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The Little Nazis KE V I N D

The Little Nazis KE V I N D

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September 11, 2017 $5.99

TheThe Little Nazis KE V I N D . W I L L I A M S O N O N T H E C HI L D I S H A L T- R I G H T

$5.99 37 PLUS KYLE SMITH: The Great Confederate Panic MICHAEL LIND: The Case for Cultural Nationalism

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! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! !! "e Reagan Ranch Center ! 217 State Street National Headquarters ! 11480 Commerce Park Drive, Santa Barbara, California 93101 ! 888-USA-1776 Sixth Floor ! Reston, 20191 ! 800-USA-1776 TOC-FINAL_QXP-1127940144.qxp 8/23/2017 2:41 PM Page 1 Contents

SEPTEMBER 11, 2017 | VOLUME LXIX, NO. 17 | www.nationalreview.com

ON THE COVER Page 22 Lucy Caldwell on The ‘N’ Word p. 15 Everybody is feet tall on the BOOKS, ARTS , and that is why the & MANNERS Internet is where the alt-right really lives, one big online 35 THE DEATH OF FREUD E. Fuller Torrey reviews Freud: group-therapy session The Making of an Illusion, masquerading as a political by Frederick Crews. movement. Kevin D. Williamson 37 ILLUMINATIONS Michael Brendan Dougherty reviews Why Buddhism Is True: The COVER: ROMAN GENN Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment, ARTICLES by Robert Wright. DIVIDED THEY STAND (OR FALL) by Ramesh Ponnuru 38 UNJUST PROSECUTION 12 David Bahnsen reviews The Anti-Trump Republicans are not facing their challenges. Chickensh** Club: Why the WHO NEEDS ADVISORY BOARDS? by Reihan Salam Justice Department Fails to 13 Prosecute Executives, Trump should take the opportunity to rethink the Right’s relationship to by Jesse Eisinger. Big Business. IN THE DESERT by Lucy Caldwell 40 A SALZBURG TRIO 15 Jay Nordlinger attends the Salzburg Senator Jeff Flake makes a Goldwateresque stand against Trump. Festival. THE USES AND ABUSES OF CULTURAL IDENTITY 17 by Saagar Enjeti & Marshall Kosloff 42 LOVE AND ITS COMPLICATIONS Look to ’s near-win in Virginia. Ross Douthat reviews The Big Sick. THAT MAGIC FEELING by James Rosen 19 43 DOWN THESE LONELY A day at Abbey Road Studios. STREETS Richard Brookhiser remembers the neighborhood. FEATURES 22 THE ‘N’ WORD by Kevin D. Williamson They hate Jews and adore swastika swag, but don’t you dare call them that . . . SECTIONS THE CASE FOR CULTURAL NATIONALISM by Michael Lind 27 2 Letters to the Editor It’s time to start taking E pluribus unum seriously again. 4 The Week MONUMENTALLY NAÏVE by Kyle Smith 33 Athwart ...... James Lileks 30 The Long View ...... Rob Long For the Left, taking down Confederate memorials is just the beginning. 34 36 Poetry ...... Li Po 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, , 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-FINAL_QXP-1127940387.qxp 8/23/2017 1:02 PM Page 2 Letters

SEPTEMBER 11 ISSUE; PRINTED AUGUST 24

EDITORINCHIEF Richard Lowry Masked Media Critics Senior Editors Richard Brookhiser / Jonah Goldberg / Jay Nordlinger Ramesh Ponnuru / David Pryce-Jones Managing Editor Jason Lee Steorts I have enjoyed NATIONAL REVIEW for nearly four . Even when NR Literary Editor Michael Potemra Vice President, Editorial Operations Christopher McEvoy gets it wrong (in my view), they almost always do so thoughtfully and from Executive Editor Reihan Salam sound conservative principles. Roving Correspondent Kevin D. Williamson National Correspondent John J. Miller In the current issue, you presented me with an exception to this rule. I refer Senior Political Correspondent Jim Geraghty Art Director Luba Kolomytseva to your (admittedly mild) defense of CNN’s “doxxing” (or, rather, threat to Deputy Managing Editors do so) of a young “Redditor” who created and posted a video graphic of Nicholas Frankovich / Fred Schwarz Robert VerBruggen CNN being beaten up by . Rather than focusing on CNN’s a) Production Editor Katie Hosmer Assistant to the Editor Rachel Ogden inability to take a (kind of lame) joke, or b) devotion of investigatory Contributing Editors resources to such a trivial matter when there are other obvious issues that Shannen Coffin / Ross Douthat / Daniel Foster could benefit from such “sunlight,” you said: “Why should political social- Roman Genn / Arthur L. Herman / Lawrence Kudlow Mark R. Levin / Yuval Levin / Rob Long media posts be anonymous? . . . The identity of social-media pundits is a Mario Loyola / Jim Manzi Andrew C. McCarthy / Andrew Stuttaford matter of public interest. Let the sun shine in.”

NATIONALREVIEWONLINE Here’s the problem: Anonymous speech is an integral and fundamental Editor Charles C. W. Cooke right tied to the right to free speech itself. If this were not inherently obvious, Managing Editor Katherine Connell Deputy Managing Editor Mark Antonio Wright please note that our nation’s civil-rights jurisprudence recognizes this fact Senior Writers Michael Brendan Dougherty / David French explicitly. The modern-day political climate is such that a person’s life can be Critic-at-Large Kyle Smith destroyed for even trivial transgressions of the current liberal pieties. More National-Affairs Columnist John Fund Reporter Katherine Timpf grimly, leftist mobs roam the land ready to destroy property, pepper-spray the Associate Editors Molly Powell / Nick Tell Manager, Office & Development Russell Jenkins objects of their unhinged hatred, and worse. There are sound reasons to Web Editorial Assistant Grant DeArmitt Web Producer Scott McKim remain anonymous when being provocative, and weighing these against the ludicrous idea that some guy with a GIF editor is a “pundit” of any stripe does EDITORS- AT- LARGE Kathryn Jean Lopez / John O’Sullivan not exactly scream out for “sunshine.”

BUCKLEYFELLOWSINPOLITICALJOURNALISM Of course I am aware that the First Amendment applies to state action and Alexandra DeSanctis / Theodore Kupfer thus says nothing about whether CNN is permitted to deploy resources to COLLEGIATENETWORKFELLOW cause someone harm as a penalty for mocking it. The “civil rights” argument Philip H. DeVoe is just a parallel: This is the powerless standing up to the powerful, some- Contributors Hadley Arkes / James Bowman / Eliot A. Cohen thing liberals claim to admire (until the moment it’s something that gets their Dinesh D’Souza / Chester E. Finn Jr. / Neal B. Freeman own panties in a bunch, of course). Combined with CNN’s willingness to die James Gardner / David Gelernter / George Gilder Jeffrey Hart / Kevin A. Hassett / Charles R. Kesler on the barricades to protect the anonymity of someone making up fake-news David Klinghoffer / Anthony Lejeune / Alan Reynolds Tracy Lee Simmons / Terry Teachout / Vin Weber allegations against Republicans, I think the real story here is the appalling hypocrisy on display. Vice President Jack Fowler Chief Financial Officer James X. Kilbridge Accounting Manager Galina Veygman J.D. Baldwin Accountant Lyudmila Bolotinskaya Circulation Manager Jason Ng Via e-mail Head of Integrated Sales Jim Fowler Senior Account Executive Kevin Longstreet

PUBLISHERCHAIRMAN E. Garrett Bewkes IV John Hillen HE DITORS RESPOND FOUNDER T E : You’re welcome, and thanks for your support. We William F. Buckley Jr. agree that CNN deserved at least mild criticism, which is what we think we

PATRONSANDBENEFACTORS gave it. We agree as well that anonymous speech is constitutionally protected. Robert Agostinelli Whether it should be celebrated is a different matter. Sometimes “the power- Dale Brott Mr. and Mrs. Michael Conway less” are just the cowardly. Mark and Mary Davis Virginia James 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 Clearly, any sportscaster named Nathan Forrest need not apply for a job at ESPN.

n got the axe. He had alienated many of his co- workers through infighting and leaks, and White House chief of staff John Kelly reportedly (and understandably) regarded him as a destabilizing force. Bannon told a reporter that the heroic nationalist phase of the Trump presidency is over. If so, it is over before it began: The administration has not yet even drawn a See page 10. design for its border wall. Bannon also dismissed white suprema- cists as a tiny and impotent fringe; but they are stronger than they were before he decided to give the alt-right, in his own words, a “platform.” Bannon is back at Breitbart.com, where we hope he listens to his better angels.

n Mitch McConnell complained that Trump had excessive expectations for how quickly Congress would move on legisla- tion. Trump fired back, and then kept firing back. Both men have a point. Trump had said again and again how easy it would be to pass a health-care bill; but McConnell did have seven years to prepare one. Instead of allocating blame, perhaps they should spend their time trying to get a health-care bill passed?

n Last spring, Julius Krein, a young, Harvard-educated financier, launched American Affairs, a new policy journal that sought to lay a coherent intellectual foundation for an arguing that none of his rivals can match his devotion to the pres- ascendant Trumpism. Now, in the aftermath of Trump’s contro- ident—although in truth he seems closer to Senate majority versial re marks about Charlottesville, Krein has renounced his leader Mitch McConnell. Mo Brooks, a conservative in the U.S. support of, and his vote for, Donald Trump. “Not only has the House who did not support Trump last year, spent his campaign president failed to make the course corrections necessary to save obscuring the fact, and didn’t make the run-off. Now Strange his ad min is tra tion,” Krein wrote in , “but his faces Judge , who came in ahead of him in the first in creas ing ly appalling conduct will continue to repel anyone round. Moore is famous in state politics for putting his own inter- who might once have been inclined to work with him.” After pretation of God’s law above the commands of higher courts. Is finding much to admire in the “hazy outlines” of an insurgent there some way to bring Sessions back to the Senate? campaign, Krein is now reduced to salvaging Trump’s agenda from “the wreckage of his presidency.” Given how fervently he n A CBS News story reports that Iceland is currently leading the supported Trump, only to quit on him less than a year into his world in “eradicating Down syndrome births.” The country has presidency, one hopes he will undertake this new project with a not discovered an innovative treatment for the genetic disorder. new sense of modesty. Icelanders are simply killing babies with Down syndrome before birth, through a combination of prenatal testing and abortion. n joined the critics of President Trump’s response This testing is optional, but doctors encourage it and the vast to Charlottesville. There was much to criticize, especially Trump’s ma jor i ty of expectant mothers choose to receive it. Nearly 100 statement that “very fine people” had joined a march that was in percent of Icelandic mothers who receive Down-syndrome di ag - truth undisguisedly anti-Semitic and racist. Romney, though, no ses (which are sometimes false) have an abortion. The situa- went with a less meritorious criticism: that Trump was wrong to tion in the U.S. is not all that different. The West has made a call out left-wing protesters for their violence, since neo-Nazis moral rather than a medical breakthrough, and not a good one. were worse. Romney is right that Trump should choose his words more carefully; on this occasion, he should have done the same. n All of a sudden, Senator Marco Rubio acquired a new security detail. Why? Apparently, because a leading player in the Ven e - n The Republican primary for Jeff Sessions’s seat in the Senate zue lan government ordered that he be assassinated. Senator Ru - has not shown Alabama Republicans in their best light. Luther bio is one of the world’s fiercest, and most specific, critics of the ROMAN GENN Strange, the appointed incumbent, has spent the campaign Ven e zue lan regime. He has particularly antagonized Diosdado

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Cabello, a veteran chavista believed to be in charge of the coun- n Few organizations in the enjoy more unde- try’s security forces. It is Cabello who evidently ordered the hit. served respect than the Southern Poverty Law Center. Formed Any indication that the Venezuelan government has tried to fol- in 1971 to oppose white supremacists in the South, it has since low through should be met with a fierce response. morphed into a particularly dangerous and disingenuous far-left activist and fundraising organization. Its current specialty is n Donald Trump just can’t quit his favorite General John Per - classifying and tracking so-called hate groups, and it has created shing myth. After the Barcelona terror attacks, he tweeted: a list only a university radical should love. It lumps together “Study what General Pershing of the United States did to terror- true white supremacists with Christian organizations such as ists when caught. There was no more Radical Islamic Terror for the Alliance Defending Freedom and the Family Research 35 years!” This was an obvious reference to a story he told on Council (FRC). It tracks hate-group leaders and also calls the campaign trail. He claimed that Pershing, when he served in American Enterprise Institute scholar Charles Murray a the Philippines, ordered the execution of dozens of prisoners “white nationalist.” It has, in other words, become unhinged, with bullets dipped in pig’s blood. This brutal action, accord- and other unhinged people have used its lists to abet their acts ing to Trump, so demoralized Islamic terrorists that they were of violence. In 2012, Floyd Lee Corkins tried to massacre FRC quiet for decades. There is no evidence to support Trump’s employees after seeing the group’s name on the SPLC list. In story. There is instead considerable evidence that General Per - 2016, student radicals referred to the SPLC to justify physical shing pursued more lenient policies than his predecessors in attacks against Murray. It is thus a genuine shame that corpora- order to earn goodwill from Filipinos. It is hard to know which tions such as Apple and JPMorgan Chase chose to respond to the is worse: that Trump has libeled an American hero, or that he alt-right march and terror attack in Charlottesville by giving thinks he complimented him. money to the SPLC. It has demonstrated time and again that it exacerbates American divisions and intentionally blurs the n Two presidential councils composed of high-profile business lines between genuine Nazis and mainstream conservatives. executives—one dedicated to economic strategy, the other to The SPLC is a cancer on the American body politic and de serves manufacturing—were dissolved after an executive exodus that no one’s support, especially not support from two of America’s began with the resignation of Merck CEO Kenneth Frazier, most powerful and respected corporations. who quit in protest of the president’s clumsy response to the murder and mayhem in Charlottesville. He was soon joined by n If you’re traveling to Seattle, bring a lead umbrella. Since the heads of Walmart, 3M, Intel, and others, and the strategy 1984, a law has prevented the Washington state government board decided to dissolve. Trump’s first response, as it often is, from conducting preparations for, or setting out an evacuation was to take to to savage his critics: He accused Frazier plan in case of, a nuclear attack. During the Cold War, Wash ing- The Southern Poverty Law Center is a cancer on the American body politic and deserves no one’s support.

of keeping pharmaceutical prices high in a “ripoff” of American ton legislators wanted to demonstrate their confidence in Rus - consumers. But as it became clear that Trump was on the losing sian nonaggression and deescalate first-strike tensions. The end of that fight, he decided to claim he had decided to dissolve leg is la tors wanted to go even further: Nuclear preparations are the advisory boards himself. The councils themselves are no imprudent, reads a vetoed section of the bill, because they give great loss, inasmuch as they seldom met and would have, at ci t izens a false sense of security in an emergency situation most, offered careful advice to a president who truly listens where there are almost no survivors. The law was then forgotten only to a tight circle of confidants. For quite some time now, until May, and a bill with bipartisan support now awaits a com- Republicans have been losing support in the business world mittee hearing in the state senate. North Korea has concentrated even as their reputation for slavish fealty to business interests the mind . . . sort of: The committee will have to wait until Jan - stayed intact. The first trend, at least, seems to be accelerating u ary to discuss the bill. in the Trump era. n The deadly terror attacks in Spain remind us, if we needed a n The American Civil Liberties Union has proven itself half- reminder, that Europe has a terrible new normal. It’s now expect- commendable in recent weeks. On the plus side, the outfit has ed that every few weeks or—at most—few months, a terrorist assiduously ignored calls to drop its staunch commitment to the will strike somewhere, usually in the heart of one of Western Eu - First Amendment—even when the amendment protects neo- rope’s greatest cities. The attack in Barcelona was just as heinous Nazis. But then along came some men who elected to exercise as we’ve come to expect, with the driver reportedly maneuvering two rights at once, and the ACLU’s resolve failed. Henceforth, to strike as many people as possible in the middle of one of the the group explained, it would not be defending the speech right city’s favorite pedestrian gathering-places. Spanish security of those who “hate” if they are simultaneously carrying firearms. forces had developed a reputation for effectiveness after the hor- Hostility to the Second Amendment trumped devotion to the rific Madrid train bombing in 2004, but as the saying goes, the First. Should gun owners be denied their Miranda readings or de - police have to be effective every time, while the terrorists do not. prived of an attorney if arrested while carrying a weapon? The The attack heightens the urgency of the continued offensive ACLU’s version of the Constitution is evolving before our eyes. against ISIS. It’s vital not just to destroy the inspiration for

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terrorist violence but also to stabilize the Middle East and stanch that is nothing compared with what her husband has done to the the flow of migrants and refugees into Europe. Otherwise, country at large. expect the new normal to get worse still.

n ISIS is committing against religious minorities in n Colin Kaepernick will be featured at the National Mu - Iraq and Syria, the State Department reiterated in August, in its seum of African American History and Culture, a division annual report on international religious freedom. Last year, under of the . An exhibit on Black Lives pressure, the Obama administration finally designated the crisis Matter will include shoes, a game-worn jersey, and other genocide, following unanimous votes to the same effect in the items belonging to the former San Francisco 49ers quarter- U.S. Congress and the European Parliament. The word “geno- back. His knee, not his arm, earned Kaepernick most of his cide” has consequences: America and 142 other countries have fame. He spent much of the 2016 season signed the U.N. Genocide Convention, which obliges them “to kneeling during the pregame national undertake to prevent” the abomination and to “punish it.” The anthem to protest, he said, U.S.-led military coalition in Iraq has made progress at least police brutality. The world is toward preventing it from continuing in Mosul. Meanwhile, deluged with political opin- more words, but the right words: In addition to prioritizing geno- ions. The gridiron promises cide victims for aid and asylum, a bill passed by the House, refuge from them, and though stalled in the Senate, enjoins the State and Justice De part - Kaepernick knocked a hole ments to help foreign governments identify and prosecute geno- in the canopy. He end ed up cidaires where possible. draw ing more attention to himself than to his cause, dur- n The U.S. government is facing what seems a great and terrible ing those brief mo ments re - mystery. Several of our diplomats have returned home from served for athletes and spectators Cuba, to seek medical treatment. In Cuba, they were deafened— on both sides to face in the same by some sort of sonic device, apparently. The same happened to direction and agree about some- Canadian diplomats. Who did this? The Castro dictatorship? That thing. The museum can honor would seem unlikely. For decades, our diplomats have been in whom it wishes. Cuba, unmolested. Why would the dictatorship molest them now, when full diplomatic relations have been established? Also, would not an attack on U.S. diplomats be reckless in the extreme? n With its wave of statue vandalism, the alt-left delivered a crude Possibly suicidal, for the Cuban government? Moreover, the gov- rebuke to Robert E. Lee. Now they have added “. . . and the horse ernment of Justin Trudeau has very warm relations with Havana. you rode in on.” Students at the University of Southern Cal i for - So, who did this, and why? Let’s hope that these questions do not nia are calling USC’s horse mascot, Traveler, racist because his remain mysteries. name is similar to that of Lee’s favorite horse, Traveller. The ori- gins of the mascot’s name are unclear, but the first horse to use it n Hong Kong was supposed to enjoy an exemption: to be an at USC was a Hollywood veteran who had appeared in a girl- island of democracy and liberalism, attached to a one-party dic- with-horse movie called “Snowfire” and been a regular on the tatorship (with a gulag). That exemption has proved chimerical. Lone Ranger series (at USC, even the mascot is a movie star). The government has now jailed three students who have led Over the years (the current incumbent is Traveler IX), the horse’s democracy protests. The judge in the case said that the sen- name and image have been trademarked, and his care and hous- tences were necessary to deter a “sick trend”: namely the belief ing are paid for with an endowment that a comp-lit professor can of some Chinese that they should live in a democracy. Such only envy, so Traveler isn’t going anywhere. (Admittedly, all the thinking is “arrogant and self-righteous,” said the judge. One of Travelers have been white males, though the original was half the students—Joshua Wong—said, “You can lock up our bod- Arabian, if that’s any help.) ies, but not our ! We want democracy in Hong Kong. And we will not give up.” n As the USS Indianapolis steamed from Guam to the Phil ip - pines on July 30, 1945, the bombing of Hiroshima was only a n Robert Mugabe is the dictator of Zimbabwe, 93 years old. His week away. The ship’s 1,196 crewmen didn’t know that, of wife, Grace, is his former secretary, and a mere girl at 52. The dic- course, even though they had just delivered a secret cargo, later re- tator is set to run in one of his sham elections next year. If he dies, vealed to be enriched uranium, to the island of Tinian, where the Grace has vowed, the ruling party will run his corpse. Mrs. M. is bomb was being assembled. Most of them did not even live to see

GETTY IMAGES a fit partner for the dictator. In South Africa recently, she beat the the end of the war—because shortly after midnight, two Japanese /

ERS hell out of a young woman—a 20-year-old model—who had torpedoes sank the Indianapolis, killing a quarter of the crew im - 49 been spending time with two of the Mugabe sons. Mrs. Mugabe’s me diately and leaving the rest exposed for several days, until a weapon of choice was an extension cord. “She flipped,” reported Navy patrol plane happened to spot the site of the sinking. Of the model, “and just kept beating me with the plug. Over and those who survived the initial blast, only 321 were still alive when SAN FRANCISCO / over.” The model was left a bloody mess. The government of rescue craft arrived; the rest drowned or succumbed to hypother- South Africa has smoothed over the incident, allowing Mrs. Mu - mia, seawater poisoning, or sharks. It was the largest loss of life at ga be to return to Zimbabwe, where life goes on as normal. Mrs. sea from a single ship in the history of the U.S. Navy. Now Paul MICHAEL ZAGARIS M. has assaulted people before—particularly photographers. But Allen, the Microsoft billionaire, has located the wreckage of the

