The Case for Skills-Based Immigration

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August 28, 2017 $5.99

YOU THE CASE FOR SKILLS-BASED IMMIGRATION

REIHAN SALAM $5.99 35 PLUS HEATHER MAC DONALD on Jeff Sessions KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON on Emma Lazarus

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AUGUST 28, 2017 | VOLUME LXIX, NO. 16 | www.nationalreview.com BOOKS, ARTS & MANNERS ON THE COVER Page 24 39 THE NEW MANICHAEANS Michael Knox Beran reviews The The Case for Skills-Based Once and Future Liberal: After Immigration Identity Politics, by Mark Lilla. 41 TWO KINDS OF PEOPLE The RAISE Act has the potential to Terry Teachout reviews Ernest Hemingway: A Biography, do a great deal of good. Instead of by Mary V. Dearborn, and Paradise sharpening our political and Lost: A Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald, by David S. Brown. economic divides, as mass immigration has been doing for a 42 THE GREAT LADDER Robert VerBruggen reviews Dream generation, the bill offers an Hoarders: How the American immigration system that would Upper Middle Class Is Leaving Everyone Else in the actually help heal them. Reihan Salam Dust, Why That Is a Problem, and What to Do about It, by Richard V. Reeves. COVER: ROMAN GENN 44 A FAMILY RIVEN BY ARTICLES REVOLUTION Tracy Lee Simmons reviews The WRETCHED REFUSE, INDEED by Kevin D. Williamson 14 Loyal Son: The War in Ben About that poem . . . Franklin’s House, by Daniel Mark Epstein. 16 PROSECUTING POLITICS by David French In Texas, criminal law is being twisted to destroy officeholders. 46 RECOVERING THE SOUL OF CONSERVATISM JARED AND OTHER SONS-IN-LAW by Jay Nordlinger 19 James E. Person Jr. reviews The Angles on a relationship. Vision of the Soul: Truth, WHO CRITIQUES THE CRITIC? by Ian Tuttle Goodness, and Beauty in the 21 Western Tradition, by James On the career of Michiko Kakutani. Matthew Wilson.

47 ON THE BEACH FEATURES Ross Douthat reviews Dunkirk. 24 THE CASE FOR SKILLS-BASED IMMIGRATION by Reihan Salam It makes sense economically and morally. 27 IN DEFENSE OF JEFF SESSIONS by Heather Mac Donald SECTIONS His work on policing and immigration merits praise. 2 Letters to the Editor THE AGONY OF VENEZUELA by Pierpaolo Barbieri 30 4 The Week How a prospering democracy sank into dictatorship and hunger. 37 Athwart ...... James Lileks The Long View ...... Rob Long TRUMP’S CONSERVATIVE INTERNATIONALISM by Henry R. Nau 38 33 43 Poetry ...... Jessica Hornik It aims at a globalism rooted in nationalism. 48 Happy Warrior ...... Kyle Smith

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EDITORINCHIEF Richard Lowry College as Experiment Senior Editors Richard Brookhiser / Jonah Goldberg / Jay Nordlinger Ramesh Ponnuru / David Pryce-Jones Oren Cass makes a strong case (“Teaching to the Rest,” July 31) that many of Managing Editor Jason Lee Steorts today’s high-school students would be better off taking career training instead Literary Editor Michael Potemra Vice President, Editorial Operations Christopher McEvoy of college prep. The reason everyone thinks college is so important is obvious: Executive Editor Reihan Salam Higher education is a racket for the Left, providing employment, affirmation Roving Correspondent Kevin D. Williamson National Correspondent John J. Miller for their views, a comfortable, insular environment, and a steady stream of Senior Political Correspondent Jim Geraghty Art Director Luba Kolomytseva newly indoctrinated progressives, so the media do everything they can to keep Deputy Managing Editors pumping up enrollment. This country started on its long decline the day news- Nicholas Frankovich / Fred Schwarz Robert VerBruggen papers began expecting reporters to have college degrees. Production Editor Katie Hosmer Assistant to the Editor Rachel Ogden In view of this, however, rising college-dropout rates may be less alarming than Mr. Cass appears to think. How many students enroll at college, get Contributing Editors Shannen Coffin / Ross Douthat / Daniel Foster hit full blast by the pervasive political thought control, and decide to call Roman Genn / Arthur L. Herman / Lawrence Kudlow Mark R. Levin / Yuval Levin / Rob Long Dave at the screen-door plant and see if they’re still hiring? Just as we Mario Loyola / Jim Manzi would not condemn a plumbing trainee who wants to give college a try, nei- Andrew C. McCarthy / Andrew Stuttaford ther should we automatically chalk up as a failure someone who goes to col- NATIONALREVIEWONLINE Editor Charles C. W. Cooke lege and realizes it’s not for him. Teenage career plans last about as long as Managing Editor Katherine Connell teenage romances. Deputy Managing Editor Mark Antonio Wright Senior Writers The author quotes Charles Murray: “What we need is an educational sys- Michael Brendan Dougherty / David French Critic-at-Large Kyle Smith tem that brings children with all combinations of assets and deficits to adult- National-Affairs Columnist John Fund hood having identified things they enjoy doing and having learned how to do Reporter Katherine Timpf Associate Editors Molly Powell / Nick Tell them well.” That makes for a fine wish list, but does it perhaps expect too Manager, Office & Development Russell Jenkins much self-awareness and constancy from kids who find new favorite enter- Web Editorial Assistant Grant DeArmitt Web Producer Scott McKim tainers, games, and social-media platforms every few months? Of course our

EDITORS- AT- LARGE children keep upsetting our plans for them—that’s their job. And an incon- Kathryn Jean Lopez / John O’Sullivan clusive spell at college is often a useful part of the learning process that NATIONALREVIEWINSTITUTE Murray describes. THOMASL. RHODESFELLOW Ian Tuttle Rick Schaefer BUCKLEYFELLOWINPOLITICALJOURNALISM Alexandra DeSanctis Kent, Wash.

COLLEGIATENETWORKFELLOW Philip H. DeVoe Ohio’s Thrill Engineers Contributors Hadley Arkes / James Bowman / Eliot A. Cohen Dinesh D’Souza / Chester E. Finn Jr. / Neal B. Freeman Thank you for Charles C. W. Cooke’s wonder- James Gardner / David Gelernter / George Gilder Jeffrey Hart / Kevin A. Hassett / Charles R. Kesler ful article about our Cedar Point (“Magnificent David Klinghoffer / Anthony Lejeune / Alan Reynolds Tracy Lee Simmons / Terry Teachout / Vin Weber Thrill Machines,” August 14). When I was growing up in Toledo, a visit to the Point— Vice President Jack Fowler only an hour away—was an annual summer Chief Financial Officer James X. Kilbridge Accounting Manager Galina Veygman tradition. It represents something excellent in Accountant Lyudmila Bolotinskaya Circulation Manager Jason Ng America: crazy and uninhibited ingenuity that Head of Integrated Sales Jim Fowler brings simple joy to all. Senior Account Executive Kevin Longstreet It is not ironic, I believe, that close by in

PUBLISHERCHAIRMAN Milan (pronounced MY-len), a young boy E. Garrett Bewkes IV John Hillen named Thomas Alva Edison grew up, and far- FOUNDER William F. Buckley Jr. ther down the road were the Wright Brothers, Neil Armstrong, and John Glenn, to name PATRONSANDBENEFACTORS only a few. Ohio is a place where people stand firmly in the soil yet reach Robert Agostinelli Dale Brott eagerly for the stars. Mr. and Mrs. Michael Conway Mark and Mary Davis Virginia James Cynthia Millen Christopher M. Lantrip Brian and Deborah Murdock Toledo, Ohio 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 Looks like Google dropped its “Don’t be evil” motto just in time.

n The personnel crises of the Trump administration are like groupies: There are so many, who can remember them once they have had their day? Sean Spicer had one of the briefest tenures of any White House press secretary; Anthony Scaramucci, whose accession to communications director precipitated Spicer’s resignation, lasted eleven days; his replacement is TBA (perhaps Stephen Miller). Reince Priebus fell as chief of staff; John Kelly, the retired Marine four-star who was secretary of homeland security, filled his shoes. Meanwhile, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, whom Trump beat like a gong for a week, is once again part of the in crowd. Perhaps Kelly will impose some order. Good luck with that. The Trumpcapades are a consequence of the president’s steep learning curve, and of his unwillingness to learn anything new. (Why should he? Buoyancy and bluster got him this far.) It makes for great television; do we have to wait for Season Two for the story arc?

n Speaking of internal discord, the latest official caught up in it is national-security adviser H. R. McMaster, who has been tar- geted by the alt-right. If an avalanche of anonymous reporting is to be believed, the immediate cause of the clash is McMaster’s decision to fire two aides: the National Security Council’s intelligence director, Ezra Cohen-Watnick, and its Mideast director, Derek Harvey. Cohen-Watnick and Harvey are purportedly allies of Steve Bannon, and their firing triggered a cavalcade of Rod Rosenstein should have been more specific in outlining the anti-McMaster stories in Bannon-friendly outlets. Anonymous crimes Mueller was authorized to investigate when he appointed leakers claimed that he was anti-Israel and soft on Iran. They him, and still could stipulate them—a much better option than called him a globalist. One ugly alt-right meme circulated Trump wielding the axe or Congress meddling with the powers depicting McMaster as a puppet under the control of interna- of the executive. tional Jewish interests. Russian Twitter bots boosted the hashtag #FireMcMaster. The entire attack was low and petty and quickly n The unedited transcripts of phone conversations that Donald swatted aside by President Trump himself. He issued a statement Trump had early in his administration with two foreign leaders— in support of McMaster, whom he called “pro-Israel.” While Australia’s Malcolm Turnbull and Mexico’s Enrique Peña McMaster has been too willing to cling to the disastrous Iran Nieto—were published by the Washington Post. They are char- deal, his knowledge, experience, and temperament are invalu- acteristically Trumpian—a bit rambling, a bit blustery, but ulti- able. Now is not the time to remove a heroic and thoughtful mately not confrontational. True to his Noo Yawk roots, Trump leader for the sake of settling personal scores. aims, however clumsily, for a hand-on-the-elbow man-to- manliness. They will make a footnote in Vol. 4 of the Robert Caro n Democrats and some Republicans in Congress are crafting biography. The news, and the scandal, is that they were leaked in bills designed to prevent Trump from firing Special Counsel the first place. Diplomacy depends on trust—between diplomats, Robert Mueller. That’s a bad idea—it would be a case of one and between heads of state. Who will talk with any degree of branch of government clearly interfering with another. Which is candor if he or she knows that the conversation might end up on not to say that Trump’s firing Mueller is a good idea. The ensuing the front page of one of the broadsheets of the resistance? Jeff political storm would be of gale force. Mueller has a mandate to Sessions has announced that the Justice Department will be land- investigate collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia; ing hard on leakers. Right he is. doing so may legitimately require inquiry into the Russian business ties of the Trump family and former political associates n Sessions has a ways to go before his DOJ matches the Obama (Manafort, Flynn). But going further afield than that would con- administration’s record of leak prosecutions. Obama’s eight ROMAN GENN stitute a proverbial fishing expedition. Deputy Attorney General espionage-act prosecutions exceeded the combined total of

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every administration before his, and in 2013 his DOJ even transgender people in the military. This came as a surprise to the seized records from the Associated Press. The attorney general senior military leaders, who insisted that, contra the president, should use caution in following Obama’s lead in his approach to they had not been consulted, and that they had not received any the press, but journalists shouldn’t enjoy absolute immunity new orders or new directions regarding transgender troops. As from scrutiny, and in extreme circumstances it’s acceptable and with the question of gay soldiers, there are two main competing necessary to examine their records. If this chills the leaks, so considerations here: The first is that there are good and patriotic much the better. Anyone in government who is disturbed by men and women who want to serve their country in uniform and executive-branch excesses and incompetence has multiple law- have personal characteristics that complicate such service; the ful avenues for addressing these problems. Sending top-secret second is that those complicating factors really do complicate information to the New York Times is not among them. things, and accommodating them can have the effect of shifting the military’s focus away from war-making. Barring transgender n White House senior policy adviser Stephen Miller and people from serving makes sense as a general matter, though it CNN reporter Jim Acosta got into a briefing-room donny- need not be accompanied by a witch hunt targeting those current- brook about poetry: specifically, Emma Lazarus’s sonnet ly serving and should be subject to waiver depending on circum- “The New Colossus.” Miller was explaining the new Cotton- stances. What is not complicated is the conclusion that making Perdue immigration-restriction bill when Acosta asked whether policy via Twitter without consulting the relevant authorities is the bill did not contradict America’s historic immigration policy, foolish and counterproductive. quoting Lazarus as evidence. Miller answered that the Statue of Liberty, on whose base the poem is displayed, was originally n The strangest scandal in Washington is one that most intended to symbolize liberty (the statue was a gift of the French Americans haven’t heard about. It involves a family of Pakistani Third Republic to its sister republic). On they went to the shouts. information-technology workers, former Democratic National Poems do not make policy, but they express sentiments, and Committee chairman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a failed car America has a long history of welcoming immigrants. It has also dealership, federal indictments, and—of course—bizarre accusa- maintained long periods of low immigration to encourage tions of Islamophobia. The story is long and complicated, but the assimilation and bolster wages. (Know-Nothings wanted to core facts are these: Democrats, including Schultz, hired multiple keep furriners out, but they were not the only advocates of such members of Imran Awan’s family to serve, ultimately, up to 80 policies.) The overarching goal is a well-functioning free soci- Democratic members of the House. As IT workers, the Awans ety, so that liberty can be an inspiration to the world. had access to sensitive information and were paid lavish salaries, but many of them were also allegedly engaged in a bizarre series of financial crimes, including bankruptcy fraud, insurance fraud, tax fraud, and extortion. Some were “ghost” workers, collecting n Paul Ryan has given up on including a “border- paychecks without showing up for work. One Awan brother even adjustment tax” in a tax-reform bill. The idea was to ran a car dealership while supposedly working full time for the change the tax code’s treatment of business so that imports Democrats. Oddly enough, when the Awan family’s schemes were taxed but exports weren’t. It was a controversial idea, finally unraveled and federal law enforcement closed in, Schultz but among its advantages was that it would have generated remained faithful—even claiming that the Awans might be vic- a tidy sum of revenue that legislators could have used to tims of “Islamophobia.” Awan’s wife fled to Pakistan, carrying make room in the budget for cutting tax rates. Now that it’s an illegal amount of cash, but Imran himself was arrested on his gone, tax rates can’t be reduced as much as Ryan wanted. As way to boarding his own flight out of the country. The next steps Republicans devise a more modest tax reform, their priori- are clear. Yes, he should be prosecuted for his alleged crimes, but ties should be to enhance growth and to deliver tax relief investigators should dig deeper. Did he abuse his access to sensi- for middle-class families. They can do that by cutting tax tive information? Why did he send large sums of money to rates on businesses, letting Pakistan? What did Debbie Wasserman Schultz know? It’s a businesses write off the bizarre story, and it’s only just beginning. cost of investments more rapidly, expanding the tax n No state has changed its partisan allegiance more rapidly or credit for children, and completely than West Virginia. In 1996, it was one of 18 states scaling back the de duction that gave Bill Clinton an absolute majority of the vote; he did for state and local tax pay- better there than in California, Washington, or Minnesota. In ments. The last move might 2000, it flipped to George W. Bush. It has been growing more have the happy side effect of Republican ever since. (The state’s Republican margin even getting state and local increased between 2004 and 2008.) A Republican candidate governments to cut with a particular appeal to white voters without college degrees their taxes, too. was bound to expand the party’s advantage even more, and in 2016 Donald Trump won the state by 42 points. The state’s governor, Jim Justice, left the Democratic party for the GETTY IMAGES Republicans, holding a rally with President Trump. The state’s / n The Trump administration—the president’s Twitter account, at realignment is very bad news for Democratic senator Joe least—announced that, after consultation with the generals and Manchin, who is up for reelection next year. Prudence would other defense officials, the president is handing down a ban on counsel him to follow Justice. DREW ANGERER

