite direction, on her a governor embarrass way to take part in previously scheduled exercises with the himself on Royal Australian Navy—3,500 miles from Korea. (In a 21st- television. century touch, that news broke when a U.S. Navy website Next time, posted a publicity photo of the carrier sailing through the it could be Sunda Strait between Java and Su ma tra en route to the Indian a judge. Ocean.) The whole mess seems to have been a case of crossed wires, imprecise language, and the obvious need for a mod- icum of obliqueness on the Navy’s part about the precise loca- n The so-called March for Science was a lot of fun for a cer- tion of its ships: The carrier finally arrived in the Sea of Japan tain kind of sneering progressive who doesn’t want to talk too

GETTY IMAGES FORtwo GLG weeks later to drill with the South Korean and Japanese much about Bernie Sanders’s views on modern agricultural / navies. The USS Carl Vinson is a 1,092-foot long, 100,000- practices. (He is an anti-GMO loon, in addition to being a ton Nimitz-class nuclear-powered aircraft carrier capable of general-purpose loon.) The Left has a love-hate relationship BRAD BARKET

: carrying up to 90 fixed-wing aircraft and helicopters—you’d with science: Talking about evolution is an easy way to get a

RIGHT think she’d be hard to miss. rise out of a certain kind of Christian, but progressives are ; queasy when it comes to questions such as the heritability of n When it came to its negotiations with Iran, duplicity was the intelligence—Charles Murray has been ridiculously de - GETTY IMAGES / hallmark of the Obama administration’s public statements. nounced as a “white nationalist” for even having considered AFP / (Sanctimonious preening was a close second.) A new the question. Invoking Science—capital-S Science—is also a investigation shows just how many concessions the adminis- useful rhetorical ploy for reconstructing contested public- tration was willing to make to strike any nuclear accord. In policy questions as matters of settled fact. The great example ODD ANDERSEN : addition to releasing, as part of a swap, seven Iranian-born is global warming, which presents polities and their leaders LEFT prisoners—some of whom were accused by Obama’s own with complicated questions involving economic and political

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THE WEEK

trade-offs between rival goods. The Left demands what it n Bill O’Reilly is out at Fox News, felled by multiple allegations demands (always the same thing: subject more of the private of sexual harassment and a left-wing pressure campaign against economy to political regimentation) and offers the preface: advertisers on his show. A combative populist who portrayed him- “Science says.” (Not that its curiosity about what “science self as the champion of “the folks,” O’Reilly forecast the Trump says” extends to evaluations of the effectiveness of its favorite phenomenon and won every argument on his program, by means programs. Head Start, anyone?) Science has rightly earned the fair and foul (on cable TV, interrupting is a powerful forensic prestige attached to it, but appeals to authority are no substitute weapon). He also, by all accounts, considered his fame and for ordinary democratic discourse. power a license to force himself on women. Fox is a formidable brand that has shown so far that it can weather the recent tur- n All of a sudden, Chelsea moil in its upper ranks and prime-time lineup. There is no rea- Clinton is on the front of the son for it to ignore the standards of the modern workplace, or glossies. Before a few weeks basic decency. ago, “What does Chelsea think?” was a question that n A few years ago, Missouri created a public-safety program nobody sane had uttered. that used scrap rubber from old tires to resurface playgrounds. A Now, it is all the rage. On preschool run by Trinity Lutheran Church applied for the rub- Twitter, in the political berized flooring and was rejected. The state cited a provision in dailies, in the anti-Trump its constitution that prohibited the spending of public money in #resistance—there she is, as aid of any church, sect, or . (The provision, known as a a voice of moral authority. Blaine amendment, was one of many such amendments states The profiles are glowing. passed in the 19th century with the intent of ensuring that Cath - Her defenders are vehement. o lic schools didn’t receive public funds.) Trinity Lutheran sued. Her denials of ambition are In April, the case was argued before the Supreme Court. At issue exquisitely parsed. We have is whether a religious institution can be denied a neutral public seen this movie before. There is something in even the American benefit solely because it is exercising a constitutional right. The psyche that longs for royalty, and Chelsea Clinton is being oral arguments suggest that the justices know they have an easy groomed to meet it. They can’t really be this reckless, can they? case before them.

n While was president, Donald Trump fre- n In a Detroit suburb in April, federal agents arrested three quently attacked him for his vacations and his golf (and his people on charges of conspiring to commit and aiding and golf vacations). He said that Obama was a heedless gobbler of abetting the commission of female genital mutilation, which taxpayer dollars. Here’s one tweet: “The habitual vacationer, has been prohibited by an act of Congress since 1995. A doctor @BarackObama, is now in Hawaii. This vacation is costing and his wife, the office manager, let another doctor use their taxpayers $4 milion [sic] +++ while there is 20% unemploy- clinic to “cut” the genitals of two seven-year-old girls from ment.” (Never mind the unemployment number.) Well, Minnesota earlier this year. The case is the first federal prose- believe this: At his current pace, President Trump will spend cution for violation of the law against performing the brutal more on personal travel in a year than Obama spent in eight procedure. Those who defend female genital mutilation often years. A president should not be “cooped up in the White compare it to male circumcision, but any similarity between House,” to borrow a phrase from Nixon. As for the hypocrisy, the two practices is superficial. Some multiculturalists argue perhaps Trump could make up for it by asking Obama to hit that Americans should accept female genital mutilation be - the links with him. cause it’s prevalent in other parts of the world, though in many places where it is, it’s also, no surprise, opposed. The fight n The H-1B visa program is supposed to let employers import against female genital mutilation is so clearly the side of com- foreign workers to fill high-skill jobs only when American mon decency that even the United Nations is committed to it. workers are impossible to come by. The rules governing the The FBI should stay on the case. program are, in theory at least, strict: The company must have made a good-faith effort to hire American workers, and foreign n The first round of the French presidential election sent workers must be paid the job’s prevailing wage. Un sur prising ly, Em ma nuel Macron and Marine Le Pen into a runoff on May these are rules frequently observed in the breach. Disney and 7. Macron is a Socialist who leapt from the sinking ship of other high-tech employers have come under sustained criticism his party to run as an independent. He seems fresh because, for using the H-1B program to undercut American workers—in al though he is a child of the establishment—graduate of an some cases, going so far as to force American employees to elite university, banker by profession—he is too young and train their foreign replacements. A new executive order from inexperienced to have his fingerprints on any failed policies. President Trump says that the executive branch will “rigorously Le Pen represents a counter-establishment of her own—the enforce and administer the laws governing entry into the United anti-immigrant French Right, which is a Le Pen family busi- States of workers from abroad” and orders the Departments of ness. She purged her fascist father from the National Front, State, Justice, Labor, and Homeland Security to work together the party he founded, and absorbed much of the old to “promote the proper functioning of the H-1B visa program.” Communist party with a program of dirigisme, radical secu- The order will seem superfluous only to people unfamiliar with larism, and kisses for Vladimir Putin. Responsible voters how the program has operated. across the spectrum will unite behind Macron who, if elected,

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will be the perfect foil for Le Pen. The great issues of French but enough to have overwhelmed Turkey’s always-fragile democ- identity and Muslim integration will continue to have no racy and (even worse) its seemingly more robust Westernization, honorable champion. undertaken by Ataturk. President Trump congratulated Erdogan on his victory. Silence would have been better. n The British must be getting election-weary. Since 2014, they have seen a referendum on Scottish independence, an election n For many years, American officials visiting Russia have for a new government, and a vote on leaving the European found it important to meet with the democratic opposition to Union. In June, they will be asked again to settle on a govern- Vladimir Putin. Two senators, Marco Rubio and Jeanne Shaheen, ment. The Conservative party does not have to call an election had hoped that Rex Tillerson would continue this tradition. “We until 2020, but it is in its interests to do so. Current opinion feel strongly that democratically-minded Russians should polling shows the Tories running rampant over Labour, which know that the U.S. supports their aspirations,” they wrote to has become something of a joke under the throwback socialist him, “and as our nation’s top diplomat, you are in a unique posi- Jeremy Corbyn. Moreover, Theresa May, the current prime min- tion to communicate this message.” Tillerson did not meet with ister, was not the leader of her party when the last plebiscite was any members of the opposition. Nor was he present, in March, held, and evidently feels she needs a mandate while she oversees when the State Department released its annual human-rights the tough task of implementing Brexit. Given the circumstances, report. Traditionally, the secretary of state presides over this the British Right now has a chance to solidify its power for at event and holds an accompanying press conference. America is least half a decade. Carpe diem, chaps. more than “another pleasant country on the U.N. roll call, somewhere between Albania and Zimbabwe,” as George Bush n By a margin of 51.3 percent to 48.7 percent, Turkish voters the Elder said. America is “a unique nation with a special role solidified President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s grip on power. The in the world.” Turkish presidency becomes by law the chief office in the state, with increased power over judges and civil servants and two five- n Russia has a law that defines extremism so widely that it is year terms in which to wield it. Opposition parties have com- being used against Jehovah’s Witnesses, all the 170,000 of them plained of stuffed ballot boxes, but Erdogan, who fired 130,000 who live and worship in the country. The justice ministry thinks government employees and arrested 45,000 after a failed coup last they “represent a threat to the rights of citizens, social order, and summer, is certain to brush all complaints aside. Erdogan is an the security of the state” and have closed their headquarters in Islamist and an admirer of the Ottomans: not a stable combination, St. Petersburg and their 400 or so regional branches as well.

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About a hundred publications are banned, one of them with the medical care and moral reform than incarceration, and prohi- title “My Book of Bible Stories.” The Witnesses turned to the bition in effect operates as a full-employment program for law, but the supreme court found against them and concurred that gangsters and Mafiosi around the world. Legalization miti- “extremist organization” is a correct designation. All that’s miss- gates some of that harm, but it does not eliminate it. We expect ing from this rerun of the past is some senior official accusing the that Canada will discover, as Colorado has, that legalization is Witnesses of being spies and saboteurs in American pay. only the first step in managing the drug problem.

n The story is dog-bites-man, really: Saudi Arabia was elected n At Oxford University, shyness is now a hate crime. Ac - to the U.N. Commission on the Status of Women. Yes, Saudi cording to the university’s Equality and Diversity Unit, “not Arabia, a state that is infamous for oppressing women. But so is making eye contact or speaking directly to people” is officially Iran, and it’s on the commission, too. Solzhenitsyn said that the considered a “racial micro-aggression.” And if you can’t man- United Nations was a bit misnamed. The U.N. is an assembly of age a steady gaze and firm handshake, for heaven’s sake don’t governments rather than of nations or peoples—and this is the try to make up for it with a little friendly getting-to-know-you result we get. When the world has better governments, it will chat, because even the question “Where are you from?” can be have a better U.N. In the meantime, democracies should push as racist by suggesting the hearer is not British. Yet there’s a prob- hard as they can to promote humane values, and to keep the likes lem with all this: Elsewhere, the Equality and Diversity Unit of Saudi Arabia and Iran off women’s-rights commissions. has written that “people with [Asperger’s syndrome] may have difficulty with making eye contact, modulating their voices, n Venezuela has broken down. Civilization is barely intact. shaking hands and expressing themselves verbally”—all mi cro- People are starving. They are unable to leave the country. The aggressions that, according to the directive quoted above, “can slums have always been the strongholds of the ruling party, be tiring and alienating (and can lead to mental ill-health).” now led by Nicolás Maduro, Hugo Chávez’s successor. The Speaking of mental ill health . . . people there have now turned against the government. One of the leading opposition politicians in the country was banned n The editors of Wellesley College’s student newspaper have from running for office. Two others sought refuge in the home announced that “hostility may be warranted” against stu- of a foreign ambassador (Chile’s). The supreme court nullified dents, faculty, or other members of the Wellesley community the congress. Under pressure, Maduro told the court to rein- who “speak hate speech or refuse to adapt their beliefs.” Not state the congress. Protest is usually a young man’s game, but to be outdone, a group of students at Pomona College, part of even grandparents, male and female, are out in the streets: California’s Claremont Colleges consortium, followed up because they have no food to feed themselves or their depen- the recent shouting-down of Institute scholar dents. People are being killed in the streets as they protest. Heather Mac Donald by declaring free speech “a tool appro- Venezuela was once a shining economic example in South priated by hegemonic institutions” and “truth” a “white- America. It took the chavistas—bad government, bad econom- supremacist” “myth.” They also suggested that Pomona ics, bad people—to destroy it. The world at large should do College’s president expel the staff of the Claremont Inde - whatever it can to encourage the return of democracy, and pendent, the campus’s student-run conservative newspaper, decency, and food, to Venezuela. for their “per petuation of hate speech, anti-Blackness, and intimidation toward students of marginalized backgrounds.” n Canada’s push to legalize marijuana is a reminder that this The screeds of these students, of which we have given you a is one of those issues we do not necessarily enjoy being right relatively distinguished sample, show that they are hostile to about. Canada will become the second nation to fully legalize education and have none. the recreational use of marijuana. (The other is Uruguay.) The fact is that the recreational use of marijuana and other drugs is n “Eerily timely” is the tagline of The Handmaid’s Tale, a new not without serious costs: social, eco- TV series adapted from the 1985 dystopian novel by Margaret nomic, medical, and spir i tu al. Atwood. The series “arrives with a newfound and unexpected Marijuana often is presented resonance in Trump’s America,” the New York Times reported by legalization advocates as in April. The tale imagines the violent overthrow of American the friendliest of buzzes, government and the installation of a totalitarian theocracy, the which it very well may be, Republic of Gilead, in which fertile women are stripped of all but the habitual use of it rights, imprisoned, and forced to bear children for elite men can ruin lives. Cities as dif- through state-sanctioned ritual rape. This nightmare bears no ferent as Am ste rdam and very striking resemblance to Trump’s America, but liberals Denver have discovered for have seen a nascent Gilead lurking in the hearts of Republican themselves that the drug cul- politicians since the . We’d wager the Times ture is a plague. The best that would have found the adaptation unexpectedly resonant in can be said about legalization Kasich’s America. efforts—which this magazine has long supported—is that they are preferable to the alternative. n Communism always was a fairy tale, and now the Left is The so-called war on drugs is as expensive and futile as it is finally admitting it. MIT Press has just published Communism destructive, and it has proved a gateway to police gigantism for Kids, an illustrated storybook that uses princesses, swords, and prosecutorial overreach. Addicts are more in need of a magical chair, and other kid-lit favorites to reveal the glories

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of collective agriculture and five-year plans. But most kids generation praised Dunham for accurately chronicling their quickly figure out that fairies don’t exist, animals can’t talk, and foibles; here’s hoping they didn’t miss the series’ unmistakable Santa Claus can’t create gifts out of nothing. It takes a college warning that Millennial solipsism is an utter disaster. education to believe in “a different kind of communism, one . . . free from authoritarianism,” that will spring up after “the people n At Boys’ Latin, a college-prep charter school for boys in take everything into their own hands and decide for themselves West Philadelphia, students are required to learn the language how to continue” (to quote the publisher’s summary). The of Cicero, who knew a few things about good writing. Beautiful author, a historian, weaves into his allegorical plot half a dozen in its own right, Latin is also a key—to clarity of thought and attempts at collectivization “borrowed from historic models of elegance of expression in many modern languages, including communist or socialist change,” all of which fail, of course; but English, as well as to the centuries of literature and scholarship he insists that if we learn a few simple les sons from these mis- that form the matrix of Western culture. The mother tongue of takes, next time we can get Communism right. You’d have ancient Rome was disseminated across Europe, northern Af ri ca, better odds kissing frogs. the Levant, and eventually the whole globe. It is read, written, heard, and spoken in America today, and not just in the class- n By turns exasperating, whiny, and tone-deaf, Lena Dunham rooms of New England boarding schools. West Philly is hardly has proved to be the very picture of a clueless, narcissistic Exeter, N.H. “Nobody expects black boys to do Latin, because Millennial. Yet her HBO show Girls, which—during a six- it’s hard,” says David Hardy, the school’s CEO, “and that’s season run, concluding on April 16, that seemed to attract as exactly why we do it.” About 97 percent of the school’s gradu- many published ruminations as it did viewers—was engaging ates go on to college. Bene factum. and funny, a relentless satiric onslaught against morally vacu- ous, self-deluding, over-entitled Millennials. In the show’s n In 1990, Peggy Noonan wowed us with her memoir of the final episode, Dunham’s character, Hannah Horvath, having Reagan administration: What I Saw at the Revolution. She has deserted hipster-infested Brooklyn for a sylvan university since been wowing us with further books—such as John Paul town, was finally finding something like stability and maturity the Great—and her regular column in . thanks to the responsibilities associated with raising a baby, She has now won the for Commentary. Four conceived in a typically heedless fling with a surf instructor years ago, Bret Stephens won it. A decent run for conserva- untroubled by any thoughts of commitment to her. Many in her tives, especially considering the judges. 95 POWERHOUSE 12 $ Compare CIGAR COMBO 19 at $147.85 12 Premium Hand-Rolled Dominican Cigars Bonus Cherrywood-finish Humidor (Holds 20 Churchills) Ultra Reliable Butane Torch Lighter (may vary) A Guillotine Cigar Cutter SAVE Order Now! Limited Supply Call 1-800-538-9590 83% thompsonspecials.com Promo Code TA781 OFFER GOOD FOR 30 DAYS