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Indianapolis on the floor of the Philippine Sea. It’s an impres- then to oppose or support causes ranging from South African sive technical feat that we hope may provide a measure of clo- apartheid to American Indian rights. His comedy career by now sure for the families of those who died and the 22 remaining abandoned, he turned ever more ascetic, preaching against drugs survivors—and prompt renewed gratitude from the rest of us. and advocating better nutrition for the poor. He denounced abor- tion as a form of black genocide. Full of interlocking conspiracy n Arthur Finkelstein was one of theories, which he thundered about with passion in later years, he the most famous, most effective, was an enigmatic man whose excesses tended sometimes toward and most notorious Republican the oddball but often toward the righteous. Dead at 84. R.I.P. consultants. He mastered many arts, including negative cam- AT WAR paigning. He was a Jewish, gay Trump’s Afghan Escalation libertarian willing to run com- bative hard-right campaigns. He RESIDENT TRUMP, thank goodness, doesn’t want to lose a believed that government had P war on his watch. He had a choice. On the one hand, he grown too big and helped to could follow his instinct to pull out of Afghanistan, act elect politicians who would deal on his many bumptious calls to abandon the war, and please his with this trend. He also had an most fervent supporters. On the other, he could acknowledge the important insight: that there disaster that would result in Afghanistan and potentially the region were Democrats more conservative than their party who would if he followed this course and instead work toward a more vote for Republicans, if those Republicans were pitched to them responsible policy. He rightly picked the latter option and spoke in the right way. We take particular satisfaction in one election: to the nation about his new strategy. that of 1970 in which James L. Buckley became the “sainted ju - If President Obama had been as willing to examine his politi- nior senator from New York” (as his brother WFB would call cal promises and ideological predispositions in the light of real- him). Arthur Finkelstein had a virtuous hand in that election. He ity, he would not have pulled out of Iraq, creating the conditions has died at 72. R.I.P. for the rise of ISIS and for overwhelming Iranian influence in that country. Obama’s foolish choice, as Trump said, informed n The son of parents in small-time show biz, Joseph (or Jerome, his more sober-minded decision on Afghanistan. sources vary) Levitch hit the big time in his early twenties, star- Trump’s strategy will involve the deployment of an unspeci- ring with Dean Martin in nightclub comedy acts and on national fied number of additional troops, looser rules of engagement, television, which in the late 1940s was new. Movies followed. and pressure on our supposed ally Pakistan, which continues to America knew him as Jerry Lewis. He played a twitchy younger- play a dangerous double game by harboring our enemies. Any brother type, fast to jump but slow to comprehend—and boyish- future drawdowns will be based on an evaluation of conditions ly awkward, like early Woody Allen but without the philosophy in the country and region, not arbitrary deadlines. This is all to jokes. At age 33, Lewis wrote, directed, and starred in The Bell - the good, and better than a precipitous total withdrawal. But boy, a vehicle for his slapstick and sight gags. A few years later cautions are in order. he repeated the feat with The Nutty Professor, his favorite. He First, if we have established anything in Afghanistan over the appeared in more than 60 films. French critics lionized his crea - last 16 years, it is that victory will be extremely difficult to tive genius. Americans were slower to take him seriously, al- achieve given the limited in that tragic, war-torn, though by now his influence on comedy is not much disputed. highly tribal country. Anything recognizable as success will be He began hosting the annual telethon for the Muscular Dystro - impossible without a commitment much larger than the Amer i- phy Association in 1966 and raised more than $2.6 billion for it can public is, understandably, willing to contemplate. So, for all over the course of more than 40 years. Dead at 91. R.I.P. of Trump’s stalwart talk about winning, the realistic choice is between a holding action and defeat. n Hugh Hefner caught Dick It’s not clear that Trump will have the appetite for this difficult, Gregory doing standup comedy in twilight war over the longer term, and his natural predilections Chicago in 1961 and hired him to confused how he talked about the strategy. He said we aren’t work the Playboy Club. Gregory’s go ing to engage in nation-building, but if the course of the war career took off overnight, helped is de pen dent on the performance of the Afghan military and gov- by a profile in Time magazine and ernment—this, presumably, is what the conditions are about an appearance on The Tonight —we will need to try to foster the development of Afghan Show. Integrating wit and social national institutions, i.e., engage in some nation-building. commentary à la Lenny Bruce and As for Pakistan, Trump’s tough rhetoric was welcome. His Mort Sahl, Gregory established warm words about India, in particular, probably concentrated GETTY IMAGES himself as a specialist in observa- minds in Islamabad. But Pakistan won’t easily be pressured out /

tions on black–white social ten- of a policy of maintaining strategic depth in Afghanistan via the BROWN . sions during the civil-rights era. Taliban that it has pursued for decades out of a sense of its na- He went to Selma in 1963 to sup- tion al interest. Wrenching it into a different strategic orientation FREDERICK M

port a voter-registration drive and ran for mayor of Chicago in is a major diplomatic undertaking at a time when Rex Tillerson’s : 1967. The following year he ran for president, as a write-in candi- understaffed State Department appears to be held together with date. He went on hunger strikes to protest the Vietnam War and duct tape and baling wire. GREGORY

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THE WEEK

It is true, as the president said, that there was violence on both sides in Charlottesville. But the neo-Nazis were the instigators via their idiot march, and they had a murderer in their midst. They must get the lion’s share of the blame. This shouldn’t mean turning away from the depredations of . It, too, came spoiling for a fight. In fact, during much of the violence it was hard to tell which helmet- wearing, pole-wielding, punch-throwing side was which. Antifa is, contrary to its name, a genuinely fascistic movement, and the same people on the left who are lambasting President Trump for his lack of moral clarity need to demonstrate some of their own by forth- rightly denouncing the violent fanatics on their side. The extremes of the two sides feed off energy and attention they derive from street fights, and there will probably be more Charlottesvilles. Next time we hope Trump finds the words nec- essary to the moment.

CULTURE The Confederates and Us

RESIDENT TRUMP asked a reasonable question about President Donald Trump announces new strategy for Afghanistan, August 21, 2017 Confederate statues: “Where does it stop?” Charlottes - P ville, Va., voted to take down its statue of General All that said, Trump’s approach is better than the alternative. If Robert E. Lee; will statues of George Washington be next? the Taliban were going to (at least in its propaganda version) He too owned slaves. There are voices on the left who want expel us from Afghanistan, it would vastly increase its prestige, to prove Trump right: They have Washington, Jefferson, and and if it were to take over the country, it wouldn’t be long until Columbus in their crosshairs. Since this controversy heated fanatics began using its territory to plot against us. This was our up, even statues of Joan of Arc have not been safe from hos- experience in Iraq. Obama’s pullout hastened that country’s tile graffiti. down ward slide and the day we had to send troops back in. There are answers to Trump’s question, but they all involve— Trump is right not to want to repeat the cycle in Afghanistan. although the word these days may require a trigger warning— discrimination. A flag honoring the Confederate fallen in a POLITICS cemetery is not the same as a statue honoring the president of the The Charlottesville Melee Confederacy in a public thoroughfare. A monument erected to celebrate a white-supremacist riot, which New Orleans had until HERE’S no putting a happy face on President Trump’s earlier this year, is not the same as a memorial to the father of T ham-fisted and equivocal response to the mayhem and our country. And a public decision to alter a city’s historical murder in Charlottesville, where white supremacists markers is not the same as a private act of vandalism. Those who staged a march and rally during which one of their number mur- take it upon themselves to deface or take down monuments dered a young woman and injured 19 others when he drove his should be prosecuted. car through a crowd of counter-demonstrators. Many of the Confederate memorials were put up not just to The president started on the day of the violence with an commemorate the dead, celebrate the achievement of peace, or oddly vague condemnation of hatred “on many sides.” Then, teach the facts of our history: They were put up to make state- under extreme political pressure, he came back two days later ments of support for the Confederate cause or of defiance against and more specifically denounced the neo-Nazis and their desegregation. It is no surprise that they are taken as such by allies. If he had left it at that, the media might have still carped many people, including neo-Nazis. In these cases, to put statues at his tardiness, but no one would have been able to criticize in a museum, or to add explanatory plaques, is not to erase history the content of his final statement on the matter. Instead, he held but to undo its distortion. a press conference the next day where, clearly angry at the crit- In considering the past, we should be clear-eyed about both icism of his remarks, he let loose as only this president can. In historical evils and human fallibility. Not everyone who abhors an instantly notorious line, he said there were “fine people” slavery today would have abhorred it had they been whites in marching on both sides. 1850s Georgia. Yet time and place do not efface right and wrong. Good people disagree about a great many things, including General Lee was given a choice in 1861, and made the wrong one. the propriety of maintaining Confederate monuments in pub- Admiral Farragut made a better one. Is our country capable of lic places. But that is not what Charlottesville was about. making the necessary distinctions, or even discussing them in tel - Charlottesville was host to a torchlight parade organized by white li gent ly? Our debate may concern judgments of our past, but our supremacists who were chanting slogans against Jews, flying conduct of it will render a judgment on our present. GETTY IMAGES

/ swastika banners, and demanding racial separatism. There are no good people in that parade. These ideas are not merely mistaken EDITOR’S NOTE: The next issue of NATIONAL REVIEW but evil, and the president of these United States ought to have will appear in three weeks. MARK WILSON said as much in the plainest terms possible.

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Start with immigration, an issue that played an important role in Trump’s victo- ry in the Republican primaries. In July, Trump endorsed legislation to reduce legal immigration levels by half. Many of the Republicans who are most critical of Trump, including Senators Jeff Flake and Lindsey Graham, criticized him over this issue too. But other conservatives who fre- quently oppose Trump, including the edi- tors of this magazine, are for the bill. Or take health care, the subject of the major legislative effort Congress has undertaken during Trump’s tenure. Both Arizona senators, Flake and John Mc - Cain, have been cool at best toward Trump. But the two of them split on health care: Flake voted for the Senate Republicans’ most recent bill, McCain against it. Senator Mike Lee of Utah, who did not vote for Trump, was skeptical of the main Republican bills because they Divided They Stand (or Fall) did not deregulate enough. Governor John Anti-Trump Republicans are not facing their challenges Kasich of , who also did not vote for Trump, was opposed because they re- BY RAMESH PONNURU strained federal spending on . These divisions among anti-Trump RESIDENT DONALD TRUMP’s If the administration continues on its Republican reflect the diversity of the response to the mayhem in current trajectory, the Republican oppo- coalition the party represents. That coali- P Charlottesville, Va., led to re - sition could overcome those obstacles. tion includes business-oriented moder- newed calls for Republicans to During his first seven months in office, ates, tea-partying conservatives, and abandon him. Even beforehand, reporters some of his strong supporters have working-class nationalists. None of these had written about a possible challenge to become weak supporters and some of groups would easily fit in the Democratic his renomination in 2020. Vice President his weak supporters have quit on him. coalition, but they have very different out- Mike Pence felt obliged to disclaim any More Republican voters could leave looks. The first and second, but not the interest in being a challenger himself. him if he makes no further legislative third, back free trade and (at least vaguely) Interest in this question is a sign of progress, or if they grow weary of entitlement reform. The second and third, Trump’s political weakness. Nobody defending him in future controversies, but not the first, would like to curtail affir- would be talking about the 2020 pri- or if the economy weakens, or if special mative action. The first and third groups, maries if Trump’s poll numbers were prosecutor Robert Mueller uncovers but not the second, like the idea of a big stronger, or if he had signed major legis- damaging information about him. If federal push for infrastructure spending. lation on health care or tax reform. But his his numbers fall enough, some ambi- Trump won the primaries as the cham- Republican opponents face four hurdles tious Republican politician will want pion of the working-class nationalists, a before they can mount a serious campaign to run against him. Republican voters group that had grown as a proportion of against him—and they do not seem to be might even eventually conclude that the Republican voting base but that had paying any attention to the biggest one. dumping the president is their surest not been well represented in the party’s Three of those hurdles are familiar from way to keep the Democrats out of the leadership. He also won it because the coverage of the Trump administration’s White House—although that is going to other two groups were split. Moderates first seven months. First, Trump retains be a very hard sell, since he won last who disliked Trump weren’t going to vote the support of most Republican voters: November when a lot of people offered for Ted Cruz to stop him, and conserva- Roughly 80 percent of self-identified plausible reasons why he wouldn’t. tives weren’t going to vote for Kasich. Republicans approve of his job perfor- Even if anti-Trump Republicans grow These splits have survived the cam- mance. Second, it’s not clear who would in number, though, they will still face a paign. When Mitt Romney registers his be able and willing to lead a Republican fourth problem: They are internally divid- disagreement with the president’s plan campaign against him. Third, we are in an ed. They are united in disliking Trump, but to withdraw from the Paris climate- era of strong negative partisanship. Even they are not united in all their reasons for change accord, most members of the Republican voters who have serious reser- disliking him, in what direction they business-moderate faction nod along. vations about Trump will be loath to do would like to see the Republican party go The other two groups prefer Trump’s anything that might help the Democrats in, and in what policies they want the approach. Trump supporters in those ROMAN GENN win the next presidential election. country to adopt. groups look at Romney’s declaration

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and are reinforced in their support of the Company, a sprawling media conglom- president and in their irritation with anti- erate, both of whom parted ways with Trump Republicans. the Strategic and Policy For um on June Many of Trump’s Republican critics Who Needs 1, just after the president decided to say that his character repels them much withdraw from the Paris climate accord. more than his policies. That his character Advisory Silicon Valley and Hol ly wood were never is deficient a point on which the critics on the Trump train, so one could dismiss almost entirely agree. Whether or not they Boards? their departures as little more than postur- like the idea of cutting immigration, they Trump should take the opportunity to ing. After the Charlottesville incident, dislike having a president who is mercur- rethink the Right’s relationship to however, it became clear that just about ial, petty, dishonest, complacently igno- Big Business all members of both advisory boards were rant. Their consensus on this admittedly rushing for the exits. Seeing the writing important question obscures their dis- on the wall, Trump disbanded them both. BY REIHAN SALAM agreement on much else. There is a case for simply saying good It is perhaps not surprising, then, that so riddance to the advisory boards and all many of these anti-Trump Republicans T the start of his presidency, that they represent. Most of the corporate are admirers of Senator Ben Sasse of Donald Trump invited a num- chieftains who agreed to serve as part of Nebraska. Thoughtful, well read, self- A ber of America’s leading busi- the Strategic and Policy Forum and the deprecating, Sasse is as far from Trump in ness executives to serve on Manufacturing Jobs Ini tia tive did not do personality as it is possible to be. His crit- two new advisory boards: the Strategic so out of any affection for Donald icisms of Trump have centered on the and Policy Forum, devoted to providing Trump. Rather, they presumably recog- president’s offenses against decency and the Trump White House with advice on nized the value of having the ear of the lack of familiarity with constitutionalism. economic issues, and the Manu factur ing president, or at least one of his under- What he is known for, besides those criti- Jobs Initiative, which focused more nar- lings, since it could mean influencing cisms, is giving voice to a conservative rowly on the president’s plans for an the country’s policy direction in ways philosophy that emphasizes virtue, civil industrial revival. Though there’s noth- that would serve the interests of their society, and their relationship to each other. ing unusual about having corporate shareholders. When it became clear that What Sasse has not yet done is take a America’s leading lights serve on such associating with the Trump administra- stand on the issues that divide anti- boards, which have been around for ages, tion was proving too costly to their rep- Trump conservatives. Advocates of the the fact that Trump was able to persuade utations and those of their companies, immigration-control bill don’t yet know so many of them to sign up in the wake the CEOs bolted. Fair enough. Then, of whether to count him as an ally or an of his controversial campaign seemed a course, there is the cultural dimension. opponent. If he comes out for reducing reassuring sign, especially to jittery As the country’s educated professionals immigration, he will disappoint a lot of investors. If the chief executives of grow more socially liberal, it’s hardly Trump critics; so too if he comes out PepsiCo, General Motors, IBM, and other surprising that corporate elites would against it. Sasse kept his head down for corporate giants were willing to do busi- follow. Perhaps a divorce between the most of this year’s Obamacare debate, ness with the new administration, surely GOP and corporate America was in - rising only to demand a vote on a bill that all would be well. evitable, Trump or no Trump. would have deferred most questions That’s not quite how things have But there’s another way to look at the about health policy for a year or two. turned out. Almost from the inception of dissolution of Trump’s advisory boards, If Sasse were to run for president, these advisory boards, members have which is that it gives the Right an though, such choices would become in- been wrestling both publicly and private- opportunity to rethink its relationship to escapable. He could well find himself ly with the propriety of serving on them. Big Business. appealing only to Cruz Republicans or On February 2, less than two weeks after By all means, business executives only to Kasich Republicans—and in Trump’s inauguration, Tra vis Kalanick, should do their best to serve all of their either case he would probably fail. who was then the CEO of Uber, resigned stakeholders, whether they reside in Or perhaps he would find a way to from the Stra te gic and Policy Forum to Columbus, Ohio, or in Kuala Lumpur. unite the different elements of the party protest the president’s temporary visa As far as U.S. policymakers are con- behind an agenda that the public would freeze on a handful of Muslim-majority cerned, however, the essential question find appealing and that would actually do states, better known as the “Muslim ought to be whether a given business is some good for the country. It’s a chal- ban.” Given Uber’s va r i ous PR woes and serving the interests of the American lenge that has so far eluded President its heavy reliance on immigrant drivers, people broadly understood. Trump. But it has also eluded congres- this shouldn’t have been too surprising. Right now, our chief interest should be sional Republicans, and the Republican Distancing himself from Trump was an in boosting productivity growth. From candidates whom Trump defeated. The easy way for Ka la nick to score points the end of the Second World War to the Republican party has enormous power with his many detractors on the left. start of the Great Recession, real GDP but does not know what it wants to do Something similar could be said of per capita in the U.S. has grown at an with it. Republicans who detest the pres- Elon Musk, the celebrated tech visionary average of 2.5 percent a year. Since ident should not kid themselves that this behind SpaceX and Tesla, and Bob Iger, 2007, it has grown a mere 0.6 percent a predicament is all his fault. the chief executive of the Walt Disney year. Just about every challenge facing

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American society would be much easier expensing is nothing but a sop to high- that while doing so will inevitably create to meet if the U.S. grew at even half the investment businesses. Why should we winners and losers, the gains are more rate it did in decades past. prioritize their needs over those of other than big enough to make up for the losses Viewing matters through this lens, we firms? But if our goal is to raise produc- in aggregate terms, and government’s can’t really speak of a single, monolithic tivity, there’s no question that we ought to role is to help ensure that the losers are corporate America united around a sin- encourage firms looking to invest in new, adequately compensated. That’s hard to gle “pro-business” agenda. Rather, we more advanced equipment rather than do if the winners from globalization shift have innovative, high-growth companies reward companies for investments they their most valuable intellectual property that contribute to rising productivity by made ages ago—not least because do ing to lightly taxed foreign subsidiaries to get investing in their U.S. work force, along- so would likely boost growth in wages out from under the IRS. side a growing number of corporate and incomes over the long haul. Conservatives tend to support moving dinosaurs that are content to exploit We see a similar dynamic at work in to a territorial tax system, in which U.S. cheap credit and cheap labor to keep their the debate over the tax treatment of the multinationals would no longer have to broken business models afloat. profits U.S. firms earn overseas. The U.S. pay U.S. taxes on money earned abroad, Consider the ongoing debate over government, and in particular U.S. trade yet they’d be free to plow the profits corporate-tax reform. negotiators, do a great deal to protect the back into their U.S. operations. This is House speaker and his interests of U.S. multinationals, regard- also the position favored (not coinciden- allies are pushing hard for corporate-tax less of whether those companies deign to tally, I’d venture) by most U.S. multina- reform to include “full expensing,” return the favor by reinvesting in the U.S. tionals. The danger, however, is that which would allow businesses to deduct economy. But that’s hardly the fault of under a territorial system, U.S. multina- the entire cost of their investments in the corporate executives. The real problem is tionals would have good reason to move

The real problem is that, as it stands, the U.S. corporate-tax code gives U.S. multinationals a perverse incentive not to invest at home.

first year instead of depreciating them that, as it stands, the U.S. corporate-tax all of their taxable operations out of the over a longer period. Others, including code gives U.S. multinationals a perverse U.S. and into tax havens. most members of the House Freedom incentive not to invest at home. As an alternative, Congress ought to Caucus, would rather pursue deep cuts At 35 percent, the statutory U.S. cor- consider adopting a global minimum in the corporate tax rate but leave the porate income-tax rate is among the tax, under which foreign earnings current law’s depreciation schedule highest in the world, so naturally U.S. would be subject to a specified tax intact. There’s no way to do both with- corporations do what they can to avoid rate—17 percent, let’s say. Companies out massively increasing the federal paying it. Many U.S. multinationals that have already paid 17 percent or deficit, so lawmakers are duking it out achieve this by shifting their operations more in corporate taxes to a foreign over the kinds of companies that should to overseas tax havens, where they can government would be free to bring the come out ahead. defer paying U.S. taxes on their foreign rest of their profits back to the U.S. Businesses that intend to make signif- earnings indefinitely, so long as they tax-free. Those that have paid less icant new capital investments—firms never use their foreign profits to invest in would have to pay the difference to the building massive fulfillment centers, the U.S. Needless to say, this is a per- U.S. Treasury. Essentially, the global manufacturers that rely heavily on high- verse result. One would hope that when minimum tax would punish U.S. tech equipment, and fast-growing start- U.S. multinationals expand their busi- multinationals that go abroad primari- ups—are far more inclined to back full nesses abroad, at least some of the ly to dodge U.S. taxes while leaving expensing, for the obvious reason that it resulting profits would make their way all others—the ones that are doing would greatly ease the burden of expand- back home—ideally to be reinvested in their part in the globalization bargain— ing and upgrading their operations. In domestic operations, which could then be pretty much untouched. Moreover, the contrast, established firms that have no a source of high-wage, high -productivity reven ue from a global minimum tax intention of making new investments, or employment. When the Apples and could finance tax cuts elsewhere, includ- that have more labor-intensive business Alphabets of the world keep their profits ing a move towards full expensing. models, are adamantly opposed to full locked up in Ireland, however, this sim- If Congress were to adopt a corporate- expensing if it means giving an inch on ply doesn’t happen. tax overhaul that helped increase the the corporate tax rate. While this might sound like a niche gains from globalization while spurring Narrow though this debate might seem, issue, it goes to the heart of what we a domestic investment boom, it would be the direction Republicans choose to take might call the “globalization bargain.” As an achievement for the ages. Donald on tax reform will have profound implica- Brad Setser of the Council on Foreign Trump could happily claim credit, and tions for America’s economic well-being. Relations has observed, one of the central soon the CEOs would come flocking To the partisans of an overall rate cut, full arguments for embracing free trade is back to the White House.