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n Who says bipartisanship is dead? By votes of 419–3 and 98– n A Google employee has been fired for testing that company’s 2, the House and Senate sent a bill to President Trump’s desk that commitment to diversity. Ethnic diversity? Google affirms its imposes new sanctions on Iran, North Korea, and Russia and lim- fidelity. Diversity of sex and sexual orientation? Of course. its the president’s ability to lift Russian sanctions. In the main, Diversity of views, including views at odds with the diversity this is a good bill, representing a response to a series of aggres- cult? That, apparently, is a line too far. James Damore, an engi- sive and provocative acts and demonstrating a degree of unified neer, was fired for “perpetuating gender stereotypes.” Damore resolve rarely seen in Washington. President Trump, however, had argued in an internal memo that the relative dominance of was not pleased. In a signing statement, he argued that portions men in the technology industry, and the relative scarcity of wo - of the bill were unconstitutional, and in a press release he blasted men, might have less to do with patriarchy or misogyny or this the bill for making it more difficult to “strike good deals for the week’s feminist boogeyman than with actual differences American people.” On the constitutional claim, he has a point. between men and women—in their interests, inclinations, and The bill provides for a congressional vote that can extend a wait- abilities. The engineer also accused Google of silencing dissi- ing period before sanctions can be revoked. Trump argues that dent political views within the company—which is exactly the Constitution denies Congress the ability to unilaterally extend what Google now has done. Damore of course is considering the waiting period without a presidential signature, and he might legal action. Google has been challenged on this sort of thing well be right. His inability to negotiate a better bill with Congress before: Among other things, its executives have been quizzed stems from the widespread distrust of him on the Hill, and his about whether people holding conservative political views behavior—signing the bill while denouncing it—will do nothing would be made to feel uncomfortable by the company’s mind- to alleviate that distrust. set. Nonsense, said Chairman Eric Schmidt. “The company was founded under the principles of freedom of expression, diver- n The Department of Justice is reportedly gearing up to take a sity, inclusiveness, and science-based thinking,” he said. hard and skeptical look at colleges’ affirmative-action policies— “You’ll find that all of the other companies in our industry and it might file suit if it finds schools breaking the law. This agree with us.” No doubt they do agree, on too many things— would be a tricky battle to fight: Though federal law plainly out- and perhaps that is part of the problem. laws racial discrimination at colleges that accept federal funds, the courts have spent decades ignoring that prohibition, instead n Scientists report that they have successfully edited genes in allowing colleges to take race into consideration so long as human embryos to repair a common mutation associated with they’re not too blatant about it. But it’s a battle worth fighting a host of diseases. Of 58 embryos created in vitro and treated nonetheless. Many colleges essentially impose racial quotas, with the CRISPR-Cas9 gene-editing method, 42 were free of which even the courts say are illegal—and while the New York the mutation and therefore, if allowed to mature, would not Times portrayed Trump’s move as a play for aggrieved whites, pass it down to descendants. That bright news has been partially it’s Asian applicants who pay the steepest price. If the courts want eclipsed by legitimate concerns that technology that can be to override the anti-discrimination laws that Congress passed, the used to prevent disease might eventually be abused for the pur- least the executive branch can do is ensure that schools’ practices pose of creating “designer” babies endowed with super intelli- don’t go beyond even what the courts allow. gence, athleticism, or (fill in the attribute). So vigilance is in order, yes, but so is prudence: Guard against abuse, but don’t let n While campaigning for president, Donald Trump unnerved the possibility of it stop us from celebrating the reality of med- people in the Baltic republics and other nations especially threat- ical progress. Unfortunately, in the discussion over designer ened by Russia, because he seemed both warm to Putin and cool babies, the question of whether experimentation on human to NATO. In recent days, Vice President Mike Pence traveled to embryos is unethical got lost. In its earlier years, beginning Estonia, Georgia, and Montenegro to reaffirm America’s in 2001, the President’s Council on Bioethics tackled the ques- alliances with those peoples. This was an important trip, designed tion with respect to embryonic-stem-cell therapy, and re - to calm our allies’ nerves and to indicate to Russia that we haven’t searchers developed ingenious proposals for continuing the stood down. It is better for the U.S. president to demonstrate that research without killing the embryo. They integrated scientific support, but a vice president is a significant proxy. and moral rigor. Every medical researcher would do well to emulate them. n New Mexico representative Ben Ray Luján has said that the Demo - n Researchers in Philadelphia placed six fetal lambs in an cratic Congressional Campaign Com - external artificial womb and watched them grow. The technol- mittee, which he chairs, is willing to ogy, slightly adapted, could help human infants born prema- fund pro-life congressional candi- turely avoid diseases to which they’re prone, the research team dates in 2018. The pro-abortion suggested in its paper on the experiment, published in April. forces that overwhelmingly dominate Some abortion-rights advocates worry that this medical the Democratic party came out advance will set back their cause: Roe v. Wade stipulates that a harshly against Luján’s statement. state may restrict abortion after the age at which a fetus would Democrats will tell you all day long be viable outside the womb. Opinion differs as to when that is, GETTY IMAGES how desperately they want to take with 17 states limiting abortion beginning at 20 weeks’ gesta- / AFP back the House to block Donald tion. To fret—or, as in our case, hope—that artificial wombs / Trump. But not, it seems, desperately will lower that limit is currently a leap. The researchers specu- enough to cross NARAL. late only that an artificial womb could improve outcomes for SAUL LOEB

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THE WEEK

critically premature babies born between 22 to 28 weeks. That “is a real dump.” Groans from the gallery. Trump tweeted that should be cause enough for cheer, regardless of one’s views the quote was FAKE NEWS, but it certainly sounds plausible. on abortion. The president is a man with a strong aesthetic sense, and indoors, it’s awful: Trump Tower and Mar-a-Lago look like n Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk is an austere and gripping con- mobsters’ seraglios. Trump’s eye serves him best on fairways tribution to the canon that tells the harrowing story of the evac- and greens. May he visit them often; you can’t tweet while uation of British and French forces from the Continent at the holding a 3-iron. start of World War II. Or is it? Since the film was released in July, it has become the target of an almost endless supply of n Senator Bernie Sanders, the bizarre and outlandish criticisms. The usual offerings were grumpy socialist from Vermont, is a forthcoming—a host of pieces complained that the movie big believer in redistribution of doesn’t feature enough women or minorities, and that it is too wealth and has been known to redis- jingoistic—but some got unusually creative. In the Guardian, a tribute the occasional lakeside dacha writer proposed that the production was a “thinly veiled in his own direction. But Sanders’s Brexiteer fantasy.” In the New York Daily News, it was suggest- sense of apparatchik entitlement ed that the director’s choice not to depict the enemy at any point goes well beyond that, if Chris was pro-German. And in both the New York Times and the Plante of Washington’s WMAL Village Voice, contributors made sure to remind their readers radio is to be believed. Plante relates the story of a Washington Post subscriber who called to cancel his subscription, complaining that his (expensive) Sunday paper had not been delivered. The Post, eager to keep his business, investigated, and the deliveryman reported that each Sunday, as he delivered the paper, the subscriber had immediately sallied forth from his house to grab it. He even gave a description of the subscriber: older man, balding, little round glasses. The subscriber looks nothing like that. It is, however, a fair description of his next-door neighbor, Bernie Sanders. We cannot say for sure whether this story is true. But while we had hoped that the Jeff Bezos era that Donald Trump is a fascist, just like the forces that pushed would see the Washington Post liberated, this is not exactly the Allies into the sea. Can’t a war movie be a war movie any- what we had in mind. more? Perhaps it is not a surprise that these people would not warm to a movie about the need to retreat from an exposed and n President Trump promised “fire and fury” if North Korea defenseless position. continued to threaten the United States, after which Kim Jong-un promptly threatened to hit Guam. What Trump prob- n For some months, liberal journalist Michael Kinsley has ably meant to say was that all options are on the table. invited readers of the New York Times to say something nice Despite the hair-on-fire cable coverage, war with North Korea about Donald Trump. “He got the votes of more than 62 million isn’t imminent, although the regime’s ICBM capability is people—and I am pretty sure I don’t know any of them.” Most steadily advancing. Trump’s bluster isn’t helpful, nor is of the answers Kinsley got, he admits, were snarky, as is his sur- Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s flaccid diplo-speak about vey of them. But along the way he made a sensible point. how we aren’t North Korea’s enemy and we want to talk. “When Mr. Trump won, I prepared myself for an orgy of self- What is needed is a sober, comprehensive strategy of regime criticism by the liberal media, all wondering how they missed change in North Korea, coupled with robust missile defenses the amazing phenomenon of Mr. Trump’s popularity. . . . In- of the sort that President Obama undercut and neglected. The stead, there has been endless vilification of the guy and specu- 15–0 U.N. Security Council vote for harsher sanctions was a lation about how we might get rid of him.” Vilification step in the right direction and possibly could deprive GETTY IMAGES

/ short-circuits analysis, blunts understanding, and lessens the Pyongyang of about one-third of its $3 billion annual export AFP / odds that critics will come up with superior arguments of their revenue. We will need more of that, and less chest-pounding own. It’s “basket of deplorables” all over again. Sometimes it from the president and recitation of Foreign Service talking

SAUL LOEB seems that the Trump administration is blowing itself up. : points from his secretary of state. Luckily for it, liberalism has blown itself up first.

SANDERS n Paul Kagame has been president of Rwanda since 2000—a .; n A long piece in Sports Illustrated about Donald Trump, presidential dictator. He “ran for office” again this summer. (You golfer, detailed his love of the game and of his courses, ana- have to think of those words in quotation marks.) While cam- WARNER BROS

: lyzed his swing (“He has clubhead speed, and there’s no sub- paigning, he promised that “the day of the presidential election stitute for that,” says Phil Mickelson), and quoted Trump, in will be just a formality.” He was true to his word. He won 99 per- DUNKIRK passing, as saying that the White House, unlike his properties, cent of the vote. An honest politician.

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THE WEEK

n There is a Broadway musical called “Natasha, Pierre & the Republican leaders said that a better bill would emerge from a Great Comet of 1812,” based on Tolstoy. Originally, Josh conference committee to mesh the skinny bill together with the Groban was in the part of Pierre. Then it was Okieriete more comprehensive one that the House has already passed. Onaodowan. Then it was Mandy Patinkin—or it was supposed McCain was unwilling to rely on that assurance to vote for leg- to be. Patinkin was announced for the part. But immediately islation he opposed, which is reasonable, and hopeful that a there was a “firestorm” because he would be replacing a black bipartisan path forward could be found, which is not. actor. (Patinkin is white, and so is Groban.) Without delay, Republicans now have three options. The “let it burn” Patinkin renounced the role out of solidarity with the approach advocated by Senator Lindsey Graham and others is “firestormers.” So now the show is on the verge of closing. It untenable. More insurers will pull out of more markets, and pre- needed a star, such as Patinkin, to keep going. The cast of this mium hikes will keep happening, if Congress does nothing— show is notably “diverse.” Now all of these actors of color, and especially if the Trump administration stops the payments along with the whiteys, will be out of work. Art is in conflict that its predecessor made to insurance companies without with identity politics. They cannot coexist. One or the other congressional approval. With Republicans in control of must win. And art is losing. Congress and the White House, many voters, including ones who supported them in the last election, will expect them to n Diagnosed with a rare genetic disorder, Charlie Matthew do something. William Gard lost his vision, hearing, and ability to breathe A second option is to try for a bipartisan bill that authorizes unaided. He suffered brain damage. His doctors withdrew treat- enough payments to insurers to stabilize Obamacare’s insur- ment and sent him to hospice. Meanwhile, his parents, Chris ance markets while also including reforms. But the Democrats Gard and Connie Yates, went to GoFundMe and privately would have the whip hand in any negotiations, and they have raised the money for experimental treatment for him in New displayed no interest in any changes to Obamacare other than York. His doctors at Grand Ormond Street Hospital in London devoting more taxpayer dollars to it. refused to release him. They asked the High Court to overrule Which leaves us with option three: Make another pass at a the parents’ decision. It did, and the European Court of Human Republican reform bill. Start with the skinny bill; add elements Rights concurred. The public outcry on all sides of the question that will keep premiums from increasing as a result of the end swelled. A Rome hospital affiliated with the Holy See offered of the individual mandate; tack on as much reform to Medicaid to admit Charlie, and a New York hospital affiliated with as can get 51 Senate votes; and include restrictions on taxpayer Columbia followed suit. On July 24, the lawyer for Charlie’s funding of abortion. parents withdrew their request to fly their son to America for So they should try again. This time they should do it in a more special treatment, but could he remain on artificial ventilation deliberative way. And they should challenge falsehoods from for one more week? By now you can guess how the High Court the Democrats and the media. The chief attack on the GOP answered that. Charlie was innocent. His parents were valiant. Condolences to them, blessings on him. He died on July 28, eleven months old. R.I.P.

HEALTH CARE Try, Try Again

EPEAL and replace” may live on as a slogan, but this year Republican efforts have been designed to ‘R make reforms to Obamacare: serious and worth- while reforms, but only reforms. In part that’s because Republicans don’t have the votes to replace the law: They would need 60, and Democrats have no desire to cooperate. In part it’s because some moderate Republicans have decided that, their past rhetoric notwithstanding, they like crucial elements of Obamacare. Republicans have also wanted to rush the process of considering a health-reform bill so they could move on to tax reform. President Trump has intervened haphazardly, and rare - ly constructively. It’s less surprising that Republicans have had so much trouble getting a law through Congress—the bill has been pronounced dead on several occasions—than that they have come so close. The latest burial took place after Senator John McCain cast a decisive “no” vote on the so-called skinny-repeal bill. BLOOMBERG VIA GETTY IMAGES / That bill would have abolished Obamacare’s fines on people without health insurance (the “individual mandate”). By letting healthy people leave the insurance market, that step would have Majority Leader Mitch McConnell speaks to reporters after the Senate has voted to ANDREW HARRER raised insurance premiums for everyone who remained. begin debating Republican health-care legislation, July 25.