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n In 1967, wrote his memoir Making It, a His great achievement, beyond cavil, was the confirmation confession of ambition. Podhoretz was speaking for himself and of Justice . Trump understood that the composi- others, whether they liked it or not. The book had a haunting, tion of the Supreme Court was a top concern for many Re pub - memorable opening line: “The journey from Brooklyn to Man - li cans, including those otherwise skeptical of him. He farmed hat tan is one of the longest journeys in the world.” These days, out the task of picking a replacement for to of Society. Leo found an excellent judge who—always a plus for Trump—looked the part. Trump made the call, the Senate confirmed, and there is once again a four-man conservative bloc on the Court. Second in importance has been the creeping normalization of Trump’s foreign policy. The Trump campaign seemed to promise a worldview like that of Vladimir Putin’s European wannabes, at once autarkic and bellicose. Yet NATO, it turns out, is important to the president, and whatever else one thinks of his Syrian mis- sile strike, it showed no fealty to Russia or its proxies. Trump seems to have begun delivering on one of his most important campaign promises: The flow of illegal immi- grants to the U.S. has drastically diminished. That is in part the result of a new seriousness about enforcement. We look it is downright cool to live in Brooklyn. But not in the child- forward to his proposing legislation to reform legal immi- hood of Norman Podhoretz. Making It was savaged by the crit- gration as well. ics. One of the myriad hostile reviews appeared in The New But legislatively, the Trump administration has been a lag- York Review of Books. This year, on its 50th anniversary, Mak - gard. The attempt to repeal and replace Obamacare has so far ing It is being republished—by the publishing arm of The New been the Capitol Hill equivalent of an oil-rig fire. The House York Review of Books. As a classic. Few writers live to see such GOP, embracing both moderates and the , was vindication. Norman Podhoretz has. Congratulations, Norman, fractious to begin with, and Speaker could not man- and keep those memoirs coming. age them. But the White House failed to do its part. Trump boasts that he is a “closer”—the man who makes the deal in the n “I have seen I think the very first attempt to talk about abortion home stretch. His closing here was to blow hard, then wash his that manages to avoid every one of the bloodcurdling clichés hands, and then deny that he had ever washed his hands. He used both by those who believe in abortion and those who oppose and the GOP need an Obamacare alternative; their next try will it. It is a most remarkable essay by John T. Noonan Jr., and it is have to go better. simply entitled, ‘How to Argue about Abortion.’” So wrote WFB Then there has been the unbearable lightness of being in 1974, in one of his many commendings of the renowned law Trump: the vanity; the word salad; the rise and fall of dodgy professor (Notre Dame, Berkeley), Catholic intellectual, author characters (Michael Flynn, Stephen Bannon); the looming (of numerous books, and several pieces for NATIONAL REVIEW), influence of his Manhattan family members, product place- and judge. He left his mark on issues ranging from contraception, ments and all. abortion, usury, and bribery to constitutional conventions and Trump’s campaign was powerful in messaging and show- religious freedom. In the early 1970s, when unrestricted abortion manship, amazingly weak in detail. In this it was the shadow triumphed through judicial fiat, it was Noonan—often through of the candidate. Where there is a coherent and organized con- essays for The Human Life Review—who constructed and pro- servative cadre—as with judicial nominations—or a long arc vided for the pro-life movement the foundation of a reasoned of governmental practice—as with post–World War II foreign counterattack. It was going to be a long slog, and the fight would policy—Team Trump has been good, or good enough. Left to require scholarship: He gave it, copiously and profoundly. Nom - its own, it drifts and bucks. i nat ed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit by Keep in mind that nothing serious has happened yet. The Pres i dent Reagan, he was confirmed in 1985 and served there for Gorsuch nomination restored a status quo. Even North Korea’s over a decade, and under senior status until his death this April burgeoning missile program is still at the stage of chest-puffing. 17, at the age of 90. One of the last great pro-life liberals, Noonan How will Trump handle a crisis? We have thirteen and a half was a remarkable champion of unborn life, a giant of the move- more hundred days to find out. ment to save and protect it. R.I.P. OBITUARY THE PRESIDENCY Kate Walsh O’Beirne, R.I.P. A Hundred Days ATE O’BEIRNE was part of NATIONAL REVIEW’s world T is strange that American presidents and pundits fetishize before she joined the staff. When she became the mag- the hundred days. FDR used the term to praise himself for K azine’s Washington editor in 1995, her résumé already CORBIS VIA GETTY IMAGES / I his early initiatives. But the first Hundred Days included stints at Senator Jim Buckley’s office, the Reagan was Napoleon’s return from Elba, which did not end well. administration, and . She served NR Pres ident Trump has fallen between his two predecessors with in that position for ten years and then became president of DAVID HOWELLS a mixture of normality, farce, and vertigo. National Review Institute for seven more.

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She brought a witty and well-informed to a

national television audience as well, through weekly appearances

on CNN’s marquee political talk show Capital Gang. Con ser va -

tives were outnumbered there, as on cable news generally at that

time, but it never seemed that way as long as she was on. Her

glor iously old-fashioned New York accent could also be heard

regularly on Crossfire and the PBS NewsHour.

Both her “Bread and Circuses” column for NR and her televi-

sion commentary were marked by a combination of a deep

interest in conservative policy, psychological insight, and com-

mon sense. Many of those same qualities put her advice—on pol-

itics, editorials, careers, and personal matters—in high demand.

It was advice she was happy to give, setting her listeners

right while somehow also making them feel like geniuses. She

enlivened every party, taking special care for the people who

seemed shy or left out. This same impulse led her to take in

young colleagues, or classmates of her children, who had no -

where to go for holidays. Kate O’Beirne

And it made her one of the most beloved people of Wash -

ington, D.C. Decades of chain-smoking caught up with her last year—vap-

You had to get to know her very well before you realized she ing came too late for her—leading to an ordeal from which she

was an introvert, one who was making a titanic effort to make shielded nearly everyone who loved her.

sure everyone was happy. In her final days, she clutched a rosary while surrounded by her

Kate was a quiet apostle for the Catholic faith, taking great devoted husband, Jim; her adored sons, Phil and John; her sisters, satisfaction in the people she had brought, or brought back, to Mary Ann, Virginia, and Rosemary; and many friends. Her great it, and cooking for priests who would “eat me out of house and regret was that she would not be able to spend more time doting home.” Reverence was never a chore for her. Leaving last on her grandchildren. She died at noon on this Divine Mercy year’s National Catholic Prayer Breakfast—one of her final Sunday. public outings—she saw a favorite priest tipping a bellman, Phil noted that his mother had believed in the show-business she thought, inadequately. She gently corrected him: “Father, adage “Leave them wanting more.” She has done that. R.I.P. you took a vow of poverty, not him.” — Ramesh Ponnuru YOU’LLYOU LL DIG ‘DDIGGINGD IN’ Get NR Senior Editor Jay Nordlingeer’s Wonderful New Collection

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line from early-20th-century progres- sivism to contemporary, Barack Obama–style “pragmatism,” which is dishonestly and glibly characterized as simply “doing what works.” In reality it means “doing what I want done, in the most convenient way.” But managerial progressivism, with its implicit faith in hierarchy and its inescapable elitism (not everybody gets a Ph.D. from Harvard), was always set for conflict with the more populist and emotional tendencies on the left that came to prominence in the Sixties, polit- ical currents originating largely in issues of identity (from black power to Chicano power to what we used to call “women’s liberation”). Such concerns exist uneasi- ly alongside a managerial progressivism based on the wisdom of people who Bill Nye were—and are—overwhelmingly white, male, and highly educated, working in institutions built by (and, the identity Left would argue, for) people who were ProgressivesThe claim Inquisitor’s to love science, but what they trulyHeirs love is power overwhelmingly white, male, and highly educated. For years, this played out as old-fashioned progressive elites’ exer- BY KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON cising a kind of managerial veto over the wilder ambitions of the identity Left: O be a good progressive is to In the English-speaking world, pro- Bernie Sanders proposes reorganizing adhere simultaneously to two gressives, under the influence not only of the American economy around the culti- T incompatible notions: one, that political philosophers such as John vation of organic hemp, and somebody science provides the final word Dewey but also of the engineer and man- responsible tells him, “No.” on any question about which scientists agement theorist Frederick Winslow This gave the identity Left a very offer any opinion; two, that the scientific Taylor, fell into something like a cult of strong incentive to work to undermine method is illegitimate, a tool of the expertise. Experts under the tutelage of the prestige of Science, a project that sundry atavistic forces conspiring to Science could, would, and should was undertaken with great enthusiasm keep down the female, the black, the decide . . . almost everything. How back during the heyday of postmod- brown, the poor, the gay, the disabled, much steel should U.S. firms produce? ernism. The academic world endures a the gender-fluid—everybody except How should they produce it? What lot of voguish nonsense about “African . should the line workers at the factory be science” and “feminist mathematics” If you were looking at the college paid? What about their supervisors? and “queer physics” (“My early postu- campuses with the right kind of eyes in Taylor’s Principles of Scientific Manage - late is that queer physics speaks about the Eighties and Nineties, you could ment, published in 1911, provides a testa- knowledge-making in physics that takes have seen this coming. ment to the ambitions of the Progressive the form of subverting the hegemony of The more philosophically self-aware Era: He and his contemporaries believed a dominant and mainstream discourse”). progressives have long been ensorceled that, using such new technological tools The extreme, Foucauldian version of by the belief that science—or, really, as stopwatches and motion-picture cam- that analysis was ridiculous and lame Science—could be pressed into service eras, one could study industrial processes and easy to write off if you were not an bearing loads of social management too at the most granular level—how a certain academic. But the more moderate ver- heavy for a mere bureaucracy. The employee turns a certain screw—and sion of that view became quite main- Soviet Union invested a great deal of its produce a single, best way of performing stream: We may not hear very much scarce capital in something it called any task. about feminist physics, but we hear “Soviet cybernetics,” a sort of Stone Age There is a great deal of ideology em - about “women’s ways of knowing,” gay attempt at using what we’d now call Big bedded in that belief, along with a great perspectives on this, black perspectives Data to analyze and solve social prob- many political assumptions, but Taylor on that, etc., as if there were not as many lems, especially those related to the man- and the others denied that they were black perspectives as there are black agement of economic production. The engaged in any sort of politics at all: people. Michel Foucault’s lurking mal- old Marxists took their “scientific social- Their business, as they saw it, was ice was reinvented as the motive force in ROMAN GENN ism” seriously. Science. There is a reasonably straight the rhetoric of “intersectionality,” the

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belief that the oppression of people with superstitious attitudes about modern department at Middlebury, has apolo- certain characteristics (black, gay, dis- agriculture and evidence-based medi- gized for the episode in which Murray abled, etc.) isn’t a matrix of attitudes and cine. You will not hear Democrats com- was prevented from speaking on campus discrete episodes but a complex nest of plaining about the fact that the Affordable by rioters: Professor Johnson apologized social relationships that can, conve- Care Act clears the way for subsidizing to the rioters for having had the poor niently, explain anything—the phlogis- such hokum as acupuncture and home- judgment to invite someone to campus ton of identity politics. opathy. Seventh-day Adventists may whose views are at variance with their The Indiana Jones heuristic—the search make some claims about the world that own. It could be that Murray’s work rep- for fact is science, the search for Truth is sound ridiculous from the scientific point resents poor science; some respected philosophy—can go only so far in finess- of view, but so do practitioners of yoga parties have made exactly that argument. ing the inherent conflict between science, and sweat-lodge enthusiasts. The public But what does Science have to say about which is organized around assumptions adoration of Science isn’t about science. the disputation of claims? of objectivity, and the poisonous identity Which brings us to the recent March The postmodernists were correct in politics holding as its fundamental princi- for Science and the popular poster boy one thing: There is some politics built ple that everything is subjective. The sci- for all things Science, Bill Nye. The into the scientific method, in that the sci- entific view is that true is true and false is March for Science was no such thing; in entific method assumes an environment false, irrespective of any particular demo- the main, it was a march for the one thing in which people are at liberty to speak, graphic or political characteristics of the almost every faction of the Left can debate, and publish—a liberty with speaker. (Though these of course may agree on: a larger public sector. Pro- which the , particularly provide grounds for skepticism: “Who gressives are culturally at home in large on college campuses, is at war. They are paid for your study?” is not an entirely institutions (universities, federal agen- not interested in debate or conversation. unreasonable question.) cies, Fortune 500 HR departments), and They are interested in silencing those At the same time, the identity Left they have learned how to game those who disagree with them, and they have has its uses for Science. For one thing, systems pretty well. More funding for high-profile allies: Democratic prosecu- it was a convenient cudgel to use against “science” means a lot of funding for tors around the country are working to conservative-leaning Christians dis- things tangentially related to science and criminalize the holding of noncon- tressed by certain implications of evolu- a lot of comfortable sinecures related to formist views about global warming The scientific view is that true is true and false is false, irrespective of any particular demographic or political characteristics of the speaker.

tion or discombobulated by the possibility science in the vaguest way: A great many (some prominent activists have openly that is a phenomenon with people with degrees in women’s studies called for jailing “climate deniers”), roots that are biological rather than dia- or Latino studies have jobs in “science” and Howard Dean has taken up the bolical. That sort of thing is usually the as community-outreach coordinators novel argument that the First Amend - stuff of low-value conversation: A cer- and program officers with responsibili- ment does not actually protect political tain kind of eternal adolescent never ties that might charitably be described as speech with which he disagrees. (It is, stops getting a thrill out of scandalizing “light.” It’s a safe bet that $100 spent on he insists, “hate speech,” a legally null his retrograde Lutheran grandmother. “science” gets you about $17.50 worth term in the American context.) Dean But if you have a sufficient number of of astrophysics with the balance going to has argued that the federal laws govern- such interactions—and we have no short- “community development,” paid politi- ing the conduct of political campaigns age of them—they can become a part of cal activism, and overhead. That is not an could and should be used to regulate all the tribal identity that is the real basis of argument against spending on science— public speaking. our politics, however much we might it is an argument for better and more The partisans of Science believe them- pretend that what we are really talking responsibly run programs. selves to be part of an eternal war between about is public policy. As the identity Left And that would be a fine argument to Galileo and the Inquisition, but they have moved out of the communes and into the have, if we could have an argument. in fact chosen the Inquisition’s side. They suburbs and progressivism became much Which we can’t. have chosen the side of the Censor and the more strongly associated with the inter- Charles Murray, who wrote one of the Index—so long as they get to choose who ests and habits of affluent, educated, world’s most famous books bringing sci- serves as Censor and who manages the coastal elites, professing one’s love of entific research to bear on social ques- Index. That is how they have reconciled Science became an exercise in telegraph- tions, has in effect been forbidden to Science and its claims of objective fact ing status. speak at college campuses. In one of the with identity politics and its denial of the But if it were really about science, most shameful spectacles of contempo- same: They are engaged in neither the we’d be hearing more from scientists rary academic malfeasance, Bert John - pursuit of fact nor the pursuit of Truth— and less from people who have batty, son, the chairman of the political-science only the pursuit of Power.

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not turn on a dime. It takes months or or appropriations for a border wall. It years to plan major investments, and would also allow the Trump administra- longer still to actually build the new tion to deter illegal immigration even in Tax Reform plants, factories, and businesses that sanctuary cities. A citizens-only jobs tax would deliver new jobs and higher credit, therefore, would address two pri- For the wages. Hurting and angry voters may not ority issues for voters—jobs and border have the patience to wait to see whether control—with one act. Working Class the promises are kept. The second idea is related: a tax credit Three ideas to meet the needs of new A tax bill that includes provisions that for wage increases for workers earning Republican voters are clearly intended to benefit these peo- the national median wage or less. It ple directly, however, might in crease should be set as a percentage of wages their support and patience. But here tra- paid above the annual national increase BY HENRY OLSEN ditional supply-side theory might not (if any) in the median wage. Thus, if the offer a palatable solution. Cutting these national median wage rose by 1 percent HE Trump administration and voters’ marginal income-tax rates won’t in a calendar year, the tax credit would be congressional Republicans are deliver much benefit. Many of these provided for any wage increases above T champing at the bit to intro- voters already pay little to no income tax that percentage. duce a comprehensive tax- because of the increases in the child tax This provision would directly attack reform bill. All indications are that the credit and the lower marginal rates that the other main economic problem that bill will dramatically slash the marginal the George W. Bush tax cuts installed in less skilled workers face: stagnant pay- rate of taxation that applies to most cor- the early 2000s. Moreover, what these checks. In effect, it would provide a porations. This may be great long-term voters really want is a return to the pros- small but real subsidy for a business to economics if supply-side theory is cor- perity they believe is their due. Cutting give a marginal dollar to a low-income rect. But without more targeted tax relief their tax rate from, say, 15 to 13 percent worker rather than pay it to a manager or that offers immediate and direct benefit won’t give them much money now and to stockholders. It could be viewed as an to the swing voters who elected Presi - won’t do anything to make them think alternative to Democratic proposals for dent Trump, Republicans might not be the future will be noticeably brighter. minimum-wage hikes, and it would likely in power long enough to enjoy the eco- Three ideas stand out as possible provi- cost many fewer jobs, because it would nomic upturn. sions that could help these voters quickly. not increase the marginal cost of all less Trump won because he received over 5 None of them fit neatly with supply-side skilled labor. million votes from people, largely non- theory, but each would deliver immediate Like the first tax credit, this wage- college-educated whites, who had voted benefits to workers and, just as impor- hike credit could also be given only for twice for President Obama. From an eco- tant, show them that the GOP cares about U.S. citizens, further increasing a nomic standpoint, these voters are likelier people like them. native-born American’s economic com- to be unemployed or underemployed than The first is a tax credit for hiring petitiveness. Moreover, by pegging the the typical Republican. They are also like- American citizens. This credit would be credit to the national median wage, this lier to have suffered financially during the in addition to the current deduction for provision would provide additional ben- Great Recession and to have faced stag- all compensation paid to a business’s efits for workers in low-wage regions of nant or declining wages for the past two workers, and it could be structured as a the country. A firm operating in a less decades. They crossed party lines because percentage of compensation or wages or prosperous area, such as West Virginia, they saw Trump as someone who was even as a flat per capita amount. It probably pays a larger percentage of its committed to delivering what they want would, in effect, be a partial subsidy for total labor bill to workers earning less most: good, high-paying jobs. job creation. It would directly meet the than the national median wage than does Economic theory says that corporate- need these workers have, and it would a similar firm in Silicon Valley or New tax reform will deliver them to Ameri - be clear and easily understandable: Hire York. This credit would therefore pro- can workers, but only over time and not a citizen, get paid. vide a subtle but potentially significant necessarily in any way that voters can This provision would also address subsidy to firms outside the larger metro directly perceive. The economic bene- concerns about the level of immigration. areas, which in turn would help spread fits will flow only if corporate managers Low-skilled immigration, often illegal, gains from economic growth more even- believe the rate reductions are perma- exerts a downward pressure on wages ly throughout the country. nent, something President Trump’s con- for many native-born Americans. Make The third provision is to exempt a tinued historically low approval these credits available only for citizens, share of wages from the payroll tax. ratings and the likely hostility from however, and on the margin it becomes This provision would directly address Democrats will call into question. cheaper to hire American than to import the “money in the pocket” issue, giving Even with this belief, corporations do labor legally or to overlook the legal sta- every worker an identical tax cut re - tus of your employees. Since it would be gardless of income but providing a Mr. Olsen is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy attached to a tax bill that would go bigger proportional boost to the less Center and the author of the forthcoming book The through reconciliation in the Senate, this well-off. If applied to the entire payroll Working-Class Republican: idea would not require any Democratic tax, every $10,000 exempted would and the Return of Blue-Collar Conservatism. support, unlike immigration legislation give a worker an additional $765 a year