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Following in the tradition of Barry would not survive and that resignation Goldwater, Flake is not the first Re - was his only option. Famously, Gold - publican senator from Arizona to contra- water traveled to the White House the Conservatism vene GOP marching orders—it was just night before Nixon’s resignation to meet last month that John McCain doomed with the president, to tell him that the In the Desert attempts to repeal Obamacare, the cul- writing was on the wall. Senator Jeff Flake makes a mination of a career that has included Jeff Flake is now having a Goldwater Goldwateresque stand against Trump crossing the aisle to join the late Ted moment with Donald Trump, of whom Kennedy in pushing comprehensive his new book is highly critical. Bucking BY LUCY CALDWELL immigration reform, not to mention the the narrative of the party faithful, who less well-loved but seldom forgotten hold their nose as they stand by Presi - , Ariz. campaign-finance reform of the early dent Trump, Flake contends that the F you drive 200 miles northeast of aughts, the McCain-Feingold Act. current administration represents the Phoenix, deep into Navajo County, As the borrowed title of Flake’s new “executive branch in chaos.” And he is I Ariz., you will find yourself in the book, Conscience of a Conservative, making such criticisms in a year when Town of Snowflake. Nestled in a reminds us, Arizona Republicans have a he must survive both a primary chal- corridor of the state between the Hopi history of marching to their own beat lenge and a general election to retain his and Fort Apache reservations, this is and incubating endangered political Senate seat. But if history is any guide, Arizona’s high country—the woodsy philosophies. And it is also in the tradi- Flake’s resistance to Trumpism will not White Mountains, a region that bears tion of Arizona Republicans to oppose be his undoing. Despite its reputation as little resemblance to the low country of presidents they consider dangerous. It a red state, Arizona produces national the Sonoran Desert. was Goldwater who, along with politicians who are anything but parti- The town of around 5,000 is not exact- Arizona congressman John Rhodes, san. John McCain credits former U.S. ly a cultural hot spot. Snowflake’s claims made clear in 1974 to President Nixon, senator Dennis DeConcini, a Democrat to fame include being an early hotbed of a man he’d long considered dangerous who represented Arizona from 1977 to Mormon polygamy (a lifestyle choice to the republic, that his presidency 1995, for mentoring him when he took that landed one of the town’s founding fathers in jail) and, later, the location of the purported alien abduction that in - spired the sci-fi movie Fire in the Sky. But now, perhaps the most notable thing about Snowflake is that it is where the new leader of a conservative resis- tance to Trumpism, Arizona’s junior U.S. senator, Jeff Flake, was born. The similarity between his surname and “Snowflake” is no coincidence—it was Flake’s great-grandfather who was imprisoned for polygamy after founding the town. Flake’s western bona fides in - clude being a fifth-generation Arizonan. His father was mayor of Snowflake, and his uncle a beloved speaker of the Arizona House of Representatives. Before he won a bid for the U.S. House in 2000, Jeff Flake served as executive director of the Goldwater Institute, a conservative think tank with an empha- sis on individual rights. (I worked at the Goldwater Institute between 2009 and 2014.) To say that Jeff Flake is a native son of

VIA GETTY IMAGES this state would be an understatement. Lucy Caldwell is the chief strategy officer and exec- utive vice president of Crowdskout, a data-man-

WASHINGTON POST agement, marketing, and analytics platform for THE / campaigns, nonprofits, and advocacy. She previously LEARY ' worked as the senior political adviser to the

BILL O Goldwater Institute. Senator Jeff Flake

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office. The senior senator brought Mc - the late journalist Bob Novak, had primaries, and it has usually been GOP Cain along to hold frequent bipartisan died of a brain tumor. I had never met contests that they have chosen to vote in. press conferences with reporters to fos- Flake, but he had sniffed out the fami- It’s no secret that the Trump agenda, ter debate. McCain tells similar ly connection. which will now be front and center in about former Arizona Democratic con- “It’s just such a loss,” Flake told me, Flake’s reelection race, has failed to gain gressman Mo Udall. recounting how he and Bob had fre- traction with independents. That bodes Nor do Arizona voters tend to vote quently met for breakfast in Washington well for Flake in a Republican primary straight-ticket. Trump won the state before Bob’s illness. He considered Bob against a Trump loyalist. (Another poten- last year, but several darlings of the far a sounding board for his thoughts about tial Flake challenger recently character- Right suffered defeat, including breaking rank. Bob had gained some ized himself without irony as “drink ing Trump ally , the longtime enemies on the right by questioning the the [Trump] Kool-Aid.”) Maricopa County sheriff and immigra- Iraq War, which Flake by then also On issues ranging from ENDA to tion firebrand. opposed. What he had really valued Cuba, Flake’s past and present contrari- Over the years, Flake has defied the about Bob, Flake told me, was how will- an positions are in fact consistent with party line several times, and he’s been ing he was to go against the grain on what most Americans think, according no worse for the wear electorally. In issues of the day. to polls. A few of Flake’s detractors 2013, his first year in the Senate, he I didn’t get the job, but this exchange, point out that in recent months he has voted in favor of the Employee Non - which put Flake’s commitment to appeared to toe the line on the Trump discrimination Act (ENDA)—the bill thoughtfulness over partisan loyalty on administration’s policy agenda. In July, would prohibit, in hiring and employ- display, has stuck with me. His critics on for example, the senator voted for the ment, discrimination on the basis of both the left and the right who have “skinny” Obamacare repeal, which went sexual orientation or gender identity— called his denunciations of Trump a down to defeat. for the second time, having previously stunt have obviously not been paying But Flake’s warnings about Trump are done so as a House member. During attention these 15 years that the man has as much a statement about the impor- the Bush administration, Flake be - been in office. tance of our policymaking culture as came a vocal opponent of the Iraq War. Noting that Flake’s approval ratings they are about the content du jour of pub- In the debate over climate change, he are at an all-time low in the state, some lic policy. Consider the senator’s words has been warm, at times, to cap-and- speculate that he must be fearful about in on July 31: trade. At the end of the last adminis- reelection next year—some right-wing tration, he was the lone Republican pundits have even posited that this so- There was a time when the leadership of senator to support opening trade with called stunt will mean he’s finished. The the Congress from both parties felt an Cuba. He traveled with Obama to nego- Trump administration has already met institutional loyalty that would fre- tiate the deal. with would-be primary challengers, and quently create bonds across party lines in defense of congressional preroga- Flake was also one of a handful of in August, the president himself tweeted tives in a unified front against the White Republican senators to decline to en- that Flake was “toxic” and that it was House, regardless of the president’s dorse Trump during the 2016 campaign. “great to see” former state senator and party. . . . Vigorous partisans, yes, but He stayed home during the Republican perennial candidate throw even more important, principled consti- National Convention last summer and her hat in the ring to unseat the senator. tutional conservatives whose primary chastised Trump for his campaign Trump called him “weak on borders, interest was in governing and making rhetoric and style. crime and a non-factor in Senate.” Of America truly great. This is not an act—it’s genuine Flake, course, in Arizona, polls have not always and I’ve seen this first-hand. Eight years been a reliable indicator of reelection Twitter-length Flake last summer, on ago, wanting a break from undergradu- chances. When McCain was running for learning of ’s nomination to ate life, I took a leave for a semester and reelection just two years ago, his the Clinton ticket: “Trying to count the retreated to Arizona, my home state. I approval ratings were among the lowest ways I hate @timkaine. Drawing a had dabbled in journalism but had never for any U.S. senator, yet he won reelec- blank. Congrats to a good man and a worked in politics. I applied for a job to tion handily, first by obliterating Ward, good friend.” be a press assistant for Representative his primary challenger, who now hopes Flake is trying to breathe life back Flake and was invited to the district to unseat Flake. The last time a Re - into bipartisanship, which worked well office for an interview. publican senator from Arizona lost a bid for our country in the past, even if it’s To my surprise, after I’d spent a few for reelection was 1926. an outlook that our current president minutes with his chief of staff in a win- Arizona is a semi-open-primary state, doesn’t encourage. Like Goldwater and dowless, fluorescent-lit conference meaning that nonaffiliated voters can others who came before him, Jeff Flake room, Jeff Flake walked through the vote in any party primary they choose. will probably never be president him- door, dismissed his staffer, and began No Democratic presidential nominee self (nor, at this moment, is there rea- interviewing me himself. But Repre - has won Arizona since 1996, but regis- son to believe he has his eyes on that sentative Flake was not particularly tered independents, not Republicans, are prize). But a prediction: He will be interested in hearing about my nonexis- the largest voting bloc in the state by far. Arizona’s senator come 2019. And he tent qualifications for the role. It was a Arizona’s independents don’t stay home just might be the guy to get conser- few days after my stepmother’s father, when they have the chance to turn out in vatism back on track.

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the campaign, but that didn’t signify any deep-rooted changes taking place within The Uses and the GOP. Corey Stewart’s recent near-victorious gubernatorial-primary campaign in Abuses of Virginia against former RNC chairman and George W. Bush White House Cultural Identity official shows that’s just not Look to Corey Stewart’s near-win true. Stewart’s full-throated defense of in Virginia Confederate monuments and heritage has proven effective with the Republican BY SAAGAR ENJETI & base. In April, during the gubernatorial campaign, the Charlottesville city council MARSHALL KOSLOFF decided to remove the now infamous statue of Confederate general Robert E. RESIDENT DONALD TRUMP’s in - Lee. In response to this, Stewart tweeted: ability thus far to translate his “After they tear down Lee & Beauregard, P populist-nationalist message they are coming for Washington & into a coherent policy agenda, Jefferson. #HistoricalVandalism.” combined with his low approval ratings, Trump’s tweets in the wake of the could have some Republicans convinced recent violence in Charlottesville, tying that a return to “normalcy” is on the the debate over Confederate statues to horizon. For Republicans reluctant to political correctness, closely resemble support Trump, a return to normalcy Stewart’s April tweet. On August 17, would mean a full embrace of the Trump wrote: “Sad to see the history and traditional post-Reagan agenda of low culture of our great country being ripped taxes, entitlement reform, and free trade. apart with the removal of our beautiful Princippled They view this agenda as normal even statues and monuments. You can’t change giving made though GOP primary voters and Trump history, but you can learn from it. Robert himself repudiated free trade über alles E Lee, Stonewall Jackson—who’s next, easyyy. and all talk of entitlement reform during Washington, Jefferson? So foolish!” the 2016 presidential campaign. Trump Those who dismiss the danger posed by cited these establishment policy goals after Stewart and his ilk point to failed candi- DonorsTrust is the only donor- securing the GOP presidential nomination dates such as ’s , advised fund committmitted to the and in the early months of his presidency, who primaried Paul Ryan in the 2016 principles of liberty. but they are clearly not his focus. campaign. Nehlen was trounced, losing Many organizations offer donor- These Republicans might tell you 84 to 16 percent. In his campaign, Nehlen advised accounts to simplify your that Trump won only because too attacked Ryan for lacking loyalty to then- charitable giving. Only y DonorsTrust many primary candidates cluttered the candidate Trump, and he parroted Trump’s field, he faced one of the worst campaign positions, such as opposition to was founded to servee conservative general-election opponents in Ameri - illegal immigration and the Trans-Pacific and libertarian donorss who want to can history, and he was able to manipu - Partnership, while painting himself as a ensure that their commitmentmmitment to late lazy mass media. And once elected, successful businessman. liberty is always honoredored through Trump has been unable to get much Nehlen sounded like Trump, but he their charitable giving.ng. To learn done, the critics note, pointing to the failed to understand why Trump was how DonorsTrust can simpliffyy and poor initial rollout of the so-called successful in the first place: Trump’s protect your giving, give ive us a call or travel ban and to Trump’s inability to competitors generally supported immi- visit donorstrust.org/principles.principles. push Congress to pass populist legisla- gration reform and free trade, while tion of consequence. Republican primary voters generally were The apparent paralysis of the Trump skeptical on these issues; with his trade - administration has lured some into the mark aggressive rhetorical flourishes, comforting belief that there’s no need to Trump emphasized this gap. Nehlen rethink Republican orthodoxy. True, they lazily copied Trump’s exact words say, Trump destroyed one establishment without applying them to Wisconsin’s candidate after another, and he paid little first congressional district. Given the heed to conservative sacred cows during length of Ryan’s tenure in Congress—he BUILDING A LEGACY OF LIBERTY was first elected in 1998—his views on Mr. Enjeti is a reporter for the Daily Caller News DT Philanthropic Services trade and immigration are probably fairly -- • www.donorstrust.org Foundation. Mr. Kosloff is a public-interest fellow at close to his constituents’ views, or close NATIONAL REVIEW. enough to keep him in office.

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By contrast, Stewart’s energetic de fense when he mounted a pro-Trump rally across the South have reached out to him, of Confederate monuments and history, outside the Republican National Com - seeking advice on how to tap the same combined with his attacks on the media and mittee’s D.C. headquarters to protest cultural vein he did during the guberna - his lack of fealty to political correctness plans to shift resources away from torial race. Stewart’s hammering of a (which both are reminis cent of Trump), Trump’s Virginia campaign. He was then cultural-identity issue comes from a perfectly fit the local Virginia context. summarily fired by the Trump campaign dangerous new playbook that insurgent Traditional Republican orthodoxy has for highlighting the campaign’s conflicts GOP candidates can employ, perhaps to few if any means to quell the cultural with the RNC. great electoral benefit. Such a strategy unrest that drives the Trump and Stewart Stewart had announced his intention to may not depend on the political success of phenomena. Recent polling indicates that seek the Republican nomination for the Trump administration. Trump’s and Stewart’s similar positions governor in April 2016, but after his bitter “We deliberately were, at times, more on Confederate monuments over - departure from the Trump campaign, he controversial in order to attract main - whelmingly resonate with the Republican was considered a long shot by Virginia stream media, in order to attract earned base and the American populace at large. political insiders. Stewart’s statewide and media,” Stewart told In a Marist poll conducted after the August national profile rose after an infamous after his narrow defeat. violence in Charlottesville, 62 percent of “Ask Me Anything” dialogue in In Virginia and elsewhere, politicians respondents supported leaving up the which he referred to Gillespie as a have long used cultural identity and anxiety statues. A similar Economist/YouGov poll “,” agreed with the sug - as a tool to help them win elections. In found that 78 percent of self-identified gestion that former president 2014, Dave Brat, an economics professor Republicans either somewhat or strongly is a rapist, and “CONFIRMED” the at Randolph-Macon College in Virginia, disapprove of taking down the statues. forum’s suspicion that Democratic governor shocked the American political scene by Stewart placed Gillespie in a difficult Terry McAuliffe is a “cuck.” (“Cuck” is a unseating Eric Cantor, then the House position throughout the campaign, much term of abuse, based on the word “cuckold” majority leader and the speaker-in- as Trump is now doing to his opponents and inspired by a genre of pornography, for waiting. By all accounts, Cantor was a on the issue of Confederate and historical Republicans seen as emasculated and too conventional conservative who had statues. Though Gillespie does not sympathetic to the interests of foreigners.) checked all of the traditional Republican support getting rid of the monuments, he Stewart followed his “Ask Me Any - ideological boxes. But Cantor’s perceived did not make their removal a centerpiece thing” exchange with bellicose tweets support for immigration reform—Brat of his campaign. decrying nationwide efforts to remove depicted him as pro-amnesty in campaign He also wasn’t supposed to be in such a Confederate statues from public grounds. speeches—left him vulnerable to an tight race. Gillespie very nearly upset “Nothing is worse than a Yankee telling a insurgent campaign from the right. Virginia senator Mark Warner in the 2014 Southerner that his monuments don’t In hindsight, we can see that Brat’s Senate campaign. He has high name matter,” he wrote, though Stewart himself campaign resembled Trump’s and recognition, his pro-life views and pro- is no southerner, having grown up in Stewart’s. Brat was an underdog candidate growth tax agenda perfectly align with the Duluth, Minn. who attacked Cantor with fiery rhetoric conservative GOP base in Virginia, and he The national media pointed to polls on his immigration policy. Perhaps un - has shown a remarkable ability to appeal showing Stewart down 20 points a knowingly, Brat wrote the playbook for at to moderate suburban voters in northern month before the election, citing his least the next two election cycles. Once is counties, who are critical to winning an rhetoric as the cause and mirroring their a fluke, twice is a trend, thrice is certainty. increasingly blue state. predictions about Trump during the The GOP’s reluctance to address the Stewart is a Georgetown-educated presidential campaign. “Stewart’s cam - cultural-identity issues within its base has international-trade lawyer who has held paign may be remembered as showing left an opening for Stewart-like candidates elected office in Virginia for more than a the limits of race-tinged attacks on to hijack the party and the conservative decade. The first post to which he was ‘political correctness,’ even among a very movement as a whole. elected, in 2003, was that of Occoquan conservative electorate,” Ed Kilgore While it is sound policy to let states district supervisor on the board of wrote at New York magazine in May. and localities find their own responses to supervisors in Prince William County, “Racist dog whistles are one thing. hot-button cultural controversies, this is one of the wealthiest and most populous Howling at the moon while defending the simply not sufficient. The lesson of the counties in Virginia. Stewart gained Lost Cause is another thing altogether.” 2010s is that the biggest mistake the GOP regional notoriety in 2007 when the But Stewart came within 4,500 votes can make is to promote conservative board of supervisors ordered the county of beating Gillespie in the June 2017 orthodoxy without directly and clearly police to aggressively pursue illegal primary and did not let his loss stop him addressing issues of culture and identity. immigrants. Stewart went on to mount a from almost immediately declaring his In the meantime, Stewart and the next failed campaign for lieutenant governor. candidacy for the U.S. Senate in Virginia round of insurgents are preparing for 2018. He emerged as an unlikely statewide in 2018. Gillespie’s supporters blame the “After I showed that you could stand up for figure after Trump chose him to serve as close election on low voter turnout and Confederate monuments and . . . withstand his Virginia state-campaign chairman in note that Gillespie spent very little in the punishment from the mainstream December 2015. the primary campaign, but Republicans media, I knew that others would follow,” Stewart’s tenure as campaign chairman should not ignore Stewart’s popularity. he recently declared to BuzzFeed, in an came to a dramatic end in October 2016, Stewart says that candidates from ominous warning of things to come.