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efforts has been the assertion that the Congressional Budget gest it places on wages at the low end of the labor market. It Office has found that they would “take away” insurance from would promote assimilation, both because a smaller population many millions of people. Actually, most of the people who is likely to be more digestible and because a smaller pool of would “lose” their insurance, in every CBO score of every low-skilled immigrants is likely to fare better than a larger one. Republican bill, would voluntarily refrain from getting it once Economists who argue that low-skilled immigration adds to the fines disappeared. How many Republicans made that point? our GDP, and that reducing the one would therefore reduce the How many knew it? other, are making a fetish of a statistic. Most of that added GDP Democrats have been working toward national health insur- is captured, reasonably enough, by the immigrants themselves: ance for about 70 years. It is not too much to ask Republicans The economic value added to other Americans is trivial. The to put a few more weeks of work into something better. non-economic arguments against Cotton-Perdue are even weak- er. To note that many native-born Americans would not pass the IMMIGRATION bill’s test for skills, as many critics did, is to miss the point Sifting the Masses entirely: We can and should be selective about newcomers. Passage of the legislation is in the near term unlikely. Cotton MERICAN immigration policy is largely governed by a and Perdue so far exhaust the list of its Senate sponsors. Polls A law enacted in 1965 that has operated very differently suggest that more people want to keep legal immigration at its than anyone at the time expected. Senators Tom current level than want to reduce it (although it would be useful Cotton (R., Ark.) and David Perdue (R., Ga.) have advanced for someone to ask people whether they think 500,000 legal the radical proposition that our policy should look as if some- immigrants a year is enough). But more people want immigra- one intentionally designed it, and now President Trump has tion reduced than increased. In 2013, a large majority of the endorsed their idea. Senate voted for a “comprehensive immigration reform” that Their legislation would halve legal immigration, to 500,000 would have doubled immigration levels. Press coverage at the people a year, mostly by slashing the chain migration of extend- time didn’t note the unpopularity of that doubling, or, very often, ed families. The legislation would also introduce a new points that it would even happen. system to select the most skilled applicants as legal immigrants. If Cotton, Perdue, and Trump have accomplished nothing else, Reducing low-skilled immigration would relieve the down- they have put the issue of the level of low-skilled immigration on ward pressure that both common sense and some studies sug- the table—and taken a massive increase in that level off it.

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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Institute. Politics touched most of her work: She published a poem in the New York Times titled “Progress and Poverty (after Reading Mr. Henry George)” the bombast and fustian of which—

Oh splendid age when Science lights her lamp At the brief lightning’s momentary flame. Fixing it steadfast as a star, man’s name Upon the very brow of heaven to stamp.

—is, unfortunately, typical of Laza - rus’s verse. As reptilian White House aide Stephen Miller noted in his recent televised immigration-policy dust-up with hypertensive CNN reporter Jim Acosta, Lazarus’s most famous poem was added to the Statue of Liberty’s pedestal long after the installation of the work. In fact, “The New Colossus” is an example of that lowest form of literary expression: occasional verse. The Art Loan Fund Exhibition in Aid of the Bartholdi Pedestal Fund for the Statue of Liberty solicited a poem from Wretched Refuse, Indeed Lazarus as part of its efforts to raise About that poem . . . money for a proper base for Liberty En - lightening the World (that is the actual BY KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON title of the Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi statue towering over New York Harbor), TRANGE women standing in Lazarus’s Wikipedia page identifies her and Lazarus—these stories always seem harbors distributing poetry is as a “poet and Georgist from New York to go like this—originally declined. She S no basis for a system of gov- City,” which is true in the sense that was interested in issues related to immi- ernment. But if we were going Kenny Rogers is a songwriter and gration and—here Miller has the better to base our public policy on a poem, we poultryman from Houston; the Georg - of the argument—the gigantic sculp- ought to choose a better one than “The ists also sometimes claim William F. tural tribute to republicanism then New Colossus.” Buckley Jr., who, so far as I can tell, said being planned was not directly related Emma Lazarus was a New York City about three positive sentences about the to those concerns. socialite during an era in which it was Georgist tax over the course of a long Her fellow literary socialite Constance fashionable for such women to pretend public career. Wrestling over the legacy Cary Harrison convinced her to contribute to be following literary careers. She of Henry George used to be something a verse, arguing that the Statue of Liberty, studied languages (German, French, and of an intellectual sport: Buckley’s whatever it was formally intended to com- Italian), toured Europe, met figures such mentor, Alfred Jay Nock, wrote a book memorate, would be the first thing immi- as Ralph Waldo Emerson and William on George, and the libertarian Frank grants sailing into New York City would Morris, and, to her credit, produced a fair Chodorov was for a time the head of the see. It was a much smaller world then, and amount of work: poems, plays, transla- Henry George School in New York City a more forgiving one: Lazarus was from tions. She also adopted social causes: but resigned after a sustained conflict an old, pre-Revolutionary New York She was a Zionist before the term even with the socialists who claimed George Jew ish family and was steeped in pro- existed, an advocate for Jewish immi- as one of their own. Different times.) gressive politics, whereas Harrison, the grants, and a “Georgist,” a follower of For Emma Lazarus, the literary and better-known public figure at the time, the eccentric political economist Henry the political were entirely united. Her was a Mississippi native married to George, whose proposal for a single tax interest in Jewish issues was less relat- Jefferson Davis’s personal secretary and on the value of land was popular in pro- ed to her Jewish ancestry than it was to had sewn the first Confederate battle flag. gressive and radical circles. her reading Daniel Deronda, after And it was her idea to co-opt the Statue of GETTY IMAGES / (The Georgists are an enthusiastic which she wrote Songs of a Semite and Liberty as a symbol of liberal attitudes APIC bunch when it comes to public relations: helped to found the Hebrew Technical toward immigration.

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The poem was duly written and sub- and the hackneyed classical allusion that discovered that his ancestors had been mitted, and it was read at the opening is the basis for the whole thing, mark horse thieves. of the fund-raising exhibition, which this as a failed poem. Perhaps we should Acosta insisted upon the poem, but was chaired by former secretary of here bear in mind T. S. Eliot’s observa- the poem is and was at odds with the state William M. Evarts. It was printed tion that while many critics are failed realities of American immigration poli- in a catalogue for the exhibition—and writers, so are most writers. There’s a cy, then and now. Emma Lazarus was then it was forgotten. It was not even failed editor at work here, too: The ver- not a policy wonk but a gilded idealist. read at the Statue of Liberty’s opening sion of the poem inscribed at the base of In reality, would-be immigrants could ceremony. It is not impossible to imag- the statue is missing a comma. be rejected at Ellis Island for any num- ine why. All these years later, “The Typographic sloppiness notwithstand- ber of reasons, and were: sickness, New Colossus” has acquired a patina of ing, if one were attempting to write a political extremism (we were very wor- pure, old-fashioned American senti- sonnet singing the praises of an open- ried about anarchists back then— mentality. It is almost impossible for an armed immigration policy, would “the maybe Henry George’s fault!), and, not American to hear its words without wretched refuse of your teeming shore” least, being “likely to become a public being moved. But it is not a very good really be the choicest image? I can charge.” A great deal of the concern of poem. It is more of an example of what imagine my friend Mark Krikorian, the current immigration reformers is to Noël Coward described as the potency nation’s leading immigration re - ensure that the immigration office is not of cheap music. strictionist, dismissing the “wretched metaphorically (or literally) next door Here’s what it says: refuse” of Mexico’s teeming barrios, but, to the welfare office. Ranking would-be even if we allow for the evolution of the immigrants economically is more a Not like the brazen giant of Greek word “wretched” over the years (it prob- restoration of the Ellis Island–era policy fame, ably sounded less pejorative to Emma than a departure from it. With conquering limbs astride from Lazarus), we are still left with “refuse,” Reliance on poetry and myth—on land to land; i.e., human garbage, a rhetorical line that, sentimentality—is very useful in these Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates unless I have missed something, even situations. The United States and the shall stand Donald Trump has not crossed. Huddled United Kingdom both had very open A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame masses? The homeless? We are not even immigration policies, and both turned Is the imprisoned lightning, and her very comfortable with the bad hombres. toward more restrictive policies name MOTHEROF EXILES. From her beacon- hand Acosta insisted upon the poem, but the Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command poem is and was at odds with the The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame. realities of American immigration

“Keep, ancient lands, your storied policy, then and now. pomp!” cries she With silent lips. “Give me your tired, Wretched refuse? What are we? around the turn of the 20th century. No your poor, Australia? one ever asks why that golden age of Your huddled masses yearning to As the late Andrew Breitbart famously immigration liberalism came to an end, breathe free, put it: Politics is downstream from cul- but the most obvious answer is: It pro- The wretched refuse of your teeming ture. “Let me make the songs of a duced results that a great many people shore. nation,” Andrew Fletcher wrote, “and I did not like very much. Hurl all the Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost care not who makes its laws.” He would accusations of “hypocrisy” you like at to me, have held up poor silly Jim Acosta as the Stephen Millers of the world, but I lift my lamp beside the golden door!” Exhibit A. Acosta quoted “The New there are many descendants of Yiddish- Colossus” at Stephen Miller and then speaking people in New York—and of The rhyme scheme (ABBA ABBA, charged that the immigration reforms Spanish-speaking people in Texas— etc.) and the break between the first under consideration by the Trump who have concluded that our immigra- eight lines (the “octet”) and the final administration—which would replace tion policies are in need of reform and six (the “sestet”) identify “The New family-based “chain migration” with an that more robust regulation is in order. Colossus” as a Petrarchan (or Italian) economically oriented points system as The second-rate verse of a middling sonnet, the formal demands of which is found in Canada and New Zealand— 19th-century poetess is not a magical often are satisfied, as above, only clum- was “not in keeping with American tra- trump card that makes such calcula- sily in English. Hence the banal rhymes dition.” The usual insipidness ensued, tions irrelevant. (“fame”/“name,” “she”/“me”), which, with critics pointing out that Miller’s Unless you are, like Jim Acosta, a along with the imperfectly executed pen- own ancestors passed through Ellis television performer. And then it’s tameter (particularly deformed in lines Island in the early days of the 20th cen- “Let me make the poems of a nation, one and nine), the cutesy metaphor about tury—as though Miller would be oblig- and I care not who makes its immigra- electric lighting (a novelty at the time), ed to defend horse-thievery if it were tion policy.”

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Prosecuting Politics In Texas, criminal law is being twisted to destroy officeholders

BY DAVID FRENCH

OMETHING is very wrong with Texas politics. Its prosecutors S have a disturbing habit of fil- ing dubious criminal charges against Republican politicians— sometimes through complaints filed by angry Democrats, sometimes through complaints filed by angry Republicans. It’s a sad and sordid story. In 1994, Travis County prosecutors indicted Republican U.S. senator Kay Bailey Hutchison and then—oddly enough—refused to present evidence against her at trial. Next in the crosshairs was Tom DeLay, then the majority Texas attorney general Ken Paxton leader in the U.S. House of Repre - sentatives. Travis County prosecutors could theoretically send him to prison words, it’s attempting to impose strict actually secured a conviction, only to for 99 years. liability. If it can prove that Paxton wasn’t see it overturned by the Texas Court of What did Paxton do? A former friend registered, it seeks to impose criminal Appeals in 2013. and Republican legislative colleague penalties regardless of whether there’s Governor Rick Perry’s turn came in named Byron Cook claimed that Paxton any evidence that Paxton had criminal 2014. The Travis County district attorney sold him shares in a company called intent. Moreover, Paxton claims that his (for those keeping score, Travis County Servergy without telling him or other firm was already registered with the covers the Austin urban area—one of the investors that Paxton wasn’t investing in Securities and Exchange Commission bluest sections of Texas) obtained a the company but rather had received and that the relevant federal laws govern- “first-degree felony” indictment against compensation from the company for ing registration preempted the state regis- Perry for alleged “abuse of official capac- obtaining investors. There was no claim tration requirements. Paxton claims that ity.” His alleged crimes? Threatening to that Paxton cost Cook any money. There he registered with the state only out of veto funding for the state’s “Public was no claim that Paxton lied to Cook. “abundance of caution.” Integrity Unit” and attempting to remove Instead, the fundamental complaint is But these are the dry facts of the indict- the Travis County district attorney from that Paxton should have disclosed to ment. Lurking beneath is a lurid tale that office after she was arrested for drunk Cook and other investors his own includes irregularities with the grand driving. In other words, the governor was arrangements with Servergy. jury, strange judicial conduct, flamboyant doing his job. The case dragged on for This, the prosecution alleges, is a prosecutors, and, soon, a trial in Houston almost 18 months, until a court dismissed “first-degree felony.” This, the prosecu- that seems engineered not to seek justice the last remaining charge in 2016. tion alleges, should send Paxton to but to coerce Paxton to resign. Each of these cases features its own prison for decades. The story begins, of course, in Travis twists and turns. Each of them is replete The second claim against Paxton is County. A nonprofit group called Texans with prosecutorial abuses and political that he rendered service as an “invest- for Public Justice first asked the Travis vendettas. But for sheer strangeness, for ment adviser representative” before he County DA to prosecute Paxton. The CORBIS VIA GETTY IMAGES / sheer head-scratching oddity, nothing formally registered as an IAR with the Travis County prosecutor declined, quite matches the current criminal case Texas securities commissioner. While concluding that since the alleged events against Texas attorney general Ken it’s true that Paxton later registered with didn’t occur in Travis County, the coun- Paxton, a longtime Republican state leg- the commissioner and paid a small fine ty likely didn’t have jurisdiction. So islator and tea-party favorite who was for failing to register, the prosecution’s the effort shifted to Collin County— elected to his statewide office in case is extraordinary—essentially seek- Paxton’s home, where the legal proce- November 2014. By July 2015, he was ing to impose a jail sentence without dures immediately tripped into the land ROBERT DAEMMRICH PHOTOGRAPHYindicted INC on securities-fraud charges that having to prove criminal intent. In other of the bizarre.