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to spend. A two-earner family making copied from it. Fraud and violence $30,000 a year—a common situation in rigged the voting in the ref erendum. A inner cities and in “Trump Country”— state of emergency was in place, and would thus get a bit over $1,500 a year Dictator still is. Selahattin De mir tas, head of the more to spend. If those wages were also pro-Kurdish party in parliament, was in exempted from the employer’s share of TheErdogan dismantling of Turkish prison, and still is. Other prominent the payroll tax, it could lower the margin- opponents of Erdogan were intimidated. al cost of hiring an additional employee. democracy continues A million or so unstamped ballots were Since the payroll tax pays for Social considered valid. Erdogan advised the Security and Medicare, any such provi- BY DAVID PRYCE-JONES supervisory panel, all of them Turks, “to sion should include other changes that know their place,” as he put it with would recoup some of the lost revenue. ECEP TAYYIP ERDOGAN has unmistakable clarity, and they duly dis- There are plenty of ideas for doing so, been prime minister of Turkey, missed all complaints. Yet in spite of the such as reducing the premium subsidies R then president, and now a ref- manipulation, his majority was scarcely that go to well-off seniors on Medicare, erendum has approved consti- more than 1 percent. Throughout the increasing Medicare co-pays for wealthier tutional changes that crown him dictator country, in the words of Elif Shafak, a seniors, or increasing the share of Social in all but name. This is a display of polit- leading intellectual, “fear, anger, anxi- Security benefits that is subject to income ical sleight of hand at the highest level, ety, and paranoia have become normal.” taxation for seniors who receive income comparable to Vladimir Putin’s perfor- As with all dictators, the drive for of, say, at least $50,000 or $75,000 out- mance in Russia, perhaps even stu diously absolute power must lie deep in Erdo gan’s side of that venerable program. Supply-siders may resist these ideas, but they should recognize that there is more than one way to produce broadly shared economic growth. Provisions such as these could help ensure that the gains from a faster growth rate do not accrue primarily to people at the top of the income and education scales, as they did over the last 15 years. These provi- sions would also give less skilled work- ers “skin in the game” as regards tax reform. Such workers might not be terri- bly interested in corporate-rate reduc- tions, but they might nonetheless care about passage of an entire tax bill if it includes these proposals as well. The GOP leadership thinks correctly that it has a once-in-a-lifetime oppor- tunity to pass vital tax reform. It also has a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to create a durable political majority, a task that has eluded it in the 40 years since Ronald Reagan brought the mod- ern Republican party into being. As Reagan told the 1977 Conservative Political Action Conference, “If we are to attract more working men and women of this country, we will do so not by sim- ply making room for them, but by mak- ing certain they have a say in what goes on in the party.” The tax provisions I have outlined are exactly the sort that these men and women would adopt if they in fact did have a real say about what the Republican party does. GOP tax-reform advocates should use the GETTY IMAGES / expected tax-reform bill as a way to complete the political task Reagan ELIF SOGUT bequeathed to us. Recep Tayyip Erdogan

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unexplored psyche. Born in 1954, he caliphate with a republic intentionally has historically fought Shiite Muslim grew up in Istanbul. Committing him- modeled on contemporary secular and Iran to a standstill, and is a counter- self single-mindedly to politics at an democratic lines. His purpose was to weight to it today. The twists and turns early age, he became mayor of Istan bul ensure that Turkey and the West would of alliances and enmities have led Mus- in his thirties and by all accounts was a meet on equal terms. In his eyes, Islam lim states to define their relation to Is - success. However, in an address at the had been the cause of backwardness; it lam and Islamism. Erdogan’s version is end of his time in that office, he quoted had lost Turkey the war and risked los- extreme: “The term ‘moderate Islam’ is a 19th-century poem that amounts to a ing it the peace. Ataturk’s reforms sub- ugly and offensive. There is no moder- declaration of war: “The mosques are jected Islam to state control. In practice, ate Islam. Islam is Islam.” Burak Bek dil, our barracks, the domes our helmets, the life and culture of the country a most distinguished journalist with the the minarets our bayonets, and the remained Islamic, and so it fell to the courage of his convictions and a feel faithful our soldiers.” Islamism of this army to decide what was permissible for history and politics, speaks of kind was an unwelcome novelty at the and what was not. No other state institu- Erdogan’s “confrontational Islamist- time, and Erdogan was sentenced to tion had the authority, and if necessary nationalist rhetoric” and explains that prison for ten months, though released the capability, for the task. its purpose is “restoring the country’s after four. Responsibility for the protection and Ottoman influence.” This leads to Founder and leader of the Justice and perpetuation of Ataturk’s legacy has potentially disruptive questioning of Development Party (AKP in its Turkish been a burden for the army, and the things long settled, such as the national acronym), Erdogan won three succes- source of permanent political tension. boundaries to which Turkey agreed in a sive elections, earning a reputation as a Since 1960, there have been no fewer moment of defeat and shame, or the capable administrator of the economy. than three military coups. During the claims to Arab territories that once Self-confident to the point of reckless- first of these, I happened to be in Is tan - were Ottoman provinces. ness, he set about accumulating wealth bul. It was simple: Tanks had merely to At one of the annual meetings in and power. He has built himself a palace rumble down the street. From a vantage Davos of the World Economic Forum, with over a thousand rooms, inviting point in a restaurant onshore, I was able Er do gan appeared on a television pro- comparison to Ceausescu’s architectural to hear the wailing over the water of men gram with the then Israeli president,

‘Democracy is like a train. You get off once you have reached your destination.’

monstrosity in Bucharest. Some one whom the army was already holding in Shimon Peres. Without warning, he some how obtained and posted on prison on the offshore island of Prinkipo. accused Israelis of being “good at YouTube audio recordings in which he Having won the tests of strength, the killing” and strode off the set, as though is heard urgently instructing his son ringleaders of these coups invariably Turks had never killed—and sometimes Bilal to get rid of shoeboxes filled with restored the status quo, ordered their massacred—Arabs, Armenians, Greeks, millions of dollars in cash. When his soldiers back to barracks, and handed and Kurds. The Germans, the Dutch, son, then a student in Bo lo gna, was power to parliament. It may be difficult and the Israelis, he likes to repeat, are detained by Italian authorities on a to accept that the military has a pro- Nazis who surpass Hitler in barbarism. charge of money-laundering, Er do gan gressive role, but the consensus in the In response, every Turk who lives in threatened reprisals at the national level. West has been that Turkey is a success- Europe should have five children and He only just managed to survive a scan- ful amalgam of Islam and modernity, a take it over. What Ataturk emulated he dal that would have destroyed a politician sort of honorary democracy that other scorns as a mere expedient: “Democ ra - in almost any other country. Muslim nations would do well to imi- cy is like a train. You get off once you The longer Erdogan has been in tate. Membership in NATO and partici- have reached your destination.” He is office, the more he has concentrated on pation in joint military exercises with looking to the past as the way out of the what it means to be Turkish and Muslim, American and European forces has been present. And it has to be said that this is two strong identities whose uncertain taken as confirmation of a mutual iden- why large crowds gather and cheer, compatibility has become one of the tity. In addition, Turkish guest workers wave flags, and vote for him. overriding issues of the moment. Turkey’s and immigrants have settled in their mil- The hold of the army had to be broken place in the world is at stake. Until the lions in Germany, the Neth er lands, and if Erdogan was to set up a latter-day sul- end of the Ottoman Empire, the sultan Switzerland. Successive Turk ish gov- tanate and caliphate. His first attempt to had also been the caliph, a figurehead ernments have repeatedly sought mem- do this was in 2007. The chief of staff, for the worldwide community of the bership in the European Union. some generals, and other senior officers faithful. In the aftermath of the First It is a fact of life, however, that Islam were accused of a conspiracy known as World War, Kemal Ataturk won the gives a great many Turks their sense of Ergenekon whose aim was to overthrow powers of a virtual dictator and used pride and power. In many ways the pre- Erdogan. Arrested and tried, they re - them to replace the sultanate and the eminent Sunni Muslim state, Turkey ceived long prison sentences. A couple

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of years later, the highest appeals court A particularly fevered season of North could not find evidence of the guilt of a Korean–crisis speculation has broken out single one of the 531 indicted, and was recently, as another round of missiles unable to prove that Ergenekon was A Different have been launched and apparent nuclear- anything other than fiction. test preparation has commenced. Yet per- Last July, the army had had enough, KindThe standoff of over Crisis North haps it is worth asking whether this North presumably taking it for granted that Korean crisis really is different. mounting a coup was the simple affair it Korea’s nuclear weapons heads into There are several reasons it could be. had so often been. Commandos stormed uncharted territory The first is straightforward: Kim Jong-un. the hotel in Marmara where Erdogan North Korea’s current dictator has been in had been on vacation but discovered that BY MICHAEL AUSLIN power since December 2011, so this is not he had escaped to Istanbul, quite proba- his first provocation. Indeed, since he took bly forewarned; conspiracy theorists are T the Passover festive meal, power, North Korea has launched dozens muttering that the coup attempt has done the key question, asked by the of missiles and conducted three nuclear him such a favor that he must have A youngest child at the table, is: tests, one in 2013 and two in 2016. arranged it himself. By the time loyalists “Why is this night different Yet American intelligence and national- had regained control and spent the night from all other nights?” The question is security officials feel that the young Kim, in the streets shouting “Allahu akbar” asked every year, and every year the set about whom the world knew almost and “We want execution,” 265 people response is designed to highlight why nothing before he took power, is a less had been killed and hundreds hurt. this night really is distinguishable from predictable, less controllable, and less The incompetence of the military all the rest. disciplined personality than his father or played into Erdogan’s hands. Fethullah With similar regularity, North Korea grandfather. Instead of seeming to use his Gulen was a colleague of Erdogan’s precipitates a crisis over its nuclear and nuclear and missile tests as bargaining until they had a falling out and he went missile programs. And, as at the Jewish chips, as his father did, Kim has increased into exile in the . In his seder, the same questions are always the pace of banned activity, keeping the mid 70s, he runs Hizmet, a slightly asked and the same answers always peninsula on a steady crisis footing, and mysterious semi-spiritual and semi- given. Why is this Korean crisis differ- matched it to chilling if routine rhetoric charitable Muslim network. No evi- ent from all other Korean crises? This about launching devastating attacks on dence supports Erdogan’s immediate time, the North Koreans will launch a the United States and its allies. claim that Gulen is responsible for the successful intercontinental ballistic mis- Kim is certainly as brutal as his prede- coup attempt. Al most certainly a fabri- sile; this time, the U.S. Navy will shoot cessors, if not more so, having executed as cation like Er ge n e kon, the accusation it down; this time, China really is upset many as 340 people since taking over. has facilitated the arrest of many guilty and will pressure North Korea; this (Needless to say, precise numbers are hard only by association. According to the time, Washington will make a grand bar- to come by.) Those who have fallen under interior minister, Suleyman Soylu, gain with Pyongyang or Beijing; and on his sword include his half-brother, Kim 47,155 people have been jailed since and on. Like the traditional Passover Jong-nam, murdered in broad daylight at the attempt and a further 113,264 readings, the questions and answers Malaysia’s Kuala Lumpur International detained, among them 168 generals, never vary. Airport, and Jang Song-thaek, his uncle 7,463 other military officers, 2,575 They have become a constant in East and China’s key agent in North Korea—an judges, and 10,732 police officers. Asian diplomacy over the past 25 years, assassination that has many wondering Among the 135,000 who have been since the Clinton administration threat- whether Kim has no fear of Beijing. North purged and have no employment are ened to bomb Kim Il-sung’s nascent Korea continues to exist because its lead- 7,317 academics and over 20,000 teach- nuclear program in 1994, only to pull ers have long had a strange ability to ers. One hundred seventy-nine televi - back at the last minute and begin a well- approach the point of no return without sion stations, newspapers, and other intentioned but futile attempt to negoti- ever reaching it, but it’s not clear that Kim media outlets have been closed in the ate with the dictator in Pyongyang. In is quite so sophisticated. He could precip- aftermath of the attempt, and 150 jour- Clinton’s wake, Presidents Bush and itate armed confrontation owing to arro- nalists are in jail. Obama both made similar diplomatic gance, mania, or simple miscalculation. In Ottoman Turkey in 1826, the elite attempts, despite endemic and increas- The second reason this North Korean military corps of janissaries rebelled ingly sophisticated North Korean cheat- crisis may be different is the American against Sultan Mahmud II, and he had ing on promises to shutter its nuclear leader: Donald Trump. The track record all 135,000 of them murdered, impris- program. Bush continued the fiction of of American failure vis-à-vis North Korea oned, or exiled. This brutality came to negotiations even after North Korea det- may complicate the situation for Trump— be referred to as the Auspicious Event, onated its first nuclear device in 2006, in but it could also liberate him. The Bush but it was a step towards unstoppable the middle of the six-party talks. administration’s repeated attempts to nego- historic decline. Erdogan’s Auspicious tiate with Kim Jong-il, even as Pyongyang Event is not as murderous, but it has gut- Mr. Auslin is a resident scholar at the American worked assiduously toward a nuclear ted Turkey, condemning it to division Enterprise Institute and the author of The End of weapon, put paid to the conceit that inten- and crisis until someone like the real the Asian Century: War, Stagnation, and the sive, multilateral diplomacy could change Ataturk comes to the rescue. Risks to the World’s Most Dynamic Region. the Kim regime’s behavior. By contrast,

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to foment unrest among the North Korean elite, or to block more-assertive Trump- administration action by feigning cooper- ation. In any case, the withdrawal of Chinese support for Kim has the potential to be enormously significant—potentially even prompting a crisis that threatens the Kim regime’s grip on power. Finally, this crisis may be different because of South Korea. The impeach- ment of former president Park Geun-hye has turned South Korean politics upside down. It appears that progressive Democratic-party candidate Moon Jae-in will replace her in the upcoming election; and, if not, the winner will almost certain- ly be center-left politician Ahn Cheol-soo, Kim Jong-un inspects North Korean special-operations forces. of the People’s party. Either way, the next leader of South Korea may well decide to Barack Obama’s policy of “strategic Kim’s conduct—a major reversal from return the country to the “sunshine poli- patience” (marred by the ill-considered the prior two administrations—in order to cy” of the 1990s, which was based on and ill-fated 2012 Leap Day Agreement, extract maximum concessions. The likeli- engagement with North Korea and a dis- which tied food aid to North Korea’s hood of Pyongyang’s breaking an agree- tancing from the United States. Candidate promise not to conduct missile tests) ment would be high, but its doing so Moon, in particular, has demonstrated an showed that ignoring the North would lead would risk punitive action from the U.S., openness to downgrading South Korea’s to . . . nothing. The Obama administration assuming the Trump administration were alliance with Washington and moving passively observed three nuclear tests and willing to pursue it. Whether that would closer to both Pyongyang and Beijing. multiple missile launches. The need for a tame the North or precipitate an all-out That could lead to the formation of a bloc new approach, or a third way, is evident. conflict is unknowable; but backing down of countries opposed to the United States Trump has matched North Korea’s would surely undercut, perhaps fatally, and Japan; the former would find its influ- hyperbolic rhetoric with some of his own, U.S. influence on the North Korean issue, ence severely diminished, while the latter marking a sharp break with recent U.S. leaving China as the dominant actor. would face new, difficult questions about practice. In doing so, he may be follow- That suggests a third reason this Korean how best to defend itself. It is unlikely that ing his familiar playbook, staking out an crisis may be different from others. There anything like a formal alliance, let alone aggressive, maximalist position (“We’re is little doubt that China is reaching the unification with the Kim regime, would going to take care of North Korea”) to end of its patience with Kim Jong-un. take place, but the result nonetheless shape subsequent negotiations. Trump also Beijing’s turning against Kim does not would isolate Washington and strengthen has ordered a U.S. Navy aircraft-carrier mean a Chinese abandonment of North Beijing as it weighs whether to work with strike group to the waters off North Korea, Korea itself—the hermit nation is still far Kim or precipitate his removal from and his vice president has publicly de - too valuable to Beijing as a buffer between power. South Korea would have set in clared that the era of “strategic patience” U.S.-aligned South Korea and itself, not to motion a train of events that would is over. Setting aside the overwrought mention as a convenient thorn in the side reshape northeast Asia and dramatically controversy about whether the strike of the United States. increase the power of illiberal states. group was dispatched to Korea exactly But as the execution of Jang Song-thaek Given the well-worn ruts of the North when Trump said it was, this White House proved, Kim Jong-un is no mere Chinese Korean nuclear and missile crisis, it is is clearly quick to flex muscle. Moreover, puppet. According to those in the know, he likely that all actors will simply revert to anyone doubting Donald Trump’s resolve has spurned Xi Jinping’s summons to form—blustering and threatening one to use military force has to be reconsider- China, and his brazen murder of his half- another, mulling more negotiations with- ing after his missile strike on Syria. brother in a foreign country showed the out preconditions, and trying to kick the Deploying an aircraft carrier to Korean dangerous reach of his secret services. can farther down the road. Yet the longer waters appears for now a more credible There are whispers that Xi finds Kim a this slow-motion crisis accumulates, the way to pressure Kim into better behavior threat to China’s continued hold on North likelier it is that new conditions will or into another round of negotiations than Korea, and perhaps to stability in northeast emerge. Once that happens, all bets are were the policies of Trump’s predecessors. Asia generally. That China is publicly off, and the country with the boldest If the president intends to open negoti- refusing coal shipments from North Korea approach, the most sophisticated policy, ations with Pyongyang, he probably will and turning away its ships (whether the or the greatest national will is likely to distance himself from both Bush and coal was already paid for has not been dis- emerge the geopolitical victor. The United

GETTY IMAGES Obama by negotiating with the constant closed), and has suggested that it might cut States should prepare. A North Korean / AFP / threat of military action. The tactic will be off oil to the North, may be seen as the crisis different from all the others is on its STR to display limited American patience with beginning of a campaign to squeeze Kim, way—if it isn’t here already.