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and virtually every published interview Deposited alone, I couldn’t even stage they ever gave. I remain pathetically in the zebra-crosswalk photo. I just stood the grips of Beatlemania. across the street, keenly surveying the That Magic A physical sensation—a body-wide pre-Victorian structure at 3 Ab bey Road, tingling, possession by electricity— St. John’s Wood. Mere sight of the place Feeling struck during my first attempt at pilgrim- triggered the electricity that suddenly A day at Abbey Road Studios age. It was February 2006 and I was possessed me. More precisely, it was covering Secretary of State Con doleez za physical visitation: the reaching at last of BY JAMES ROSEN Rice’s meetings with the Quar tet, the the epicenter of All That, confirmation, as cadre of foreign ministers game ly draft- though any were needed, that the Beatles HERE is no happy ending to this ing a roadmap for the Israeli–Palestinian weren’t some grand media confection, a story. Not many years from conflict. (The session proved memorable hoax of Cap ri corn One dimensions . . . It T now—five? one?—the world only because former president Carter had all really happened. will be reduced to an uninhabit- made a special appearance to lecture the Those steps: That’s where they jumped able state in which no Beatles are alive. Quartet on—what else?—Israel’s per- on each other for the Please Please Me– Nor will this essay meet the dictates fidy.) With New York and Washington era photos, the outtakes from which first of feel-good pop psychology, wherein still asleep and a bit of time to myself, I appeared in Mark Lewisohn’s 1988 ref- my visit to Abbey Road Studios in wandered the streets near my hotel in erence volume, The Complete Beatles this summer neatly caps, and suit and tie, puffing a cigar and imagin- Recording Ses sions: The Official Story of thereby helps me to turn the corner on, ing myself, Murrow via Mitty, one of the the Abbey Road Years 1962–1970 . . . The my Fab obsession. Pilgrimage to Mec ca great foreign correspondents. roof: That’s where Paul took John, that did not free me of the quasi-religious Suddenly, it dawned on me: You fool! night during the Sgt. Pepper sessions, fervor that seized me at seven and has You should be using this time to visit when the Beatles’ founder was tripping led me to accumulate vast archives cap- Mecca! I milked an ATM, hailed a taxi, hard and needed fresh air, and Paul, to turing virtually every sonic blip they and barked: “Take me to the holiest of erase the experiential gap with his best ever recorded, released or unreleased, holy Mecca sites.” “Where’s that, mate, resolved to take LSD . . . The only Mr. Rosen is the chief Washington correspondent of mate?” “Abbey Road Studios,” I re- oth er spot on earth that had produced that Fox News. plied, and the driver nodded wearily: same electric-possession sensation had one of those. been Tiananmen Square, with the giant A Man and His Presidents The Political Odyssey of William F. Buckley Jr. Alvin S. Felzenberg

“William F. Buckley was the most consequential journalist of his era because he always was much more than a journalist. This is a brisk, groundbreaking examination of Buckley’s history-shaping role as a tireless and sometimes audacious political operative.”—George F. Will “A gracefully written and richly informative book.” —Damon Linker, The New York Times “[A] fine political biography.”—Cullen Murphy, Vanity Fair “Felzenberg writes with grace and good humor.” —John R. Coyne, The American Spectator

Yale university press www.YaleBooks.com

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black T-shirt, white slacks, and sneakers. It was Gabe, it turned out, who was the James Rosen fan who thought to invite me to his father’s fourth (or was it his fifth?) recording session at Abbey Road. “For us,” Gabe told me, grinning like a young Roger Waters, “Fox News is like the Beatles and you are like Paul McCartney.” I warned him never to repeat such heresies. After an exchange of gifts—my latest book and the new Sgt. Pepper set (featur- ing outtakes recorded Right There!) for four Abbey Road coffee mugs Gabe had very thoughtfully procured from the gift shop—we toured the entire building, save one exception: The fabled roof, site The Beatles during a recording session for the album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, 1967 of John’s LSD retreat, eluded us. Here was Studio One, red sign illuminated out- side, a separate classical session under painting of Mao staring down. All That to London but not to Ab bey Road; my one way inside, cavernous and eerie as one had really happened, too. shot at Mecca would not be spent fretting glimpsed, through control-room glass, a I breached the wall perennially cov- over lost fidget spinners. Instead we invit- baton rising and falling in the hand of a ered in Beatle-ffiti and climbed the steps ed along Sara’s cousin and her husband, white-haired conductor. to the front door, just as the lads once did affluent Londoners accustomed to elite Here was the renovated cafeteria, in newsreel comings and goings, and rooms but still impressed by my ticket to adorned with black-and-whites of the ’62- addressed myself to the receptionist, a ride to one of the most revered, yet least era Beatles in That Spot. There was ’78-era brunette who, in my memory, resembles visited, sites in all of Great Britain. Paul, sliding his tray down That Food Line. Elizabeth Hurley (although Anglophilia Because Abbey Road remains one of The shots of Gerry and the Pacemakers may here have conquered cognition). I the world’s most technologically sophisti- scarfing food with George Martin, or Cilla told her I was an American journalist trav- cated and solidly booked recording stu- Black playfully pulling on the tie the famed eling with the secretary of state, showed dios, only a handful of public tours have producer always wore to work, now con- my official credentials, and asked if there ever been conducted, and then only for jure eras as distant as the Civil War. was any way she could walk me past—not small groups. This differentiates the stu- Every hallway featured long lines of in, just past—Studio Two, where the dio from a heavily trafficked attraction framed, autographed movie posters, Beatles recorded most of their canon. “No, such as, say, Buck ing ham Palace. For this their soundtracks having been conducted I’m sorry, I Kant,” came the posh-accented reason, assuming flawless execution of or mixed there. Cluttering the industrial- reply; an instant later, I was back on my Mis sion: Im pos si ble–style diversionary carpeted walkways, awaiting disposal, lonely street corner. Con so la tion came tactics, one stands a better chance, mathe- were obsolete ’90s-era reel-to-reel from an older gent carrying a tuba case. matically, of rummaging the queen’s machines, now shelter to the sparkling- No, but he had played on one of Paul’s pajama drawer than of setting foot inside water bottles stowed beneath them. An solo albums—what do you mean you don’t Stu dio Two—where, as well, Pink Floyd alcove housed a photocopier and tens of remember which one?—and his friend recorded Dark Side of the Moon. thousands of pages of yellowing sheet had played on “Eleanor Rigby.” “He got a This time, the receptionist—a different music: the print library. The idea of glimps- day rate,” the man said wistfully. one—was expecting me. I signed the vis- ing, let alone sampling, the 400 hours of This time the invitation came from a itors’ log directly beneath two inked master tapes the Beatles filled between stranger. An assistant to a world-renowned names: visitor ADAM SHARP, whom I 1962 and 1970, a communion ritual afford- classical pianist I’d never heard of—how knew as the publicist for the late Sir ed only to a privileged few historians, had would I have?—wrote me to say the George Martin, and Sharp’s host, GILES, been raised by me a few days earlier and musician was a fan of my work on Fox who was of course Giles Martin, son of Sir summarily shot down by the three corpora- News and knew of my interest in the George and inheritor of the solemn task of tions whose permission is now necessary Beatles, and how would my family and I remixing all reissued Beatles recordings. for all such demonstrations. And the mas- like to attend his next session at Abbey GILES was here! Maybe we would bump ter tapes are, in any event, housed offsite. Road, in Studio Two with the London into him and somehow win admission to Finally, we visited the Studio Two con- Symphony Orchestra, on July 13? the vaults—or relive that time, in 1991, trol room. There we watched, through the Before securing the time off or verify- when I’d accosted the Martin family dur- glass and on mounted TV monitors, Jan ing that the pianist, Jan Mulder, existed, ing a layover at LaGuardia . . . Mulder massaging a Steinway while con- and this was not some elaborate extortion Gabriel Mulder, the pianist’s lanky 20- ducting 41 casually dressed LSO musi- plot, I was booking travel. year-old son, introduced himself. He had cians. Forty-one, did you say? The exact Sara and I took our two boys, whose assured me jackets were unnecessary but number of classical musicians brought in, middle names are Lennon and McCartney, welcomed us in a black velvet jacket, in formal dress, to record the mad

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crescendo on “A Day in the Life” 50 that lead down from the control room to session agreement form for the cellist, years ago in—This Very Spot! After an the floor of Studio Two: the white-walled, Jennifer Brown! After a few more min- hour the cellists and violinists broke from parquet-covered inner sanc tum of British utes spent grasping at communion, with the hymn they were rehearsing (“Come rock. Here possession posed a brief threat: our small party kindly but unnecessarily Thou Fount”) on this latest of Mulder’s As we looked down the staircase, I was concerned for my emotional state, we Christian-themed albums, and the mae- overcome, briefly, with hot flashes and held repaired to the basement, and the Abbey stro joined us to say hello. my head in my hand. My wife poked me. Road Café, for a fine lunch of antipasto, Dutch-born, tall and lanky like his son, Once before, in October 2005, when arroz con pollo, sopa de lentejas, and Jan also sported a black T-shirt, along Sir Paul plucked me from a small studio York ham with cheddar. with a ’70s perm and the same aura of audience to play piano for him during the Stepping outside, Gabriel brilliantly unflappable decency his son exuded. recording of the XM Artist Confidential took our zebra-crossing photo. And then, Several of his albums have gone gold and program, a nudge from Sara had kept me with the same cruelty that was visited platinum, and the Mulders, it turns out, from collapsing into tears, my default upon the pilgrims who filled the Ed are residents of North Ca r o li na—and state at Paul’s concerts following the Sullivan Theater and Shea Stadium, Trump fans. From his breast pocket Gabe death, in late 2001, of George Harrison. when the show was over and one’s brief, proudly produced a three-by-five of him The Beatles’ proximity to death is more frenzied exposure to the Magical Ones and Dad posed with the president-elect, than I can handle. A solitary trip to see last had come to its end, we were disgorged thumbs-up, after an inaugural rehearsal. year’s excellent Ron Howard documen- back into Real Life. Also present was Geoff Foster, the tary, Eight Days a Week, had left me so “This next song,” Paul used to tell the Grammy-winning studio engineer best distraught that my six-year-old asked why fans, “will have to be our last one this known for his work on Daniel Craig’s “the Beatles movie” made me so sad. “It’s evening . . .” And when the jet -engine James Bond films. His eagerness to just that they were so great,” I offered, screaming would erupt in pro test—you return to the console and the work at hand “and it was so long ago.” can hear it before “Long Tall Sally” on the exposed him as the embodiment of John Jolted into propriety, I roved the large reissued version of Live at the Hollywood Cheever’s definition of a good host: He room, photographing every major and Bowl that Giles Mar tin recently superin- held in equilibrium the pleasure he took minor detail, marveling at how similar tended—Paul would adopt a mock-stern in his guests’ company and the pleasure the chamber looks to its 1960s appear- headmaster’s tone and say, “Oh, yes . . .” he took in knowing they would all soon ance. Who knew those famous white- But the screaming only grew louder be gone. metal sidings with the slits sit on wheels? and more determined, until no one, in - A break in recording enabled Sara, our And that filthy, bent grate—that had to cluding the Beatles themselves, could guests, and me to tread the famous steps have been there then! Look: the completed hear anything at all.

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White nationalists, neo-Nazis, and alt-right demonstrators clash with counter-protesters in Charlottesville, Va., August 12. The ‘N’ Word They hate Jews and adore swastika swag, but don’t you dare call them that . . .

BY KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

Dallas INDOW NINJA, what’s your twenty?” served in the Marines and who probably didn’t actually serve in The militia is here, in the park next to city the Marines, self-described free-speech activists, that inevitable ‘W hall, on patrol, pretty decently armed up with dude with the mullet waving the Confederate flag, guys in 7.62x39mm rifles, pudgy faces concealed home-made riot gear slapped together from dusty hunting and behind olive-drab keffiyehs, radios crackling with status motorcycling equipment, acres of sad dreary desert-camo cargo reports, eyes presumably alert behind the polarized aviators pants over coyote-tan boots from the Army-surplus shop, they’re not quite ready to give up in spite of the weak light of Communists, anarchists, extravagant beards, TV cameras, the early dusk, and they are ready—and by-God eager!—to dreadlocks, ponytails, banana magazines protruding from stand tall in Texas and enforce justice for the law, an eagerness matte-black Kalashnikov’s knockoffs, cases of bottled water by that is kind of hilarious even if it is something a lot less than the City of Dallas for your dissident convenience, Antifa and amusing to the actual law-enforcement officers here, standing Antifa wannabes, Democratic-party organizers, cotton-candy stiff-necked and rigid behind steel-tube barricades with their vendors, at least three kinds of police, including Dallas moun- riot batons and helmets casually arranged on the thick August ties on big fine gray horses, the whole mess kind of milling summer grass behind them, watching as the setting sun sends about counterclockwise, a slow-motion hurricane of human the long shadow of Robert E. Lee falling across the various and angst and rage and boredom and more rage. sundry wackos, prodigal sons of the Confederacy, sad little left- A couple of hundred people are here at the side protest in a wing collegiate tomboys playing radical dress-up with red ban- largely Confederate cemetery, trampling on the graves of Civil danas over their faces like spaghetti-western bandits and SMASH War veterans and widows and on group graves for young chil- THE ASH GETTY IMAGES F ! placards, conspiracy theorists who want you to know dren felled by the many terrors of the 19th century. The main / what the Federal Reserve—the creature from Jekyll Island!—is show, with the speeches and sound system and all, is across the really up to, old-fashioned rednecks whose T-shirts proclaim way at city hall. them STONE COLD COUNTRY BY THE GRACE OF GOD, weird skinny Somewhere in the shadows, Window Ninja is watching. A CHIP SOMODEVILLA twitchy guys who mention in every other sentence that they silent sentinel, a watcher in the dusk.

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At the eye of the hurricane, at least for a minute, is the local were chanting about Jews and flying swastika banners, were a ambassador from the Republic of Kekistan. peaceful bunch, he says, not looking for any trouble, and, rather Maybe you don’t know about Kekistan. Here’s the deal, from than do the usual thing and keep the police between the “free- the website Know Your Meme: “The Cult of Kek, also known as speech activists” with the Nazi regalia and the Antifa thugs look- the Church of Kek, is a satirical religion based around the wor- ing to SMASH THE FASH! the Charlottesville police plotted to push ship of the ancient Egyptian deity Kek (also spelled Kuk or them together in order to provoke violence that could be blamed Keku), an androgynous God of darkness and chaos who is often on the boys from Kekistan. depicted as a frog or frog-headed man in male form or a snake- Someone lays a hand on the Kekistani’s chest: “DONOT headed woman in female form. On , the character Pepe the TOUCH ME!” he screams, and what ensues is a little game of Frog is often considered a modern avatar of the diety [sic], who “I’m Not Touching You!” that will be familiar to anybody who uses ancient Egyptian meme magic to influence the world, often ever spent much time in the back of a station wagon on a long by fulfilling the wishes of posts that end in repeating numbers.” family road trip. Kek is another silly in-joke from the Dumb Green Frog Gang, The cotton-candy guy does steady business. A fair profit, noth- the Internet apfelstrudelführers of the so-called alt-right, and it’s ing more. a pretty good example of their modus dumbasseri. The flag of A guy shooting video on his iPhone interviews one of the mili- Kekistan is a Nazi battle flag with the blood scarlet replaced by tiamen, and he’s going on and on about the militiaman’s rifle and Pepe green and the swastika at the center transformed into a Kek its ammunition: “Full metal jacket!” he repeats, over and over, cross, four “K”s arranged around a central “E.” When three “K”s obviously ignorant of the fact that the rifle in question can be aren’t enough . . . loaded only with jacketed ammunition, since this isn’t 1899. A “IT’S A PARODY!” screams the slightly porky man from young black woman on a cheerful pink bicycle rides past and Kekistan, who has literally wrapped himself in the flag, wearing pauses to take in the show. The dramatic contrast is of interest to it like a superhero’s cape. The crowd isn’t having any of it. “It’s the guy shooting the video, and he points it out to the militiaman. based on a Nazi flag!” comes the response from the skinny little “You’re here with your rifle, with your full-metal-jacket ammu- kid in the yarmulke. “That’s . . . not okay!” The crowd moves in nition, and here’s this little girl on her bicycle.” She leans in to on the Kekistani, who insists that he isn’t a racist or a neo-Nazi speak to him. “Here’s this 30-year-old woman on her bicycle,” he or anything like that—in fact, he says, he doesn’t even particu- corrects himself. larly care about the Confederate statues here in the park adjacent Slick puts on his red MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN cap and to city hall, which, in theory, is what this pageant of rage is really wades into the scrum. all about—he is, he says, simply here to exercise his free speech. Free speech about what? He either doesn’t know or won’t say. “I’M NOT A NAZI!” ONVENTIONAL Republicans” is how he describes his The girls in the red bandanas creep in, eyes wide, ready to parents, chuckling. “Episcopalians,” he adds with a SMASH THE FASH! as hard as their soft pink little fists can smash little snort. it. He’s sweating and squealing and wide-eyed and pretty clearly ‘C“I had a very normal childhood in Dallas,” says Richard Spencer, thinking about when he read Lord of the Flies in high school as the slickest and most notorious racist in American public life since the crowd tightens in around him, the eye of the rage hurricane . “I went to St. Mark’s”—that’s a $28,000-a-year prep contracting on his person. But nothing happens. It’s like kids at a school—“and I was on the football team. But I was interested in junior-high dance: Somebody has to make the first move, other- some more avant-garde things.” He directed and starred in a wise the boys and the girls just stay on their own respective sides school performance of K2, Patrick Meyers’s 1983 Broadway play of the gym and never start dancing. The bandana brigades came about a doomed mountaineering expedition. “It’s a real . . . mas- for a riot, but they will go home disappointed. culine play,” Spencer says, with just a hint of self-derision in his Slick takes it all in. Slick has traveled to this protest from . . . soft voice. “It’s about two mountain climbers climbing K2. One somewhere . . . and he doesn’t want to be interviewed or to give leaves the other to die. Very Nietzschean.” His interest in the- his name. Amid the various kooks and cranks and goons and ater continued into his adulthood. “At UVA, I directed my own mall-ninja militiamen, he’s a slick little f***er indeed, neat productions, including a very avant-garde, Robert Wilson–like church-boy haircut, button-down shirt, khakis, pristine Nikes. No version of Hamlet. I was looking for something beyond pedes- fatigues and swastikas and Confederate flags for him. He’s like a trian reality and bourgeois society.” miniature Richard Spencer, 20 years younger and still enjoying Richard Spencer isn’t a storm trooper. He’s a theater kid. his anonymity. Aloof and ironic, he’s an organizer, on the phone The nexus of fascism and the avant-garde is familiar territory, at intervals with somebody somewhere, making his report. from the Italian Futurists to Le Corbusier. Poor rotten old “The mayor of Charlottesville is a Democrat,” he explains, syphilitic Freddy Nietzsche provides the shared philosophical “and a Jew.” basis, or at least the shared intellectual posture: The new man and This gets the attention of the little gaggle of protesters who had the new civilization must be pulled forth out of the corruption and spent the better part of an hour standing around a Confederate flag decadence of the present by intellectual and/or physical vio- and swapping cigarettes and conspiracy theories—fluoridation lence. If a white nationalist’s name-checking a gay experimental- and the other classics—among themselves before Slick showed theater icon sounds weird to you, you aren’t paying close up on the scene. “So, he wanted chaos, and he got it. He wanted enough attention. The so-called alt-right is not about politics: It all the havoc he could. And people died.” He tells an exculpatory is about aesthetics. And though it shares some political space version of the Charlottesville story in which the police, not the with conservatism and, thanks to Donald Trump, with the white nationalists, are at fault: The “free-speech activists,” who Republican party, the alt-right isn’t exactly right, either: Richard

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Spencer is a pro-choice atheist with some substantial reserva- Conservative, the right-wing periodical co-founded by Pat tions about capitalism, a man who mocks the Republicans as a Buchanan. When his views proved too extreme for that journal, bunch of Babbitts who cannot see that life contains “more than he moved on to Taki’s Magazine. He founded a website of his free trade and tax cuts.” And he is, inescapably, a deep-dyed own and soon occupied a number of high positions in the rela- Nietzschean. Or at least he thinks he is, and he describes his first tively tiny world of white-nationalist intellectual life: executive encounter with The Genealogy of Morals as “a shattering expe- director of the race-obsessed Washington Summit Publishers, rience.” He is insistent in his belief that people do not really founder of the white-nationalist journal Radix, director of the change over time, a point to which he returns several times, and National Policy Institute, a racist think tank supported by William reading Nietzsche is as close to a transformative experience as Regnery II. Playing a game of Six Degrees of Separation between he’ll allow. mainstream conservative institutions and white-nationalist nut- Transformation is a theme in his life. He talks about having lost tery is an uncomfortable exercise for many on the right. There’s a lot of weight after “bulking up” to play offensive tackle in high a great deal of political and intellectual space between a tradition- school, and is famously vain about his looks. He affects a “fashy” alist Christian conservative such as Rod Dreher of The American razor haircut with a little lock arranged to casually fall just so Conservative and a guy waving a swastika flag and raving about over his right eye and often dresses in pastoral tweeds like he’s “white genocide,” and Richard Spencer inhabits some of that hunting grouse on an English country manor. He is much more space, with a foot and a history in both camps. He is frank—more interested in the aesthetics of his movement than he is in any spe- than frank—about his white-identity politics, but he does not so cific policy ideas, a subject about which he is in fact quite vague. much as mention Jews, blacks, or any other traditional target of “I recognize the power of spectacle,” he says. “It could even be fringe-right hatred. “What’s misunderstood is that people think something as simple as looking good—something conservatives our movement is about hate, that it can be equated with past could learn from. Politics isn’t just about dusty ideas or arcane movements and cartoon versions of past movements, with Nazis policy matters. The question isn’t whether you’re about politics and the Klan foaming at the mouth about hatred. I would not do or about theatrics, because those aren’t different things. But is it what I do if I were dominated by hate. Hate is an emotion we all just theatrics? Speaking for me, absolutely not.” Asked for his top feel. I hate injustice. But what is truly motivating is hope: a three policy-agenda items, he gets to No. 2: a net-zero immigra- vision of a better, more beautiful world.” What’s important for tion policy and “a tremendous change in foreign policy.” He says Spencer isn’t winning elections or changing public policy but It is all but impossible to argue someone out of a perception, and the ‘mimetic warfare’ of the alt-right, all that Internet ugliness and trollery, is designed to change perceptions. the usual thing about “neoconservatives” hoping to bomb the changing the culture, developing a new and publicly acceptable world into democracy. ethic in which “white people think of themselves as part of a He likes Depeche Mode and “peaceful” ethnic cleansing and greater story and broader community.” He went on Israeli tele- rejects the label “white supremacist,” and he is obviously and vision and described himself as a Zionist for white Americans. painfully embarrassed by the swastika flags and silly costumes What Spencer gets—and exploits—is the American sensitivity that invariably show up in the crowds he attracts, though he has to unfairness, real or perceived. That deeply rooted sense of jus- been known to throw out a Heil or two himself—he’ll cop to tice as fairness, combined with the American tendency to univer- being “trollish” on occasion—as he did when celebrating the salize principles, is why, for example, gay-rights groups have election of Donald Trump, the alt-right hero whose shine has been so successful in adopting the rhetoric of the African- quickly worn off, at least for America’s most infamous white American civil-rights movement. The American fairness ethic is nationalist. “Swastikas are not my style. But once you declare, ‘I basically good-for-the-goose-good-for-the-gander-ism. And so am a white American, I am proud of my heritage, my identity Spencer, and others like him, ask: If blacks are permitted pride in matters, I am not just an individual, not just interested in free mar- themselves as black people, and if we accept a collectively self- kets and tax cuts,’ then you get the ‘H’ word or the ‘N’ word. interested black politics as legitimate, why are whites not permit- People get called ‘Nazi,’ and they want to throw it back in the ted pride in themselves as white people, and why is a collectively face of their adversary. And some people are stuck in the past, and self-interested white politics not also legitimate? Spencer says they’re not able to understand that we need to live here and now, that it is inaccurate to describe him as a “white supremacist” in and not in the 1920s or the 1940s. Others want to alienate them- that he has no interest in seeing whites dominate other races. selves from society. My strategy is to be provocative and radical What he wants, he says, is a “safe space.” If the Jews can have a in the best sense, but also to communicate with”—here is a physically secure ethno-religious state, Spencer asks, then why favored bit of alt-right lingo—“the normies.” not white Americans, including “cultural Christians” like him? Spencer’s career traces the arc of the alt-right’s intellectual Highlighting these perceived hypocrisies and acts of unfair- development. He thought of himself as part of the Right, broadly ness is what the style adopted by Spencer and the rest of the alt- attached to the conservative movement, in spite of his secular- right—he coined the term “alt-right”—is intended to do. It is all ism and his distaste for religion and religiously informed poli- but impossible to argue someone out of a perception, and the tics. He studied at Virginia and did a master’s in humanities at “mimetic warfare” of the alt-right, all that Internet ugliness and the University of Chicago, and worked at The American trollery, is designed to change perceptions. It appeals to the