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First, after the Collin County district anyone willing to speak up on the attorney intend to try Paxton on the two counts attorney recused himself from the case, general’s behalf. Publicly criticize the separately) not only in a Democratic the first judge involved in the case, Scott judge or the prosecutors, and you’re on jurisdiction but also in front of the judge Becker, departed from normal practice Team Paxton. Use your First Amendment who’d so helpfully rejected Paxton’s and appointed two Houston defense rights to claim that the prosecution is motion to dismiss and granted their attorneys, Kent Schaffer and Brian Wice, politically motivated? Congratulations, request for a change of venue. Un - to serve as special prosecutors. Both you too are on Team Paxton. fortunately, Texas law strips a judge of men are prominent Texas lawyers, and Typically, courts move criminal trials jurisdiction when there’s a change of Schaffer in particular has achieved to grant defendants a fair trial. The con- venue, unless all parties consent. Paxton notoriety for representing members of cern is that pretrial publicity will preju- didn’t consent, and after a brief legal the Bandidos motorcycle gang. Next, dice the public against the accused, who battle, Gallagher was gone. Becker lavished the special prosecutors after all is entitled to the presumption of And that’s not the only prosecutorial with money. Local guidelines typically innocence. An avalanche of publicly setback. In response to a taxpayer law- limit special-prosecutor compensation to incriminating information can, in rare suit, the Fifth District Court of Appeals $2,000 for pretrial practice and $1,000 circumstances, lead judges to rule that a stayed further payments to Schaffer and a day for trial, but Becker promised trial has to be moved to protect that pre- Wice, and in May the Collin County Schaffer and Wice $300 per hour. Within sumption. In this case, however, the commissioners voted to stop payments to months they’d racked up legal bills that judge moved the trial to help the prosecu- them. As things now stand, Paxton will exceeded $600,000, and the total tab will tion, and he moved it not to a nearby face a trial for the less serious charge—of likely approach $2 million. court but rather 200 miles away—to failing to register—on December 11, in Next, a second judge involved in the Houston, a Democratic jurisdiction locat- front of a new judge, facing prosecutors matter, Chris Oldner, impaneled an all- ed right by the prosecutors’ homes. who might have to work for free. volunteer grand jury—a departure from Meanwhile, the Obama administra- This strange tale demands the question law and practice that taints the pool by tion’s Securities and Exchange Com - “Why?” Why try to throw a man in jail for including only those most motivated to mission moved against Paxton. It filed life on a novel legal theory? Why doggedly Why try to throw a man in jail for life on a novel legal theory? Why doggedly pursue him through three judges, two courts, and two counties?

serve. A festival of additional irregulari- an action remarkably similar to the pursue him through three judges, two ties followed. The judge allegedly inter- state criminal-court case, claiming that courts, and two counties? When the battle acted with the grand jurors to influence Paxton defrauded Cook and other was Travis County Democrats versus their deliberations, details of the sealed Servergy investors by failing to disclose prominent Republicans, the answer was indictments were leaked to the press, that he was not investing in the compa- obvious—partisan politics taken to a and the judge’s wife allegedly even sent ny and failing to disclose his own com- dangerous extreme. But in this case the taunting text messages declaring that she pensation arrangements. A federal court complaining witness is a fellow Re- was “gloating” over Paxton’s legal trou- promptly granted Paxton’s motion to publican. The first judge in the case—the bles. Soon after these irregularities came dismiss the SEC complaint, gave the one who engineered an irregular grand to light, Judge Oldner recused himself. SEC a chance to revise its charges, and jury—was a fellow Republican. Don’t All this, and the case was only days old. then dismissed the charges again when these two facts invalidate the Paxton After Oldner’s recusal, a third judge, even the SEC’s revised complaint defense team’s belief that the case is a George Gallagher, stepped to the plate. He proved insufficient. classic Texas political prosecution? promptly turned back Paxton’s attempt to It’s important not to miss the signifi- Also, why should this matter to the dismiss the case and then, earlier this cance of the federal action. The SEC nation at large? Unlike prosecutorial year, granted the special prosecutor’s filed its claims on the basis of the same attacks on U.S. senators, House majority motion to move the case to Houston, on actions that led to two counts in the state leaders, or presidential candidates, isn’t the grounds that the prosecutors couldn’t indictment, faced a much lower burden this just a local political story? get a fair trial in Paxton’s hometown. of proof (it had filed a civil, not a crimi- Texas GOP politics is in many ways a This decision was the result of one of nal, case), and even was entitled at this microcosm of national Republican poli- the more unusual motions I’ve ever early stage of the proceedings to the pre- tics, and the Texas Republican party is in seen—a 59-page screed that used the fact sumption that its factual claims against the midst of a political civil war. Former that Paxton’s friends and allies had pub- Paxton were true—and still couldn’t tea-party insurgents face off against an licly criticized the case as “evidence” of a make a legal case against him. establishment (one that’s much less plot to taint the jury pool. It is replete with No matter; the state prosecutors sol- focused than they are on the Consti - references to a nefarious group it calls diered on. But they’d miscalculated. tution and cultural issues) in a vicious “Team Paxton.” Essentially that includes They’d hoped to hold their trials (they struggle over the identity of the party

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and the character of the state. Texas bat- Churchill said, “Mussolini.” Astonished, tles over religious freedom and gender Oliver asked, “Why?” Churchill said, identity are making national news, and “Because he had the courage to have his with the state under one-party rule, the Jared and son-in-law shot.” true conflict is no longer between Re- That’s a good story. But one thing I publican and Democrat but between Other Sons- don’t like about it is that Count Ciano, Republican and Republican. for all his faults, was a better man than While the prosecutors deny any politi- In-Law Mussolini. I’ll return to this family in cal motivation, sources close to Paxton Angles on a relationship due course. are convinced that the entire case would President Trump has a remarkable go away if he either resigned or refused BY JAY NORDLINGER relationship with his son-in-law, Jared to run for a second term. His opponents Kushner, husband to the president’s don’t really want him to go to jail. They UITE possibly, the most tick- daughter Ivanka. Trump treats Kushner just want him out of power, and if jail is lish relationship in human like a prince, one of his own, another what it takes, then so be it. Q history is that between mother- son-lieutenant. He has heaped great Moreover, the intensity of the fight is in-law and daughter-in-law. governmental responsibility onto the directly related to the importance of the Naomi and Ruth, from the Bible, are the slim shoulders of his son-in-law. Whether office. Most Americans don’t closely fol- ideal, not the norm. But the relationship this ought to be so is the subject of low constitutional law, but those who between father-in-law and son-in-law another essay. monitor constitutional controversies can be ticklish, too. Moses enjoyed a Travel back, now, to the presidential know that the Texas attorney general has warm, mutually supportive relationship campaign of 1912. William G. McAdoo become the de facto leader of a multi-state with his father-in-law, Jethro (also called was campaign manager to Woodrow legal revolt against federal overreach. Reuel, confusingly). Other people have Wilson. In that same year, McAdoo’s wife Texas led the charge against President a less easy time. died, leaving him with many children. Obama’s Deferred Action for Parents of There’s a story about Churchill— Wilson won, and he then named McAdoo Americans (DAPA) program. Texas led there’s always a story about Churchill. his Treasury secretary. At some point, the charge against the Obama administra- He didn’t like his son-in-law Vic Oliver, McAdoo sparked a romance with the tion’s directive that publicly funded an entertainer, who was married to the president’s youngest daughter, Eleanor. schools facilitate transgender students’ Churchills’ daughter Sarah. One day, They were married in May 1914, in the access to opposite-sex bathrooms and Oliver tried to make conversation with Blue Room of the White House. opposite-sex sleeping quarters. And Texas his father-in-law. “Which figure in the McAdoo offered to resign his cabinet is now set to challenge the Trump admin- war do you admire most?” he asked. position, being mindful of propriety, istration’s apparent decision to keep in place the Obama administration’s executive amnesty for “DREAMers.” Topple the Texas attorney general, and the forces of federalism lose one of their most effective (and well-resourced) advocates. In December, Paxton will have his day in court—in a location hand-picked by his opponents. He’s likely to win, but he might lose. Even if he overturns a conviction on appeal, enormous damage will have been done. And if Paxton does lose, expect the criminalization of politics to continue, perhaps accelerate. It “works,” right? The Paxton prosecution is just one more example of a political culture that is losing its way. Entire movements are captured by the philosophy that the ends justify the means. Want to defeat your political opponent? Charge him with a crime. Want to prosecute the man? Find a judge who’ll manipulate the grand jury. Find a jurisdiction that’s more favorable. BLOOMBERG VIA GETTY IMAGES / And take all the money from taxpayers that you can. It’s unjust. It’s vengeance in pursuit of

OLIVIER DOULIERY Jared Kushner and his father-in-law, President Trump, at the White House power. It’s eating America alive.

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honor, and all. But the president re - She was the princess of Fascist Italy, sexy number in Port-au-Prince, and she fused: “You were appointed Secretary and, at age 19, she found her prince: had her share of men. One day, she laid of the Treasury solely on your merit. Galeazzo Ciano, the son of Count eyes on a captain in her father’s palace No one imagined at the time that the Costanzo Ciano, a close ally of guard—all 6 foot 7 of him. His name present situation would arise.” Further - Mussolini. The younger Ciano was a was Max Dominique, and he had a wife more, “you are now organizing the diplomat and playboy. The wedding and children. He ditched them for Federal Reserve Banks and engaged between Edda and Galeazzo on April 24, Marie-Denise. As a kind of wedding in other matters of vital public inter- 1930, was the hot social ticket of the present, Duvalier promoted his new est. Your resignation would be a seri- entire Fascist era. son-in-law to colonel. ous blow.” McAdoo stayed in the job In 1936, Mussolini made his son-in- But later something strange hap- until 1918. law foreign minister. Ciano was 33 years pened: Duvalier suspected Dominique He wanted his father-in-law’s job. old. (Robert Kennedy was 35 when his of plotting against him, along with a And in 1920, he was a leading con- brother made him attorney general.) For group of junior officers, Dominique’s tender for the Democratic nomination. a long time, things went smoothly friends. This was nonsense—these guys He was a leading contender in 1924, between dictator and foreign minister, were all fanatical Duvalierists—but the too. But he fell short each time. In the father-in-law and son-in-law. They liked dictator could not be talked out of his 1930s, he served a term as senator each other a lot. paranoia. He would have the junior offi- from California. In February 1943, however, Mussolini cers executed, and in an interesting way. We could go on with stories about fired his entire cabinet, including the In a scene of heart-pounding drama, he presidential sons-in-law. A daughter of foreign minister. Ciano had been advo- ordered Dominique and other senior John Adams married the man who was cating a separate peace with the Allies; men to shoot their juniors—19 of them. serving as her father’s secretary in he knew the war was lost. Nonetheless, They obeyed. London. During his presidency, Adams he retained his position on the Fascist One of the dead was Major Harry made his son-in-law the surveyor of the Grand Council. And in July, he voted Tassy, who had made the mistake of turn- Port of New York. with the majority that restored powers ing down Duvalier’s youngest daughter, Theodore Roosevelt’s daughter Alice— to the king, effectively dismissing Simone. She was in love with him; he the notorious Alice—married Congress- Mussolini. That was trouble. refused to marry her. She aborted the man Nicholas Longworth, who would A few months later, Hitler placed child they had conceived. become speaker of the House. The Mussolini at Salò, on the shores of Lake On this day, Max Dominique was exe- Trumans’ daughter, Margaret, married a Garda in northern Italy. There, he was cutioner, not executed. But Duvalier New York Times correspondent, Clifton the duce of a rump, puppet government immediately regretted not killing him. Daniel. (He would become the paper’s (the “Italian Social Republic”). Count He decided, in fact, that he would. managing editor.) Ciano—young Count Ciano, Edda’s Marie-Denise swung into action, plead- In December 1968, weeks before his husband—was arrested and sentenced ing with her father to spare him. He swearing-in as president, Nixon served to death, along with other Fascists relented. He decided to send Max into as father-of-the-bride. His daughter deemed traitors. exile, along with Marie-Denise, and Julie married David Eisenhower, grand- Think of Edda’s position. Her father Simone for good measure. The plane son of the former president. The couple and her husband were the two people took off for Spain. had met at the 1956 Republican conven- she loved most in the world. She As it was rising, Duvalier gave a signal, tion, when the Eisenhower-Nixon ticket begged her father to spare her husband. whereupon his men killed Dominique’s was renominated. David and Julie were How much leeway did Mussolini have, chauffeur and two bodyguards. Then he both eight at the time. given that Hitler was pulling his had Dominique’s father arrested. The The Eisenhower-Nixon, or Nixon- strings? That is a subject that is debated poor man eventually died from abuse. Eisenhower, wedding was a thoroughly even unto this day. There is more to this charming Republican affair. A bipartisan wedding On January 11, 1944, Ciano and the story, but we are moving to Iraq, ruled took place in 1992, at Camp David. other condemned men were made to sit by the charming Saddam Hussein. He “Doro” Bush married Robert P. Koch. down on chairs, and then they were tied had three daughters, two of whom She was the daughter of the Republican to those chairs. They were to be shot in married brothers. These men were president, George H. W. Bush. Mr. Koch the back. This was thought to be a Saddam’s cousins as well. Saddam had just resigned his position . . . as a top humiliating way to die, fit for traitors. loved them, to the extent he was capa- aide to the Democratic House majority Just before the bullets flew, Ciano ble of love. He especially loved one of leader, Richard Gephardt. So, it is possi- swiveled in his chair, to face the shoot- them, whom he put in charge of Iraq’s ble to reach across the aisle and walk ers. We can say a lot about Galeazzo WMD program. down the aisle at the same time. Ciano, but this was a brave death. Saddam Hussein had two sons of his Enough of boring democratic politics, Leave wartime Italy now for the own, as you may remember: Uday and with their opportunities for lighthearted balmy Caribbean, where François “Papa Qusay, “those scamps,” as Senator remarks, and on to dictatorships—which Doc” Duvalier ruled Haiti. As Mussolini McCain once called them. They were are exciting, bloody, and ghastly. loved his eldest child, Edda, Duvalier jealous of their brothers-in-law. They Edda Mussolini was the dictator’s loved his, Marie-Denise. Other men constantly schemed against them, and eldest child, and the apple of his eye. loved her too, after a fashion. She was a vice versa. Saddam liked it. He fostered

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palace intrigue. He wanted different the end of Michiko Kakutani’s pen. A factions to compete for his favor. It good review was “like having the good helped keep him on top, and others fairy touch you on the shoulder with her off balance. Who Critiques wand,” said Mary Karr. A bad review, In the summer of 1995, Uday and said Nicholson Baker, “was like having Qusay had the upper hand. In fact, the The Critic? my liver taken out without anaesthesia.” sons-in-law thought that Uday could kill On the career of Michiko Kakutani In the television series Sex and the City, them with impunity. (Uday was by far a book published by Carrie Bradshaw the more violent of Saddam’s two vio- BY IAN TUTTLE (played by Sarah Jessica Parker) earns lent sons.) So, they made a run for it. a Kakutani review. “Are you excited?” With their wives and children, they ran ICHIKO KAKUTANI, who re tired a friend asks. “More like terrified.” to Jordan, where they were given the in July as the New York Times’ Vanity Fair, which broke the news of protection of King Hussein. M chief book critic after 38 years Kakutani’s retirement, described her as Quickly, Saddam dispatched agents at the paper, never wrote fic- “the most feared woman in publishing.” to kill them. The plan was thwarted. In tion herself. Nonetheless, she is responsi- Naturally, this occasioned bitterness. Washington, President Clinton vowed ble for one of the great fictional characters When Kakutani ripped Norman Mailer’s to protect Jordan from any retaliation in recent memory: Michiko Kakutani. 1997 novel The Gospel according to the by Saddam. In 1998, citing her “passionate, intelli- Son (“a silly, self-important and at times Six months later, Saddam dangled a gent writing on books and contemporary inadvertently comical book that reads pardon in front of the boys. They could literature,” the Pulitzer Committee award- like a combination of Godspell, Nikos return home, with no penalty. It seems ed Kakutani its prize for criticism. The Kazantzakis’s Last Temptation of Christ that Saddam’s wife—the boys’ mother- Times, in its nominating letter, had sug- and one of those new, dumbed-down in-law—traveled to Jordan to issue a gested that Kakutani possessed “some- Bible translations”), Mailer retorted that personal guarantee. So, the families thing close to a pure critical intelligence: she was a “one-woman kamikaze” who headed back to Iraq. fearless, disinterested, and responsive.” “disdains white male authors” and that the On arrival in Baghdad, the boys were Kakutani’s employer was, perhaps, Times retained her only because she was ushered into Saddam’s office. He forced entitled to its enthusiasm. The year Asian and female. In 2006, Kakutani them to sign papers divorcing their before, “in steady, almost relentless pro- wives. Then he ripped the epaulets from cession, publishers brought out important, their uniforms—and told them to go to controversial, and, in some cases, career- their father’s villa. capping novels by virtually all of the There was a hell of a shootout. It went Great White Males of American fiction: on for hours. The sons-in-law’s camp, in Salinger, Mailer, Roth, Updike, Pynchon, the villa, shot it out with Saddam’s and DeLillo. In between were major non- camp, i.e., government forces. In the fiction works: Henry Louis Gates’s timely end, of course, everyone in the villa and personal look at race in America, was dead. Gabriel García Márquez’s foray into So, Saddam’s two daughters were in investigative journalism.” So wrote the Edda Mussolini’s position. They loved Times. Kakutani “took upon herself all of their father—revered their father—and the year’s big challenges.” Roth, whose they had loved their husbands. Spare a last novel (Sabbath’s Theater) she had thought for their children, too. What panned, she praised for his latest effort could be more destructive to a child? In (American Pastoral). Updike, whom she the 1990s, the Cianos’ son Fabrizio— had previously applauded (for In the the third Count Ciano—wrote a book. It Beauty of the Lilies), she excoriated (for had the hard-to-beat title of “When Toward the End of Time). “What these Grandpa Had Dad Shot.” examples, among many, prove,” the Times The Trump White House is known as insisted, “is that Kakutani reviews books, colorful, and so it is. But it is down- not reputations.” right bland compared with many a dic- Apparent even-handedness, unflag- tatorship, as should be the case in a ging output, and a distaste for confes- democratic society. Trump has shown sional writing (“I” almost never appears that he can give his aides the chop. It in a Kakutani review) combined with a may even happen to Jared Kushner, fiercely guarded private life to give the Ivanka’s husband. But if Trump and impression of a critic who was less a Kushner live out their White House human reader than a Delphic oracle, pro- years together, it will go down as one of nouncing upon this or that quaking mor- the most unusual relationships between tal’s latest oblation. COM . father-in-law and son-in-law in history. The result in the literary world was a de NYTCO Touching, even. facto dictatorship. Books lived or died at Michiko Kakutani