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The Celebrity We Need Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson unites in a time of division

BY DAVID FRENCH

HERE are cinematic moments that define a career. For Moments later, he commandeers an ambulance and races at Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, that moment occurred breakneck speed to the scene of a battle between a heavily armed T before wildly cheering fans on April 3, 2015. The fans aerial drone, a stealth attack helicopter, and Toretto’s belea- were packed into movie houses worldwide. The Rock guered squad. Just as the drone flies through a tunnel and seems was onscreen, playing diplomatic-security-service agent Luke to achieve a deadly missile lock on a hero’s car, The Rock’s Hobbs in the movie Furious 7. ambulance busts through a concrete barrier, collides with the The movie was approaching its climax, a pitched battle in drone in midair, detonates, and falls to the pavement below. the streets of Los Angeles between the movie’s supervillain Is this the end of The Rock? Did he meet his doom in a and the makeshift “family” of heroes, led by Vin Diesel’s valiant kamikaze attack to save his friends? Of course not. He Dominic Toretto and Brian O’Conner, played by the late Paul emerges from the wreckage, unscathed, flexes his muscles (he Walker. The Rock is sidelined, in the hospital with his arm does that a lot), picks up a minigun from the drone’s wreckage, encased in a cast. He sits next to his daughter when he spots a and strides off to take on the attack helicopter in single combat. distant explosion and fire. As he leaves, he has an Oscar-worthy exchange with co-star What follows is peak Rock. Michelle Rodriguez: He stands, gazes outside with a look of fierce determination, and then says, “Daddy’s gotta go to work.” Keep in mind that he LETTY (Rodriguez): You bring the cavalry? GETTY IMAGES FOR PARAMOUNT PICTURES / knows nothing at this point about the explosion and fire. He just HOBBS (The Rock): Woman, I am the cavalry! sees flames and knows. It’s time. So he flexes his enormous biceps, and the cast explodes off his arm. He tears away the rem- Cue the wild cheering in theaters stretching from Columbia, ANDREAS RENTZ nants, gives his daughter a fist bump, and gears up for combat. Tenn. (where I was front row, center), to Los Angeles, to London,

2 1 2col_QXP-1127940309.qxp 4/25/2017 11:14 PM Page 22

to Beijing. It was absurd. It was over the top. It was funny. It was of his exploits in the ring. But again, it took time. There were oddly inspiring. It was The Rock. hits, there were busts, and there were some plain ol’ bad It would be easy to say that The Rock is having a pop-culture movies (I’m looking at you, Tooth Fairy), but by 2011, he “moment.” He’s coming off a 2016 in which he was the highest- seemed to have figured it out. He joined an already-successful paid movie star in the business, he was named People maga- Fast and Furious franchise and helped catapult it into the zine’s sexiest man alive, and he was even floated as a future financial stratosphere. presidential contender. He’s charged into 2017 with another The numbers don’t lie. The fourth movie had a worldwide star turn in the Fast and the Furious franchise, with the latest gross of $363 million. The fifth movie, his first? $626 mil- installment, The Fate of the Furious, enjoying the largest lion. And the numbers kept climbing. The sixth movie hit opening weekend in global box-office history. We’re weeks $788 million, the seventh movie pulled in a whopping $1.5 away from The Rock’s reboot of the Baywatch franchise, this billion, and the eighth is already on pace to gross close to the time on the big screen as a summer blockbuster comedy, and same amount. he’ll be returning soon to HBO for the third season of The Rock’s other movies also hit box-office highs. San Ballers, the channel’s highest-rated comedy when it debuted Andreas, a disaster movie that featured The Rock as a rescue- two years ago. helicopter pilot facing down an earthquake and a tsunami, And that’s just the start. He’s formed his own production raked in $473 million. Central Intelligence, a buddy action company (called “Seven Bucks Productions” because that’s all comedy with the diminutive Kevin Hart, made $216 mil- the money he had when he launched his entertainment career) lion. Disney’s Moana, in which he voiced a Hawaiian and has a dizzying array of projects in the works. Add all this demigod, has grossed $639 million. The Baywatch pre- to a dominant social-media presence (he has almost 100 mil- miere awaits later this summer, and he has potential future lion more followers on all platforms than Donald Trump), and blockbusters planned or in production from now through it’s clear that The Rock isn’t just enjoying a “moment,” he’s 2019 (at least). building a juggernaut. Arguably, he’s in the process of becom- But why should we care? Why is this a good thing? ing the world’s biggest celebrity. Because, simply put, in our hyper-polarized age, The Rock And that’s a very good thing indeed. has become the celebrity America needs. He’s doing celebrity the right way, and he’s one of the few people in public life who have truly learned to thread the needle—leading to rapturous O understand why, and to understand the cult following coverage in both BuzzFeed and the Federalist. (Conservative he’s gained with young conservatives across the land, writer Sean Davis amusingly tweeted last summer, “There are it’s important to track his career arc and to define the two kinds of people: those who are on the 2020 Dwayne Train, Tpersona that he’s developed through a two-decade march into and filthy terrorists.”) public consciousness. Until the GOP jumped with both feet onto the Trump Dwayne Johnson was originally supposed to be a football Train, there was an emerging schism in the political star. He was recruited to play for the Miami Hurricanes at the approach to celebrity. With Hollywood overwhelmingly lib- peak of that university’s football dynasty, but he never achieved eral, Democrats urged celebrities to “use” their popularity stardom. Overlooked by the NFL, he was cut after a brief for the sake of social justice. If audiences loved Meryl sojourn with the Calgary Stampeders of the Canadian Football Streep on the silver screen, wouldn’t they be receptive to her League. Out of money, his football dream dead, he turned to the views on women’s rights? Conservatives, sick of the celebrity family business—professional wrestling. moralizing, responded with a simple retort: “Shut up and Though he had a pedigree—both his father and his grandfa- sing” or “Shut up and act.” Don’t use your fame to preach ther wrestled—Johnson was no overnight success. It took your politics. years to become “The Rock.” He started as “Rocky Maivia,” Now, as polarization brings with it the politicization of every- as an homage to his father’s and grandfather’s wrestling thing, celebrities are expected to toe their respective political names—his father wrestled as “Rocky Johnson” and his grand- lines. The GOP has a celebrity in the White House, he brings in father was “High Chief” Peter Maivia—and audiences largely celebrity friends for photo ops, and, outside the White House rejected him, famously chanting “Die, Rocky, die!” It took gates, progressive celebrities spew vitriol at their hated former time (and a brief turn to the dark side as a wrestling “heel”), but entertainment-industry colleague. he eventually carved out the niche that he occupies to this The Rock, however, has followed a different path. Rather day—The Rock is the “People’s Champion.” than self-seriously viewing his career as secondary to his For a generation of wrestling fans, The Rock was an elec- activism, Johnson clearly aims to entertain. He understands a trifying, entertaining, and heavily muscled version of core truth: that there is nothing wrong—and a lot right—with Andrew Jackson. He expressed amused skepticism with the sheer, unmitigated fun. Not everything has to have a Message. arched “people’s eyebrow.” He finished off opponents with Not everything needs to reveal Larger Truth. Sometimes a man the legendary “people’s elbow”—a blow to the chest of a has to shoot down an attack helicopter with a minigun. Not for prone opponent delivered only after stoking the crowd to a social justice and not for individual liberty—but because it’s a high-decibel frenzy. His insults (including “Know your role” cool thing to do. and “It doesn’t matter”) leaked into high schools and colleges At the same time, Johnson is keenly aware that he’s come a across the country. long way. He’s an unabashed patriot, and his Facebook and Like a number of WWE stars, The Rock had his eye on Instagram feeds are full of expressions of gratitude to his Hollywood. Unlike most, his movie success far exceeded any country and his fans. He constantly reminds fans that he was

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once broke and struggling. He blesses his family with the most important thing right now is strong honest leadership fruits of his labor. And in his own turn, he seems to positively from our current and future leaders of this country. Thanks delight in bringing joy to others. His Instagram feed is full of again Washington Post.” small incidents demonstrating his love for “the people,” even The Rock is a registered Republican, and he spoke briefly to the smallest admirers of The Rock. If young girls hold up a the 2000 Republican National Convention (as part of a WWE sign on his route to work, asking him to stop for a picture, he get-out-the-vote initiative), but his precise political positions stops for a picture. If a two-year-old asks him to play patty- are undefined. He’s been friendly with Barack Obama and Bill cake while he’s on the set of Hercules, he plays patty-cake. Clinton. After the 2016 election, he took issue with the Under And when it comes to veterans, he’s extravagant with his Armour CEO’s statement of support for Donald Trump but praise and his time. refused to distance himself from the company itself. We know Part of the legend of The Rock is this May 1, 2011, tweet: The Rock loves America, but we can’t begin to guess where he “Just got word that will shock the world—Land of the free . . . stands on the EPA’s Clean Power Plan. home of the brave DAMN PROUD TO BE AN AMERICAN!” Rather than speculating about whether The Rock could run He tweeted this at 10:24 P.M. It was not for another 45 minutes and win, let’s ask a different question: What is his highest and that major networks began reporting Osama bin Laden’s death, best purpose as a patriotic American? Is it really in politics? and it was 11:35 P.M. that night when Barack Obama formally Or is it in expanding a public platform that combines an announced the successful raid. How did The Rock know in enormous amount of pure fun with outspoken patriotism, advance? He had a cousin in the SEALs, but he won’t confirm love of his fellow citizens, and evangelism for hard work his source. and perseverance? These family military connections have led The Rock to be Those of us who write about and study both politics and pop among the foremost celebrity supporters of the military. In culture are keenly aware of the truth famously articulated by December 2016, he hosted a “Rock the Troops” event at Joint : Politics is downstream from culture. In - Base Pearl Harbor–Hickam in front of 50,000 service mem- deed, more alarming than the political polarization of the bers, veterans, and family members. His YouTube feed is full nation is its increasing cultural polarization. Red and Blue

At this time in American life, we need points of agreement, and right now tens of millions of Americans on both sides of the political divide agree on The Rock.

of tributes (and gifts) to vets. He diligently and enthusiastically Americans live in different places, watch different shows, and honors American heroes. increasingly adopt different manners and mores. We seem to And that brings us to inspiration—one of the animating pur- be growing apart. poses of The Rock’s public persona. When he “uses” his pub- The Rock is one of the few culturally unifying figures in lic platform, he uses it to promote the value of hard work. As American life, and he’s a culturally unifying figure with a mes- he tweets (and constantly states), “Blood, sweat, and respect. sage of gratitude and hard work that also happens to be cultur- The first two you give, the last one you earn.” The mantra is ally edifying. If he moves into the naturally polarizing world of constant. And it accompanies every aspect of his personal politics, where he’ll have to take positions on issues great and story. Without hard work, you can achieve nothing. As a basic small, will he be forsaking a larger unifying role for the lesser cultural message—particularly to an entitled generation—it’s polarizing path of public policy? At the risk of sounding corny: hard to beat. At this time in American life, we need points of agreement, and right now tens of millions of Americans on both sides of the political divide agree on The Rock. INCE it’s 2017—and since a less popular celebrity made In Fate of the Furious, The Rock arguably tops his Furious 7 it to the White House—the question has arisen: Will The minigun scene. In the midst of a climactic chase on a field of Rock bring the people’s eyebrow to politics? Will we see Siberian ice, a nuclear submarine bursts from the depths and theS rhetorical equivalent of the people’s elbow delivered to the launches a torpedo straight at The Rock and his fleeing friends. solar plexus of his political opponents? Questions that once As the torpedo surges past The Rock’s vehicle, he leans out and seemed crazy to ask are now a normal part of American politi- physically alters its path with his bare hands. Yes, in his career, cal life. And indeed, Johnson seems to enjoy thinking through he’s graduated from wrestling people to wrestling 6,000-pound the possibilities. Soviet-era munitions. Last June, ran a piece by Alyssa If The Rock steps down from film to promulgate regulations Rosenberg exploring whether he could run and win. The Rock and appoint judges, who will take his place on the ice? Who responded in an Instagram post, concluding with this: “I care will shoot down drones with stolen ambulances? For now, we DEEPLY about our county [sic] . . . and the idea of one day want him behind that minigun. We need him wrestling torpe- becoming President to create real positive impact and global does. The Rock is the right celebrity for our polarized time. change is very alluring. Buuuuut until that possible day, the The politics can wait.

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asked U.S. District Court Judge James Bredar for 90 days to study the 227-page decree that had just been dumped in its lap. Let the Police The Sessions request was patently justified. Most of the decree’s 510 paragraphs contain mandates governing the day-to-day opera- tions of the Baltimore Police Department that the federal govern- ment would be obligated to enforce. The most disturbing severely Police limit officers’ ability to maintain public order in the streets. Under the decree, officers may no longer on their own recognizance make So says Jeff Sessions, but some an arrest for trespassing or loitering; they may take action against big-city chiefs disagree an offender only if a civilian has called in a complaint about him. Even then, the officer still needs permission from a supervisor to arrest the trespasser or loiterer. Supervisor sign-off is also re - BY HEATHER MAC DONALD quired to arrest someone for disorderly conduct, failure to obey, resisting an officer, and making a false statement to an officer. EDERAL consent decrees—agreements between the fed- These gratuitous roadblocks to enforcement strip officers of eral government and a local agency to change how that essential tools for disrupting criminal activity. If the restrictions F agency operates—are burdensome, costly, and rarely on public-order enforcement were not crippling enough, an all- justified. You would think, then, that when Attorney purpose ban on any police activities that have a “disparate General Jeff Sessions announced in a memo at the end of March impact” on minorities has the potential to shut down virtually all that he was reviewing police consent decrees, politicians and policing in Baltimore, given the vast racial disparities in criminal police chiefs in the affected cities would have let out a glad cheer. offending. Not content with unleashing misguided disparate- Instead, Sessions’s announcement produced a bizarre spectacle: impact theory on police tactics, the consent decree directs it at hir- Local officials proudly proclaimed themselves unable to func- ing as well. Alternatives must be sought to employment criteria tion in the absence of federal control. Therein lies a tale about that have a disparate impact on minorities. But the Baltimore law enforcement in the Black Lives Matter era. Police Department is at least 40 percent black, as the Calvert Sessions’s March 31 memo signaled an overdue federal course Institute’s George Liebmann has pointed out. There is no need to correction regarding policing, coming after the hostile Obama eliminate vital screening devices for the sake of “diversity.” years. The Obama administration had slapped an unprecedented number of consent decrees on police departments, guided by the belief that policing was shot through with systemic racism. The RRESTS in Baltimore, especially drug arrests, have methodology used by the previous Justice Department to deter- already dropped 45 percent over the past two years, fol- mine whether a police agency was engaged in a “pattern or prac- lowing the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement tice” of unconstitutional policing was deeply flawed. The andA the Freddie Gray riots in April 2015. Homicides reached their civil-rights attorneys evaluated officer activity against racial- highest per capita level in Baltimore’s history in 2015, a level population ratios rather than against racial rates of criminal vic- maintained in 2016. One typical shooting in East Baltimore in timization and offending; if, say, officers arrested blacks at a September 2016 involved three gunmen and eight victims, higher rate than their representation in the local population including a three-year-old girl. The toddler underwent a month of would predict, that disparity would constitute proof of discrimi- operations in the hospital to try to repair her leg and foot, but she nation, regardless of whether blacks committed a disproportion- still uses a wheelchair. Violent crime in Baltimore increased 40 ate amount of crime. The resulting decrees cost tens of millions percent during the first two and a half months of 2017, compared to hundreds of millions of dollars, funneled into endless paper- with the same period in 2016, as arrests continued to drop. In work and the wildly overpriced salaries of federal monitors. March 2017, a gangbanger threw two Molotov cocktails into a The Sessions memo declared that the paramount duties of the house in retaliation for a gang shooting two days earlier; two Justice Department were protecting the public and guarding teens were burned to death in the ensuing conflagration, and two civil rights. Most consequentially, the memo recognized that children and four other residents were injured. local control is essential for effective policing. It is not the In a word, now is not the time to discourage proactive policing responsibility of the federal government, Sessions affirmed, to in Baltimore further. manage local law-enforcement agencies. The media and Democratic politicians immediately denounced Sessions ordered an evaluation of all Justice Department the administration’s consent-decree review. The U.S. Senate and activities to make sure that they supported the above princi- House delegations from Baltimore declared: “We are gravely ples. Among the first targets of reexamination were the concerned that the Justice Department will retreat from its obli - Baltimore and Chicago policing decrees, which were in varying gation to protect the federal civil rights of the citizens of stages of completion. Baltimore. . . . We owe it to the dedicated professional law The Obama DOJ, in a last dash to seal its legacy, had hastily enforcement officers of the [Baltimore Police Department] to finalized the Baltimore decree just a week before the inaugura- bring this matter to a just, prompt conclusion.” tion of Donald Trump. All that remained was for a federal judge But if Baltimore officers are so “dedicated” and “professional,” to sign off. On April 3, 2017, the Sessions Justice Department why can only the Justice Department protect civil rights? Baltimore is far from a Jim Crow regime; it has been governed by black may- Heather Mac Donald is the Thomas W. Smith fellow at the Manhattan Institute ors, councilmen, and police chiefs for decades. Absent a complete and the author of The War on Cops. breakdown of lawful governance, the primary responsibility for

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civil rights falls to local officials. Does the congressional delegation law. The decree gives powerful symbolic support for the Black believe that local rule in the city has fallen apart? Lives Matter narrative of endemically biased policing and will The oddest outcry over the proposed Sessions pause came from have ripple effects throughout the anti-cop movement. the very officials who would be handcuffed by the decree and Sessions has more leeway when it comes to putting the Chicago who would have to pay for it. Baltimore mayor Catherine Pugh Police Department under federal control, and officials in the decried “any interruption in moving forward” with the implemen- Windy City are clearly nervous that he will not do so. The Obama tation process. Pugh has been competing with Baltimore council- civil-rights lawyers released a typically specious report on the men to see who can propose the stiffest cuts to the Baltimore Chicago department in the final days of their reign. That report Police Department budget to offset funding increases to social contained no quantified evidence backing up its charge of systemic services. Yet even as Pugh aims to slash the police budget, she unconstitutional policing. Ironically, the CPD had been the darling insists on a consent decree that is predicted to cost $12 million in of left-wing academics for years, and the Obama Justice its first year and at least $7.5 million annually for the next five. Department itself had touted the CPD’s “police legitimacy” cur- (These estimates are greatly lowballed.) If spending more on riculum to other departments. In late 2015, however, a video of an social programs is such a high priority, why not do so with the unjustified police shooting from 2014 was belatedly released and money that is apparently available for the consent decree? the Obama DOJ changed its tune. In January 2017, the Washington The reaction of Baltimore police commissioner Kevin Davis lawyers reached an agreement in principle with the city to negoti- was even stranger. Sessions was in essence saying to Davis: “I am ate a consent decree, but the clock ran out before they could finish. not prepared to accept without evidence that you are incapable of Mayor Rahm Emanuel had initially opposed the Obama Justice managing your own department. Absent clear proof to the con- Department investigation of the Chicago police, but he reversed trary, I believe that you are committed to constitutional policing. himself once he saw which way the political winds were blowing. If my review warrants it, I am going to allow you to run your Now he, too, is striking a defiant tone in anticipation of a Sessions department on your own.” reprieve. “We’re on the road to reform,” he told the Chicago Sun- Davis was having none of this outrageous imputation of man- Times editorial board. “We’re not getting off.” Emanuel and agerial capacity, however. He called Sessions’s requested delay police superintendent Eddie Johnson can reform all they want, but Until now, the consent-decree process has been a form of political theater.