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adolescent appetite for transgression, the épater les bourgeois transgressive and provocative politics of white identity and the ethic of radical youth movements around the world. A generation saddest and uncoolest and cringiest of all American social move- ago, when Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols performed wearing a ments: the men’s movement. It’s easy to make jokes about how swastika T-shirt, no one thought it was because punk rock was all this fringy rage is just the natural outcome of a bunch of 4chan anti-Semitic or that the Sex Pistols hated Jews—it was shocking geeks who couldn’t get laid in a sex-doll factory, but their own for the sake of being shocking. That is the shelter into which the rhetoric and discourse continually returns to that theme. It is an alt-right retreats when it is challenged—the Kekistani guy at the ancient story: The sons of the effete white ruling class feel city hall protest shouting “It’s a parody!” while wearing his Nazi- emasculated in comparison to the swarthy high-testosterone inspired flag. But the act of being shocking, as the Sex Pistols’ primitives from . . . that part gets kind of interesting, inasmuch accountants could tell you, is effective. The Sieg Heil stuff may as there was a time when the American WASP felt sexually be done partly—not entirely—tongue in cheek, but the next part intimidated by Asians, Jews, and Italians, though it is the mythic of the pitch—“Let me tell you why the white-nationalist move- sexual rapacity of the African that has most kept them up at night. ment is like Zionism”—is deadly serious. It’s a performance, but Muppet News Flash: A bunch of under-employed animé nerds not one without a purpose. marching with tiki torches in rage-fueled sausage fests have In other words: “Let’s put on a show!” And there’s no business trouble with women. like show business, until somebody gets killed. After the protest in Charlottesville—in which a woman was murdered by a white nationalist—Anglin advised his fellow knuckleheads to go out to bars that night, because “random EAR, oh hear, this tale of woe, this poetical lament: girls will want to have sex with you.” One wonders whether Charlottesville is home to very many women who are quite that random. The men’s movement has moved on from Iron John and HMany of us have student loans on degrees that are worthless. suburbanite drum circles and virile weeping and all that business, Many of us fought in wars for Jews. and its new spokesmen are the pick-up artists, whose appeal to Many of us have struggled with substance abuse. men (put an asterisk there) such as is pretty obvi- Many of us are out of shape. ous. Like Islamic jihadists promised an eternity with a harem of We feel emasculated. virgins, white-identity jihadists believe that they can elevate Many of us feel we have never had power. We crave power. themselves through conflict and confrontation and, by proving We lust after power. We want to be part of a group, which will their value to the tribe, finally get some nookie. give us power. A group that will confirm our worth as men. “We want a war,” writes Anglin. We do not have identities. He is barely five feet tall. We want identities. But everybody is ten feet tall on the Internet, and that is why the We want to be productive. All men want to be productive. We Internet is where the alt-right really lives, one big online group- want to build things. We want to build, we want to create, we therapy session masquerading as a political movement. A few sad want to be needed. specimens will occasionally sally forth into the public square in We have problems with women. All of us do. We lie to each Charlottesville, Boston, or Dallas, and there will always be an other and claim that we don’t. opening for a charismatic racist such as Richard Spencer, who We are a generation of throwaways, which (((those who write holds a position in American life that once belonged to David history before it happens))) have slated to be the last generation of Heterosexual White Men. Duke and to George Lincoln Rockwell before him. Some roles in We are angry. our common life are passed down from generation to generation. There is an atavistic rage in us, deep in us, that is ready to boil over. And some kinds of sadness are passed down from generation to There is a craving to return to an age of violence. generation, too: The substance abuse that Anglin bemoans tends We want a war. to run in families, as does divorce—and the failure to form mar- riages and families in the first place. The young men to whom Andrew Anglin is the founder of , a now- Anglin addresses his lament often are themselves the sons and defunct neo-Nazi website that served as a clearinghouse for alt- grandsons of similarly disappointed men, living in communities right and also as a bellwether for its aesthetic. left behind by globalization and other social changes, with those The above complaint, written for some reason as though it were who have the wherewithal to move on already having done so lines of verse, is his confession, his apologia pro sad little vita sua. long ago. Without prestigious jobs, solid incomes, or happy fam- The Daily Stormer has been disappeared from the Internet by the ilies to provide them with a sense of social status, they understand Corporate Powers That Be, but Anglin is still moping around. themselves to be failures not only as people but specifically as Anglin is more frank about the Nazi stuff than is Spencer, and men. In reaction to the “rootless cosmopolitanism” of the age, once wrote that he asks himself “WWHD”—“What Would Hitler they seek to reverse 21st-century deracination with blood-and-soil Do?” But get what he means by that: “I ask myself what Hitler racination: Consider that Richard Spencer‘s journal is called would do if he’d been born in 1984 in America and was dealing “Radix,” i.e. “root.” Their longing for community is authentic— with this situation we are currently dealing with and also really and it is legitimate, in spite of the horrifying direction in which liked 4chan and anime,” he writes. Anglin, like Spencer, says that they take it. But like all men who are missing something necessary he thinks it is important for the alt-right to forgo the old style of at the center of them, they are born to be marks, and it is easy to “White Nationalism 1.0,” as he puts it, and try to be, in his word, sell them almost anything—how-to-meet-women books and sem- “cool.” But what you really find in Anglin is the cultural intersec- inars, conspiracy theories, daft white-identity politics—so long as tion that is the home to the alt-right, the nexus between the what you are really selling is hope.

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Hapsburg empire, is an arbitrary collection of many ethnic nations, cobbled together by force by a ruling nation, aristoc- The Case for racy, or royal family. The modern nation-state has two parents. One is En - lightenment republicanism, which requires a sovereign people as the source of the state’s legitimacy and usually has found it Cultural in a preexisting ethnic nation with a shared identity. The other is industrialization, which, by lowering the cost of communi- cations and policing, allowed populations much larger than Nationalism cities or cantons to be governed by constitutional and represen- tative government, not just by local satraps answering to It’s time to start taking E pluribus unum remote despots. Almost all contemporary states are fragments, created by seriously again secession or partition from a larger and more diverse multina- tional empire. The United States, born as a fragment of the BY MICHAEL LIND 18th-century British empire, is no exception. Whether they have been built on the ruins of dynastic empires in Central Europe or of European colonial empires in the Americas, RESIDENT DONALD TRUMP’s feeble and vacillating Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, few if any modern states have response to the violent confrontation that white been completely homogeneous in ethnicity. P nationalists provoked in Charlottesville has embold- In the first wave of nationalism, the new state is usually cap- ened those on both the alt-right and the radical left tured by one of its ethnic groups, often a majority (Anglo- who claim that and are the American Protestants in the post-colonial United States) but same thing. Most Americans of all races think otherwise. sometimes a minority (Afrikaners in South Africa, Alawites in Unfortunately, the ability to promote or even discuss a com- post-colonial Syria, Sunni Arabs in post-colonial Iraq). Where mon American identity that transcends race and religion is an ethnonational state has democratic institutions, it is what weakened by confusion about four terms: “nation,” “culture,” sociologist Pierre van den Berghe has called a Herrenvolk “race,” and “ethnicity.” (“master people”) democracy, with government of the domi- “Nation” can refer to a state, a purely political entity, whose nant ethnic nation, by the dominant ethnic nation, and for the citizens may belong to various ethnicities (Switzerland). It can dominant ethnic nation. also refer to the exact opposite—a stateless ethnic group (the Until the civil-rights revolution of the 1950s and 1960s, the Kurds). “Culture” in American parlance can refer either to United States was a Herrenvolk democracy, with the informal actual culture (English as the primary language) or to the cate- definition of the Herrenvolk broadening gradually from gories of the U.S. Census, such as “non-Hispanic white,” British-American Protestant to white Christian or white which refer to race or biological descent. To compound the Judeo-Christian. Law and custom—from legal racial segrega- confusion, “ethnicity” can refer both to acquired culture tion to the recitation of Christian prayers in public schools— (Amish culture) and to inherited DNA (white or Caucasian). signaled that “real” Americans were white Christians. This confusion is natural and persistent, because the identities Non-whites and non-Christians were considered by most of of most people everywhere in the world come as part of an inher- the white Christian majority to be resident aliens in the U.S., ited package that unites race or biological descent with culture whether they possessed American citizenship or not. From (and also creed, that is, a religious or secular way of life)—what the 1790s, when the first Congress limited naturalization to I’ll refer to as “ethnicity” here. Ethnicity is a permanent feature “free white persons,” through late-19th-century bans on of human life because of the family. The question is how inher- Asian immigration, to the quota system of the 1920s, which ited ethnic identity should relate to political identity. favored northwestern Europeans, U.S. immigration policy As Azar Gat, Anthony Smith, and other scholars of national- sought to reinforce the white and Christian aspects of ism have shown, the claim of the postmodernist Left that all American national identity. ethnonational identities are recent and “socially constructed” America’s white-Christian ethnonationalism was always at is false. Even the modern nation-state, with rough congruence odds with republican ideals of equal treatment under law and between a nation and a state, has precursors in kingdoms with the separation of church and state. In addition, it defied the a common ethnicity, such as ancient China and Egypt, when reality of lived experience. they were ruled by native dynasties, as well as in smaller ethnic Remember, ethnicity is a compound of race, creed, and cul- states such as ancient Israel and Judah. ture. But in the United States, black Americans in the South Even so, until recently much of the world’s population lived largely shared the culture, dialect, and Protestant religion of fel- either in multi-state nations or in multinational states. A multi- low southerners who were white. The result was an American state nation is one, such as ancient Greece or Renaissance Italy caste system defined by the racial or descent component of eth- or premodern Germany, in which a single ethnic nation is nicity alone. A European immigrant who could not speak a divided among many political units such as city-states. In con- word of English was granted more privileges than an American trast, a multinational empire, such as the Roman empire or the with “one drop” of African “blood” whose ancestors had lived Mr. Lind is the author of The Next American Nation. in U.S. territory for centuries and whose native language was a dialect of American English.

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MERICA’s version of Herrenvolk democracy was dis- nationalism is fraternal (and sororal) solidarity with the sov- mantled by the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting ereign nation or people (however defined) whom the state Rights Act of 1965, and the Immigration and exists solely to serve. NaturalizationA Act of 1965. In the half century since the civil- Nationalism is more fundamental than patriotism. This is not rights revolution, the question of what it is to be American has some illiberal Central European doctrine: It is the basic been contested by four schools: racial nationalism, creedal Lockean republican theory that underlies the Declaration of nationalism, multi-ethnonationalism, and cultural nationalism. Independence and the very existence of the United States, as Each school tries to create an alternative to the older white- well as other modern democratic nation-states. Christian ethnonationalism by rooting American identity in Think of the nation as a condo association and the state as the one of the three unbundled components of ethnicity: race, condo management. The members of the condo association/ creed, and culture. nation owe their chief loyalty not to the state (their collective So-called white nationalism—the racial nationalism of alt- servant) but rather to one another, on the basis of their mutual right neo-Nazis, Klan members, and others—is distinct from contract. The condo owners cannot unilaterally break condo old-fashioned American ethnonationalism because it empha- rules, but as a group they can fire the manager and rewrite the sizes the racial strand in the white-Christian Ameri can bundle. rules as they see fit at any time. The implication of creedal Like German National Socialism, it views humanity through nationalism—that believing in American ideals is what makes a zoological lens, indifferent to national cultural differences you a member of the American nation—is as unworkable as within gene pools and frequently hostile to Abrahamic reli- saying that approval of a particular condo building’s manage- gions (which Odin- and Thor-worshiping neopagans on the ment automatically makes you a member of that particular “white Right” deride because of their Semitic origins). condo association. Pan-white identity can hardly be the basis for an inclusive American national identity, because a growing number of Americans are not white as conventionally defined, while most F we reject racist white nationalism and abstract creedal whites on earth live outside American borders. Logically, nationalism, what remains are American multicultural- white nationalists should call for the unification of all ism, or, to be more precise, “multi-ethnonationalism,” and Caucasians in a single empire or federation, echoing Hitler’s Ipost-ethnic American cultural nationalism. hope that a racially purified, German-led Europe would be The adherents of each of these two schools agree that the allied in the future with a pro-Nazi, racist British empire U.S. should be a liberal constitutional democracy. They dis- against supposed race enemies—mongrelized, Jew-controlled agree on whether the U.S. should be thought of as a nation- America and the non-whites of the world. state with a predominant majority nation and rights for Recognizing that a Caucasian caliphate is not in the cards, minority groups or as a single government shared by several the racist Right has long speculated about dividing the U.S. identifiable and permanently distinct nationalities. into racial homelands—the United Bantustans of America. Modern democratic nation-states are based on a majority lan- While white nationalists might, in public, justify this lunacy guage or culture (not necessarily a common ethnicity or race). using the rhetoric of progressive multiculturalism, not even the But a democratic state can also be organized to formally reflect most ardent multiculturalist on the left endorses racially pure the existence of two or more constituent ethnic or cultural nations white, black, and Latino states. within its borders. Examples of multinational democracies, in Another possible successor to moribund white-Christian which multiple ethnic nations are formally recognized and repre- American Herrenvolk nationalism is what is sometimes called sented, include Canada (Anglophones and Francophones), “creedal nationalism” (in my 1995 book The Next American Belgium (Flemings and Walloons), and Switzerland (ethnic Nation, I called it “democratic universalism”). This is the Germans, French, Italians, and Romansch). familiar argument that Americans are defined as Americans In theory, America could be organized along multi- solely on the basis of their shared commitment to the creed ethnonational lines like Canada or Belgium or Switzerland. of the American Founding, with articles of faith including But there are two big problems with a liberal-democratic ver- belief in liberty, democracy, equality, and natural rights. sion of multi-ethnonationalism in America. A shared commitment by the citizens to republican values First, conventional multiculturalism in the U.S. confuses is to be desired in a republic. But creedal nationalism, like race or genetic descent with culture, equating American “cul- racial nationalism, succumbs to the objection that most of the tures” with our arbitrary and somewhat absurd U.S. Census people who share the liberal-democratic creed live outside categories. In bi-national Belgium, the Flemish and the U.S. borders, while not all Americans believe in liberalism Walloons are genuine ethnic groups combining descent and and democracy. A Norwegian who reveres the Declaration of culture. Likewise, the Québécois in Canada are a genuine Independence is not for that reason an American, and an ethnic nation. American who decides that the Founders were wrong and that But there is no common “non-Hispanic white” ethnicity the ideal form of government is a Tibetan-style Buddhist reli- that recent immigrants from Ireland share with old-stock gious polity is still an American, if an eccentric one. German Americans and Italian Americans, any more than Further, creedal nationalists who try to distinguish “patrio- there is a common “Asian and Pacific islander” ethnicity tism” (good) from “nationalism” (bad) are confused—and shared by Indian Americans, Chinese Americans, Korean not just because their preferred universalistic term, “patrio- Americans, and Filipino Americans. Meanwhile, successive tism,” is based on a Latin word meaning “fatherland.” generations of Latino immigrants are adopting American Patriotism is loyalty to the state as a political entity, while English as their native language at about the same rate as

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previous generations of European immigrant groups. And How big is the American cultural majority? Americans of rates of out-marriage among immigrant groups rise with each all races who speak a dialect of American English as their first generation. You can’t have a formal Swiss, Belgian, or language are, as a rough approximation, about 80 percent of Canadian group-based system if ethnic differences are either American citizens. The remainder are divided between recent arbitrary, like Census racial categories, or quickly erased by immigrants and some of their children, and self-segregated assimilation or blurred by intermarriage. linguistic minorities such as the German-speaking Amish. The black–white divide, the deepest divide in American The U.S., like Brazil and Mexico, is a multiracial and mixed- society, is a caste divide, not a cultural divide. It is impossible race nation with a predominant national language and national to separate white and black cultures. African-American ver- vernacular culture. Racial diversity does not necessarily lead nacular English, with African trace elements, is classified by to linguistic or cultural diversity. Indeed, as the descendants of most linguists as a variant dialect of American English origi- recent immigrants grow up speaking American English and nating in the South. For its part, the culture of the American losing touch with ancestral traditions, the linguistic and cultural South has always been hybrid and transracial, even when majority in the U.S. might increase as a share of a population southern states outlawed racial intermarriage. Think of an all- that is more diverse in ancestry. white bluegrass band, playing the banjo, an African instru- The purpose of defining and defending American national ment, using a style influenced by black guitarist Arnold Shultz, identity in this way, as a matter of common culture but not while dressed in cowboy clothes borrowed from north- common race or creed, is not to promote a new version of Mexican culture. The idea of separating out the elements of Herrenvolk democracy, privileging some Americans above America’s national culture and assigning them to different others on the basis of language or customs. It is simply to point descent groups is almost as mad as the white-racist vision of out the obvious. There is and long has been an American cul- American Bantustans. tural majority that is much larger than the shrinking, descent- What remains as a plausible basis for a widely shared defined “non-Hispanic white” majority. American identity, after we reject racial nationalism as stupid and Twenty-first-century conservatives, progressives, and centrists repulsive and creedal nationalism and multi-ethnonationalism as have many subjects for legitimate debate. But one area that unworkable, is American cultural nationalism—the idea that should be the basis of consensus is the recognition of the there is an American national majority defined by a common American majority not as an ethnonational tribe but as a cultural culture, but not by common racial descent or common secular nation whose members have diverse ancestries and creeds. It is or religious beliefs. time to take our national motto seriously: E pluribus unum.

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The clamor to remove the statues is a minority movement, and though many thoughtful commentators—including NATIONAL Monumentally REVIEW editor Rich Lowry and senior editor Ramesh Ponnuru— have said the statues should come down to signify that America has moved on from the divisions associated with the Civil War, the Left is not signing up for any implicit bargain. Ponnuru is cor- Naïve rect to note that the failure of others to draw a distinction between Confederate traitors and flawed heroes such as George Washing - For the Left, taking down Confederate ton and Thomas Jefferson does not mean that conservatives can’t draw it. We can, we must, and we will do so. memorials is just the beginning Nevertheless, an urge to destroy icons, once unleashed, can be BY KYLE SMITH a mania that proves too powerful to easily arrest.