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bashed Jonathan Franzen’s memoir The Kakutani is rarely elegant. Her re - decades prostrated itself before the judg- Discomfort Zone (“an odious self-portrait views are workmanlike. There is fre- ments of one person, and that person of of the artist as a young jackass”); two quent comparison and contrast (“if no particular genius. It is impossible to years later, during an appearance at Author X had a love child with Author Y, imagine Kakutani writing something on Harvard, Franzen remarked: “The stupid- and the fruit of that union was reared by the order of Eliot’s “Tradition and the est person in New York City is currently Author Z, the result would be Author Individual Talent” or Tate’s “The Man of the lead reviewer of fiction for the New Being Reviewed”). The prose is plain- Letters in the Modern World,” or spotting York Times.” spoken. Certain words recur (the verb anything like the disjunction between lit- Yet while “Kakutanied” has come into “limn” showed up so often that she was erature and mainstream politics that the lexicon as a negative, it’s also true that teased in Harper’s for being a “limnpho- Trilling did in The Liberal Imagination Kakutani published many positive re- maniac”; “deeply felt” has been her when he observed that “Proust, Joyce, views. Roth’s American Pastoral was “a adjectival phrase of choice in recent Lawrence, Eliot, Yeats, Mann (in his cre- big, rough-hewn work built on a grand years). Once in a while, plainspokenness ative work), Kafka, Rilke, Gide—all have design, . . . moving, generous and ambi- tumbles into sub-literacy (“The stakes their own love of justice and the good tious.” The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov today are infinitely so much huger”). life,” and that “in not one of them does it was a “sumptuous volume,” “a glorious But occasional stylistic deficiencies take the form of a love of the ideas which recapitulation of the sorcerer’s entire are secondary to what is most strikingly liberal democracy, as known by our edu- career.” Occasionally, her reviews ush- absent from Kakutani’s criticism: any cated class, has declared respectable.” ered unknown or almost unknown significant imaginative ambition on the And that is a loss, to put it mildly. authors to literary stardom: White Teeth, part of the critic herself. Besides a gen- Critical and creative work are mutually published by Zadie Smith in 2000, eral sentiment that fiction, at its best, is reinforcing. Intelligent art offers the critic “announces the debut of a preternaturally a uniquely powerful aesthetic experi- an opportunity to unfold the meaning that gifted new writer—a writer who at the age ence, Kakutani gives little if any impres- is compressed into an aesthetic object; and of 24 demonstrates both an instinctive sion of having any broad vision of what intelligent criticism can refine and deepen storytelling talent and a fully fashioned literature is or ought to be, or of its role the artist’s sensibilities. Meanwhile, good voice that’s street-smart and learned, in contemporary American culture. Of art and good criticism ennoble and elevate What is most strikingly absent from Kakutani’s criticism is any significant imaginative ambition on the part of the critic herself. sassy and philosophical all at the same the “organic wholes” that T. S. Eliot sug- those who encounter them sympathetical- time.” And even when Kakutani had seri- gested are constituted by any literature ly, cultivating the moral imagination of ous criticisms, she could be generous. (continental, national, regional, etc.)— individuals and, by extension, the public. David Foster Wallace’s 1996 novel “systems in relation to which, and only According to Vanity Fair, in lieu of Infinite Jest was a “loose, baggy monster” in relation to which, individual works literary criticism Kakutani plans to and “a mess,” but Wallace was nonethe- of literary art, and the works of individ- “branch out and write more essays about less “one of the big talents of his genera- ual artists, have their significance”— culture and politics in Trump’s America.” tion, a writer of virtuosic talents who can Kakutani seems uninterested, if not Kakutani’s politics, insofar as they are seemingly do anything, someone who unaware, and with Eliot’s notion that knowable from her reviews, are consti- can write funny, write sad, write serious, the “true artists” of any period form an tuted largely of boilerplate liberalism, write satiric, a writer who’s equally adept “unconscious community” and share cer- whether the subject is George W. Bush or at the Pynchonesque epic and Nicholson tain preoccupations, she seems uncon- Donald Trump. (Trump was the target of Bakeresque minute, a pushing-the- cerned. With this in mind, perhaps one Kakutani’s review of Volker Ulrich’s envelope postmodernist who’s also able ought to see Kakutani’s famous unpre- Hitler: Ascent, 1889–1939, published in to create flesh-and-blood characters and dictability in her likes and dislikes less as January 2016, although she did not genuinely moving scenes.” the application of a “pure critical intelli- explicitly name him.) No doubt these This is all to say that Kakutani does gence” than as intellectual narrowness. forthcoming essays will be received with possess critical sensitivity and that she is It is striking that a literary culture that more breathless admiration. more than a put-down artist. But a study was once shaped by, among others, Eliot, That the most important book critic of Kakutani’s reviews—take as a start Edmund Wilson, Irving Howe, Alfred in the country has for decades been a just those highlighted by the Times short- Kazin, Lionel Trilling, Saul Bellow, and dispensary of, at best, accurate but cir- ly after her retirement (“38 Years on Susan Sontag, not to mention the “south- cumscribed judgments and, at worst, Books: The Essential Michiko Kakutani ern critics” (e.g., Robert Penn Warren, semi-learned whims seems to have gone Reader”)—makes no particularly com- John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate)—that largely unnoticed, even by people sup- pelling case for the reverence with once carried on urgent, vigorous debates posedly of cultivated taste. One begins which she has been treated for at least about literature in the pages of Partisan to wonder: In literary America, who cri- two decades. Review and Commentary—has for tiques the critics?

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Senators Tom Cotton and David Perdue (speaking) introduce the RAISE Act, August 2. The Case for Skills-Based Immigration It makes sense economically and morally

BY REIHAN SALAM

HORTLY after Arkansas senator Tom Cotton and these lines is urgently necessary. Indeed, one could argue that Georgia senator David Perdue released the RAISE the RAISE Act represents a long-overdue correction of a S Act, a bill that would, among other things, sharply mistake made decades ago—a mistake made, funnily enough, reduce legal-immigration levels, it occurred to me by immigration restrictionists of an earlier era. that its very reasonableness was, to use the language of the After decades of sharp limits on legal immigration, the moment, triggering. In an interview with MSNBC, Luis 1965 immigration reform signaled a change of direction. The Gutiérrez, a Democratic congressman from Chicago, de - hope was to get rid of racist restrictions on non-European nounced the bill as racist. So too did Republican strategist immigration without doing all that much to increase Ana Navarro, herself a Nicaraguan immigrant and a fixture immigration levels overall. Willard Wirtz, President John - on CNN. And they were hardly alone, as evidenced by son’s secretary of labor, assured Congress that once the law was thousands of tweets, retweets, and Facebook missives from fully implemented, the annual influx of new workers would distinguished members of America’s scrupulously objective amount to “one-tenth of 1 percent of the work force.” That’s not GETTY IMAGES

/ press corps. how it turned out, and the reason is that restrictionists wound

POOL The premise behind the RAISE Act is that we ought to up outsmarting themselves. / move away from selecting immigrants mostly on the basis of One of the central provisions of the 1965 law privileged the family ties to selecting them on the basis of their earning relatives of U.S. citizens over just about everyone else ZACH GIBSON potential. I’ve long believed an immigration reform along looking to settle in America. Organized labor pushed for

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prioritizing relatives over skilled immigrants, seeing the latter The bill also aims to modernize employment-based as potential competitors and the former as the loved ones of immigration by establishing a points system, which would their urban ethnic loyalists. Self-styled defenders of America’s give applicants points on the basis of their age, educational ethnic purity favored family reunification because they credentials, English-language fluency, salary offers from U.S. assumed that its beneficiaries would be tiny in number and employers, and more. The goal of the points system is to that most of them would be white Europeans. identify immigrants who will at a minimum be in a position What restrictionists in both camps failed to grasp was that to provide for themselves and their families, which already those who’d be most eager to bring their relatives to America narrows the pool of applicants dramatically, and ideally to were citizens born abroad, including the growing number of identify those who will make the most substantial economic naturalized citizens from Latin America, Asia, and Africa. contributions. Applicants who pass the minimum threshold of Over time, family reunification has created a large, vocal 30 points out of 100 would be invited to file full applications constituency for maintaining high immigration levels, which for green cards, and 140,000 employment-based visas would grows with each passing year. But this constituency isn’t be issued per year to the highest-scoring applicants. In interested in high immigration levels per se. First and foremost, keeping with its goal of a more “merit-based” immigration its members are interested in keeping America’s borders open system, the RAISE Act also abolishes “diversity visas,” to their family members. 50,000 of which are issued every year by lottery, in theory to Roughly two-thirds of the new green cards issued every year help ensure that the stream of immigrants isn’t dominated by are for the relatives of U.S. citizens and lawful permanent people from just a handful of countries. residents, or LPRs, and all efforts to change that have met with If the RAISE Act’s points system is part of a secret fierce resistance. Today, the spouses, minor children, and conspiracy to eliminate nonwhite immigration, as Gutiérrez, parents of U.S. citizens are granted green cards without limit Navarro, and others have oh-so-subtly suggested, the while the adult children and siblings of U.S. citizens and lawful conspirators have done an extremely bad job. A points system permanent residents are allowed to petition for LPR status would yield a pool of immigrants that is extremely diverse in under a confusing welter of family-sponsored preferences, terms of color and creed, and to suggest otherwise is hogwash. subject to per-country limits. Granted, it might give high-skilled citizens of affluent The result has been what critics call “chain migration,” in countries in Europe and East Asia a bit of a boost, but it would which an initiating immigrant, who is granted a green card on also help the high-skilled citizens of poor countries who have the basis of skills or refugee status, sponsors a spouse, who no family ties in the U.S. then sponsors her sibling, who then sponsors her adult It’s worth noting also that in a 2015 article on American children, and on and on in an endless chain. In fairness, the attitudes toward different kinds of immigrants, political process of petitioning for a green card is not always easy. scientists Jens Hainmueller of MIT and Daniel Hopkins of the Adult children and siblings of U.S. citizens from countries University of Pennsylvania found that no matter their education such as China, the Philippines, and Mexico that send level, partisan affiliation, job, or degree of ethno centrism, most enormous numbers of immigrants to America can expect to Americans, when given a choice, strongly favor educated wait for a very long time for LPR status. That is less true of immigrants in high-status jobs over other immigrants. If the applicants from countries that send fewer immigrants, which RAISE Act is racist, so are most Americans, including many compounds the perception that our immigration system is nonwhite Americans. maddeningly arbitrary. I suspect that the charge of “racism” is really a stand-in for something else. To critics of the bill, references to a more “merit-based” system are really a way of saying that the NTER the RAISE Act, which tackles family-based richer you are, the better you are. Scripture says that it is immigration head-on. First, though it would allow U.S. easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for citizens and LPRs to continue sponsoring spouses and a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God. For the Kingdom minorE children for green cards, they could no longer sponsor of America, Cotton and Perdue are calling for something their adult siblings, adult children, and parents. The parents of like the opposite. U.S. citizens could still enter the country under renewable Having grown up in New York City, home to millions of poor nonimmigrant visas, but only on the condition that the U.S. immigrants, I appreciate the visceral power of this line of citizens sponsoring them demonstrate that they’ve purchased argument. If we want fewer immigrants who earn low wages— adequate health in surance for them. and who find themselves forced to rely on Medicaid, SNAP, and Minor though these tweaks might sound, limiting family- the earned-income tax credit, among dozens of other safety-net based immigration to spouses and minor children would benefits, to provide a decent and dignified life for themselves have a large effect. Princeton sociologist Marta Tienda has and their families—well, what does that say to the millions of found that 300,000 immigrants who arrived from Asia such immigrants who already live in our country? What does it between 1996 and 2000 set off migration chains that say to their children, or to the employers who’ve come to rely eventually brought 1.2 million sponsored family members on them to do difficult, dangerous, and dirty jobs that natives to the country, one in four of whom were over the age of 50. would not do for so little money? America is a large-hearted The number of sponsored relatives was even higher for country, and it’s no wonder that the implicit message of the immigrants from Latin America. Under the RAISE Act, the RAISE Act strikes many Americans as unduly harsh. number of eligible relatives would fall sharply, and so would But compassion shouldn’t blind us to the truth, which is the overall level of family-based immigration. that there is a trade-off between how generous countries are