“a punch in the gut to the community—certainly to me.” He that job would be easier without having to divert millions of dol- added: “We have to continue to stress the necessity of constitu- lars a year to the care and feeding of a federal monitor. tional policing in Baltimore. . . . I want to say to the community Proactive policing has already plummeted in Chicago, with in particular that the Police Department is absolutely dedicated pedestrian stops dropping over 80 percent in 2016. As a result, the to the consent-decree process.” past 14 months have been the most violent in at least two decades, Nothing prevents Davis from engaging in all the reform he according to the . More than 4,300 people were wants. Even if he is convinced that every one of the decree’s para- shot in Chicago in 2016—one person every two hours. In graphs represents a necessary mandate, he could implement those February 2017, a twelve-year-old girl was killed when a bullet mandates on his own, without having to accommodate an inva- pierced her spine while she was playing on an elementary-school sive federal monitor and his team of attorneys and consultants. playground; 30 minutes later, a 19-year-old marijuana dealer sent The Baltimore Police Department has fewer officers than it has a fatal shot through the right temple of an eleven-year-old girl sit- had in decades and is struggling to muster sufficient patrol ting in her family’s minivan; four days later, on Valentine’s Day, strength, reports the Baltimore Sun. More officers will be taken a two-year-old boy was killed by a bullet to his head while sitting off the street to write reports for the monitor. Judge Bredar him- in a car with a 26-year-old gang member, who was also killed. self called the decree “highly intrusive,” though he went on to call Arrests are at their lowest levels in at least 16 years. it necessary. The mystery is why Davis agrees with its necessity, The consent-decree process has been a form of political theater. Big- thereby declaring himself an impotent public servant. If Davis city police chiefs feel more pressure from race activists than from the wants better equipment and training for his officers, he should hard-working residents of high-crime areas, who fiercely want more make the case directly to taxpayers. policing but have no spokesmen to defend their interests. President Davis can breathe a sigh of relief, however. Judge Bredar reject- Donald Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions want to change ed the DOJ’s request for a review period and entered the decree as the false BlackLives Matter narrative, but it doesn’t look like they will fully enforceable on April 7, 2017, relieving the police chief of the have many allies among liberal mayors and their police commanders. distasteful autonomy with which Sessions had threatened him. Those public officials would rather conform to the conventional Mayor Pugh declared the decision a “great victory for the citizens narrative about systemic racism than stand up for their departments. of Baltimore, as well as the Baltimore Police Department.” Yet these prostrate officials, who declare themselves helpless to police constitutionally without federal control, suddenly become clarions of proud and defiant federalism when asked to cooperate N fact, victory belonged only to the anti-cop activists and with the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement in politicians, who have sought to snuff out proactive policing deporting convicted alien criminals. The ways of race politics I and to immunize low-level offenders from the reach of the become more tortuous by the day. 2 9 2col_QXP-1127940309.qxp 4/25/2017 11:14 PM Page 30

living in a $10 million New York condo with 250-foot-long hall- ways? Oh, and do you have any comment on longtime Clinton Her Foundation officer Doug Band’s claim, in a private e-mail uncovered by WikiLeaks, that the foundation paid for your “wedding and life for a decade”? Yet Vogue writer Jonathan Van Meter, after spending much Chelseaness of the spring and summer of 2012 with Chelsea, was so lost for a juicy anecdote about her that he led off his lengthy profile How to be entitled and boring with this tidbit: “I am pretty intrigued by Joplin Avenue Coffee without really trying Company,” Chelsea told him in Joplin, Mo., adding, “When in doubt, coffee.” Van Meter italicized the final noun in a heroic attempt to make the remark sound a little more electrifying BY KYLE SMITH than it was. Variety’s writer Ramin Setoodeh whipped up this pulse- pounder to open his profile: “Chelsea Clinton is about to tell you HELSEA VICTORIA CLINTON was named after the Joni some things you may not know about her. In an interview with Mitchell song “Chelsea Morning,” and as of the spring Variety, she lists the last great movie she saw (Hidden Figures), C of 2017, it’s Chelsea Morning in America. Boom, her most surprising job (an internship at a cattle ranch in 1999), she’s in Variety . . . CBS This Morning . . . The New and her favorite food growing up (cheddar cheese).” York Times Book Review. She even picked up a Lifetime award! Supposedly the media have an intriguing new angle. After 20 Okay it was from Lifetime, as in the cable channel, not for a life- years of declaring that Chelsea has at last found a niche for her- time of achievement, but still, Chelsea Clinton is everywhere. self, they’re now saying that Chelsea has at last really found a America, whether it asked for it or not, has become the setting for niche for herself. Said niche is her new social-media role as the an invasion-from-inside thriller: The Chelsening. tart-tongued Trump tormentor of Twitter. “Now on Twitter: She’s not just a little girl anymore, you know, not just some- Chelsea Clinton, Unbound,” proclaimed the New York Times in a one’s daughter or campaign prop. Chelsea Clinton is a person, no, story of more than 1,100 words—longer than the same newspa- a citizen, no, a global citizen, and she is done being quiet. Hear, per’s April 18 story about the Fresno Islamist who slaughtered world, as Chelsea speaks out. She is speaking out about social three people while yelling “Allahu akbar.” media: “I’ve recognized, as a lot of people have, that Twitter is a You’d have to grade on a steep curve, though, to call Chelsea’s vehicle for me to share my thoughts.” She’s speaking out on anti-Trump tweets withering or even amusing. After Sean Spicer, movies: “Of course I’m going to see Furious 8. I’ve already seen defending Trump’s notorious tweet about alleged Obama wire- Logan. I love that Logan is being succeeded by a little girl.” She’s tapping, said, “The president used the word ‘wiretaps’ in quotes,” speaking out on the Clinton Foundation: “At its most distilled Chelsea fired off the following semi-coherent riposte: “Is the les- level, we try to make a positive, impactful, empowering differ- son that we should put in ‘quotes’ things we don’t mean? Rather ence in whatever ways we can.” She’s speaking out on speaking than what we say (and mean)? Asking for . . . the world.” In out: “This is not the time to be silent or stay on the sidelines.” another supposedly wicked tweet cited by the Times as evidence With the exception of a few resentful Twitter pokes at the man that the Clinton heir is now “unbound,” Chelsea criticized Trump responsible for rendering her mom an isolated forest monster— for not condemning whoever left Nazi leaflets at a Jewish student Chappaquatch—instead of the most powerful woman in the his- center at Virginia Tech. After a Washington Post writer tweeted, tory of the planet, everything Chelsea says is pretty much like “Huh. Looks like Trump’s version of taking on Wall Street is to this. The positions she articulates on progress (pro), climate deregulate it. Who could have predicted this?” Chelsea retweeted change (anti), and gauzy, inspirational, make-the-world-a-better- the remark, adding her own comment: “Anyone taking him seri- place-for-girls-and-women goodness (super-duper pro) are ver- ously.” This stuff isn’t exactly insult-comedy gold; even for a bal fentanyl. Everything she says is a platitude wrapped in a celebrity, Twitter Chelsea isn’t interesting. cliché washed down with a bromide. She’s the dusty end of the Variety did take a deep breath and dare to ask Chelsea whether greeting-card section, the lite FM of famous-person chatter, a she is running for anything. Her answer inspired a breathless human press release. In short, Chelsea Clinton is becoming the March 29 headline on its site: “Chelsea Clinton: I Am Not champion dullard of our time. This didn’t happen by chance: Running for Public Office (EXCLUSIVE).” And she did say We’re talking about the ever-calculating Clintonworld here. The those words: “I am not running for public office.” But the world dullness is a strategy, a demented post-last-ditch effort by the may be pardoned for pointing out that the formulation sounds a Clinton gals to finally power Hillary into the Oval Office. But I’ll bit Clintonian. Of course she isn’t running for public office right come back to that. now, just as was not receiving favors from Monica Lewinsky at the exact moment he said, “There is not a sexual relationship.” What we want to know is: Will she ever run for T’S not like Chelsea Clinton lacks for interesting things she public office? Here’s a fuller quotation of her thoughts on the could talk about. What’s it like being in college when your matter: “If someone steps down or something changes, I’ll then dad humiliates your mom with an intern your own age? ask and answer those questions at that time. But right now, no, IWhat’s it like watching said mom humiliate herself by losing the I’m not running for public office.” presidency, after a lifetime of preparation for the task, to a So a more accurate Variety headline would have been “Chelsea cheesy reality-television star running on a whim? What’s it like Clinton Leaves Door Open to Running for Public Office,” more

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or less the opposite of the one that actually ran. Given the timid, deliberate pace of her emergence into public life, though, it is a bit hard to picture Chelsea jogging for anything, much less run- ning for anything. Low-level city-council-type gigs would be beneath Her Chelseaness, and the big juicy jobs would require too much glad-handing, too many speeches she wouldn’t be good at giving, too many intrusive questions from pesky political reporters. If she were really staking her claim in politics, would she be confining her interviews to Elle, Vogue, and Variety? Sure, like Caroline Kennedy, she’d probably enjoy being tapped to fill a vacant Senate seat. Who wouldn’t? But actually fighting for elective office seems like it would require more fire in the belly than she’s got. At her age—37—her father, having started with nothing, was in his second term as a governor. She has instead assembled a résumé that bespeaks a certain lack of . . . focus. “Mainly I work really hard. I really believe in the work I’m doing, and so I work seven days a week,” she told The Chronicle of Higher Education as her interviewer fawned at Chelsea’s Stakhanovism. “I will just always work harder [than anybody else] and hopefully perform better,” she told Fast Company. “And hopefully, over time, I preempt and erase whatever expec- tations people have of me not having a good work ethic, or not being smart, or not being motivated.”

HAT’S Chelsea: a workhorse. But what exactly does she do? So far, the career path is a random stumble in and out of school, in and out of entry-level jobs. After Stanford, sheT seemed to sample every ultra-connected Millennial pursuit except being a Girls co-star. She did some consulting. She University,” a job she said she got because she “met John scored first a master’s, then a Ph.D., in international relations Sexton,” the president of the university, and “then met some of from the University of Oxford, which apparently allowed her to his team,” as she told The Chronicle of Higher Education. She do her coursework remotely (you know, like the University of knew she wanted to “be part of translating their shared vision of Phoenix). She did a stint on Wall Street, as an analyst. She NYU into reality.” Vision-translating? Sounds sweet if not slipped up to Columbia for a master’s in public health. exactly arduous. Her most public gig so far has been her most disastrous one: Along the same lines, Chelsea and three others are credited lending her personality to NBC News at a salary of $600,000 per with co-founding NYU’s Of Many Institute, a group that means annum. It was a gig New York magazine dubbed an “unbelievably to “reach across faith boundaries to solve social problems.” cushy fake job” and for which, Business Insider calculated, she Chelsea said she was inspired by her interfaith marriage (to Wall was paid $26,724 for each minute she was on air—including all the Streeter Marc Mezvinsky, who is Jewish). She also became co- minutes in which she was interviewed by other NBC staffers about chairwoman of an Of Many Institute advisory board of 20 mem- her awesome work for the Clinton Foundation. In her own pieces, bers, including Jared Kushner. Since the institute appears on its she interviewed the Geico gecko and reported on a program to pro- website to have only five employees, including an office manager, vide therapy dogs to soldiers, in the process demonstrating that she it’s not clear that it really needs a 20-person advisory board, but takes after her mom when it comes to connecting with people. She then again, Chelsea grew up in the age of meaningless résumé- is “bombing,” said The Week. “Her debut was boring, her subse- padding. Maybe once you start accumulating credentials, you quent work has been boring, just as she planned,” wrote Gawker. can’t stop. Maybe the credentials become the point. Without establishing herself in any field, she segued gently The closest thing to an actual job Chelsea seems to hold now into the realm of the ceremonial job, as though, having skipped is a gig as an adjunct assistant professor at Columbia’s Mailman entirely the “rising to the top of one’s profession” part of life, it School for Public Health. “I’m committed to my teaching at was time to kick back a little, to accept due recompense in the Columbia,” she told Variety. Well, not that committed. She form of board seats (such as the one on the family foundation) teaches one three-hour class, Global Health Governance, a week. and advisory sinecures and other such vapor-jobs, prestige Chelsea is also an author. Her name—her brand?—is on the appointments lightly tethered to the vaguest of duties. Remember cover of Governing Global Health: Who Runs the World and Why? how, on Seinfeld, the lifelong dilettante Kramer retired to Florida She and Devi Sridhar, the chairwoman of Global Public Health at in his forties? That’s our girl Chelsea, albeit with the wacky the University of Edinburgh, are listed as the co-authors. An charisma replaced by an exceptionally monotonous raise-your- adjunct who teaches one course a week and a department-chairing voice-and-be-heard female-empowerment component. full professor—which one do you think did the bulk of the work? In 2010, Chelsea landed an appointment as “assistant vice Chelsea is listed as the sole author of It’s Your World: Get ROMAN GENN provost for the Global Network University at New York Informed, Get Inspired & Get Going!—an intensely dull 402-page

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book (“Most historians, economists, and social scientists—aca- dawned on the editors of the slicks that, as Hillary Clinton is demics who study people and societies over time—agree that perhaps the biggest laughingstock in the history of American geography matters”) meant to nudge ten- to 14-year-olds in a politics, her daughter’s emergence as a Trump critic carries the progressive direction. Soul-scarifyingly tedious as the book is— sad stench of sore-loserdom. Consider how outraged the media it’s like the middle-school version of one of those campaign- reaction would be if a bitter Ivanka Trump were sharpshooting manifesto blobs nobody reads—it seemed to take a village to President Hillary Clinton from Twitter. Moreover, if it’s true write it. Hundreds of people are thanked in the acknowledgments, that, as Chelsea says, “everything is at risk. Our fundamental and some of these folks seem like they did more than simply offer rights, our fundamental security, are at risk,” er, whose fault is a friendly read. “Ruby Shamir, Bari Lurie, Joy Secuban, Allie that? As Andrew Sullivan put it in New York magazine, “any Gottlieb, Sarah Henning, Emily Young, Kamyl Bazbaz, and Tara candidate who can win the popular vote by nearly 3 million Kole helped me build on a base of ideas, provided crucial research votes and still manage to lose the Electoral College by 304 to assistance, and supported the various phases and incarnations of 227 is so profoundly incompetent, so miserably useless as a It’s Your World,” Chelsea wrote in her voluminous thank-yous. politician, she should be drummed out of the party under a wel- “And last, though certainly as the saying goes, not least, the bril- ter of derision.” liant Lissa Muscatine.” Muscatine, a former Washington Post jour- But in the febrile imagination of Hillary dead-enders—just last nalist, just happens to be Hillary’s longtime speechwriter and, week they were tweeting out pictures of themselves smiling on according to Jeff Gerth and Don Van Natta’s HRC bio Her Way, the the campaign trail in a pathetic attempt to counteract Shattered, ghostwriter of the narcoleptic Hillary memoir Living History, for the brutal new book on their failures and infighting—the which Lurie served as lead researcher. Many of the other helpers mechanical-bull-ride-on-a-roller-coaster-during-an-earthquake Chelsea listed are also longtime Hillary flunkies and factotums. Trump presidency will have America clamoring for bland com- Is it too much to expect of a Stanford grad who has two mas- petence and a return to normalcy. And the epitome of unobjec- ter’s degrees and a Ph.D. that she write her own book instead of tionable, experienced leadership will be agreed to be . . . Hillary? calling in a ghostwriter? How hard can it be to produce a volume It’s utterly daft, but in the Clinton imagination, Chelsea’s dullness of stuporous change-the-world banality in the first place? will rub off on her mother and be transmuted into normalcy. Especially a bad book written with all the verve of the iTunes Which will—finally, after 30 years!—mean the much sought Terms of Service agreement? A book for middle-schoolers? final humanization of Hillary Clinton. This new, boring, human In April, Chelsea announced her latest authorial project: It’s a Hillary will, the reasoning goes, seem like an ideal alternative to picture book. About the history of awesome powerful women. the way-too-exciting and not-at-all-normal President Trump. It’s called “She Persisted.” This is a grown-up with a Ph.D. in Hillary won’t, of course, run again, because the donor money international relations from the University of Oxford, and she’s won’t be there. The donors know that she was looking at a two- volunteering for the preschool ghetto. The branding seems a tad inch putt of a campaign and somehow managed not only to miss off: If a woman with all of Chelsea Clinton’s connections, wealth, but to shank the ball into the long grass while screaming about and academic credentials, a woman to whom all options in the the Russians and misogyny. When she starts knocking on the world present themselves, is directing her energies to supplying donors’ doors, she is going to get nothing but gentle hints that captions for a picture book illustrated by someone else, does maybe it’s time for her to catch up on Veep. The donors know this really advance the message “Women can do anything”? that they can get the same progressive policy initiatives without Shouldn’t an Oxford international-relations Ph.D. be editing signing up for a quarter century of baggage and reliving the Foreign Affairs or producing a 900-page history of diplomacy? humiliation of two face-plantingly bad presidential campaigns. The one time that Chelsea accidentally said something reveal- Longtime Clinton flunky and former DNC chairman Ed ing, what she revealed was that she is very much the daughter of Rendell gave away the game in a January story in Politico that was the woman who claimed she was “dead broke” when she left the ostensibly about Hillary’s withdrawal from electoral politics and White House. Chelsea told Fast Company, “I was curious if I supposed pivot to the pure political altruism of helping other could care about [money] on some fundamental level, and I Democrats. As if Hillary, on the cusp of 70, were suddenly going couldn’t. That wasn’t the metric of success that I wanted in my to become a team player. In a remark that was buried at the end of life.” She certainly cares enough about money to live in an apart- the story, Rendell hinted that the real plan was otherwise: “I’m ment costing $10 million instead of, say, a double-wide in certain Trump will screw up enough that by the fall of ’18, Trenton, N.J., but the remark illustrated how ill acquainted Hillary’s numbers will be way up again,” he said. But why would Princess Clinton is with the reality that nice things cost money, Hillary or her team be thinking about her numbers next year if which in turn must be earned. She likes nice things, but since she’s done running for office? Who would even bother to poll the they’ve always been there without her having to do anything, it citizenry about her prospects? Does Gallup still ask people how has never occurred to her that others who want things one-tenth as they feel about pulling the lever for Al Gore or Michael Dukakis? nice are forced to care about money a hundred times as much. Chelsea Clinton is indeed working hard—on the family Trying to signal that she was better than the rest of us mere money- brand. But like her mother, she makes politics look effortful. She grubbers—while sitting in a chic apartment the length of an entire is clearly uncomfortable on the cover of Variety. All clenched Manhattan block—simply defined her as Millennial Antoinette. eyes, big teeth, and stiff arms, she looks not like a person cap- tured in a moment of levity but like someone who is trying very hard to look strong, confident, and fun. After all these years she’s OT that the media are interested in making much of that spent carving out a niche for herself, she is right back where she remark, because they’re living in a self-constructed started: a family implement, a maternal-humanization weapon, N matrix where Hillary’s career is still viable. It hasn’t a campaign prop. 3 2 | www.nationalreview.com MAY 1 5 , 2 0 1 7 lileks--READY_QXP-1127940387.qxp 4/25/2017 10:46 PM Page 33

Athwart BY JAMES LILEKS ‘We Have Science!’