HERE’S a fever in the August air, a thick, swampy fever HERE are more than 700 Confederate monuments in pub- of righteous stupidity. At the University of Southern lic places all over the country. For conservatives to sup- T California, the Black Student Assembly raised a port tearing down the statues now, in such a heated ruckus by pointing out that the school’s equine mas- Tmoment, strikes me as pouring kerosene on a brush fire whose cot, Traveler, the ninth in his line, had almost the same name as is unknown. It’s like inviting a tiger to nibble on your little Robert E. Lee’s horse, Traveller. It’s unclear whether there is finger but expecting it to stop there. If conservatives are saying, any tie between the two horses’ names, but Saphia Jackson, the “Take the statues of anyone who rebelled against the Union, but group’s co-director, touted the similarity as proof that “white go no farther,” that message is not being heard, much less supremacy hits close to home.” accepted, by the Left. In Atlanta, an angry mob attacked and desecrated a statue If you’re like Charles Barkley and me (an inveterate north- called the Peace Monument. It depicted a Confederate soldier erner), you don’t much care about the statues. But the Left laying down his arms at the behest of an angel of peace over the doesn’t much care about them either, at least not in the way they inscription, “Cease firing, peace is proclaimed.” A masked pro- claim. If they did, you would have heard Nancy Pelosi’s opinion tester was photographed trying (unsuccessfully) to pull the mas- about the Confederate statues in the Capitol before now. The sive statue down with a chain. Obama administration would have made this an issue, too. But In a Times Square subway station, a group of tiles formed a only now does Jeh Johnson, Obama’s secretary of homeland blue X on a red background to symbolize the area’s nickname, security for three years, declare that removing Confederate the Crossroads of the World, and no one among the tens of thou- memorials is a matter of “public safety” and “doing what’s right.” sands of non-equine travelers who pass by every day seemed to Yet if a statue of General Lee can be a rallying point for racist care. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority nevertheless demonstrators, a depression in the ground where Lee once stood announced that the design would be removed for its supposed will be an even more incendiary one. Hitler fanboys are unlikely resemblance to the Confederate battle flag. to be mollified as the country carries out exactly the acts whose It was left to Charles Barkley, the longtime NBA star, to con- possibility they have been using to inflame their supporters. vey thoughts that would have struck everyone as obvious a few Rather, the Left sees an irresistible opening to indulge its glee years ago: “I’m 54 years old. I’ve never thought about those stat- for denouncing and destroying things associated with the Right. ues a day in my life. I think if you ask most black people, to be The more sagacious ones among them counsel that now is not the honest, they ain’t thought a day in their life about those stupid time to mention that the Washington Monument and Jefferson statues.” According to an NPR/PBS/NewsHour/Marist survey Memorial are homages to slaveholders, because when you’re released August 17, Americans backed keeping the statues by a upending institutions you have to take them in the proper order. margin of 62 percent to 27 percent. Black Americans agreed, by You have to mow down the front ranks before you can jump into a 44 percent–to–40 percent margin. the enemy’s trenches. Let’s mull that finding for a moment: On August 14 and 15— Once most of the Confederate statues are down, as they might immediately after the horrific events in Charlottesville, where well be in very short order, that will be the time for the Left to do an alt-right march in favor of keeping a Robert E. Lee statue in what it always does—push on to new frontiers so boldly defined a public place culminated in an actual charge of murder being that they would have shocked even its own diehard partisans just laid against a man on the pro-statue side who’d driven his car a generation earlier. The Teddy Roosevelt protests are coming. into a crowd of his ideological adversaries, and during the ensu- (Indeed, there has already been one, at the statue of the Rough ing nonstop maximum-volume media coverage inveighing Rider outside the American Museum of Natural History last against the statues—Americans still supported them by an over- October. It seemed like a fringe thing at the time.) The Woodrow whelming majority. Wilson protests are coming. (Indeed, they too have already start- On what conceivable issue, besides motherhood and maybe ed.) The Christopher Columbus protests are coming. (Same.) Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, do so many Americans line up on The Mount Rushmore protests will come in due course. “Let’s the same side? And how much more lopsided might the polling be Blow Up Mount Rushmore,” read a tweet from the Millennial- in a more sedate moment, when everyone has returned to his senses progressive Web journal Vice. Oops, that sounded a bit too terror- and hate and fear and blood are no longer in the air? The statues istic in 2017, though it may be standard progressive rhetoric in a are as popular as air conditioning. They’re as popular as dogs. few years. So Vice amended the headline to “Let’s Get Rid of

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Mount Rushmore.” The pride of South Dakota was, by the way, six months and had taken no notice of it, owing, he said, to his principally sculpted by Gutzon Borglum, a white supremacist nearsightedness. When a visiting alumnus told him about the and reputed member of the . window, he didn’t believe it at first. The chief sin the Left associates with Robert E. Lee and Menafee was arrested and fired for attacking the window, but Stonewall Jackson, meanwhile, is not insurrection but the much then Yale asked for the charges to be dropped and re-hired him more broadly committed and forever contemporary one—racism. after a protest had made him a folk hero. Is it reasonable to be that “Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson will be removed from the angered by a stained-glass window? If it is reasonable, is vandal- CUNY [City University of New York] hall of great Americans ism a fitting response? because New York stands against racism,” Governor Andrew The tendency to lash out against things you deem offensive used Cuomo tweeted. Racism can be linked to most of America’s his- to be a disagreeable tic of undergraduates. Now the impulse is torical figures, not excluding Abraham Lincoln, who in 1858 said, spreading. The mob led by a cop-hating North Korea sympathizer “I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters of the that pulled down a 1924 statue of a generic Confederate soldier in negroes, or jurors, or qualifying them to hold office, of having Durham, N.C., was acting out of a well-justified sense that author- them to marry with white people.” The Lincoln Memorial was ities were not in the mood to maintain order. Police did nothing vandalized three days after the Charlottesville unrest. except take pictures; Governor Roy Cooper meekly tweeted that It may take some time for progressives fully to turn their ire on “there is a better way to remove these monuments”; Durham Lincoln. But then again, a year is “some time.” Who would ever County’s public-information office made Cooper sound like John have guessed that the policy toward transgender individuals that Wayne when it declared, even more mildly, that “our elected offi- obtained for the first seven and a half years of the Obama presiden- cials and senior staff understand the unrest in our nation and com- cy would be declared vile, hateful, and retrograde a year later? In munity.” Only after a nationwide uproar about the lawlessness June, Salon ran the mocking headline “Armed right-wingers rally did the sheriff begin making arrests (eight as of this writing). in Houston to defend statue—that nobody is attacking.” On August The ringleader of the mob declared, “Anything that emboldens 20, the Houston Chronicle reported that near Sam Houston Park, those people and anything that gives those people pride needs to where a Confederate monument stands, “more than 400 socialists, be crushed.” Anything? A statue of Hank Williams? The Jack liberals and Black Lives Matter activists showed up to demand the Daniel’s distillery? A NASCAR track? If destroying stuff that The tendency to lash out against things you deem offensive used to be a disagreeable tic of undergraduates. Now the impulse is spreading. monument’s removal, while a few dozen counter-protesters— makes other people proud is your goal, you’ve signed up for a some carrying Confederate flags—showed up in opposition.” never-ending culture war. Writing in the Washington Post, The park was actually closed as two Texans tried to have a nor- columnist Christine Emba denounced the statues by saying they mal wedding. “Women in heels and men in summer suits snuck represent “privileged status, not history, that’s being protected.” out of the park just before 2 P.M. to be whisked around the barri- The dusty old statues of the Confederacy are just an opening to cades in police vans,” the Chronicle reported. the much juicier and very 2017 war on “privileged status.” Unable even in the Obama era to win much in the way of eco- If I were a coldly cynical political analyst, I’d say the contro- nomic redistribution, the Left today trains its batteries on cultural versy is a gift of a wedge issue. For instance, to win a primary—to issues. Disrupting Americans’ everyday lives thrills them. triumph in an arena filled exclusively with hyper-partisans— Georgia Democrats may now have to take an extreme stance on Stone Mountain, which bears gigantic images of Lee, Jackson, HE obsession with cleansing and sanitizing our past is and Jefferson Davis that were sculpted by Borglum at a Klan becoming frantic. In Brooklyn, a plaque was removed meeting ground. Despite the monument’s history, destroying after it stood by a tree for 105 years bearing the legend the state’s own Mount Rushmore sounds insane to the average T“This tree was planted by General Robert E. Lee while stationed voter, but gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams has already at Fort Hamilton from 1842 to 1847.” This wasn’t a tribute to the called for the images to go. Lost Cause. The plaque didn’t depict Lee striking a hero’s pose on Similarly, when Charlie Rose asked Al Sharpton this summer horseback. It didn’t depict him at all. It simply gave information whether the Jefferson Memorial should be torn down, Sharpton you might or might not find interesting. Who could be offended? didn’t say, “Absurd, no one wants that.” He instead dodged the Yet the tactic of the Left is: Claim to be triggered, then claim question and called for defunding the memorial, a startling option your prize. Let nothing as drab as social norms or even the law that seemed calculated to leave even more extreme choices stand in your way. open. That kind of talk must strike the median Rust Belt voter as After Corey Menafee, a dishwasher at Yale University, broke a a chilling harbinger of culture battlegrounds to come. stained-glass window with a broomstick last year because it Woe betide the pol who is on the short end of a 62-to-27 split, depicted slaves picking cotton, he explained his thinking: “I just and yet safe-seat Democrats such as Pelosi, who speak only to said, ‘That thing’s coming down today. I’m tired of it. . . . It’s fellow true believers, will gravitate toward it. Conservatives can 2016, I shouldn’t have to come to work and see things like that.’” only hope that Michael Moore will soon start musing about It turned out that Menafee had been working near the window for renaming the Washington Monument after Maya Angelou.

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Athwart BY JAMES LILEKS Rated PC

HERE’S a certain sort of person who feels a merry real-man-type slob, and we’re supposed to think the slob’s little thrill when the banning begins. Oh good, the annoyance isn’t shrieking homosexual panic?” statues are coming down? Now we can do some- “It’s called ‘The Odd Couple.’ The prissy guy is straight. T thing about that historical plaque I don’t like. As if He’s just a typical neurotic archetype of the era, common to nothing happened here before 1855. Who knows what the major East Coast areas. See, his wife—” Native Americans did on this spot? We may never know, so “Oh, so he’s not gay? They’re negating the experience of let’s stop pretending history began when General Killian actual gay men and straight-washing out their existence? McGenocide slept here. GET A CROWBAR. At a time when Stonewall was still fresh in everyone’s If someone objects because you’re crowbarring off a his- mind? Seriously?” torical marker, hit him with the crowbar. It’s self-defense, “Would you rather watch a documentary about the after all: The people who object to your objecting are pre- Stonewall gay-bar riots?” venting a future in which you’ll be happier. Why, they’re “And think about Stonewall Jackson and the Civil War? Do assaulting you. you want me to report you to the block officer?” Statue-banning brings out the ridiculous people who get Note: This sort of conversation takes place only when a moment of media exposure when they insist the entire there’s someone to harangue and silence. When a person is past must be hidden under a tarp. Let’s welcome the watching a movie alone, it can be taken on its own terms— Reverend Hal Shrapten: but if there’s anyone who needs to be reminded of his com- “I think we should take down the statue of Lincoln, who plicity in All the Bad Things Ever, then everything’s a was, after all, president of a country in which slavery was problem. Another screening of a Bad-Thought UnClassic legal. I know there’s no chance of this happening, but just might go like this: being here on TV spouting this twaddle bolsters my political “Okay, I can tell I don’t like this movie already. It has fortunes and inflates my rapacious ego—and yes, I am utterly Nazis.” indifferent to my contribution to the Left’s ongoing estrange- “They’re the bad guys. Relax.” ment from the center of American thought. Buy my book.” “Don’t you tell me to relax when Nazis are marching in the Perhaps the best example of ordinary folk getting giddy streets today.” about our bold new era came after the Charlottesville episode, “These are historical Nazis who numbered in the millions, when an actual Yale-educated TV producer tweeted: backed by a powerful war machine. The current Nazis “Now that we’re talking, there are casually racist + sexist + couldn’t fill a minor-league baseball stadium, and half of homophobic moments in classic movies that don’t need to be them would be there to ogle cheerleaders, because the only classics any more.” women in their daily lives are calling ‘Dinner’s ready’ from This makes it sound as if there’s a National Classic-Movie the top of the stairs.” Designation Board, where a panel of gouty white men decide “What’s this—oh, a black man. Movie’s set in Africa, and which films are classics. The term means “old and pretty there’s one black man. And he’s an entertainer.” good,” and nothing more. But, apparently, we shouldn’t call “First of all, he’s a musician. An artist. He’s the only one those movies classics because they have wrongthink embed- who brings beauty and joy to this place—” ded in their narrative DNA. Anyone who says “Citizen Kane? “So, he has magical soul, on account of his people are so My favorite of all the classics” would get a raised eyebrow. spiritual. Right. And didn’t he just call the white man ‘Boss’? Really? You don’t find it problematic that one of the actors, BOSS?” Joseph Cotten, is named after the crop most often associated “Well, the white man is his employer, yes, but they’re old with slave labor? I mean, in this day and age. friends and clearly regard each other with deep respect—” Perhaps all the good old movies could be moved from “Respect? Did you just hear the white guy order him to play Turner Classic Movies channel to Turner Diaries Classic it again? You played it for the white lady, you can play it for Movies channel, named after the white-separatist garbage me, Sam as in ‘Sambo.’ What’s this mess called again?” novel enjoyed by people who move their lips while reading “Casablanca.” and trace the sentences with their finger so they don’t lose “Right. ‘White house.’ Okay, you can call it a classic, but track. You could have a federal blue-ribbon committee that this is insulting to anyone who’s not a white male.” decides which movies go to TDCM, but it would be easier to “You’re a white male.” put everything made prior to 2008 into the bin of Degenerate “Yeah. But I get it. I understand embedded structures of Art and have exquisitely sensitive people screen them for supremacy, both coded and explicit. I hate everything about offense. That would be fun: the past except for the fact that it led us here, where we can “Stop! STOP! Can this movie BE anymore homopho- denounce it with utter finality.” bic? The prissy, nervous, artistic guy has to live with a “Okay. What would you like to watch?” (Pause.) (Looks around, gets up, draws the shades, whispers.) Mr. Lileks blogs at www.lileks.com. “Please tell me you have Blazing Saddles.”

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The Long View BY ROB LONG

DONALD TRUMP: It’s just that . . . it’s DONALD TRUMP: Got it. I’m gone. just that . . . He exits quickly. General John Kelly enters. A pause. DONALD TRUMP: Tell her, John! KELLYANNE: He’s not at his best in JOHN KELLY: Mr. Bannon has been the mornings. When you get to know relieved of his duties. Let’s all get him better— “The Kellyanne Conway back to work. Kelly holds up his hand. Show” KELLYANNE: But . . . but . . . JOHN KELLY: I don’t plan on doing JOHN KELLY: Kellyanne, you and I Episode 203: “New Boss, Same as that. Now. Mrs. Conway, I will be don’t know each other well. While I was frank with you. This is not a ship- the Old Boss” in uniform, fighting for this country, shape operation, and if there’s one you were . . . you were . . . you were thing General John Kelly, USMC, FADE IN: INT. WHITEHOUSE—DAY where, again? expects and demands, it’s a ship- KELLYANNE: Working for Frank shape operation. Do you know why I Kellyanne enters in a rush. Luntz? took this job, Mrs. Conway? KELLYANNE: So sorry I’m late! You JOHN KELLY: Right. The guy with KELLYANNE: Um, the convenient would not believe how hard it is to the hair? parking? get here through all of those awful KELLYANNE: Well, that’s sort of hard JOHN KELLY: Is that some kind of protesters. I mean, I guess it’s a First to answer. It’s more like the guy — witty remark, ma’am? Some kind of Amendment thing, but— DONALD TRUMP: With the weird humoristical joke designed to create She stops. She notices the empty hair! Am I right? (OFF THEIR a warm rapport between you and desk next to hers. LOOKS) Hey, I get the irony, okay? your new boss? KELLYANNE: Uh oh. Hey, is Luntz Jewish? Or is he just KELLYANNE: Kinda. She crosses over to Mr. Bannon’s Jew-ish? I ask because I’m getting JOHN KELLY: Well, then, I regret to office, takes a deep breath, smooths more flak for the whole Char - inform you, ma’am, that those kinds her dress, breathes into her hand to lottesville thing and I want to may - of satirical asides do not work on me. check her breath, and is about to be ask some actual Jews if they’re I have spent most of my life trying to knock on the door when Donald okay with what I said about those rid myself of any trace of a sense of Nazi guys down there not being Trump enters from the Oval Office. humor, and I’m proud to say that I’ve so bad. DONALD TRUMP: Hi guys! (STOPS, succeeded at that mission. We have JOHN KELLY: Sir, you’re dismissed SEES KELLYANNE) Gals. Gal. work to do here, Mrs. Conway. This for the moment. Hi gal! administration is a chaotic mess. The DONALD TRUMP: Seriously? Terrific. KELLYANNE: Good morning, sir! chain of command is broken. And I’ve been collecting some really fun our commanding officer is, if I may DONALD TRUMP: Super cute outfit! Confederate-statue memes and I speak frankly, probably unfit for his (THEN, SEEING EMPTY DESK) want to tweet them while I take my duty. Our mission, ma’am, is to do What’s with the empty desk? morning— what we can to right this sinking KELLYANNE: I don’t know, sir. We JOHN KELLY: Sir, please hand over ship, corral and contain the irrational were supposed to have a communi- your device. and self-destructive impulses of our cations director here last week. You DONALD TRUMP: Hey, that’s what commander, and achieve clarity and know, to replace the one you— she said! effectiveness in the work that we do. DONALD TRUMP: What do you call Beat. And I believe, one hundred and ten that kind of sleeve? Is it a ruffle? Is DONALD TRUMP: Get it? percent, that we can do that. it a Dolman sleeve? I think it’s very John Kelly extends his hand. Trump A pause. attractive. reluctantly hands him his smart- KELLYANNE: Are you sure you KELLYANNE: Thank you, sir. But as I phone. don’t have a sense of humor? was saying, the comms director. I DONALD TRUMP: Great. So now Because what you just said is pretty really think we need to get someone what am I going to do when I’m in freakin’ funny. into that job as soon as possible. I’m the— JOHN KELLY: Drop and give me going to ask Mr. Bannon if we can John Kelly hands over a sheaf of fifty, Mrs. Conway. maybe move a little faster on— papers. KELLYANNE: You can’t be serious. DONALD TRUMP: Mr. Bannon? Steve DONALD TRUMP: As my daughter JOHN KELLY: You want to make it a Bannon? says, Oy! hundred? KELLYANNE: Yes. He exits. A beat. Trump re-enters. Kellyanne looks around, then gin- DONALD TRUMP: Oh boy. Look, I have DONALD TRUMP: That’s funny, ger ly, in her heels, starts doing some bad news, Kellyanne. I think right? I should use that at one of my pushups. you’d better sit down. rallies, right? KELLYANNE: Sir? You’re scaring me. JOHN KELLY: Mr. President— ENDOFACTONE

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people realize. Freud’s ideas influenced many papers and letters that cast doubt The Death America more than they influenced any on the myth he had created, and others other country, from Benjamin Spock’s were destroyed by his daughter Anna or admonitions about toilet training to various keepers of the Freud archives. Of Freud Margaret Mead’s pronouncements on Other papers and letters were locked sexual freedom to Norman O. Brown’s away in bank vaults to be made avail- E. FULLER TORREY advocacy of political activism (he able in the distant future. Crews docu- claimed to have read Freud’s writings ments his sources carefully and gives “six and ten times”). Freudian ideas proper credit to other Freud scholars came to dominate the publishing and (including Peter Swales) who patiently film industries as well as—according to tracked down the truth. a 1961 article in Monthly— Regarding the origin of psycho- “sociology, anthropology, legal thought analysis, Crews shows it to be one of and practice, humor, manners and Freud’s many schemes to make money mores, even organized religion.” And and become famous. Freud appears to this is not merely of historical interest. have been obsessed with economic and The current disastrous mental-illness- social success. When he officially treatment system in the United States announced his new therapy in 1896, is a direct consequence of Freudian according to Crews, it “was little more Freud: The Making of an Illusion, by Frederick ideas about treating children so as to than a brand name for a product in beta Crews (Metropolitan, 768 pp., $40) prevent the emergence of serious mental development. His subsequent aim illness in adulthood. The 20th-century would be to protect and promote his HIS is the longest but most architects of the system, such as William brand, irrespective of its run-ins with engaging obituary I have Menninger, claimed that Freudian the- evidence and logic.” Initially Freud ever read. Although it has ory “serves as the only logical basis for claimed that most cases of neuroses been known for several years preventive psychiatry.” We are now were caused by molestation of the Tthat Sigmund Freud has been on life experiencing the consequences of child by the parent, but in 1897 he support, the final demise of the man these mistakes. abruptly dropped the molestation responsible for popularizing the uncon- One of the people who were seduced (“seduction”) theory in favor of the scious comes nevertheless as a shock. by Freud in the 1970s, as he acknowl- Oedipal theory, thereby moving the ori- As W. H. Auden once noted: “To us he edges in his book, was a young English gin of the problem from the parent to is no more a person / Now but a whole professor at Berkeley named Frederick the child. climate of opinion.” Frederick Crews’s Crews. In his 1975 book Out of My Exactly what Freud was doing with new biography demonstrates not just System: Psychoanalysis, Ideology, and his patients in 1896, when he publicly that this “climate of opinion” has disap- Critical Method, Crews praised psy- claimed to have discovered a new peared but that psychoanalysis, as a choanalysis as “the only thoroughgoing therapy, is unclear, since the use of specific method for the treatment of theory of motive that mankind has free association would not be de - mental disorders, is also dead. Crews devised.” A decade later, Crews had scribed for another eight years and the systematically and convincingly autop- become skeptical and began systemati- problem of transference for yet one sies the corpse to prove it. cally examining Freud’s ideas. This led more year. What is clear is that what- But wait—why should we even to a series of encounters with Freudian ever Freud was doing was not work- care? Much of Crews’s book concerns true believers and extensive literary ing. “Freud lacked a single ex-patient the details of self-absorbed young men battles fought largely on the pages of who could testify to the capacity of in 1890s Vienna debating whether men The New York Review of Books. the psychoanalytic method to yield the are really anxious about having their Crews continued his mission and specific effects he claimed for it,” penis cut off because, as children, they became probably the most respected of Crews writes. “Freud knew that his wanted to kill their father so they could Freud’s many critics. Freud: The Making claims of healing power for psycho- marry their mother. What does that of an Illusion is the culmination of analysis lacked any basis in fact.” That have to do with 21st-century America? more than 40 years of research and was did not stop Freud from publicly claim- Surprisingly, much more than most eleven years in the writing. It is doubt- ing that psychoanalysis was “the only ful whether it will be surpassed as a possible method of treatment for cer- Mr. Torrey is a medical doctor, the founder of the scholarly work on Freud as a person or tain illnesses.” Privately, however, he Treatment Advocacy Center, and the author of on the origin of his ideas. told one of his disciples: “Patients only Freudian Fraud: The Malignant Effect of Ascertaining the historic truth about serve to provide us with a livelihood Freud’s Theory on American Thought and Freud and his ideas turns out to be a and material to learn from. We certainly Culture. difficult task. Freud himself destroyed cannot help them.”