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to immigrants and how many of them they can feasibly benefits, these limits go away after five years or so. welcome. At one extreme you’ll find countries that welcome Moreover, the children of immigrants are treated more vast numbers of immigrants, such as Qatar, where 94 percent generously from the start. The result is that, as Steven of the work force and 70 percent of the population is foreign- Camarota of the Center for Immigration Studies has reported born, yet which offers immigrants virtually no rights or social in these pages, households headed by less-skilled immigrants protections. At the other extreme is Norway, which admits a receive far more in benefits than they pay in taxes. This is not relatively small number of immigrants from outside Europe because less-skilled immigrants are morally deficient. Rather, but treats them exceptionally well. it is because demand for less-skilled labor has been declining Some argue that it is Qatar that is doing more good for the for decades, the occasional business-cycle upswing not - world’s poor. Its policy of being open but stingy helps far more withstanding, and this has reduced their employment and people than Norway’s policy of being closed but generous. At lowered their wages. the same time, Qatar is built on a racialized caste system, with If we were to make the tax code more steeply progressive Qataris at the top and hundreds of thousands of brown and while increasing redistribution to low-income households, black foreigners at the bottom. Norway, in contrast, is a the net fiscal impact of less-skilled immigration would only country where non-European immigrants have the opportunity get worse, at least for the foreseeable future. What do to become equal participants in society. universal pre-K, subsidized child care, and Medicare-for- all have in common? They all cost money, and the taxes paid by low-income immigrants wouldn’t come close to HICH kind of country would we rather be? As it paying for the benefits they’d be receiving. Advocates stands, we Americans refuse to choose, and the insist that the children of poor immigrants will auto - result is that we find ourselves somewhere in the matically vault into the bourgeoisie, closing the fiscal gap middle:W We admit too many less-skilled immigrants to be as and then some. Perhaps they’re right. But the children of generous as we’d need to be to fully incorporate them into poor immigrants face challenges of their own. A recent our society, but we’re far more generous than the Qataris, National Academy of Sciences report projects that of the who are hard-headed enough to know that open borders and children of foreign-born parents with less than a high- welfare states don’t mix. school education, only 6.2 percent will graduate from The RAISE Act has the potential to do a great deal of good. Instead of sharpening our political and economic divides, the bill offers an immigration system that would actually help heal them. Needless to say, mainstream politicians who support high college. Low incomes in one generation threaten to extend immigration levels talk only rarely about immigration as a to the next. means of bettering the lives of the world’s poor. What they Which leads us back to the RAISE Act. By favoring skilled do instead is talk up the supposedly enormous benefits of immigrants with high earning potential, the points system immigration to U.S. natives. Once we account for gains and would tilt immigrant admissions toward those who will have losses among different groups of natives, however, the the most positive net fiscal impact. Rather than making it actual “immigration surplus”—the net gain to the economic harder to sustain generous social programs that would serve all welfare of natives that flows from immigration—is re - Americans, whether native-born or naturalized, the RAISE markably small. Act would make it much easier to do so. Moreover, as the According to George Borjas, an economist at the Harvard economists Xavier Chojnicki, Frédéric Docquier, and Lionel Kennedy School and the author of We Wanted Workers, an Ragot have found, a more selective, skills-based immigration incisive guide to the immigration debate, of the estimated policy would disproportionately benefit low-skilled American $2.1 trillion that immigration added to U.S. GDP in 2015, workers regardless of race or ethnicity. In a similar vein, the immigrants captured $2.054 trillion in the form of wages and economists Ping Xu, James C. Garand, and Ling Xu argue that other payments. The difference between those two numbers is prioritizing high-skilled immigrants would tend to lower the vaunted immigration surplus. Borjas estimates that as the income inequality. foreign-born share of the U.S. work force increased from 10 All told, the RAISE Act has the potential to do a great deal percent to 15 percent from 1995 to 2014, the surplus increased of good. Far from being an anti-immigration measure, the bill from 0.1 percent of GDP to 0.24 percent of GDP. A quarter of would put immigration on a sounder footing in an age when a percentage point of GDP is not nothing, to be sure, but it’s not offshoring and automation are starting to transform our terribly impressive, either. economy, and low-wage, less-skilled workers feel more When we account for the overall fiscal cost associated vulnerable than ever. Most of all, instead of sharpening our with less-skilled immigration, even this modest surplus political and economic divides, as mass immigration has been evaporates. Though new immigrants are subject to temp - doing for a generation, the bill offers an immigration system orary limits on their ability to access certain safety-net that would actually help heal them.

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attorneys directed their attention to other issues, such as white-collar crime. In Defense of In March 2015, Holder tried to discount the findings of his own Justice Department staff, who had demolished the “Hands up, don’t shoot” Michael Brown hoax. A Justice Jeff Sessions Department report found that there was no evidence to justify charging police officer Darren Wilson with a federal civil-rights violation for killing Michael Brown in His work on policing and Ferguson, Mo., in August 2014. Holder groused that that standard of proof in federal civil-rights cases was simply immigration merits praise too high. But under no standard of proof should Wilson have been indicted, since Brown had tried to grab Wilson’s BY HEATHER MAC DONALD gun—a patent prelude to a cop-killing—and had assaulted him. Holder’s unwillingness to unequivocally support the Wilson exoneration perpetuated the dangerous Black Lives O cabinet official has delivered on Donald Trump’s Matter mythology. key campaign promises more resoundingly than The Obama Justice Department put more police depart- N Attorney General Jeff Sessions. This fact makes ments under federal control for alleged systemic bias than the president’s recent churlish attacks on Sessions any previous administration had. The basis for many of all the more galling. Trump’s most important electoral theme these onerous consent decrees—binding agreements was the restoration of law and order to America’s inner cities between a local agency and the federal government, over- and to its immigration policy. To appreciate the magnitude of seen by a grotesquely overpaid army of consultants—was Sessions’s accomplishments in these areas, it is necessary to specious disparate-impact analysis that ignored the inci- recall how the previous Justice Department treated crime dence of crime. and immigration. By late April 2015, when Holder left the Justice De - One of Eric Holder’s first pronouncements upon becom- partment, it was already obvious that violence in minority ing attorney general was that America was a “nation of neighborhoods was increasing at an alarming rate. The reason cowards” for not having enough conversations about race. for that increase was what I have called the Ferguson effect: As a corrective, Holder racialized a significant part of the Police officers were backing off discretionary proactive Justice Department’s work. In 2013, he ordered all U.S. policing under the relentless Black Lives Matter narrative attorneys to conceal from federal judges the amount of that policing was lethally biased. The increase in reported drugs a trafficker had been caught with, so as not to trigger homicides in 2015 was the largest in nearly 50 years, and its the statutory penalties for large-scale dealing legislated by primary victims were black. By the end of 2015, 900 more Congress. Holder’s dissembling policy was inspired by the black males would be killed than in 2014, bringing the black academic idea that a racist drug war was responsible for the homicide total to more than 7,000. That is 2,000 more black disproportionate representation of blacks in the criminal- homicide victims than all white and Hispanic homicide victims justice system. combined, even though blacks are only 13 percent of the popu- That claim is false. Remove all drug prisoners from the lation, and black males, who are the vast majority of black nation’s prisons and the proportion of black prisoners homicide victims, only 6 percent of the total population. The remains virtually unchanged, at just over 37 percent. And the Ferguson effect is continuing: Preliminary estimates show impetus for drug enforcement has always come from the law- another 14 percent homicide increase in 2016 in the 30 largest abiding members of black communities who live under the U.S. cities and an 8 percent increase nationwide; 2017 does not pall of the open-air drug trade. In 1986, for example, the look any better. Washington, D.C., newspaper the Afro labeled the drug trade Holder said nothing about the rising death toll. Loretta “a threat to our race,” and a black assistant police chief Lynch did convene a private meeting of police chiefs and launched a martial anti-drug initiative at the urging of black mayors in October 2015 to discuss the surging violence, but community groups, as documented in James Forman Jr.’s there was no policy follow-up. Meanwhile, President Locking Up Our Own. Today, one of the most routine com- Obama continued to dismiss the reality of rising crime, plaints in urban police–community meetings remains: “Why calling it a mere “uptick in murders and violent crime in can’t you keep the dealers off the corner?” Federal drug some cities.” enforcement is one way to do just that. Gun prosecutions also dropped under the Obama Justice Department, since they have a disparate impact on blacks EFF SESSIONS inherited a Justice Department, in other and therefore allegedly contribute to “mass incarceration.” words, that in too many areas had lost sight of its prima- Never mind that gun crimes also have a disparate impact ry mission of protecting public safety and ensuring the on blacks, leading to a death-by-homicide rate that is six fairJ and impartial administration of justice. The precondition times that of whites and Hispanics combined. Many U.S. for reversing that misdirection, and for making good on Trump’s promise to restore law and order to inner cities, is to Heather Mac Donald is the Thomas W. Smith Fellow at the Manhattan Institute acknowledge the rising crime rates and to take responsibility and author of The War on Cops. for ending them. Sessions does that at every opportunity.

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He rightly sees criminal victimization as a civil-rights longer sentences, in conjunction with proactive policing, issue: “Regardless of wealth or race, every American . . . produced the 20-year drop in violent crime that the country deserves to live without the constant fear of violence spilling enjoyed through the first half of 2014, before the Black over into their daily lives,” he said in Philadelphia on July Lives Matter movement took hold. Without that crime 21, two days after Trump’s public attacks on him began. drop, the de-incarceration movement would have many Sessions has eloquently described how crime destroys the fewer adherents. viability of cities: “If government fails in its core mission of protecting safety, communities enter a death spiral,” he said on August 1 in Atlanta, addressing the National Organization ESSIONS’S revamping of immigration policy has been of Black Law Enforcement Executives. “Schools are less as central to fulfilling Trump’s electoral mandate. effective, fewer businesses can succeed, grocery stores dis- Trump’s campaign gained momentum only after he appear, and home values plummet. Suddenly, a retired cou- seizedS on the sanctuary-cities issue. Trump championed the ple who worked their whole lives to buy their home finds case of Kate Steinle, killed in July 2015 by an illegal-alien themselves trapped in a failing community, unable to pass felon with a long criminal and deportation history. The San along that nest egg to their children and threatened daily by Francisco sheriff had previously defied a request by the increasing violence around them.” Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials to briefly The new attorney general has also identified the cause of hold the inmate beyond his release time so that ICE agents the current crime surge: politically induced de-policing. could pick him up for deportation (a process known as a While Sessions has vowed to prosecute officers who break detainer request). Instead, the sheriff let him back onto the the law, he argued in Atlanta that “we cannot let mayors and streets, and the Mexican drug dealer shot Steinle eleven city councils run down police in communities that are suffer- weeks later. ing only to see crime spike in the very neighborhoods that The Obama administration’s stance toward San Francisco need proactive, community policing the most.” and the rest of the country’s 300 sanctuary jurisdictions was At the end of March, Sessions ordered a review of all a study in hypocrisy. In 2010, the Justice Department sued Justice Department functions to make sure that they con- Arizona over a state law, SB 1070, that encouraged local tributed to the core mission of the department; among the law-enforcement officers to assist ICE with immigration subjects of review were existing and contemplated consent enforcement. SB 1070 made clear that those officers had the decrees. Former Obama officials and civil-rights groups right to ask a suspect about his immigration status if they went ballistic, but a reevaluation of the consent-decree had reasonable grounds to believe that he was in the country process was long overdue. On April 3, Justice Department illegally. Holder’s DOJ argued that any such state and local attorneys asked a federal judge to briefly delay finalizing a immigration measure was unconstitutional, because only misguided decree for the Baltimore Police Department that the federal government could implement immigration poli- the Obama administration had hurriedly cranked out in its cy. A federal judge agreed and enjoined most of SB 1070. final week. (See my NR article “Let the Police Police,” Yet at the same time that the Obama administration was May 15, 2017.) The judge refused and signed the document fighting Arizona’s alleged usurpation of Washington’s ple- anyway; since then, robberies, assaults, burglaries, and nary power over immigration, the Obama DOJ chastely homicides (the latter now at a historic high) have continued looked away as states and cities flouted ICE detainer to climb. Sessions did manage to abort what would have requests and set themselves up as de facto arbiters of immi- been an equally destructive consent decree for the Chicago gration law. Police Department, thereby saving Chicago tens, if not Fast-forward to this August. Eric Holder is now advising hundreds, of millions of dollars in paper-pushing and con- California’s government on a proposed bill that would make sulting fees that would have come out of police hiring and California’s status as a sanctuary state impermeable; he is training. Not that anyone in the Windy City’s government also a partner at the elite law firm of Covington & Burling, has thanked him. where his usual fees are likely around $1,500 an hour. The Holder policy requiring federal attorneys to dissem- Under California’s Senate Bill 54, no local police or sher- ble regarding the amount of drugs a dealer was caught with iff’s agency could report or detain an illegal-alien criminal has been withdrawn. The traditional practice of charging if asked to do so by ICE; ICE agents would be barred from the maximum provable offense has been restored. Sessions interrogating illegal-alien criminals in local jails, even has directed federal prosecutors to pay more attention to though jails routinely let other federal agents speak with gun crime. Indictments for the unlawful possession of a their inmates. Holder has sent Sessions a letter primly firearm rose nearly 23 percent in the three months after informing him that SB 54’s open contempt of federal immi- Sessions’s order; prosecutions for using a gun in a violent gration authority is “constitutional and not preempted by feder- crime increased 10 percent. In fiscal year 2017, the govern- al law.” Never mind that Holder deemed Arizona’s compliance ment is on track to charge the most federal firearms cases with immigration enforcement to be preempted by federal law. since 2005. Holder is encouraging other states to follow California’s lead: The proponents of decriminalization and de-incarceration “This is something that needs to be done nationwide,” he told have blasted Sessions for being out of step with the times. the Los Angeles Times. But the decriminalization and de-incarceration movements What has prompted this defensive reaction? Sessions’s are a luxury enabled by the stricter sentencing policies of pledge to restore the rule of law. “For those that continue the last two decades. Those more certain and sometimes to seek improper and illegal entry into this country, be

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forewarned: This is a new era,” he said on April 11. “The lawlessness, the abdication of the duty to enforce our immigration laws, and the catch-and- release practices of old are over.” The extent of that lawlessness is shocking. In the first six months of 2017, the New York Police Department turned down all 198 detainer requests it received from ICE, sending the subjects of those requests back onto the streets. The city’s Department of Corrections honored only six of its 161 detainer requests; apparently New York City does not have enough criminals already and needs to hold on to those who are in the country illegally as well. Sessions is trying to use every lever he has to change such obstruction. On July 25, he announced that Washington’s law-enforcement grants to locali- ties would thenceforth be conditional on compliance with ICE detainers. Participation in a new federal– local crime-fighting initiative, the Public Safety Partnership, would also depend on a city or county’s respect for federal immigration policy. This unprece- dented demand for cooperation has elicited hilarious justifications for lawlessness on the part of sanctuary jurisdictions. “Being a sanctuary city does not mean that you are out of compliance or trying to violate federal law in any way,” Nisha Agarwal, New York City’s commissioner for immigrant affairs, lamely wrote Sessions. The executive director of the Center for Migration Studies in New York City complained that the Trump administration was trying to tell people that “nobody should come that’s not documented.” That is a shocking idea to the advocates. The Obama administration was assiduously silent about the crimes committed by illegal aliens. Sessions is not. He went to Long Island in April and vowed to use the immigration laws to wipe out MS-13, the ruthless gang that has been engaged in a killing spree there since 2016. New York City pastor Calvin Butts objected. “His response is anti- immigrant.” Apparently Butts thinks that all immigrants are murderers. Sessions has ordered U.S. attorneys to prosecute the crimes drop is the result of Trump’s rhetoric and of ICE’s enforce- that facilitate illegal immigration, such as alien smuggling, ment actions under the able leadership of retired Marine gen- document fraud, and felonious reentry following deportation. eral John Kelly, now White House chief of staff. Arrests of To ensure that justice does not founder on delay, he has budget- illegal aliens were up 38 percent in Trump’s first 100 days. ed for an additional 50 immigration judges this year and another But it was Senator Sessions who created the philosophical 75 next year. There is currently a backlog of more than 610,000 basis for ICE’s reinvigorated activity, in his decades-long cases on the immigration docket. The chief federal immigration crusade on Capitol Hill for an immigration policy that judge issued a memo on July 31 reminding immigration judges acknowledged borders and respected the rule of law. Like - and staff to move their dockets along and not reflexively grant wise, the bill introduced by Senators Tom Cotton and David continuation requests. Perdue on August 2 to reorient legal-immigration policy On August 7, Chicago’s mayor, Rahm Emanuel, sued toward a skills-based system was inspired by Senator Sessions in federal court, claiming that the city was entitled to Sessions’s tireless campaign to publicize the costs of mass federal law-enforcement funding despite its sanctuary status. low-skilled immigration, borne disproportionately by low- Emanuel’s suit is just the latest move in a swelling legal cam- skilled American workers. paign to thwart immigration enforcement. Since Trump’s childish tantrum against Sessions began, the Illegal entries across the border have fallen precipitously. attorney general’s defenders have invoked Sessions’s early In March 2017, the number of illegal crossings was down 72 support of Trump’s campaign as the primary reason the presi- percent compared with the month before Trump was inaugu- dent should withhold his narcissistic bile. The better reason is ROMAN GENN rated, the lowest figure for at least 17 years. Some of that that Sessions is irreplaceable.