HE March for Science, which occurred on that fertilizers is better than the scary nitrogen grown in labs by annual parade of pagan panic known as Earth profit-mad corporations, which inject pure moral evil into Day, was a remarkable success. We have sci- their product because it comes from a lab instead of a T ence again! Chemical scientists all across the cow’s rear. nation are back to staring intently at beakers; space scien- Bad science: GMOs, which tinker with plants to produce tists are back to finding new planets; climate scientists are disease-resistant strains. Good science: understanding back to staring at computer projections, trying to figure out DNA so we can tinker with humans to produce disease- how to turn statistics into grant money. resistant strains. It’s a relief, isn’t it? Obviously President Trump’s legisla- And so on. It doesn’t make one a better, more morally tive agenda to ban science is dead on arrival. The adminis- pure person to Love Science. If you march around with a tration had proposed the replacement of science with old poster of Spock and ask people to behave logically, that’s folk wisdom. Energy companies, for example, would find cute. But if logic tells you we should have a eugenics cru- untapped oil fields with enormous dowsing rods carried by sade to weed out the defectives, you’re bad and you’re hundreds of men; medical research would consist of watch- wrong. Even though the science on sterilizing the undesir- ing goats eat various plants and making pills out of the ones ables was once quite settled among the high-minded. that didn’t make the goats fall down and foam at the mouth. What we know for sure is often wrong, thanks to the That was the horrible future from which the March for earnest certainties of previous people who Loved Science. Science saved us, right? No? Then what were the marchers A recent study, for example, concluded that you can proba- protesting? This: bly eat egg yolks without fear. Like saturated fat, they’re 1. The replacement of constant screeching terror over glob- not as bad as you were told. Turns out the steak-’n’-eggs al warming with an official policy of “Eh. Maybe. We’ll see. platter at the diner is good for you, but if you have the pan- Carry on.” cakes, use the sugar-free syrup, because— 2. Reducing the EPA budget so that the agency would be —hold on, this is just coming in over the wires—okay, less inclined to declare the entire state of North Dakota a turns out that people who consumed more artificial sweet- habitat for an endangered amoeba. eners had a higher rate of dementia and strokes. We suggest 3. Less money to do stuff. you put jam on the pancakes, because studies show that 4. Trump, and anyone who voted for him, because they’re fruits are high in antioxidants, which are good! (Ten years idiots and bigots. The “MarchforScienceDC” group tweet- later, a study ties antioxidants to oxidant-deficiency syn- ed: “Colonization, racism, immigration, native rights, sex- drome, which causes deformed duodenums in rats.) ism, ableism, queer-, trans-, intersex-phobia, & econ justice Obvious disclaimer: Just because science was wrong are scientific issues.” then doesn’t mean science isn’t right today. A lot of science Uh-huh. At least the Left loves science again. If the cultural is settled, because humankind has smart people who fig- climate is experiencing one of its back-to-nature periods, ured stuff out. Water is made of H2O, not dinosaur tears. An then science is the enemy, since it produces war and chemi- eclipse is not a dragon eating the sun. Vaccines do not cause cals and plaaaastic, maaaan. But should the cultural climate auteurism, which is a style of French cinema. shift toward reducing government involvement in everything But science is not a belief system. It is not an alternative from the sex lives of newts to the science of Intersexual to religion, as some of the marchers seemed to believe. One Colonialists, then all of a sudden science is awesome. sign had a picture of a rocket—a Soviet-era Proton, for Well, some science. The Left has its pets. Good science: some reason—and said, “You can’t launch this with replacing all our current power sources with solar power prayer.” As if there were black-robed men at the Vatican and eagle-mincing wind farms. Not science: scary nuclear Space Program chanting, “O Lord God, save us from perdi- power, which produces toxic waste and Jane Fonda movies, tion / and please initiate stage-one ignition.” but I repeat myself. More science in the schools? Yes. And if it means cele- Fun experiment: When an anti-nuke person asks what brating the spirit of inquiry and intellectual freedom that we’ll do with the waste, just say we’ll store it for a few has characterized the West and memorializing the long line years and then shoot it into the sun when we develop a of people who made our modern world of marvels possible, hyper-powerful railgun. Once they stop explaining why sci- and it turns out that most of these people were men, that’s ence could never invent such a thing, because science just . okay, right? . . wouldn’t, they get indignant: Shoot nuclear waste into the Hurrah for the West! Hurrah for men! Hurrah for—hey, sun? Must we POLLUTE EVERYTHING? why are you all so frowny? Okay, okay, if we said that Good science: organic food that’s grown with copious Alexander Graham Bell’s first telephone message—“Come amounts of night soil, because the nitrogen in organic here, Watson, I want to see you”—was an expression of homosexual desire, would that make you feel better? Mr. Lileks at www.lileks.com. Thought so.

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The Long View BY ROB LONG

MALE VOICE: That’s right. Just hand talk, be sure to nod—that’s when it back to the lady. Smile and say you move your head in an up-and- that your mom has one just like it. down way— Then smile again. Great! Great FEMALE VOICE: Too vigorous! Slow it smiling, Chelsea! You’re really get- down! ting the hang of this kind of human MALE VOICE: Okay, now the server is interaction. telling you a story about her newborn FEMALE VOICE: Keep moving, Chel - baby and this is a good time to make sea. You’ll be able to move away a small physical gesture, just reach BeginNSA Extract SURVEILLANCE from these people soon. Just a few out and touch her shoulder—are we [Static.]TRANSCRIPT more smiles and—Chelsea! No! That getting this? Are we taping this inter- FEMALE VOICE: Can you hear us, was just a reporter, okay? Just a ques- action? This is good interaction right Chelsea? tion. Don’t do that face. Take that here, let’s get this up on the web and MALE VOICE: Nod and smile if you face off, okay? to Colbert—wait, what is she saying? MALE VOICE: can hear us. What is she doing? You don’t have to say anything, FEMALE VOICE: Is she doing it? She’s just staring at that guy from the Chelsea, you don’t— FEMALE VOICE: MALE VOICE: I can’t tell. Times. Chelsea, I don’t think FEMALE VOICE: FEMALE VOICE: Chelsea, can you see He asked about 2020. the waitress is relating here. She MALE VOICE: the van? It’s just past the rope line. Chelsea, use the speech. doesn’t have a doorman, I’m pretty MALE VOICE: She’s nodding. Okay. Use the speech. What we talked sure. And she doesn’t have two nan- We’ve got you, Chelsea. We have about. What is she doing? She’s just nies, I don’t think. Just please re - visual and audio contact. staring at him. member to smile, look intently into FEMALE VOICE: FEMALE VOICE: Okay, now, Chelsea, She’s wishing the the subject’s eyes, and keep verbal your mom really thought what we do reporter into the corn field. interactions to a minimum. MALE VOICE: MALE VOICE: here was helpful for her to navigate What? You can stop touching FEMALE VOICE: public appearances and speeches and It’s a thing she does. the waitress now. MALE VOICE: FEMALE VOICE: so forth. The key is to act natural and Um, does she actually Just keep moving to don’t call attention to the earpiece. have the power to— your table. FEMALE VOICE: MALE VOICE: MALE VOICE: Remember: When the No, of course not. Leave the waitress reporters ask you anything about But she thinks she does. Okay, where she is. Don’t drag her to your 2020 or beyond, just smile and say Chelsea? Please keep moving. You’re table. She’s a real person, okay? FEMALE VOICE: the lines we crafted for you. supposed to give your speech in a few Chelsea, you’re at FEMALE VOICE: I have no plans to run minutes. your table. Just sit there quietly MALE VOICE: for anything. I’m busy being a work- Just keep walking. Wait. while we load up the speech mod- ing mom and working for change, Stop. ule. You may feel some slight pres- FEMALE VOICE: and I really don’t want to get into pol- Give that man his sure behind your eyes, pay no itics. watch back, Chelsea. Remember: attention to it. It’s just the new MALE VOICE: Got it? You are not allowed to take someone operating system running a back- FEMALE VOICE: Just say that. else’s property. That watch is not ground update. MALE VOICE: MALE VOICE: Chelsea, as you walk yours to take, okay? Just hand it And remember, there past the rope line, just remember to back . . . will be some Q-and-A after the MALE VOICE: smile at the people there. Remember Good, good. Nicely speech, so remember that humans what we talked about in the van done. Okay now, moving inside, like it when you smile warmly at before the event: Real people are real, Chelsea, find your table. It’s table them. Don’t forget to do that. FEMALE VOICE: Chelsea. They have lives and feelings one, and it’s— Be natural. Just be FEMALE VOICE: and—what is she doing? Chelsea, you have to normal and natural. MALE VOICE: FEMALE VOICE: Chelsea! Don’t sit in your assigned seat, you can’t You should probably touch that woman’s purse, okay? Do just— stop saying that. MALE VOICE: FEMALE VOICE: not do that. Okay? It’s not your Oh, wait. Okay, this is Why? MALE VOICE: property. You are not allowed to good interaction, Chelsea. Make Because she has no idea take someone else’s purse for any eye contact with the server. Great what that means. reason. smiling, by the way. Now as they End Extract

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appeal to their tech-savvy workers, some places, no matter how many con- A Failed which meant they had better get with the verted lofts and taxpayer-funded poetry progressive program. events a city might have. It turned out there were plenty of Rust “The Rust Belt in particular looks Urbanism Belt cities willing to dish out $35,000 to likely to shed vast numbers of jobs, and hear Florida explain how gayborhoods, some of its cities and towns, from JOHN DANIEL DAVIDSON hipster coffee shops, and converted lofts Cleveland to St. Louis to Buffalo to could transform their former manufac- Detroit, will have a hard time recover- turing hubs into bustling creative cen- ing,” he wrote, citing long-term—and ters. If places like Cleveland, Toledo, rather obvious—trends in manufactur- and Rochester could just master what ing, such as foreign competition and Florida called the “three T’s”—technol- automation. Instead of trying to revive ogy, talent, and tolerance—they might these doomed places, Florida declared, become the sort of places that artists, it was time for a “new geography” that designers, and biomedical researchers eschewed suburban sprawl and old Rust wanted to call home. Right? Belt towns. Instead, City leaders from Syracuse to Green Bay seemed to think so, and shelled out we need to encourage growth in the quarter-million-dollar studies on how to regions and cities that are best posi- tioned to compete in the coming The New Urban Crisis: How Our Cities Are leverage their native “creative capital.” decades: the great mega-regions that Increasing Inequality, Deepening Segregation, and Florida’s theory of creative cluster- Failing the Middle Class—and What We Can Do already power the economy, and the ing—that a flood of laptop-toting cre- smaller, talent-attracting innovation about It, by Richard Florida atives would lift all boats—had a centers inside them—places like (Basic, 336 pp., $28) certain appeal. It suggested that cities as Silicon Valley, Boulder, Austin, and the seemingly uncool as Des Moines might North Carolina Research Triangle. ICHARD FLORIDA would like be able to transform themselves into to clarify something. The hipster hubs of the new economy, In other words, Florida seemed to creative class, it turns out, is through progressive values (and good say, quit trying to save your old manu- not going to save your city— bars and restaurants). facturing town and just move to Austin Ror any city. Florida, the stylish urban- The Great Recession put the lie to this already. Not that he came right out and studies professor who launched a hokum. In March 2009, Florida recog- said so. Indeed, he defended his earlier lucrative career as a jet-setting urban nized as much—penning a cover story speaking tours when Alec MacGillis theorist with his 2002 book The Rise of for The Atlantic, titled “How the Crash interviewed him for The American the Creative Class, thinks cities have Will Reshape America,” in which he Prospect in 2009. “I’ve never tried to become a big problem. In fact, the most argued that we can’t stop the decline of sugarcoat the message to any of them,” problematic cities are the ones that seem most fully to embody his optimistic ideas about the creative class. Whether Florida is willing to admit it or not, his LARKINESQUE new book is more or less a sustained rebuttal of his famous theory, which in The trees have shed their leaves at last, hindsight turns out to be a recipe not for Like something over—done and said. urban renewal but for rampant income How shall their settled piles be read inequality and other evils, including Now that fall is dead and past? “economic segregation.” Florida’s conflicting theses would be Perhaps like sibyl’s words that wait laughable if they hadn’t proven so influ- On wind to spell out some despair, ential over the past 15 years. He popular- When all their writing blots the air ized the idea that highly mobile young And hints that hope may be too late? workers in growth industries—“cre- atives”—want above all to live some- Above, do quires, runed though bare, place cool and tolerant. If cities wanted Image the warning of a dream to attract those industries, they had to Where we fall too, until they seem To say, “Prepare. Prepare. Prepare”? Mr. Davidson is a senior correspondent for the Federalist. —LEN KRISAK

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he told MacGillis. Of the cities that evolve: “I realized I had been overly have some effect on housing and the hired him to dispense advice on optimistic to believe that cities and the cost of living? attracting creatives, he said, “I’ve creative class could, by themselves, As with other questions that challenge given them the facts . . . about what they bring forth a better and more inclusive his preferred conclusions, Florida lets were up against. I never tried to give kind of urbanism.” these pass over him in silence as he them false hope. I encouraged them to The larger problem with his course moves on to his proposed solutions. But work on their assets, but I tried to be correction is that he swaps one set of his alarmist rhetoric—the new urban honest and objective in helping them faulty maps for another. Even his cri- crisis is “the central crisis of capitalism engage their problems. I hope they tique of his own clustering theory today”—doesn’t quite fit his recommen- don’t feel let down.” doesn’t quite make sense, in part dations, which amount to a laundry list But they must feel let down, in part because he focuses on every progres- of worn-out liberal talking points. It will because Florida himself has since all but sive’s favorite economic canard, come as no surprise that Florida thinks openly refuted the entire premise of his income inequality. Setting aside the we need more government action. creative-class argument. In a 2013 post voluminous research showing income Whether it’s subsidized housing, a higher (a version of which shows up in his new inequality to be a meaningless indica- minimum wage, or high-speed rail, book) on the website The Atlantic Cities tor of how the poor are actually doing, what’s needed is massive “taxpayer examining data on the economic effects Florida still can’t quite twist the logic investment” in our cities. Florida even of talent clustering, Florida admits that in his favor. In a chapter titled “The proposes a new layer of federal bureau- the creative class “provides little in the Inequality of Cities,” Florida claims cracy, a cabinet-level “Department of way of trickle-down benefits. Its bene- that, “just as clustering and growth go Cities and Urban Development,” to help fits flow disproportionately to more together, so do clustering and inequali- coordinate all the new public spending highly skilled knowledge, professional, ty.” Two pages before that, he says and make sure cutting-edge new policies, and creative workers whose higher income inequality is “a drag on eco- such as diverting a share of foreign aid wages and salaries are more than suffi- nomic growth,” even though the three “from nation-building to city-building,” cient to cover more expensive housing most unequal cities in his “Composite are properly implemented. in these locations.” Blue-collar and ser- Inequality Index” are New York, Los One can already see our cities vice workers might earn more in places Angeles, and San Francisco—Florida’s gleaming with the luster of this 21st- such as Silicon Valley, but the rent is too very own “superstar cities and knowl- century urban New Deal—or at least damn high for it to do them any good. edge hubs.” How can income inequality Florida can. Likewise, he can see the The New Urban Crisis is all about be a drag on economic growth when, by dystopia that awaits us if we don’t act. economic inequality and the supposed Florida’s own measure, it is most pro- Today’s urban crisis, Florida warns disappearance of the urban middle class. nounced in wealthy cities with vibrant darkly, will only deepen: “Our superstar “The central idea is that the very same economies that employ a great teeming cities and tech hubs will become so clustering force that drives economic mass of creatives? expensive that they will turn into gilded and social progress also causes the In order to make the case that low and gated communities; their innova- divides that separate us and hold us levels of income inequality promote tion and creative sparks will eventually back,” Florida writes, as if it had just growth, Florida is forced to make dubi- fade; and they will price out the essen- occurred to him that, say, an influx of ous comparisons between the United tial service workers needed to keep highly paid techies to a former steel States and other countries, arriving at their economies running.” town might drive up the cost of housing the erroneous but unsurprising conclu- And what then? Will the urban bil- and displace blue-collar workers. “Left sion that redistributive policies and lionaires starve in their towers because unchecked,” he explains, “this cluster- massive welfare states actually gener- no one is around to feed them? What ing force generates a lopsided, extremely ate growth. about the rest of the country? What will unequal kind of urbanism in which a For all his complex charts and happen if we fail to implement the dras- relative handful of superstar cities, and a graphs, basic economics seem to flum- tic reforms Florida calls for, such as a few elite neighborhoods within them, mox Florida throughout his rambling negative income tax that gives a guaran- benefit while many other places stagnate book. For example, it doesn’t occur to teed minimum income to the poor? “Our or fall behind.” him how public policy can shape a suburbs will grow poorer, more eco- In other words, Florida is discover- local economy. In the final chapter, nomically distressed, and more unequal. ing basic economics. It turns out, the Florida says that it’s a “perplexing real- More middle-class neighborhoods will cities that were the exemplars for his ity that the traditional American Dream disappear, and our nation will further creative-class theory—Austin, Toronto, of an affordable home is more achiev- divide into walled-off enclaves for the Pittsburgh, San Francisco, Boston, able in sprawling conservative areas of rich and larger and larger areas of urban etc.—are among the most unequal and the country than in dense, knowledge- and suburban decay.” economically segregated. Again, not based liberal ones,” noting that housing In the end, Florida’s entire book is that Florida acknowledges he was costs are nearly twice as much in deep- designed to give a veneer of urbanist wrong. The closest he comes is to say, blue markets as in red-state ones. scholarship to Bernie Sanders socialism. in the opening pages, that in the years Perplexing indeed. Could it be that pub- Its one saving grace is that maybe fewer after his bestseller came out in 2002, lic policy has something to do with this people will take his muddled theories as his understanding of cities began to difference? That taxes and regulations seriously this time around.