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Freud scholars have argued at length microscope for good and replaced it obsession with money, which he called regarding the origin of Freud’s ideas. with a crystal ball.” He made no his “money complex,” was also promi- Some were most certainly borrowed attempt to test any of his psychological nent. He selectively took rich patients, from others, according to Crews, “with theories. In 1911, Freud joined the whom he referred to as “goldfish,” and only the most glancing gestures of Society for Psychical Research and colleagues were “shocked by his will- acknowledgment.” Crews also quotes later consulted a soothsayer. Crews fur- ingness to keep affluent patients in treat- Freudian scholar Paul Roazen: “The ther notes that Freud “attended at least ment for as long as five years without theme of plagiarism can be found one séance with his daughter Anna, fre- signs of consistent improvement.” The almost everywhere one turns in Freud’s quently exchanged ‘thought reading’ number and consistency of such stories career.” Many other ideas appear to with her,” and believed in “visitations collected by Crews leaves little doubt have come from Freud himself during from departed spirits.” regarding the character of Freud. the 15-year period—from 1884 to In addition to the origins of psycho- Finally, Crews details some of 1899—when he was using cocaine analysis, a major theme of Crews’s Freud’s most unsavory clinical cases, heavily. As described in detail by biography is the character of Sigmund among them that of Emma Eckstein, a Crews, Freud was one of the earliest Freud. He is not a sympathetic figure, young woman he treated in 1895 for and most enthusiastic promoters of emerging on the best of days as ethically hysteria. Freud’s closest collaborator at cocaine, giving it to his fiancée, friends, challenged. His relationship with his the time was Wilhelm Fliess, an oto- and patients, and continuing to claim daughter was bizarre: “In person and in laryngologist, and the two shared a that it was non-addictive even after his correspondence, the teenage Anna kept belief that “genital spots” within the friend, Ernst von Fleischl-Marxow, had Sigmund apprised of her unsuccessful nose influenced the reproductive sys- clearly become addicted. Thus Freud attempt to stop masturbating, and fan- tem. With Freud’s encouragement, was using cocaine during the same tasizing about being beaten by him. . . . Fliess operated on Eckstein, removing years that he was developing his ideas And at 22 she began the first of two a piece of turbinate and causing her regarding the origins of mental disor- secret analyses on her father’s couch, almost to bleed to death after the oper- ders and the use of psychoanalysis to six days a week, lasting a total of four ation. Also included is the story of treat them. As Freud wrote in 1895: “I years.” Crews also assembles data that Horace Frink, a New York psychoana- need a lot of cocaine.” Crews cites confirm what many scholars had long lyst who had bipolar disorder and came Freud’s cocaine use as being “of cardi- suspected—that Freud had a long-running to Freud for treatment. Frink was hav- nal importance for our study,” since “it affair with his wife’s younger sister, ing an affair with one of his patients, a follows that his writings were typically Minna, who lived with them, and that on very wealthy heiress. Freud therefore influenced by cocaine.” (Unfortunately, one occasion he got her pregnant (she ordered Frink to divorce his wife, Crews fails to provide any specifics apparently got an abortion). which he did, and also ordered the about what effect he thinks cocaine had Freud was also an inveterate self- heiress to divorce her husband, which on Freud’s work.) promoter, comparing himself to she also eventually did. Freud told The bottom line of Crews’s book is Copernicus and Darwin. In his later Frink that, by marrying the heiress, he that psychoanalytic theory and therapy years, he demanded complete confor- would have his psychoanalysis com- were based not on any scientific foun- mity from his followers, denigrating pleted, and that Frink could repay dation, but rather on the meanderings those such as Jung who broke away. Freud by making him a “rich man.” of a cocaine-addicted but economical- According to one psychoanalyst: “Freud Freud never got his money, since the ly ambitious mind. Although Freud was often deceptive, manipulative, and new marriage went badly and both had been trained as a physician and Machiavellian. He schemed with his Frink and the heiress blamed Freud for had even carried out some early neu- favorites to get rid of others for whom having ruined their lives. ropathological research, by the time he expressed contempt, riding rough- What are we to conclude from 768 he developed psychoanalysis, accord- shod over them when they got in the pages on Freud and his psychoanaly- ing to Crews, Freud “had retired his way of his grand design.” Freud’s sis? Freud’s reputation has suffered gravely in recent decades and Crews’s book will certainly accelerate that decline. As for psychoanalysis as a treatment modality, it seems likely HOME that it will continue to wither away, When I left here I was young; joining other dead approaches, such as I return—a target for stares. primal-scream therapy, as museum curiosities. What Freud is likely to be Though my temples are gray remembered for is popularizing the I still speak the local tongue. unconscious—The Interpretation of Kids smile at me as I pass Dreams and The Psychopathology of And ask me where I’m from. Everyday Life. People enjoy the idea that their dreams, and Freudian slips, —LI PO (701–762) have meaning, even if most of the time translated by Richard O’Connell they don’t.

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profound fervor of youth has long since prove the truth of Buddha’s contention Illuminations given way to the quotidian onset of that there is no “self,” or at least not the midlife. Long devotions are replaced type of self that we usually describe. MICHAEL BRENDAN with logistical overmanagement of “This is a matter of nearly unanimous small children. With the addition of agreement among psychologists: The DOUGHERTY mid life sins such as greed and pride to conscious self is not some all-powerful the usual lusts and gluttony, no one executive authority,” he writes. After a would describe me as having over- successful meditation retreat, “some of flowing reserves of inner peace or the contents of your consciousness that tranquility. I’m a setup either for the you normally think of yourself as gener- devil or for conversion. And if anyone ating seem to be getting generated by could persuade me to get into a lotus something other than you.” Wright re - position and focus on my breath for views psychological experiments, some half an hour every day, I think it would of them involving brains that have had be Bob Wright. their hemispheres separated, and in I’m not the only one experiencing a which human will and intention seem to sense of danger. In this book, Wright operate completely shorn of each other. Why Buddhism Is True: The Science and Philosophy sets out to show how recent findings in He cites others in which subliminal psychology and other sciences rhyme images bring about different “modes” of Meditation and Enlightenment, by Robert with the philosophy and insights of or “modules” of non-rational reaction. Wright (Simon & Schuster, 336 pp., $27) Buddhism. He begins by considering Psychologists can manipulate how peo- his own “futile pleasure seeking,” in ple respond to stimuli by subtly priming HE last time Bob Wright and the form of a powdered-sugar dough- them to think in terms of self-protection I discussed religion was nut. You may sense another danger or mate acquisition. almost two years ago, on an already—that Wright might end up “The closest thing to a self would be episode of his video podcast trivializing Buddhism as a kind of the algorithm that determines which Ton MeaningOfLife.tv. Wright is a per- super self-help system. Too fat? Try circumstances put which modules in ceptive journalist but seems to have detachment. Struggling to achieve your charge,” he writes. “And that algorithm moved beyond the typical world- career goals? You’ll achieve them when can’t be what we mean by the ‘con- weariness of that type to something you discover that ambition is an illu- scious self’ in humans—the CEO self— else, something wiser and more alive. sion. But this is a danger Wright suc- because humans don’t consciously It feels woo-woo to say it, but the short ceeds in avoiding. de cide to go into romantic mode or

Wright sets out to show how recent findings in psychology and other sciences rhyme with the philosophy and insights of Buddhism.

conversation we had after the record- For Wright, the pleasure found in a fearful mode.” In other words, brain ing stopped left me feeling as if the powdered-sugar doughnut reveals the chemistry conditioned by evolution world temperature had cooled by three slippery way that our conditioning by meets happenstance and produces our to five degrees and I had lit one of evolution fools us. Our imperative to reactions; as a side effect, this generates those scented candles that wives like to pass on our genes, bequeathed to us in the illusion of our “selves” reacting buy, eucalyptus or persimmon. He was a much harsher environment than 21st- authentically and consciously. solicitous, generous, and, in his lap- century America, has made our desires Wright eventually comes around to idary way, compassionate. We got off disproportionate to the pleasures we describing his life-altering breakthrough the phone, and suddenly the world get from indulging them. Our desires in meditation. After having spent days at seemed fresh again. I made a firm pur- mislead us, leave us crashingly unsatis- a retreat beating himself up for his poor pose to amend a particular wrong in fied. Presumably, if they run wild with meditation, experiencing in concentrat- my life. us, we get diabetes or destroy our rela- ed form the kind of self-reproach he had And so, I read Wright’s new book, tionships. Wright then describes how tortured himself with for years, he finally Why Buddhism Is True, with trepida- meditation allowed him to see his de - experienced some detachment from the tion, fearing another round of unwanted sires and his feelings from a different critical, self-hating voice inside his edification—or possibly even conver- angle, and to increasingly escape their own head. This sense of detachment sion. I’m a Catholic and often rather mastery over him. from that voice was accompanied by snippy about it. But as I’ve embarked Wright’s book is particularly inter- “narcotic-caliber bliss . . . enveloping on parenthood, I’ve felt the consola- esting when marshaling psychological me with growing warmth as the experi- tions of my religion less often. The studies and experiments in order to ence unfolded.” And as he contemplated

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the prospect of a life in which that moment, the self reappears when seen voice was no longer his master, he in the light of history. It might be a con- Unjust cried. Reading this gave me a jump: fused self that I drag around: It might My own religious conversion had all be subject to psychological manipula- the same physical and emotional com- tion, vulnerable to the delusions of Prosecution ponents as Wright’s breakthrough. In motivated reasoning, or tripped up by this moment, Wright realized that his its own weakness. DAVID BAHNSEN inner tormentor was in some sense an What else but my self is doing the illusion. He was translated into a life in things I do? Whatever the genesis of my which his guilt was no longer primor- desires or thoughts about a powdered- dial, inescapable, and oppressive—born sugar doughnut, on August 11, 2017, I again, you might say. bought one and ate it—because of this There is a modesty to this book that book. Then I finished this book review serves Wright very well, though I’m just before the deadline set for it, and not sure it serves Buddha. While resolved to have a better diet (again). Wright does a very respectful job of The circumstances of the universe in teasing out different aspects of which I find myself, and which influ- Buddhism that jibe with careful reason- ence the operation of what Wright calls ing about ourselves and with the “the algorithm” that determines my The Chickensh** Club: Why the Justice Department insights science gives us, it is admittedly responses, I trust to be designed by Fails to Prosecute Executives, by Jesse Eisinger a highly selective reading of Buddhist Providence, conscious of my fallen (Simon & Schuster, 400 pp., $28) sources, one that doesn’t seem ground- human nature. ed in an authoritative tradition. In other In some ways, I wish that Wright had ERHAPS no recent occurrence words, Wright is a cafeteria Buddhist, ventured beyond what he describes as stirred leftist-populist angst as and it isn’t clear how many other “Western Buddhism”—his version of much as the lack of any crimi- Buddhists are dining with him. It might the faith, which focuses on Buddhist nal prosecutions in the after- be difficult for potential converts per- philosophy and meditation and is mathP of the 2008 financial crisis. Many suaded by his arguments for medita- denuded of the various gods, prayers, analysts believe that a few sacrificial tion to sift through these religious and worship that are the focus of the lambs would have pacified angry Ameri - traditions and philosophical texts religion of the vast majority of cans and helped to stave off public dis- themselves without experiencing the Buddhists. At midlife, with young kids, content. It’s a plausible-sounding thesis, romance that comes in adhering to an a day job, and a hobby business, I find and Jesse Eisinger’s new book seeks to authoritative tradition. that my religious practice now rarely explain where the blame lies for the lack Wright’s concluding list of the rea- involves deep readings of the saints or of what he and many others believe sons he meditates is also modest but long uninterrupted prayers that will would have been worthy prosecutions. subtly persuasive. Although its mix of one day open the door to mystical The phrase “chickensh** club” quickly conveyed scientific research experience. Instead, when obliged by comes from a sort of inaugural speech and friendly-faced spirituality might the calendar, I get dressed up and drag that James Comey (yes, that James appeal to people who watch TED Talks, the little ones to church. There I wres- Comey) gave in 2002 upon his arrival as the book does not reduce Buddhist tle my squirming children, who are U.S. attorney for the Southern District meditation to a productivity hack, help- animated by their own infernal algo- of New York. Comey was calling out ing you to get what your unenlightened rithms. But at some point, the bell prosecutors who have never lost a trial as self wanted out of life. It’s a selective rings, my knee bends, the Host is lifted a “chickensh** club” of those who are reading of Buddhism but not, in my up, and I , “My Lord and my unwilling to take on risky cases; the view, a sacrilegious one. God.” Wherever my thoughts strayed, implication was that a gutsy prosecutor So, is it time to convert? I found little however pathetically distracted I was, will lose a couple along the way. to dispute as Wright explained how elu- whatever delusions clouded my judg- Eisinger then recounts the Enron case sive the “inner CEO” is, but I do not ment that week, in that moment, in the and celebrates not only the prosecutorial feel tempted to doubt my “self” itself. light of history, I slip out of my own successes that that debacle generated, The sense of self would begin to disap- subjectivity and am a witness to the but the prosecutors’ tactics and their pear from me if I looked for it the way truth of all existence. holistic approach to the fraudulent Enron Wright does, searching for it in signs of So, no, I’m not becoming a Buddhist. ecosystem. The Enron prosecutors had an observable integrated character Or a Wrightist. But you might. I’m not a perfect conviction record and took beneath the thoughts and feelings I unchanged from reading his book. The down the whole chain of actors in - experience. But the self becomes unde- piles of mind research, illumined by volved in that rather clear case of direct niable if I look for it in my mirror, or in Wright’s funny and sometimes search- fraud. But it was the Enron case that my journal, or in the memories of ing personal reflections, have convinced friends. While it is sometimes general- me to wake up earlier than my kids and, Mr. Bahnsen is the managing partner of the Bahnsen ly hard to know what it is that I really according to the light of my own tradi- Group, a wealth-management firm, and the author of want or really feel in any given tion, meditate. the forthcoming book Crisis of Responsibility.

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Eisinger believes started to send things give them a pass for a lack of evidence legal tradition demands a high burden astray, through the government-forced that a crime had been committed at all, in prosecuting the accused, and this shutdown of the famed accounting firm let alone committed by particular peo- entire cultural context is exactly why. Arthur Andersen. ple. The acquittal of the Bear Stearns Innocent or potentially innocent people Eisinger’s thesis is that Arthur Ander - defendants was the turning point in this should not be the sacrificial lambs when sen’s winning of the PR war in that case, story, but it merits barely a footnote in a thirst for “Old Testament justice” even as the government succeeded in Eisinger’s book. (Treasury secretary Tim Geithner’s destroying it, led to new burdens on Surely a 400-page book dedicated to famous phrase) overcomes the desire prosecutors of white-collar crime. A telling us what went wrong in the pur- for genuine justice. To give in to the company of 28,000 law-abiding and suit of justice after the financial crisis political temptation to take down real extremely gifted tax and finance profes- would provide a smoking gun—a clear people in order to make a purely sym- sionals was forced to close because of and obvious case of a crime that was bolic statement is wholly unbecoming the deviant actions of perhaps half a not sufficiently prosecuted? Sadly, no. of our republic. dozen people; in 15 years of studying the After 200 pages of throat-clearing, we It is also, of course, unbecoming for Arthur Andersen prosecution (eventual- get to the first case in which Eisinger guilty people to walk away scot-free. ly thrown out by the Supreme Court, but believes the people responsible for the And to the extent that a real individual not until it was too late to save the com- crisis were inadequately prosecuted. commits a real crime and there is real pany), I do not believe I have ever read But there’s a problem: The case had evidence that requires his prosecution, a single analysis that defends that abu- nothing whatsoever to do with causing no reader would disagree with Eisinger’s sive overreach . . . until now. Eisinger the crisis. plea that prosecutors be equipped with thinks society was wrong to condemn The case involved the process in which the tools necessary for an aggressive the Arthur Andersen shutdown and iden- Bank of America swept up a beaten- effort to secure such justice. The prob- tifies it as a turning point in our expecta- down Merrill Lynch. The prosecutors lem is that Eisinger’s book started as a tions of prosecutors. alleged that, in the closing of that trans- conclusion in search of support, and If my patience for Eisinger’s world- action, there was a troubling effort by that the support he provides is based view was wearing thin during his treat- leaders at both Bank of America and entirely in emotional assertion. The ment of the Arthur Andersen case, he Merrill Lynch to downplay, in a decep- financial crisis was so severe that permanently lost me by the time he got tive manner, the bonuses that would be there just had to be someone to put in to the infamous KPMG prosecutions. paid out at Merrill and the nature of the jail for it. Eisinger’s inquiry was In the KPMG case, the court system losses Merrill had incurred. But that never focused on ascertaining who lambasted prosecutors in the strongest transaction was the result of the finan- committed criminal infractions or way possible for their perverse threats: cial crisis, not its cause. For years, hype what criminal infractions he might have They had warned the company that it has been built up to the effect that crim- committed. It began with a presupposi- would be treated more harshly if it paid inal actors committed illegal acts of tion that some guilty bastards were the legal bills for its key executives fraud and corruption that caused our walking free and a case needed to be and officers who were then under in - society to enter a great housing melt- made against the “chickensh**” pros- vestigation. The courts, quite reason- down, recession, and financial crisis. ecutors who allowed it. ably, ruled that this was an egregious That the lead “case in point” in Eisinger’s The pain of the financial crisis will violation of due process and constitu- book is nothing of the sort, but an anec- be with American society for a long tional rights, and the entire case was dotal story that took place months after time to come, and for good reason. thrown out as a result. To Eisinger, this the crisis, out of a transaction that took From Main Street to Wall Street to K was yet another indication that the place only because of that crisis, is Street, there were a plethora of bad deck was being stacked against prose- extremely telling. actors and an entire set of policies that cutors who were trying to take down If Eisinger and I agree on anything, it did extraordinary harm to the Ameri - white-collar criminals. is that using “deferred-prosecution can economy. It is an irreversible fact Eisinger dedicates a grand total of agreements” to shake down corpora- of human nature that, after such a one paragraph to what is perhaps the tions for financial settlements, instead large and traumatic event, we want most significant factor in the lack of of pursuing actual individual lawbreak- someone to suffer. But populist rage criminal prosecutions in the financial ers, represents a deeply regrettable shouldn’t drive legal decision-making crisis. The U.S. government did indeed shift in the philosophy of American in a society ruled by law. Only a sim- try to prosecute two high-profile justice. It forces us to address a foun- plistic and inadequate account of the actors: the two famed hedge-fund man- dational question, one that has as yet financial crisis would assert that what agers at Bear Stearns whose failure pre- not been adequately answered: Do we have missed is a legal prosecution ceded the crisis. The jury trial resulted companies break the law, or do people? of its worst culprits. And perhaps that in acquittal, and for good reason: It is Be cause a person has a face, and will be the real achievement of not illegal to be bad at investing. enjoys constitutional rights, including Eisinger’s book: After reading this Prosecutors did not become “chick- such arcane ones as “innocent until first thorough work making the case ensh**” after that failed attempt; proven guilty,” prosecuting individu- for such crisis criminalization, readers rather, they were provoked into a sober als is not easy. But it is not easy are left realizing how naked that reflection that public anger would not because it is not supposed to be. Our emperor really is.