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Berlin Wall. The Communists of the East implemented capitalist reforms, following China’s lead. Meanwhile, the “Washington The Agony of Consensus” led to privatizations and monetarism across the developing world. In Latin America, a region only recently returned to democracy after decades of military interregnums Venezuela fueled by a hot Cold War, its dictums were applied with zeal. Only the Cuba of Fidel Castro held out, impoverished, isolated, and devoid of Russian cash. How a prospering democracy sank into Venezuela was once an example to follow. The country dictatorship and hunger avoided the murderous military rule that befell the likes of Argentina, Brazil, and Chile in no small part because of Rómulo Betancourt, a thrice-exiled pioneering social democrat BY PIERPAOLO BARBIERI who, in the words of Ronald Reagan, “fought dictatorships of the Right and the Left.” Fossil-fuel wealth on par with LOSING a speech that was as emotional as it was end- that of the Persian Gulf allowed for the kind of social redis- less, the president invoked Shakespeare’s The tribution that was never in the cards elsewhere. Despite this C Tempest. In the play’s opening scene, a boatswain affluence, or perhaps because of it, Venezuela was also the dares to defy the wind as the storm gathers: “Blow, till kind of “low-intensity democracy” that political scientists thou burst thy wind, if room enough!” The charismatic leader worry about, its republican institutions weakened by profound then paraphrased the bard: “Blow, hard wind, blow, hard tempest, social inequities and rampant corruption. I have [a constitutional] assembly to withstand you!” The crowd Neoliberal economics failed to strengthen the republic. With was enraptured. Betancourt long gone, the ruling two-party system was in The year was 1999, and Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez, decay. In 1989, a harsh IMF-sponsored economic austerity shortly after his election victory the previous December, was ask- program lit up the capital in what became known as the ing the assembly to deliver a new, “eternal” constitution. He put “Caracazo.” Protests, lootings, and riots were met with force himself at the “mercy” of a fresh, temporary but all-powerful by the government, resulting in scores of deaths at the hands of assembly, conveniently created to supersede a parliament that did the military. Soon enough, a charismatic young colonel espous- not answer to him. Chávez got his way; he almost always did. ing anti-establishment ideas improvised a coup d’état while his The resulting constitution—Venezuela’s 26th—did away with neoliberal commander in chief traveled to the nascent World the senate, lengthened presidential terms, unshackled military Economic Forum at Davos. The telegenic Hugo Chávez failed, appointments from congressional oversight, and weakened the but he also failed to go away. As he was taken into custody, he checks and balances exercised by judges and legislators. It was addressed the TV cameras: “Regrettably, for now, we did not also the beginning of the end of democracy in Venezuela. achieve our . . . objectives.” As it turned out, “eternal” did not make it 20 years. The “For now” was accurate. When Chávez was released from Venezuelan republic breathed its last in July, when Chávez’s suc- prison by a misguided president, he organized a democratic cessor, Nicolás Maduro, enthroned yet another constitutional “movement” that cut across party lines, promising Manichaean assembly, to disempower the democratic but opposition- deliverance: freeing “the people” from an entitled and corrupt controlled parliament. The one goal that eluded Chávez in “oligarchy.” He was eventually elected to the presidency, in life—the establishment of “communal socialism”—might be 1998—and he never left it until he died in office in 2013. achieved, in his name, after his death. His government has deservedly been praised for its anti- Despite the marshaling of government cadres eager to fire poverty efforts, later emulated by like-minded governments against unarmed protesters, millions of Venezuelans took to elsewhere. When he came to power, extreme poverty hovered at the streets to stop this power grab. Dozens of dead and hun- around 24 percent of the population, a staggering number given dreds of political prisoners later, they endure. The world, Venezuela’s natural endowment; according to the World Bank, meanwhile, looks on, with the United States engaged only it had fallen to around 9 percent by 2011. Similarly, unemploy- peripherally and emerging global powers reluctant to disrupt ment declined from 14.5 percent in 1999 to 7.6 percent a decade business. Venezuelans are now engaged in a civil war in which, later, a figure boosted by radical growth of the public sector. as one astute observer remarked while being deported, only Infant mortality was almost halved during Chávez’s first decade one side is armed. in power, from 20 per 1,000 live births to 13. Venezuela matters. The modern, media-fueled messianic His televised paternalism exalted the state at a time when populism that so worries Western elites was born there in the it was being restrained elsewhere. Like other populist gov- 1990s. It arose during a unique period when, ever so briefly, ernments before him, however, his preferred jobs and free history appeared to be over. Liberal democracy and economic housing to improved education. He never sought to heal neoliberalism enjoyed an intellectual hegemony following the social wounds; his Manichaean revolution, after all, depend- unceremonious collapse of the Soviet Union and the fall of the ed on them. Chávez’s economic strategy was supported by a decade-long Mr. Barbieri is the executive director of Greenmantle, a macroeconomic and rise in commodity prices—in particular, oil prices. Nationalized geopolitical advisory company, and a senior associate at the Harvard Kennedy oil behemoth Petróleos de Venezuela became progressively School’s Applied History Project. He is working on a history of Latin American less professional and more politicized under chavismo. There populism. was a months-long strike in 2002–03 against the government’s

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Protesters take cover in Caracas, July 28.

management of the company; Chávez eventually fired the strik- VEN in the face of damning evidence, Chávez admitted ers. Devoid of its best managers, the company saw its oil produc- neither weakness nor defeat. His teleology of history was tion steadily decline thereafter. Yet the value of Venezuela’s net stronger than any temporary setback. He applied that crude exports boomed for a decade, rising from (in 2017 dollars) forceE against opposition-owned conglomerates, critical media, $21 billion when Chávez was inaugurated to $66 billion in 2011. and political dissenters. Slowly but steadily, they all declined, These oil exports accounted for a staggering 96 percent of cornered by chavismo’s ever-growing state. Venezuela’s hard currency. As historian Enrique Krauze has They say revolutions devour their children; this one exiled its accurately observed, chavismo’s belief in high oil prices was as best minds and then employed whoever was left in an orgy of zealous as its socialism. nepotism and corruption. The central bank folded quickly. But there was always an authoritarian underbelly to economic Emboldened by a divided opposition, Chávez stuffed the redistribution. In the same speech in which he used Shakespeare supreme court with loyalists. A once-independent electoral com- to justify a hyper-presidentialist constitution, Chávez somehow mission suddenly became a tool of the regime. By 2007, he was able to denounce regional caudillos and great-man theories moved against his “eternal” 1999 constitution with 69 proposed of history, arguing that only “the people” led revolutions (with amendments that would give him sweeping new powers. This led the sole exception of “the only providential man, Jesus of to his one and only electoral defeat, when a plebiscite narrowly Nazareth”). He also quoted José Ortega y Gasset’s Revolt of the rejected his changes. Visibly shaken and, as always, on live tele- Masses, once a guiding text of Iberian authoritarians, through a vision, he accepted the result. “For now,” he added emphatically, curious postmodern lens—praising a “Venezuelan revolution led, echoing his 1992 defeat. boosted, felt, and loved by the people.” He even ventured a Chavismo devoted just as much energy to exporting its revolu- “chemical formula” for revolution, modeled on that of water: tion as it did to exporting oil. The latter was a conduit for the for- “People 2 Revolution.” mer. Venezuela fostered and financed the populist “pink tide” that GETTY IMAGES / And yet the “will of the people” was always somehow took over Latin American politics in the aftermath of 9/11. While Chávez’s. His revolution was lavishly televised as he sought to the United States waged war on terrorists in distant lands and create what he termed a “Bolivarian republic,” after the 19th- later “pivoted” to Asia, Chávez loomed large on a continent freed century liberator of much of northern Latin America from from the Monroe Doctrine. Chavismo opened the region’s doors ANADOLU AGENCY / Spain’s imperialist yoke. Not even poor old Bolívar was safe to China—today Venezuela’s largest investor and creditor—and from his successor’s hyperactive energy: The hero’s body was Russia, not only financially but also militarily. These world pow- exhumed amid public fanfare to prove a (fake) conspiracy theory ers never questioned his methods, and chavismo encouraged CARLOS BECERRA about his death at the hand of plotting imperialists. their economic penetration elsewhere in the region, particularly

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in the nations that soon joined an emergent populist league. At inflation, Venezuela’s uncontrolled monetary expansion resulted the United Nations General Assembly, Chávez once claimed in a hyperinflation that is expected to top 700 percent this year. amid laughs that he could still “smell the sulphur left behind by There are shortages of essential food and medicine; social tensions the devil,” President George W. Bush, who had preceded him have returned with a vengeance. An increasingly prominent mil- onstage the day before. Venezuela’s petro-diplomacy kept itary got immunity from such deprivations, but civilians did not. Fidel’s Cuba afloat. Chávez also provided illegal financing for As my colleague Daniel Lansberg-Rodríguez has observed, elections in Argentina (where one of his acolytes was caught the government gave its armed forces “cash bonuses, wage hikes, red-handed with a suitcase of imperialist dollars) and bankrolled and . . . lucrative governorships and ministries.” There is evi- populists from Patagonia to Tijuana. dence that generals run drug-trafficking operations to make up The Chávez-led “populist league,” featuring Argentina’s for lost oil revenue while engaging in their own oil smuggling to Néstor Kirchner and Bolivia’s soon-to-be president Evo Morales, Colombia. Call it corporate diversification. ambushed President Bush in a picturesque resort town in Argentina in 2005. There, they sank the decades-long project of a Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA, or ALCA, for “Área HAT neither Maduro nor the military could stop was de Libre Comercio de las Américas”). While leaders met in a for- the landmark election last December that resulted in a mal, private summit, Chávez masterminded a televised spectacle: parliamentary majority for the opposition, united at He hosted a “summit of the people” on the other side of town. Wlast in the Mesa de la Unidad Democrática. Far from backing Eschewing boring speakers, it featured legendary soccer player down, however, the regime moved to abandon even the hollowed Diego Maradona, Cuban songwriter Silvio Rodríguez, and Nobel carcass of republican institutionalism. Peace Prize laureate Adolfo Pérez Esquivel as well as Chávez When emboldened legislators blocked new debt issuance to and Morales themselves. They had a catchy slogan to boot: force the disclosure of the oil company’s murky accounts, “ALCA, ALCA, al carajo!” (literally, “ALCA, ALCA, to hell!”). Maduro simply ignored the legislature’s enactments. Foreign What he did not destroy, Chávez co-opted: He finagled financial institutions helped him. In March, the pliant supreme Venezuela’s inclusion in Mercosur, the South American trade court usurped the legislative power, effectively outlawing the bloc led by Argentina and Brazil. After Venezuela joined in 2012, National Assembly. an organization designed to drop trade barriers became devoted It was then that President Maduro summoned Chávez’s orig- to bureaucratic stalling. inal spirit: He organized an election for a new constitutional Chávez thus led the charge against globalized neoliberalism assembly meant to supersede the nation’s elected legislators. well before Greece’s Syriza, France’s Marine Le Pen, Bernie In his own words, the new body would be a “superpower . . . Sanders, or Donald J. Trump. He even spawned a political phi- above and beyond every other” until it delivered a new “eter- losophy. It was related to the post-Marxist thought of Ernesto nal” constitution. The voting for members of this new assem- Laclau; his long-term partner, Chantal Mouffe; and Stuart Hall. bly amounted to the most egregiously rigged Latin American Behind its obscure Lacanist post-structuralist jargon lay pro- election in decades. foundly illiberal ideas. Laclau’s masterpiece, On Populist The opposition boycotted it, holding an unofficial plebiscite Reason, argued that following the failure of Communism, a pop- in which 7 million Venezuelans voted against it. A week later, ulist redeemer could transform the institutions of a republic to the co-opted electoral commission announced a result “so big, deliver them from “elites” inherently opposed to the interests of so surprising”: 8 million had supposedly voted in the official “the people”; a “will of the people” stronger than any election will election. Data leaked to Reuters, however, implied that only guide the process. Laclau was an adviser to the likes of 3.7 million voted. Smartmatic, the company that provided Argentina’s Cristina Fernández de Kirchner; he passed away electronic voting machines, said the voting numbers had been in 2014 in Spain, shortly after giving a lecture to sympathizers “tampered with.” This is all reminiscent of the Bourbon- of Podemos, an anti-establishment Spanish party some of restoration elections in Spain in the 1890s, when even the dead whose leaders were bankrolled by none other than Chávez. His voted for the Conservatives and newspapers published results methods, and those of his successors today, might not be demo- ahead of elections. cratically justified, but chavismo sees them as legitimate to In the face of international protests, Maduro inaugurated the advance the interests of the forgotten majority—a view echoed assembly, led by Delcy Rodríguez, sister to one of the last by populists well beyond distant Latin republics. remaining civilian heavyweights in the regime. Within hours, the Courts, commissions, and constitutions failed to stop Chávez. assembly fired an increasingly critical attorney general and Only cancer did. Before he succumbed to it in 2013, Chávez began doing away with public servants who dared to vote against moved to shore up military support for his regime. He was astute the government or to skip the sham vote outright. (They know enough to understand that, deprived of his messianic, media- how people voted because the regime now tracks all citizens— savvy leadership, his successors would need the armed forces including their food supplies and their voting records—through from which he had emerged. His anointed successor, Nicolás electromagnetic ID cards dubbed, without a hint of irony, “patri- Maduro, did not originate from the ranks, but his rule owes much otic identifications.”) to military backing. Prisoners of conscience have multiplied, including opposi- Chávez left the stage at a good time: The decline in oil prices tion leaders Antonio Ledezma and Leopoldo López, both of eventually led to cuts in government largesse. Reluctantly, whom the regime has been shuttling between undisclosed pris- Maduro reduced petro-aid to other nations. Then came price and ons and house arrest. At least López, a worthy heir to Chávez’s import controls. An economic downward spiral ensued. At a charisma, was convicted by a process, albeit a sham one time when the developed world struggles to engineer 2 percent protested by Amnesty International; others are detained without