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and began arranging their affairs worked for Wilbur Mills, the Demo - The Ture- accordingly: Wealthy capitalists began cratic chairman of the House Ways to seek out economically worthless and Means Committee, but who was investments that delivered beaucoup no Democrat. Kennedy tax breaks, or they hid their money Ture was a proto-supply-sider and from the taxman, or they simply the integral connection between Blueprint gave up and enjoyed the remaining Kennedy and the 1970s supply-siders, fruits of their labors without laboring as he became staff director of the Joint IKE BRANNON any more. Economic Committee for the Re - The nascent supply-siders—most publicans in the 1970s when that com- notably Representative mittee was at its apex. Kudlow and (R., N.Y.), Senator Orrin Hatch (R., Domitrovic report that Ture forcefully Utah), and the economists on the con- argued to Kennedy that the economy gressional Joint Economic Committee, didn’t need a Keynesian jolt, and sug- as well as Kudlow—knew that a tem- gested that a reduction in the top cor- porary tax cut of the sort Jimmy Carter porate and personal tax rates would proposed early in his tenure would not boost long-run growth. The final legis- fix what ailed America: This group lation signed by President Johnson did wanted a fundamental restructuring of precisely that, reducing the top corpo- the tax code to make it more con- rate rate from 52 percent to 48 percent ducive to work, investment, and eco- and the top personal rate from 91 per- JFK and the Reagan Revolution: nomic growth. cent to 70 percent. A Secret History of American Prosperity, Their idea that sky-high tax rates The extent to which the tax cuts suc- by Lawrence Kudlow and Brian deterred economic activity was some- ceeded at stimulating economic growth Domitrovic (Portfolio, 256 pp., $29) what radical at the time. Eventually, the is a matter of debate, of course: The

OUR decades ago, was part of a cabal This book is an effort to reclaim that began thinking about tax the proud history of policy not from the demand side—whereF the government gives supply-side economics. people back a little of their own money for a bit so they spend more— notion caught on, thanks in no small economy did grow smartly in the years but from the perspective that any tax part to the editorial page of the Wall after passage of the tax cut, but the changes should boost the incentives Street Journal, and it became the guid- defense buildup associated with the for people to work and firms to invest, ing force for the Kemp-Roth tax cuts in Vietnam War and an increasingly and thereby stimulate output and em- 1981 as well as the comprehensive tax accommodative Federal Reserve have ployment. The movement these peo- reform in 1986. Kudlow played a role led Keynesians to conclude that the ple begat came to be known as in both. long and robust expansion of the supply-side economics. To some degree, this book is a work decade owed to demand-side effects. In the 1970s, the tax code strongly of humility: What Larry Kudlow and The authors beg to differ. deterred entrepreneurship and work. Brian Domitrovic suggest is that the People have ascribed a supply-side The corporate tax rate was 48 percent work that Kudlow did with Kemp, motivation for Kennedy’s tax cuts and the top rate on small businesses and Hatch, and the Joint Economic Com - before, but this book goes farther than workers was 70 percent. In his fascinat- mittee in the 1970s actually had its previous efforts. Ture’s influence is ing biography of Johnny Carson, Henry roots in the Kennedy White House. illuminating: These days the man has Bushkin reported that Carson hired And it’s easy to read this as a recom- an outsized reputation in conservative him as his agent partly because—after mendation that Donald Trump emulate tax circles, and his role in crafting the federal, state, and New York City taxes, JFK as he pursues tax reform. Kennedy tax package is notable. combined with his previous agent’s 10 The authors praise Kennedy for Discussions over what became the percent commission—it wasn’t clear being ecumenical in his appointment Kennedy tax cut began shortly after that Carson was seeing anything from of cabinet members and senior staff the economist John Muth published his salary, and Carson wanted Bushkin and eschewing party loyalty in favor “Rational Expectations and the Theory to do something about it. of competence, which is now as then a of Price Movements” (1961), the paper Hundreds of thousands of Ameri - radical notion. He took the same that later became the foundation for a cans came to the same realization approach when he began considering a new school of economic thought that tax cut, and among the people he moved the economics profession be - Mr. Brannon is a visiting fellow at the Cato Institute brought into the fold was Norman yond the ineffectual Keynesian per- and the president of Capital Policy Analytics. Ture, an economist who at the time spective in the 1970s. Economists paid

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little attention to it at the time, but Leaf’s new play, Deconstruction, which Ture—who got his Ph.D. from the Uni - Acts of premiered in March in New York City, versity of Chicago—may have grasped courtesy of the Storm Theatre Company its importance early. and Christopher Ekstrom Productions. This book is, of course, very time- Undermining Set in the summer and early autumn of ly; not only are Republicans hoping 1949, Deconstruction reimagines the to enact some sort of comprehensive I A N T U T T L E relationship between a young de Man tax reform in the next year, but too (Jed Peterson), newly arrived in New many of them have tried to sell reform ISCUSSING Rousseau’s Con - York City from Belgium, and novelist- as a Keynesian shot in the arm for the fessions in his work critic Mary McCarthy (Fleur Alys U.S. economy. Allegories of Reading, Paul Dobbins), by the late 1940s a member It is a powerful urge: The George W. de Man wrote: “It is always in good standing of the celebrated Bush administration used such rea- possibleD to face up to any experience (to Manhattan literary circle that included soning to push both the 2001 tax cuts excuse any guilt), because the experi- Dwight Macdonald, Edmund Wilson and the 2003 acceleration of the ence always exists simultaneously as (McCarthy’s second of four husbands), remaining tax-rate reductions through fictional discourse and as empirical and many others. It was through Mac - Congress and largely eschewed any event and it is never possible to decide donald that McCarthy met de Man, and supply-side rhetoric. And, of course, which one of the two possibilities is the she promptly procured for him a tempo- politicians of all stripes embraced a right one.” This was a pregnant com- rary teaching position at Bard College. Keynesian perspective when it came ment, though no one knew it at the time. But it has long been rumored that their to the 2009 stimulus bill, and there By 1979, when Allegories was pub- relationship was not strictly professional, was no shortage of economists willing lished, de Man had become the toast of and Deconstruction imagines how that to do likewise. American academia, and his “deconstruc- liaison might have unfolded. The return of Keynesianism in D.C. tionism” a staple of humanities depart- The play is a study in sophisticated is understandable: The mere fact that it ments. The above was the sort of deception, as were the lives of the princi- justifies more spending will always erudite-sounding twaddle to which his pals. Is de Man the bashful prey of a make politicians amenable to such acolytes thrilled: the both/and, the nei- predatory older woman? Or is he the thinking. (Keynesianism has not made a ther/nor, the ultimate “unreadability” of a seducer? “There’s something cruel about similar comeback in academia.) But it’s text. The prospect of the indeterminacy of you,” McCarthy says in the opening also true that by the 2000s the supply- meaning was exciting. “The fall into the scene, and even as de Man acts the side moniker had become stained by abyss of deconstruction inspires us with ingénu, it’s a clear indication of what is various outlandish claims made by as much pleasure as fear,” one of de to come. By the end of the play, de Man charlatans holding its banner. Man’s students would write. “We are will have impregnated McCarthy, threat- One way to view this book is as an intoxicated with the prospect of never hit- ened her with blackmail, and abandoned effort to reclaim the proud history of ting bottom.” her for one of his students, whom he has supply-side economics for the next In 1987, though, four years after de also impregnated. fight and advance the view that eco- Man’s death (which was noted on the Peterson and Dobbins handle their nomic growth should always be a pri- front page of the New York Times), a sud- roles admirably, particularly as the emo- mary goal of our government. Of den sobering occurred. That year, a young tional pitch of events escalates. Dobbins course, the common perception is that Belgian scholar, Ortwin de Graef, is a convincing McCarthy, shifting seam- any growth we’ve had over the past revealed that between 1940 and 1942 de lessly between vulnerability and icy wit, two decades has gone only to the Man had contributed some 170 articles to while Peterson’s amorphous de Man wealthy, and these days people on the Le Soir and Het Vlaamsche Land, manages to be both repulsive and pitiable. left would rather focus tax policy on Belgian daily newspapers, one French, These subtleties are facilitated by Leaf’s redistribution. Thomas Piketty, the lat- one Flemish, that acted as propaganda smart script and the simple set, constituted est economic hero of our nomenklatura, arms for the Nazi occupiers. Those reve- largely of scattered books. has suggested that a 90 percent top tax lations (which also appeared on the front In real life, de Man, by the end of rate would work just fine and still page of the New York Times) were explo- 1949—that is, a semester into his job at “leave plenty” to motivate the upper- sive, sparking a vicious battle between his Bard—had conceived a child with a stu- income workers. This perspective detractors and defenders that occupied the dent named Patricia Kelley, whom he makes many despair of any bipartisan pages of prominent academic and literary married shortly thereafter. It seems not to tax reform. journals for several years, and prompting have fazed him that he also had a wife and If the populace comes to despair that a reassessment of his work that included three children living in Argentina. (They economic growth will ever do them any new, darker readings of passages such as divorced sometime in the 1950s.) De Man good, it will bode ill for the future of our the above. The fallout continues. In 2014, and Kelley subsequently moved from country, as well as that of the GOP, and City University of New York professor prestigious institution to prestigious insti- the next tax reform won’t be concerned Evelyn Barish published The Double Life tution as his profile rose; they remained about reducing tax rates at all. of Paul de Man. together until his death. And Larry Kudlow’s efforts will De Man is one of three 20th-century In Deconstruction, McCarthy is the have been in vain. notables who share the stage in Jonathan collateral damage of these lies, which are

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ultimately exposed by the play’s third celebrity: political philosopher Hannah Arendt (Karoline Fischer). A refugee from Hitler’s Germany, Arendt moved to New York City in 1941. While in fact it would be a few more years before their relationship blossomed, it’s true that Arendt and McCarthy became extremely close friends. When Arendt died in 1976, McCarthy was her literary executor. The quarter century of intimate, sometimes profound, often gossipy conversation that they shared is partly recorded in Between Friends: The Correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy, 1949–1975. In Leaf’s imagining, Arendt’s cool, probing mind is immune to de Man’s charms, and she acts as inquisitor, hoping to protect her friend from another ill-fated romance. Part of this searching-out is to inquire after de Man’s philosophical con- victions, and that conjures up Martin Jed Peterson as Paul de Man and Fleur Alys Dobbins as Mary McCarthy in Deconstruction Heidegger and another, even more impor- tant 20th-century intellectual scandal. hold when it did: following not just the had been an atheist from the age of 13. Almost certainly the most significant traumas of the Second World War and Indeed, in 1949, no moral reformation philosopher of the century, Heidegger the Holocaust, but the rebellions of the was in the offing. During the Vietnam proposed, most famously in Being and 1960s (which spanned the United States War, she would offer apologias for the Time (1927), a radical reorientation of and Europe). A sophisticated conceptual Vietcong, and, in a particularly dis- philosophical thinking—back toward the apparatus that could justify the inver- graceful episode, attack an American question of Being, of what it means to be. sions taking place—of morals, customs, POW she met during a trip to North Heidegger was also a member of the Nazi traditions, etc.—was surely a welcome Vietnam: Air Force colonel James party, and his philosophy is entwined arrival. Undoubtedly, it has been used to Robinson “Robbie” Risner, held in cap- with the rise of the Third Reich. (To pre- great effect. tivity and routinely tortured for seven cisely what extent is a matter of fierce But that apparatus was, it’s clear now, years. McCarthy was a sharp-tongued debate, renewed recently by the publica- flimsier than it initially appeared. critic, in print and in person (it was she tion of the “Black Notebooks,” private Neither deconstruction nor any other who said, of playwright Lillian Hellman, journals that Heidegger kept through grand philosophical or ideological pro- “Every word she writes is a lie, including much of the 1930s and 1940s. They con- ject has been able to resolve the origi- ‘and’ and ‘the’”), and that sharpness tain more-explicit anti-Semitism than nary experience of deep and abiding could easily descend into spite. appears in his previously known work.) guilt. For that, Leaf, in Deconstruction, The fondness with which Mary Arendt was Heidegger’s student, and his turns to a much earlier tradition. The McCarthy is remembered has less to do most famous lover. final, brief scene shows Arendt and with her literary accomplishments—she Leaf’s play requires three actors, but it McCarthy at the latter’s Greenwich lavished an extraordinary prose talent has four characters. “Martin” looms Village apartment on Thanksgiving Day, on a handful of minor novels, the most omnipresent over the unfolding events, 1949. They are discussing the events of famous of which remains The Group and threaded deftly through the plot is an the last few months. (McCarthy has mis- (1963)—than with the snobbery and ongoing, increasingly urgent debate about carried; her cuckolded husband, not de sexual promiscuity that she parlayed the merits and demerits of his philosophi- Man, was by her bedside.) The conversa- into an enduring foothold in high soci- cal project, which de Man claims as his tion prompts from McCarthy a memory, ety. Nonetheless, the facts of her life intellectual patrimony. Against the back- and the stage goes dark with her recit- perhaps heighten rather than detract ground of Heidegger’s Nazism and de ing—at first for Arendt’s benefit, but from the drama of Deconstruction’s res- Man’s many sins (political and personal), finally for her own—the words of the olution. The lives that Leaf portrays Leaf’s question is clear: How should we “Hail Mary.” could have been different. God is not evaluate the intellectual achievements of This is a moving conclusion at which jealous with his grace. But He demands these bad or misguided men? Is it just McCarthy purists will sniff. The author that we call a sin a sin. Dismantling that coincidental, in de Man’s case, that “de- was raised in the Roman Catholic claim on us was the project of many men construction” can be used to pardon the Church—the period is recalled in her and women of formidable intelligence conduct of its founder? Memories of a Catholic Girlhood during the last century. Deconstruction Upon reflection, it should come as no (1957)—but shortly before her death she displays the wreckage, and suggests a MICHAEL ABRAMS great surprise that deconstruction took observed to the New York Times that she way to begin to rebuild.

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much of his time doing three things: Rachmaninoff. He also heard Horowitz. An seeking commissions; seeking perfor- “He was a pianist who made me aware mances; and seeking recordings. That is of what the piano could do,” says Mr. the lot of a composer. Walker. He was not always on. Like American Speaking of D.C., he was born and many of us, Mr. Walker heard him great raised there. When he was born—in and heard him shockingly bad. But Outsider June 1922—Warren G. Harding was when he was on—there was hardly any- president. Mr. Walker’s father, also thing else like it. JAY NORDLINGER named George, had come from Jamaica. There was another pianist at Oberlin, He was a doctor: a graduate of Temple by the way: Frances Walker. Mr. Walker’s Montclair, N.J. University’s medical school, in Phila- younger sister. Later, she would be a EORGE WALKER greets me at delphia. Mr. Walker’s mother, Rosa, was teacher on the same campus, the first the door, smiling and dap- American-born and a high-school grad- black woman to become a full professor per. I figured he would be uate. She worked at the Government at Oberlin. She still lives there. (dapper). Mr. Walker is a Printing Office. From Oberlin, Mr. Walker went to gentlemanG of the old school. I’ve never Both Walkers observed standards. Curtis, where one of his teachers was seen a photo of him when he wasn’t They did not even use slang. Not even Rudolf Serkin, a major pianist. Mr. wearing a coat and tie. He is dressed that “okay,” which was spreading like a weed. Walker remembers everything Serkin way now, in his own home. I have a feel- Mr. Walker knew his grandmother— said. But he did not say much. And he ing he wouldn’t welcome a guest any his mother’s mother—very well. Her did not know some of the scores, says other way. name was Malvina King. She had had Mr. Walker, as well as he thought he did. We are in Montclair, N.J., a town two husbands. She lost the first one For composition, Walker had Rosario some 15 miles from Manhattan. “I’ve when he was sold at auction. The second Scalero, who had also taught Barber. lived in this house since 1969,” Mr. had died. Mrs. King herself was an One day, Samuel Barber returned to Walker says. “I was the first black per- escapee from slavery. One day, young the school in his uniform: the uniform son in this neighborhood.” I ask whether George asked her about it—the experi- of the Army Air Corps. He served he ever had any problems. No, he says. ence of slavery. She said one thing: Wednesday tea with Mrs. Bok, the Mr. Walker has many “firsts” to his “They did everything except eat us.” founder of the school. credit. He was the first black person to In 1946, Mr. Walker composed Lyric Walker had an orchestration class graduate from the Curtis Institute of for Strings, his best-known piece. It is with Gian Carlo Menotti. “It was a Music, the famous conservatory in dedicated to his grandmother. joke,” he says. I respond, “He didn’t give Philadelphia. He was the first black per- He went to Dunbar High, the famous you much?” Mr. Walker says, “He didn’t son to earn a doctorate at the Eastman school in Washington—the most fa- give us anything.” Walker pretty much School of Music, the famous conserva- mous high school for blacks in all of taught himself orchestration. tory in Rochester, N.Y. He was the first America. It produced a who’s who of He is nothing if not blunt in his black person to win the Pulitzer Prize people, including Edward Brooke, the opinions. At one point, we’re talking for Music. And so on. first black senator (popularly elected). about Kreisleriana, the Schumann Obviously, Walker is a musician—a Mr. Walker says that some of the teach- piece. “If you listen to that pianist from composer and pianist. That’s the right ers at Dunbar were very good; and South America,” he says, rubbing his order, too. You can see it in the title of some were not so good. He really val- eyes in disgust. The object of his dis- his autobiography (2009): “George ued his classmates. gust, he cannot remember the name of. Walker: Reminiscences of an American One teacher he unquestionably valued “Martha Argerich?” I hazard. He nods Composer and Pianist.” There is some- was Clyde McDuffie, who taught Latin. his head. “Terrible,” he says. “Terrible. thing else about the title: the word They spent one year—fourth-year She has no idea about the piece at all. “American,” unqualified. Latin—on the Aeneid. Mr. Walker can No sense of the rhythm, no sense of “I feel strongly about that,” Mr. still recite the famous opening: “Arma the phrasing . . .” Walker tells me. “I’ve always disliked virumque cano . . .” Also, the poem In 1945, Walker played Rach - being called ‘African-American.’” As impressed on him the importance of duty maninoff’s Concerto No. 3 with the he elaborates on this, he points out that above personal desire. Philadelphia Orchestra, under Eugene his music is dotted with American tunes: He graduated from Dunbar at 14. Did Ormandy. The maestro was not very hymns, spirituals, pop standards, and his father pressure him to follow in his nice to very many people. “Was he nice the like. You may not hear them—they footsteps as a doctor? Not at all. “He to you?” I ask. No. Ormandy should at are planted in this classical music. But never brought up the subject.” Young least get points for consistency. they’re there. George would be a musician. He went to Warmly supportive of young Walker This summer, Mr. Walker will mark Oberlin College in Ohio, which had was Nadia Boulanger, the famous com- his 95th birthday. His latest composition been admitting blacks for a hundred position teacher in France. She had is his Sinfonia No. 5. It will be played by years. George was the youngest student taught anyone and everyone, including a the National Symphony Orchestra, in in the college, 15. slew of Americans: Virgil Thomson, Washington, D.C., at the beginning of At Oberlin, he heard many of the Roy Harris, Aaron Copland, Elliott the 2018–19 season. Mr. Walker spends greatest musicians of the day, including Carter. She taught Walker, too. “You’re