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BOOKS, ARTS & MANNERS

thudding. he committed some unattrac- 1934. It almost got him killed, this opera. A Salzburg tive accents. In reviews, I often find Stalin and the Party didn’t like it. But myself saying that a pianist “wrestled Shostakovich survived, and his opera manfully” with the “hammerklavier.” resurfaced decades later, to take its place Trio Kissin wrestled manfully too. among other masterpieces. The second movement is Beethoven’s Lady Macbeth is based on a novel by JAY NORDLINGER scherzo, and here Kissin was a little Nikolai Leskov, written in 1865. The mechanical, and sober. The music has story is cruel: a story of love, hate, Salzburg, Austria more impishness and charm than Kissin betrayal, murder, suicide—a natural he recital in the Great Festi - allowed it. his preference was for the big opera. In Salzburg, the stage director is val hall had the air of an and blunt. I have to tell you something Andreas Kriegenburg, from Germany. occasion, an event. The hall else I occasionally say, when reviewing a he has fashioned a production that is in was packed, and there were pianist in this sonata: “he put the ham- concert with the libretto and the music— Teven extra seats on either side of the mer in ‘hammerklavier.’” which is what a production ought to be. stage. This is rare here. A big pianist was In the third movement, the Adagio, This one is very hard to watch. But then, going to play a big program: a demand- Kissin was duly reverent. But he did not it’s Lady Macbeth. ing, virtuosic program. show much of a singing line. Rather, he In the opening minutes of the opera, I Our pianist was evgeny Kissin, born thudded out the melody. The fourth and thought, “Uh-oh: This is all wrong.” The in 1971 (Moscow). he came to the final movement, however, was a clear problem was, the Vienna Philharmonic world’s attention at age twelve, when he success. It is a great and formidable Orchestra was in the pit, and they are an recorded the Chopin concertos. he was fugue—and Kissin was great and formi- exceptionally, famously beautiful band. curly-headed and cute, wearing a red dable in it. They were playing in accordance with Young Pioneers scarf. From the beginning of the sonata to their tradition and reputation. I am used An émigré, he became a British citizen the end, he always evinced a sense of the to Lady Macbeth somewhat steely, and in 2002. In 2013, he became an Israeli architecture of the piece, and the impor- abrasive, and raw. This opera is definitely citizen. Why? Anti-Israeli protesters had tance of the piece. I liked Kissin better as ohne Schlag—without cream. And the been disrupting the concerts of such a forest, so to speak, than as trees. Viennese orchestra can lay on Schlag groups as the Jerusalem Quartet. If they The second half of his recital, he like no one’s business. were disrupting those concerts, Kissin devoted to Rachmaninoff: twelve pre- And yet, my ear adjusted, and I real- wanted them to disrupt his own. “Israel’s ludes. he began with the Prelude in C- ized how much beauty there actually is enemies are my enemies, and I do not sharp minor, which was brave, I thought: in this score. It does not have to be ugly. want to be spared.” Kissin received his Long ago, this prelude became a chest- The action onstage is ugly enough. Israeli passport from the hands of Natan nut, a cartoon, a stereotype. Yet it is a Conducting the VPO, and assembled Sharansky, who, as Anatoly Shcharansky, beautiful and interesting piece, and other forces, was Mariss Jansons. he had been one of the foremost prisoners in Kissin played it that way. was born in Riga—the Riga ghetto—in the Soviet Gulag. his Rachmaninoff at large, he played 1943. his mother was in hiding. her here at the Salzburg Festival, Kissin beautifully, and interestingly, and virtu- father and her brother had already been took the stage wearing formal concert osically. The singing line that I found killed by the Gestapo. Mariss’s father attire, though with a white jacket, in absent in the Beethoven was present in was Arvīds Jansons, a conductor who acknowledgement of the summer heat. the Rachmaninoff. Only the Prelude in D worked under the legendary evgeny Not for him those black pajamas that are major, I thought, was ruined by thudding. Mravinsky in Leningrad. Mariss would standard concert wear today. I some- The Prelude in D minor had some lovely, do the same. he is a superb conductor, times refer to these pajamas as a “Mao subtle blurring. And in the B-flat-major full of humanity, and he had an out- suit,” reflecting “proletarian chic.” prelude—that stirring storm of notes— standing night in the Great Festival hall. These days, Kissin reminds me of Anton Kissin was a glorious lawn mower. he conducted Lady Macbeth with Rubinstein, who had a broad forehead Rachmaninoff includes a nobility, intelligence, mastery, musicality, and and a terrific mane. and Kissin includes it too. These pre- sympathy. I have heard crazier, more This Rubinstein was the great Russian ludes sometimes have a storytelling intense accounts of this opera. Never pianist who lived from 1829 to 1894. he quality, which Kissin brought out. have I heard one more understanding and is not to be confused with another great There were some clinkers—some wrong beautiful, with power to spare. pianist, the Polish-born Artur Rubinstein, notes—but this only proved that we The title role, Katerina, a.k.a. Lady who lived from 1887 to 1982. When he were not listening to a studio recording, Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, is one was a boy virtuoso, the second Rubinstein thank heaven. of opera’s most demanding roles. From had cards printed up that included the I do not always like Kissin’s playing. the soprano, it requires strength, lyricism, words “No Relation.” But I always want to hear him, which stamina, theatrical range, focus, and In the Great Festival hall, Kissin says something about an artist. sheer nerve. Nina Stemme, the Swede, opened his program with the mightiest The next night, also in the Great met all demands. So did her tenor, por- Beethoven sonata: that in B flat, Op. 106, Festival hall, the Salzburg Festival pre- traying Sergei, Brandon Jovanovich. known as the “hammerklavier.” In the sented Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk he is from Billings, Montana, and he first movement, Kissin did some of his District, Shostakovich’s opera from has made a specialty of Sergei. Last

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Nina Stemme in Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District

season at the Metropolitan Opera, he makes a beautiful sound—as you would were you doing when you were 16? was the Prince in Dvořák’s Rusalka. expect, given his position. Mendelssohn was writing this octet. He excels in these Slavic-language Then came one of Mozart’s most sub- I’m not sure he ever wrote anything roles, as perhaps befits an American lime works, his Clarinet Quintet, K. better. The Vienna players rendered it named Jovanovich. 581. Playing the clarinet was Daniel with brio and savvy. There was some Dmitri Ulyanov was Boris, Katerina’s Ottensamer, a principal of the orchestra. sour intonation along the way, and father-in-law. Ulyanov comes from a He made a smooth and burnished some technical stumbles—but, as with long line of Russian basses, and he is an sound, and he was seamless. There were Kissin’s clinkers, it was a reminder that exemplar of that line: a booming, beauti- no registers to his “voice”; it was one we were listening to the real McCoy, ful singer. Without straining, he filled the voice, top to bottom. He sang as much not a studio recording. Great Festival Hall as though it were a as he played. His soft playing, or A discreet paragraph in our programs phone booth. singing, was remarkable. It was gen- informed us of something jarring: Ernst A good performance of Lady Macbeth uinely piano, not disembodied. He Ottensamer, one of the principal clarinets will leave you rattled for a while. This caught the poignancy of the music. And in the orchestra, had died two weeks one was really good. all through the work, he demonstrated before. The concert was being dedicated The next night, some players from the Mozartean purity. From everyone to him. His son Daniel had been one of Vienna Philharmonic went to the Great involved, this was a performance wor- his co-principals. Another son, Andreas, Hall of the Mozarteum, to play a cham- thy of the work. is a principal clarinet of the Berlin ber concert. All orchestral work and no After intermission, six players gath- Philharmonic. (These are the two best chamber music makes Jack a dull boy. ered for a suite by Hans Werner Henze, orchestras in the world, mind you.) (Or would that be Hans?) Nine of the the German composer who lived from In America, I guarantee you, there VPO’s best participated in this concert, 1926 to 2012. This was his Fantasia for would have been at least one speech from captained by one of the orchestra’s con- String Sextet, drawn from his score for the stage. It would have been maudlin. certmasters, Rainer Honeck (brother of Young Törless, a 1966 film based on the No one at this concert in the Mozarteum

THOMAS AURIN notorious novel of Robert Musil, pub- / Manfred Honeck, the conductor of the said a word. Players and administrators Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra). lished in 1906. Henze’s suite is varied, knew, I’m sure, that Mozart’s quintet Their concert began with Richard skillful, and intriguing. would say far more than words could. Strauss: the sextet from his opera The concert ended with one of the And Daniel Ottensamer’s playing— Capriccio. From the VPO’s six, it was most famous chamber works of all, which required some bravery, I think— SALZBURGER FESTSPIELE relaxed and poised. Rainer Honeck Mendelssohn’s Octet in E flat. What was painfully good.

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BOOKS, ARTS & MANNERS Film Love and Its Complications

ROSS DOUTHAT

HE dog days of summer are a good time to catch up on the season’s counterprogramming, the movies that somehow foundT an audience while competing against superhero sequels, commercial juggernauts, and the deserved success of Dunkirk. This year, the best of the rest has Zoe Kazan and Kumail Nanjiani in The Big Sick the worst possible title: It’s The Big Sick, a romantic comedy that escapes that genre’s present exhaustion by the novel method of know that (in some form) it really hap- subplot about Kumail’s one-man show putting its leading lady in a coma. pened. The movie’s joint screenwriters are about growing up Pakistani that never That lady is Emily (Zoe Kazan), a Nanjiani himself and his wife, Emily V. pays off, plus one too many mini-endings Chicago grad student who becomes an Gordon, the movie-Emily’s real-life coun- on the way to the (effective) very end. object of affection for Kumail (Kumail terpart, and the coma-romance is basically I also have some sympathy for one of Nanjiani), the son of Pakistani immi- how they ended up together—which helps the left-wing #hottakes offered online grants who’s disappointing his parents by explain why the movie has an agreeably about the film—a piece noting that pursuing a career in stand-up comedy human, lived-in quality that doesn’t re - Kumail’s whole immigrant-in-love arc while driving for Uber to pay the bills. quire too much stretching from the cast. effectively promotes the idea that the They meet after she offers a friendly Nanjiani, known mostly for being a essence of Americanization is seculariza- heckle during one of his stand-up perfor- put-upon ethnic straight man on Silicon tion, that the good assimilated Muslim mances and have a cute young-broke- Valley, is well matched with Kazan, not isn’t just the one who might watch horror urbanite courtship that ends, abruptly, least because they both have faces that movies and do stand-up and marry a white when she discovers a cigar box filled are pretty/handsome about one-third of girl, but also the one who doesn’t pray with headshots of young Pakistani ladies the time. He is also well matched with anymore (we watch Kumail pretending to in his apartment. What we already know, Romano, who wears his famous sitcom pray to appease his folks, and in the end and what she discovers, is that Kumail’s and stand-up past lightly (and also wears boldly confessing his agnosticism) or take parents (and particularly his steely moth- a beard); their characters, the anxious any of his religion’s moral precepts seri- er, played in a great if underwritten turn sort-of boyfriend and the fretful dad, are ously. There is no sense of what an assim- by Zenobia Shroff) expect him to marry a basically different comedian-types, each ilated and believing American Muslim woman who is both South Asian and turning inappropriately to jokes during might look like—a fairly important ques- Muslim, and while he’s rebelling against the crisis but in styles that clash before tion in the West these days—and I did find them he isn’t ready to imagine actually they mesh. And then Romano and Hunter myself, at times, wishing that the movie marrying outside his tribe. together are even better still: The movie had allowed Kumail’s parents to be a bit No sooner has Emily dumped him, gives them an implicit backstory like more than stereotypes, a bit more like the though, than she is suddenly hospitalized, their daughter’s with Kumail—they’re a fuller characters inhabited by Hunter and and for under-explained reasons her mixed North-South marriage, with her Romano, and had made their appeals to friends order Kumail to her bedside just as twang and his hangdog outer-borough traditions more interesting and less rote. she disappears into an induced coma, look, dealing with a betrayal he commit- But it asks a lot of a shaggy romantic while the hospital staff struggle to figure ted, and their scenes together are some of comedy to also wrestle effectively with out what’s wrong. At which point her par- the best in the film. the deepest questions of religion, identi- ents, played by Ray Romano and Holly What’s not good about the movie is its ty, and modernity. I am reviewing The Hunter, show up, and suddenly the meet- length, rooted in the obvious desire of its Big Sick after its summer of relative suc- cute comedy about escaping parental personally invested writers to shoehorn in cess, so the tendency is to nitpick and rules and pressure turns into a somewhat all kinds of extra business they find fun— note its weaknesses. The basic truth is more old-fashioned story in which, to win which means we have long interludes that this is a good movie, flaws and all, his ex-girlfriend back, Kumail first has to with Kumail and his friends at the come- with a story of love and anxiety in woo her parents. dy club, which play like middling out- everyday life that—after so much sum- This setup might feel a little over- takes from Judd Apatow’s Funny People mer bluster—the moviegoer can enter LIONSGATE engineered, but it’s easier to accept if you (Apatow is a Big Sick producer), plus a and relax into with relief.

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when he said, “We used to have books Just the other day my wife came up City Desk the tenants could borrow. No more!” He in the elevator with three cops, in full spoke as if mourning the flight of the uniform, pistols on hips. This looked Down These earls. When he retired, there was a party more serious than shushing five kids in for him in the lobby, his domain. Soon a modified one-bedroom who have after, as if life were work, he died. invited 25 of their best friends over for Lonely Vinnie, his most notable junior col- a beer blast. (The cops hardly ever league, was Italian, ebullient, a Yankees come for that; five kids to one apart- Streets fan, regularly greeting my wife with a ment is how the building makes money.) great, joyous “Hi, doctor!”—and right- Gossip supplied the explanation: An ly, for she has a Ph.D. (New School for elderly mother and daughter had been Social Research). But so he also greeted found dead in their own apartment, after me (no school, for nothing) and every- two weeks. one. He ran the easiest defense of a disser- I inquired of the doorman (Moroccan- tation in the world. He died of diabetes; French). From his description, I could a notice in the mailroom announced a not picture them. You know a lot of wake in the Bronx. faces in a 19/20-floor building, but not The passing of tenants—our neigh- all. If they were there undiscovered for bors—is more elusive. You see a face two weeks, evidently I wasn’t the only every, or every other, day, and then you one who didn’t know them. Hadn’t their don’t, preceded perhaps by seeing it family missed them? Maybe they were RICHARD BROOKHISER altered for the worse. The first such their entire family. Hadn’t their friends? change I noticed came upon an elderly Maybe they met their friends once a E live in a white brick man, with a habitually sweet expres- month for lunch and an organ recital building, 19 stories tall sion, always dapper in a black suit and (my heart, my feet) and died in the gap. (there is a 20th floor but fedora. Then I saw him in the neighbor- At moments like this, whether we live no 13th), from the hood supermarket, making repeated in the city or the wide-open , we KennedyW administration. We are the loops past the cash register, then back dream of community. Nostalgists, roman- second tenants of our apartment. and past again, back and past. The tics, anthropologists, communitarians, Before we moved in, we met the checkout girl scolded him, he smiled and op-ed writers making grist from all homesteaders, an old couple, moving on. Dementia. Soon he was gone. There the above encourage the feeling. Jane on to assisted living or Florida. The was an older lady—lady was how you Austen is everyone’s pet novelist—also apartment occupies a corner; looking instinctively thought of her—bright- a very great one, but we love her for her out one window, the wife could see, eyed, well spoken, well turned-out. The toyland villages and the costumed across the street and down the block, city removed a traffic sign that stood inhabitants. Think again. Living in those the brownstone in which she had near our awning, but left a stub of the little communities can be like having a grown up. metal post sticking out of the sidewalk 24-hour anal probe. Everyone knows Younger tenants leave because of where everyone jaywalked across. Next everyone else’s business and has known promotions, reproduction, or both. Years thing the lady had a wheelchair and an it for years, if not generations. The ago we had a friend our age, genial, sin- attendant, which she kept for several Reverend (later Father) Richard gle, Wall Street. We asked him once, years. Philosophical systems, wrote Neuhaus (d. 2009) was driving Will before throwing a party, if we could Henry Adams, especially those which Herberg (d. 1977) through Brooklyn. store something in his refrigerator, and justify God’s ways to man, must They passed a Hasidic neighborhood. found it empty, almost showroom-floor account for catastrophes worldwide and Isn’t it wonderful, Richard said, seeing clean, except for champagne and beer. accidents in corners. old and young together? Herberg re - Excellent man! Then he married and A dramatic departure happened on proved him: You have no idea how rigid left for an even better job elsewhere, our floor years ago. An older woman those communities are. from which he annually sends us cards and her middle-aged son lived together. Pursuing happiness instead, we creat- picturing his family and wishing us He played the piano in an Italian ed a continent of runaways, whether we Season’s Greetings. But for city restaurant in the neighborhood, which live in the badlands, with wild horses dwellers already fixed in life, the rent never had a single customer (if you and opiates, or among the millions of laws encourage stasis. The old leave to are thinking money laundering, you are the city, in buildings full of faced but go to the nursing home or the grave. probably thinking right). Mother and nameless near-strangers. When we go, The only departures that are accorded son drank and fought, audibly. You’re apart from family and friends, there will formal notice are those of the staff. The drunk! You’re dead! Shut up! etc. Once be a few words in the elevator or the oldest doorman when I first moved in they left a pot on the stove, which mailroom, a few words from the door- was Eddie, an Irishman, tall, competent, filled the hall with smoke, then fire- man, then back to nods and talk of the sometimes given to melancholy. He was men. One day there was yellow KEEP weather. The day of our death will be, as dusting a breakfront that stood in the OUT tape across their door. They were Auden put it, a day when one did some- lobby several decorating schemes ago, heard no more. thing slightly unusual.

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Happy Warrior BY HEATHER WILHELM Home on the Ranch

EARS ago, as enthusiastic new Texans, my muddy trail, like some bizarro wilderness episode of husband and I moseyed into the Lone Star Scooby-Doo. State with a vague and dusty dream: We wanted Nature, as it turns out, does not mess around. Through it Y a ranch. all, I kept coming back to a quote from that wise old philoso- Here’s where things get tricky, for in Texas, “ranch” can pher, country legend Willie Nelson: “Fortunately, we are not mean a lot of different things. The term is rather fast and in control.” loose, a verbal grab bag used to describe everything from Modern technology makes this age-old truth awfully easy small hobby farms to 50-acre “gentlemen’s parcels” to mind- to forget. The great outdoors, however, are more than happy blowing sprawls of land and cattle and oil. to offer frequent reminders. One wonderful example came Furthering the confusion, it is widely considered ill-man- in the form of America’s recent solar eclipse, which tore nered to ask a casual acquaintance how large his ranch through the usual news cycle, inserting some much-needed might be. This is unfortunate, given that said acquaintance wonder and awe. “Just when we thought we run the show might own something like the King Ranch, an 825,000-acre down here,” MSNBC’s Brian Williams quipped, opening marvel larger than Rhode Island, or something like Buck’s his coverage of the sun’s mesmerizing disappearing act. Ammo Hollow, which would be a few unkempt acres with Indeed we don’t. a yurt, some guns, and a longhorn. (If it’s the former, “The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men promptly start weaseling your way into an invitation, be - how little they really know about what they imagine they cause there’s probably a chef and a pool. If it’s the latter, I can design,” Friedrich Hayek wrote in The Fatal Conceit. guess it depends on how you feel about yurts. Who doesn’t Hayek was warning of the folly of command-and-control love guns and a longhorn?) economies, but man, oh man, when it comes to human hu - In any event, some dreams do come true: We now have a bris, unexpected consequences, and the pitfalls of central “ranch.” In keeping with the grandest of ranch traditions, I planning, he would have had a heck of a time at my ranch shall shroud its size in mystery. And while I regret to inform this summer. you that there is no chef or pool onsite, the ranch does boast Want to craft an amazing hiking path? Giant trees will fall, one extremely important trait: It is remote enough to make blocking your way. How about a charming little trail of step- cell-phone service difficult and obtaining Internet access a ping stones crossing a creek? Weeks later, you’ll find you’ve sometimes fruitless chore. accidentally diverted the entire water flow, sprouting a crop In other words, in this day and age, it is paradise. of mysterious tough-as-nails weeds with a gurgling mud pit Imagine a summer largely unplugged. Friends, I lived it! on the side. I recently read that it takes about $900,000 a year At the ranch, I faced no daily dose of Trump-related media and a staff of two dozen to keep the Grand Canyon National panic. I followed no frantic political ten-tweet pileups. When Park looking “natural.” Boy, do I believe it. Anthony “The Mooch” Scaramucci blasted in and out of the “You’ve got to be patient in the country.” I was told this public consciousness for approximately ten flaming hilari- more than once, and it’s certainly true. It’s good advice for ous seconds—a foul-mouthed Icarus, he was, plummeting just about anywhere. And while my largely unplugged exis- from the sun—I paid little heed. When one of my daily polit- tence was glorious in its own way, my countrified life wasn’t ical e-mail newsletters informed me that one-third of our wholly innocent of the hearsay and whosay and wild specu- nation’s cats have body-image issues thanks to our troubling lation that currently plague . celebrity culture, did I snap to attention? Please. With my cell For instance, on the subject of snakes, I was told the fol- service, that e-mail would have taken a full half hour to lowing, each from a seemingly credible source: 1) “Well! download, and I don’t even have a cat. One thing to be happy about, there sure aren’t any water At first I felt unmoored, as any political junkie would. moccasins around here!” 2) “Are you kidding? Of course Soon enough, the unmooring became a thing of wonder. As we have water moccasins. They’re all over the place! One the summer rolled on, I read more books. I hiked. I finished fell into my canoe as a kid!” 3) “Lady, all I have to say is my multi-year backlog of family-photo albums. (Just kid- this: Watch where you walk. I once almost stumbled into a ding. That’s an obvious lie.) nest of water moccasins. They were wound into a giant I dodged black-widow spiders, found a baby rattlesnake seething ball! Stuff of nightmares! Chased me over land for curled up on the front welcome mat, and, on one particu- 20 yards!” 4) “Pffffffffft. A snake ball? Who told you that? larly exciting morning, discovered a startlingly fresh trail You could poke a cottonmouth with a sharp stick 13 times of gigantic mountain-lion pawprints leading right up to and it still wouldn’t come after you!” our front door. Later, I learned that the prints circled the And finally . . . drumroll, please . . . entire house. It was staking out the place, leaving only a 5) “One thing to be happy about, there sure aren’t any water moccasins around here!” Heather Wilhelm is a NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE columnist and a Political Twitter, eat your heart out. At that one moment, it senior contributor to the Federalist. was like I was never gone.

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