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George Walker

a composer,” she told him—a high com- all. This is tremendously frustrating for We talk about race and the impact of pliment, from that source. She confirmed a composer, Pulitzer or no Pulitzer. discrimination. Mr. Walker says that a for him that he was on the right track. Mr. Walker was married to a fellow big problem is tokenism: People per- “Just keep going,” she said. pianist, Helen Walker-Hill. They had form a work by a black composer, pat In the middle of the century, and for a two sons, Gregory and Ian. Mr. Walker’s themselves on the back, and think, long time thereafter, there was tremen- father kept mum about medicine. What “Well, that’s done.” Also, black pianists dous pressure on composers to conform about Mr. Walker? Was he laissez-faire may well be asked to play Rhapsody in to a modernist fashion: a fashion epito- with his sons? No. “I’m the microman- Blue—instead of a concerto by, say, mized by Pierre Boulez, the famous ager!” he says. Gregory is a violinist; Mozart. (Note that Rhapsody in Blue Frenchman. Did Walker ever feel such Ian is a playwright. Gregory is a cham- was composed by a Brooklyn-born son pressure? “No,” he says. “I’m an out- pion of his father’s music, including a of Russian-Jewish immigrants. The sider. I don’t have connections to com- violin concerto, written for him. family’s original name: Gershowitz.) posers. Even black composers.” In his 90-plus years, George Walker Mr. Walker has many gripes about the I ask him who, among his colleagues, has written 90-plus works. Interesting music business, as everyone does. But is underrated. He cannot give me an how that has worked out. In 2008, I he has no gripes about music. He had his answer. I ask who is overrated. He says, interviewed Elliott Carter on the occa- first piano lesson at five, 90 years ago. emphatically, “Boulez.” sion of his hundredth birthday. (He And he loves music as much as he ever Walker had a busy career of teaching, lived to 103.) He was diligently work- did. “The love of music permeates me,” along with composing and playing. He ing. Mr. Walker, too, works. “When he says. “The love of good music.” taught at several institutions, mainly you’ve been doing something for so Is there any music he is feeling espe- Rutgers, in New Jersey, where he was long, there’s nothing else you can think cially close to now (apart from his own)? chairman of the music department. In of doing,” he says. Well, it depends on his mood, he says. 1996, he wrote Lilacs, for voice and I ask, “Are there musical ideas in your Often, he will go back to some piece he orchestra (setting Whitman’s poem head all the time?” No, he answers. “I has known for many years—and discover “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard try not to think about music except when something new in it. Why didn’t I under- Bloom’d”). It was this work that won I sit down to compose.” That both sur- stand this initially? he’ll think. But he him the Pulitzer Prize. Since its pre- prises and impresses me. I think of a does now. And “my respect for great FRANK SCHRAMM miere, it has barely been performed at modern word: “compartmentalization.” music is never-ending.”

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Leaving his passionate spouse (Sienna Film Miller, excellent in her umpteenth anguished-wife role) and their small Jungle children, he takes ship for South America and a landscape familiar from Herzog, Fever Coppola, and Conrad. The jungle is thick and steaming, the natives inscrutable, the whites sunk in moral squalor, the entire ROSS DOUTHAT enterprise surreal. The edge of civilization is a rubber plantation that enslaves Indians N this river, God never while staging torchlit operas beneath the finished his creation.” So jungle foliage; its swollen proprietor per- says one of the natives mits Fawcett to go on upriver but every- in Aguirre, the Wrath of one warns him that nobody comes back. God‘O, Werner Herzog’s fevered early-’70s He goes on, accompanied by Henry nightmare about a mad conquistador in Costin—a huge-bearded weirdo of an Charlie Hunnam in The Lost City of Z Amazonia, searching for El Dorado and aide-de-camp, played by the Twilight finding only baleful, stagnant jungle. It’s a heartthrob Robert Pattinson with eccen- movie that haunts The Lost City of Z, tric glee—and the usual assortment of As history this is rubbish: The real which is about a kind of spiritual descen- expendables. There are piranhas, spears Fawcett was if anything more racist than dant of the conquistadors, the English flying from the foliage, boils, and black the Edwardian norm, and he thought that explorer Percy Fawcett, whose early- vomiting, and you wait for the Aguirre- his Zed would resemble the imaginary 20th-century search for a lost civilization esque madness to kick in . . . but it doesn’t, African empire of Zu-Vendis in his in the rain forest captivated the world— quite. Instead Fawcett successfully finds friend H. Rider Haggard’s adventure right up until he (and his son) vanished the river’s source, completes his map, novel Allan Quatermain—an island of without a trace. keeps (most of) his men alive, and heads superior “white Indians,” perhaps of The source for the film is the recent back to England a hero. European ancestry, hidden away amid book by ’s David But he brings with him what he thinks is the under-evolved natives. But his in- Grann, which interweaves the history of something more important than a map: vented wokeness lets the director, James Fawcett’s expeditions with Grann’s shards of pottery and other goods, found Gray, play with a kind of politically cor- attempt to follow in his footsteps. Perhaps deep in the jungle, that seem to him proof rect reversal of the Aguirre/Heart of understandably, the film carves away the that there might have been, or might still Darkness formula, in which the secret of modern framework, giving us instead be, a real hidden empire in Amazonia, a the jungle isn’t horror but some kind of what amounts to a straight biopic of city to match the El Dorado of 17th-century white-supremacy-destroying revelation. Fawcett, from his beginnings as a soldier- legend. This city, dubbed “Z” (and pro- Except there is no revelation within the turned-cartographer to his mysterious nounced “Zed,” in fine English style) confines of Fawcett’s story; only misap- celebrity-explorer end. But the result sug- because it would represent the last undis- prehensions, blind alleys, overconfidence, gests why Grann made himself a charac- covered civilization, becomes Fawcett’s and ultimate defeat. This was where ter: Without a link to the present, the life’s obsession, drawing him away from Grann’s present-day framing device was movie’s story starts strong and then fades his family and back into the jungle time useful, because it let him suggest—not out, its power evanescing with its subject. and time again. always convincingly, given the gap be - The first act finds Fawcett, played by So perhaps Fawcett found madness on tween what’s been found and what Charlie Hunnam (most famous from the the river after all. That’s one way of inter- Fawcett imagined—that subsequent exca- TV biker melodrama Sons of Anarchy), preting the movie—that its hero never vations provide the vanished explorer with trying to overpower social barriers with escapes from the jungle of the mind, that a kind of vindication. The movie tries to do energy and charisma. An officer in the the vines that creep around his neat brick that with a few lines before the end credits, pre–World War I British Army, he’s dash- English home are really creepers around but to weak effect: In the ending that ing, courageous, bold—in the opening his imagination. But the film isn’t sure it matters, the shadows claim both Fawcett scene, we watch him down a stag by taking wants to say that; it doesn’t want to go the and his firstborn (Tom Holland), and all the forest trails where the rest of the hunting full Aguirre or Kurtz with its subject. So studied, mystic ambiguity of Gray’s final party fears to go—but also fatally ham- instead it tries to complicate things by sug- scenes cannot turn that darkness into light. strung by his family name: His father was gesting that maybe Fawcett’s obsessions The trip upriver is a departure for Gray, a drunk and a gambler and that’s enough to were actually visionary, idealistic, woke— who up till now has made a series of put a ceiling on the prospects of the son. portraying him as a kind of post-imperial moody, evocative, ultimately disappoint- Until, that is, the Royal Geographic explorer, an enlightened Dances-with- ing movies about ethnics and immigrants Society comes calling, offering him a Jaguars sort who champions the capacities and gangsters in greater New York. But career-making opportunity in western of the indigenes against racist condescen- he’s traveled far to achieve the same Amazonia, where the rubber-rich border- sion, a man who seeks Zed because he results, because “moody, evocative, and lands of Bolivia and Brazil require a thinks it will prove all the white male patri- ultimately disappointing” describes The AMAZON STUDIOS mapmaker to stave off a resource war. archal snobs of the British Empire wrong. Lost City of Z as well.

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studios for Pilates and Gyrotonics. I did it seem special to us—the voice of Mr. City Desk not follow him there—I move the Science. But defecation is also neces- weights my trainer tells me to as best I sary for survival, yet it is not special in The Staff can—but my wife did. For eleven years the same way. Eating summons its own I kept in touch at second hand. arts: farming, hunting, herding, cook- Only weeks ago, my wife heard on ing, serving. When they have done their Of Life the grapevine at the movement salon work, eating is best done together. The that Anthony was opening a new restau- person who eats alone is overworked, or rant. In a vacant space on a corner there under-socialized. Even if you are alone, was activity. The old sign, for a defunct as only those who live among millions bistro—no longer an invitation but a can be alone, there are clean, well-lighted tombstone—came down. There was places where you can eat alone together. light in the commercial sepulcher. Then There may be no communication, but came an invitation to the soft opening, a there is communion. We are all present party for friends and family. and accounted for. His new space was inviting—street There is a young woman friend of level on an avenue, with outside tables; ours whom we met 20 years ago when no more stairs. But the two dining she was a coltish actress working as a RICHARD BROOKHISER rooms were dark and small. So he waitress. She moved cross-country opened up the dividing wall, and paint- and got into real estate, which also OU cut them along the ed the remaining walls white and the depends on the suspension of disbe- face, like a diamond. pressed-tin ceiling gold. The salt and lief. Then came her cancer. Luckily for Then you have to pepper shakers were wrapped in gold her, the colt had become one smart shake them—shake foil with ragged tops—the pomegranates animal. She researched online, picked ‘Ythem until your teeth rattle. Then you of the Hesperides. Anthony presided in the brains of fellow support-group cook them in good oil.” a white chef’s jacket, with the Italian members, found a clinical trial back Anthony described making fried zuc- colors on the collar. He could not yet on this coast, and is in the midst of a chini without the slices subsiding into offer dessert or espresso, and the ser- treatment that sounds like science fic- sodden, shapeless messes. The shaking vice was slow—an hour, plus eleven tion. One hurdle had been passed suc- is to get the water out, the good oil is to years—but the dishes tasted exactly as cessfully, so we went together to the make sure the freshness comes through. they had before. hard opening of Anthony’s restaurant He had done it, or overseen it being Like Italian Americans of an older on Easter Sunday. done, for decades in his neighborhood generation, Anthony speaks with his If it had been a play, this would have restaurant, a red-sauce place with a light hands: on the shoulder (greeting, been the tech rehearsal. You hard-open, hand. Red sauce—and chicken francese farewell), on the forearm (emphasis), as the SecDef said, with the restaurant and veal milanese—was the genre: on the hand (special emphasis). We, you have. But once again, every dish familiar, popular, moderately priced. less articulate, are reduced to words was just what it should be. Why, I won- The light hand meant it was that much and appropriate facial expressions. dered, is cheesecake like this available better than similar places. The kitchen Eleven months ago, he was diagnosed no place else that I go? Is Grandmother’s remembered Grandmother, but you did with cancer. (Forearm.) (Mm! frowns.) recipe lost but for here? not automatically become a peasant or a They gave him radiation and chemo - Our young friend (so we think of child eating there. You went up a stair- therapy, and rearranged his alimentary her, for she will always be younger case, grandfathered in: Today there canal. (Gestures, showing what was than we are) showed her suture: sta- would need to be a wheelchair-accessible rehooked where.) “So this,” we said to pled, like tax returns. Anthony is thin- funicular railway. There were white him, of his restaurant, “is your re - ner and more stooped; even his sons linen tablecloths and a picture of the sponse.” (Nod/shrug: defiance and have, here and there, gray hairs. But not pope (Polish—what can you do?). fatalism: I go on, fingers crossed. Then only do we go on, sometimes we can Anthony’s sons held divisional com- hand on hand, he had to go off to check come back, from mischance or worse mands. The music was Frank and Dino on another order.) (disaster, misbehavior). but at levels that permitted conversation. Celebrants came and went: bald For a time. Every restaurant will His empire expanded like Rome dancers from the movement salon, a close for good. The cancer that Anthony absorbing Carthage and Gaul. He Village person bearded like Father surmounted has killed two of my bought established restaurants in Little Ferapont, knowledge-class profession- friends; baffled now, it can call up a Italy and the East Village, opened a can- als who in the city consider themselves hundred reinforcements, and time is the tina on his ground floor. Then the lease middle class. Passers-by, he told us, most powerful of all. on the home property expired, the land- were stunned to see him again; one So let’s eat. And to be more impudent, lord’s children aimed at a new rate of woman said she remembered being let’s eat well. Friends at the front of the return, and that was that. taken to his old place in a stroller. house, friends in the kitchen, friends at Anthony did not repine. He had al - Why is eating special? It is necessary the table. Take a picture on the sidewalk ready moved into movement, opening for survival, and so evolution has made before we leave. Buon appetito.

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Happy Warrior BY HEATHER WILHELM Noisy Desperation

EWARE, America: Hillary Clinton is officially out from the national stage? Oh, don’t be silly. Here’s what of the woods. Hillary thought about—or at least what she’d like us to think “I went to the woods because I wished to live she thought about—deep in the heart of the woods: “Resist, B deliberately, to front only the essential facts of insist, persist, enlist.” life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, Official reports have not yet confirmed it, but sources tell when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” That’s not me that at the exact moment Clinton spoke these lines, there our friend Hillary, of course, who has grown notorious for was an instant national shortage of spare extra-large sighs. her post-election Chappaqua woodland hikes. It is Henry Meanwhile, the cairns marking Thoreau’s Walden Pond cabin David Thoreau, whose ponderous Walden, published in trembled, shuddered, and shed small water drops resembling 1854, went on to inspire thousands of future writers to cook human tears, while a slow, ominous rumble startled hikers on up excuses to jaunt off to some supposedly mystical, deep- the summit of Yosemite’s Half Dome. (“It was like the earth thought-inspiring wilderness cabin when they really just was trying to roll its giant eyes, man. You know, like in a wanted some time off and a few rounds of s’mores. cosmic sense,” one climber noted, munching a Clif Bar.) Thoreau learned his lessons—“The mass of men,” one went, Two thousand four hundred thirty-three miles to the east, a “lead lives of quiet desperation”—as did writer Bill Bryson, winsome 26-year-old trekker named Astro Mulch barely whose 2006 book A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America dodged a wicked bolt of lightning at the pinnacle of the on the Appalachian Trail chronicled the ups, downs, and bear- Appalachian Trail, just as the word “enlist” wafted into the air. streaked horrors of America’s best-known footpath/weight- Since that fateful speech, one hasn’t been able to miss the loss program/center for prodigious beard growth. (Dear indefatigable Hillary. She flits here and there, pitching a readers, a warning: If you meet a man who “just came back vague “resistance.” She grouses about misogyny. She’s fre- from the Appalachian Trail” and he does not look like an quently joined in the proverbial media salad by her mysteri- emaciated Grizzly Adams, he did not actually go on the trail.) ously omnipresent daughter, Chelsea, whose public persona Among the many benefits of far-out wilderness experi- resembles a bland multilevel pile of overly processed “nutri- ences—on the Appalachian Trail, those benefits include tious whole-wheat” bread. This is all rather hilarious, given earning a “trail name” such as “Danger Pants,” “Botox that most reports credit Clinton, the valiant face of the Marge,” or “Gluten Puff”—the most important, perhaps, is a “resistance,” with tanking her own presidential run. sudden sense of clarity. Time spent in the great outdoors In Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign, often reminds us, sometimes startlingly, of our embarrass- reporters Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes detail the Clinton ingly small personal niche in a vast and churning universe. camp’s numerous woes, most of which had one thing in com- “I understand now, in a way I never did before,” Bryson mon: Hillary Clinton. And yet, as we now like to say, she per- wrote, post-trail, “the colossal scale of the world.” The more sisted. “The one person with whom [Hillary] didn’t seem starry-eyed Thoreau, who encouraged the building of theo- particularly upset,” Allen and Parnes write, was “herself.” Oh. retical castles in the air, nevertheless echoed the sentiment: The American public might feel otherwise: A new poll “Resign yourself,” he wrote, “to the influence of the earth.” “shows more buyer’s remorse” among Clinton’s voters than Here’s more of Thoreau on his stoic bent: “It is a character- among Trump’s, reports the Washington Post. “While just 4 istic of wisdom not to do desperate things.” percent of Trump’s supporters say they would back someone Since we’re speaking of desperate things, let’s turn back to else if there was a re-do of the election, fully 15 percent of America’s new queen of quiet—yet strangely entitled!—des- Clinton supporters say they would ditch her. Trump leads in peration. Hillary Clinton, as we all know, is not a contempla- a re-do of the 2016 election 43 percent to 40 percent after los- tive Thoreau or a whimsical Bryson. After an embarrassing ing the popular vote 46–44.” electoral defeat that was almost certainly her own fault, Ah, well: What’s done is done. Let’s walk through this Clinton has slowly emerged from her own set of forest wan- wild and crazy world, eyeing its wonders. We’ll traipse derings, armed with her own set of insights, bearing deep and through national forests. We’ll trudge through deserts filled valuable wisdom about . . . well, I’ll let her take it from here. with pristine Native American artifacts, pondering time “It’s the kind of things you think about when you take itself. We’ll weave through remarkably intact Egyptian ruins, long walks in the woods,” she told a meeting of the dwelling on the majesty of history and our small part in the— Professional Businesswomen of California in late March, Hey, wait a minute! What kind of knucklehead would scrawl describing her post-election exile and supposedly powerful LEONARDO 1820 on top of rare hieroglyphics? While we’re on bonding period with Mother Nature. Was it self-reflection? the topic, what about the yahoo who scrawled CARL + BESS + Self-accountability? The somber realization that it might be IT’S BEEN A SWELL 1920 on that priceless pictograph? And who time to succumb to the old vaudeville hook and slide away on earth would carve MALLORY XO into that ancient, giant redwood? Why couldn’t they just take a walk in the woods? Heather Wilhelm is a NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE columnist and a senior Oh, never mind. We know the answer, don’t we? Boy, do contributor to the Federalist. we ever know.

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