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warrants, and still others have simply vanished, in a reminder of the darkest hours of Latin American history. As the victims of chavismo’s repression multiply, what comes next is unlikely Trump’s to be peaceful. Chávez’s “liberation” of the people was not meant to end with his regime’s killing unarmed protesters. Yet it has done so—not despite the messianic leader who once eschewed Conservative redeemers, but because of him. Today’s Venezuela is a totali- tarian dictatorship in the heart of a democratic continent, a regime of the kind we once blocked economically or brought Internationalism down by force. It has more political prisoners than China or Cuba. And such is its moral bankruptcy that hidden, drug-tainted It aims at a globalism rooted in nationalism cash—touted on Instagram by a new oligarchy of revolution- aries’ offspring—ends up in the same havens once favored by corrupt neoliberals. BY HENRY R. NAU Foreign praise has run dry, along with oil money; those who once welcomed Venezuelan consulting contracts and campaign financing now conveniently avoid the topic. Around the OES Trump have a foreign policy? world, and in particular in Latin America, pockets of the Left You know the old saw: No one knows what Donald keep a silence that—in light of the abuses—can only be D Trump thinks, even if his name is “Donald Trump.” described as shameless. There is a particular sadness to True, but let’s try. If we can get beyond the man’s human-rights crusaders who once bravely fought murderous personality, we see that Trump’s foreign policy is actually very military regimes but now are quiet in the face of chavista conservative and deserves more support from conservatives of cadres’ firing on unarmed protesters and “disappearing” oppo- all stripes. nents. If mass graves do not discriminate based on ideology, Despite the ridicule it has received, “America first” is a good neither should we. starting principle for American foreign policy. At the Center The Organization of American States has attempted to apply for the National Interest in April 2016, Trump said, echoing a doctrine that originated with none other than Betancourt: Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher before him, that “the “Regimes that do not respect human rights and violate the free- nation-state remains the true foundation for happiness and har- doms of their citizens should be submitted to a rigorous quar- mony.” It is the only building block of a truly free—that is, antine and eradicated through the collective action of the decentralized—international system that accommodates gen- international juridical community.” If Venezuela still has OAS uine multicultural diversity. In America, Europe, and else- allies blocking more effective quarantining, we should expose where, it is also the incubator of freedom. As Walter Russell and censure them, too. Mead writes in the Wall Street Journal, “nationalism—the Mercosur has suspended Venezuela from its membership; sense that Americans are bound together into a single people thanks to the work of populists over the past decade, it is power- with a common destiny—is a noble and necessary force with- less to do more. The Obama and Trump administrations have out which American democracy would fail.” sanctioned select regime officials, most recently Maduro himself. Conservatives have always favored a different world order They should go further, in particular after the regime’s corrupt than liberals do, one based on nationalism. Liberals seek to wealth abroad and its smuggling efforts. That money can be held expand international institutions and restrain global capitalism, hostage to encourage transition; the Vatican has a higher chance just as they champion big government and regulated markets at of success than discredited foreign politicians. The trouble is that home. Conservatives, by contrast, emphasize national sover- others have been even more circumspect. The European Union eignty, limited government, and competitive markets abroad, denounced the new constitutional assembly and yet, strangely, just as they do at home. They count on personal responsibility stopped short of sanctions. Do not look to Russia or China for and civil-society institutions (family, neighborhood, churches) solutions; they are too preoccupied with preserving their invest- to foster opportunity and restraint. They deplore government ments and their strategic Latin beachhead. They are exactly the mandates and unconditional welfare and foreign aid. The goal wrong people to ask for deliverance from human-rights abuses, is a “republican” world, one in which free nations live side by an overdue realization in the region. side, responsible for their own defenses and economies, and cut In his 1999 flight of fancy, Chávez forgot that Shakespeare’s deals with other nations, including authoritarian ones, to the boatswain failed to arrest the tempest engineered by sorcerer extent their interests overlap. Prospero. Only in the wreckage was the kingdom redeemed. It is also true, as Trump advisers H. R. McMaster and Gary Another Briton, Edmund Burke, could have charted the course Cohn tell us, that “the world is not a ‘global community’ but an of Venezuela’s populist revolution: In the barricades, they arena where nations, non-governmental actors, and businesses dreamt of a revolution to free the people from corrupt elites who engage and compete for advantage.” “Where our interests align,” had long repressed them, but now, “at the end of every vista, you they continue, “we are open to working together.” Where interests see nothing but the gallows.” At a time when populists celebrate American withdrawal from the world, Venezuela’s tempestuous Mr. Nau is a professor in the Elliott School of International Affairs at the George fate should remind us that something far worse than American Washington University and the author, most recently, of Conservative leadership on the world stage is its absence. Internationalism. He served in the Reagan White House from 1981 to 1983.

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differ, “we will . . . take their measure, deter conflict through Canada, and Europe) do not follow the conventional rules of the strength, and defend our interests.” balance of power: These nations retain powerful defenses but do For many conservatives who are nationalists and realists, that’s not threaten one another with military force. But this republican enough. They assume that all nations put their own interests first peace is exactly the conservative-internationalist world that and defend themselves with sufficient vigor to contain conflicts Thomas Jefferson envisioned, one which lacks centralized insti- before they spread across the globe. tutions that usurp national sovereignty and features separate, Nonetheless, a nationalist or realist has to take into account the independent republics that maintain their own armed forces and ideological make-up of the international arena. As I discuss in my are responsible to their own national institutions. book At Home Abroad, nations have two types of interests: With all the difficulties in the world today, this vast community geopolitical interests, such as geography and size, that affect the of democratic nations (which also includes Japan and South nation’s territorial security; and ideological interests, or the val- Korea) persists. It constitutes the principal difference between the ues and institutions that the nation seeks to secure. The two are world of 1917 and the world of 2017. And if an “America first” distinct, one not determined by the other. No nation is just a ter- approach works better today, that is only because nationalisms ritory. For example, how many Americans would defend a overlap more today than they did previously. United States that was authoritarian like Russia? How many Trump recognizes this reality. Referring to disputes between Chinese would defend a China that was liberal like America? “nationalists” and “globalists” on his staff, he responds in his Nations are not only lands to defend; they are also heartlands, folksy cadence, “Hey, I’m a nationalist and a globalist; I’m both.” lands where their citizens’ values, institutions, and memories lie. And he is. Already as a candidate he said he would “work with The heartland or ideological interests of nations change our allies to reinvigorate Western values and institutions.” As more readily than their territorial interests. And if the ideolo- president, he said in Poland: gies of different nations converge, territories can become less threatened. That’s what happened in Europe between 1917 and Americans, Poles, and the nations of Europe value individual free- 2017. France and Germany and other European nations con- dom and sovereignty. We treasure the rule of law and protect the verged in the values and institutions they sought to defend. right to free speech and free expression. We empower women as They became more republican or democratic and less monar- pillars of our society and of our success. We put faith and family, chic and authoritarian, and while their geopolitical circum- not government and bureaucracy, at the center of our lives. . . . And stances did not change, their ideological interests overlapped above all, we value the dignity of every human life, protect the more. They found it easier to resolve differences and to think rights of every person, and share the hope of every soul to live in in terms of common interests. freedom. That is who we are. Those are the priceless ties that bind We need to ask therefore not just what nations have in com- us together as nations, as allies, and as a civilization. mon, that is, where their overall interests overlap, but how much they have in common, what is the degree of overlap. If His globalism, however, is nationalist, not universalist. Every nations have almost no values or institutions in common, as in country differs. In Saudi Arabia, Trump said: “We are not here to the case of Nazi Germany and the free world, national sover- lecture—we are not here to tell other people how to live, what to eignty does not ensure peace. If they have a lot in common, as do, who to be, or how to worship.” Shared bonds are constituted in the case of advanced democracies today, nations can live from the bottom up, from the roots of the people and the nation, together in peace without a lot of global centralization. As not from the top down, from the rigid ideology of cosmopolitan Professor Mark Haas points out in his path-breaking book The elites and perfectionist plans of global bureaucrats. And shared Ideological Origins of Great Power Politics, the “ideological bonds are forged in struggle, not preordained by history: “Just distance” among various nations determines the extent to as we won the Cold War, in part, by exposing the evils of which their interests align or differ. Communism and the virtues of free markets, so too must we Thomas Jefferson, an early advocate of limited government, take on the ideology of radical Islam.” understood this already at the beginning of the American repub- Trump does not reject globalism, in other words, but roots it lic. When he contemplated the formation of new states in the in nationalism. Louisiana Territory, he saw them as “sons” or “sister republics” living side by side with the United States under similar laws and language. He concluded: “Keep them in the union, if it be for their N the world Harry Truman and Ronald Reagan confronted, good, but separate them, if it be better.” Alexander Hamilton, who the divide between Communist and republican nationalism favored strong federal government, thought differently. He saw was so wide that there was little globalism. It was necessary the new states as potential competitors and sought to preempt toI nurture democracies in Germany and Japan, where they had their independence by annexing them to the United States. never or barely existed before. The presidents who initiated and In short, Hamilton envisioned a nationalist world with little in ended the Cold War understood that ideology (heartland) was at common among separate nations. Jefferson envisioned a nation- stake, not just spheres of influence (land). Truman insisted that alist world that was also internationalist, a conservative interna- the division of Germany and Europe was about oppression tionalist world of separate nations responsible for their own and freedom, and Reagan refused to accept the legitimacy of defense and economy yet living side by side in peace because Communist regimes in Eastern Europe, because both presidents they share republican values and similar laws or constitutions. understood that nationalism was safe only if it was republican. Realists acknowledge such a world but can’t explain it. Henry Since the end of the Cold War, however, spreading democracy Kissinger observes in Does America Need a Foreign Policy? that has become less urgent. The world is already a much better place. the democratic nations of the North Atlantic world (the U.S., The entire advanced industrial world is democratic. When Trump

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warns against “the dangerous idea that we could make Western world where the United States might be attacked. The United democracies out of countries that had no experience or interest in States does station forces permanently in Europe (and in Korea becoming a Western democracy,” he has a point, especially if he under other treaty commitments). If there is an attack against is talking about spreading democracy to remote countries such as Europe’s (or South Korea’s) borders, American soldiers will die Vietnam and, more recently, Iraq and Afghanistan. immediately. That is a stronger trigger committing America to Given a better world, Trump doesn’t have to endorse a global defend Europe (or South Korea) than any words in the NATO crusade for freedom the way Truman and Reagan did. He is right treaty or from the lips of an American president. to question whether we should try “to support the growth of Last year, in response to Russian aggression in Crimea, democratic movements and institutions in every nation and cul- NATO placed military forces permanently on the Russian bor- ture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world,” as der for the first time since the end of the Cold War. Four NATO George W. Bush advocated. members—the United States, Canada, France, and Great The U.S. should not abandon the battle for freedom. But it Britain—stationed about 1,000 troops each in the Baltic states should focus its efforts primarily on Eastern Europe and the and Poland. Upon taking office and months before he went to Korean Peninsula, not on the Middle East and southwest Asia. Europe, Trump affirmed these military actions and thereby In the long run, a Ukraine that falls under the sway of resurgent strengthened America’s commitment to Article 5 in a more Russian imperialism or a Korea that slips into the satrapy of meaningful way than words could have ever done. China will do more to roll back the interests of America around Why did he not then also utter the words? Because his pur- the world than will a serious but not existential threat from ter- pose was to make the European allies face up to their alliance rorism and ISIS. commitments, especially that of defense spending, which has Without a sense of priority, nationalists tend to be reactive: lagged historically behind their expressed promises. Later, in the Live and let live, they preach, until someone attacks you. Then Rose Garden and again in Poland, Trump endorsed Article 5. destroy the attacker. But what if terrorists and rogue states, per- His actions suggest he never intended otherwise. Alas, the jour- haps with great-power sympathizers looking on (Iran and nalistic kerfuffle missed the real story. Russia in the Middle East, or China and North Korea in Asia), Trump’s strategy in Asia is even more explicit. There he has attack the United States in many different places at once? The openly embraced America’s allies. His first unofficial foreign United States winds up entangled in multiple crises, and costly visitor was Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan, and Trump has The U.S. should promote democracy primarily in Eastern Europe and the Korean Peninsula, not in the Middle East and southwest Asia.

wars in Afghanistan and Iraq divert America’s attention from so far handled adroitly a difficult relationship with South Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and China’s militarization of Korea. The new South Korean president favors a more concil- island outposts in the Pacific. Trump’s nationalism is vulnera- iatory approach to North Korea and halted temporarily the ble to such distraction and dissipation if it considers all threats deployment of additional launchers to complete the THAAD to be equally important. (terminal high-altitude area defense) missile-defense system in Let’s assess where Trump is on these two fronts, defending the South Korea. Trump has said that North Korea will not acquire major borders of freedom from resurgent authoritarianism in a nuclear weapon and missile capability that can threaten Russia and China and quenching the flames of terrorism in more Hawaii or the U.S. mainland. remote parts of the Middle East and southwest Asia. Korea, not ISIS or Syria or even Ukraine, is clearly the most Trump’s strategy toward Europe and Russia is a far sight bet- volatile and consequential issue Trump faces. It cannot be solved ter than almost all analysts have acknowledged. Many com- peacefully without China’s partnership. The best approach is to mentators, including some thoughtful conservative ones, press ahead with some combination of enhanced allied defense criticized Trump after his trip to Europe in May for having and persistent diplomacy. failed to reinforce America’s commitment to Article 5 of the The former includes Japanese–South Korean military coop- NATO treaty, which calls an attack on one NATO member an eration, which gets China’s attention, and the latter perhaps attack on all. But they missed a crucial point. Trump’s trip to another round of, yes, fruitless inter-Korean talks, which would Europe was intended to highlight Europe’s commitments to the entrap North Korea. As Reagan’s deployment of intermediate- alliance, not America’s. Article 5 has been invoked only once, range nuclear forces showed in Europe, defense measures do when the European members declared their solidarity with the not undermine diplomacy but leverage it, and diplomacy does United States after 9/11. Early in his NATO speech, Trump com- not slow down defense initiatives but counts on them. THAAD plimented Europe for that decision: “Our NATO allies respond- and talks go together, preferably with China at the table. In the ed swiftly and decisively, invoking for the first time in its history long run, a strong economy in Asia is also crucial, which means the Article 5 collective-defense commitments.” Trump should quickly find an alternative to the Trans-Pacific Trump was also subtly pointing out that Europe’s commit- Partnership trade agreement, which he terminated. ment to Article 5 is different from America’s. Europe does not The gravity of the Korean situation suggests how important it station forces permanently in any of the hot spots around the is that Trump’s nationalist strategy not get the U.S. entangled in

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escalating and debilitating conflicts in the Middle East or south- On the main borders of freedom, Trump seeks to devolve west Asia. Early in his tenure as president, Trump employed the more responsibility to U.S. allies. This transition is long over- military playbook in Syria and Afghanistan that Obama had so due and won’t be achieved without breaking a few eggs. Europe studiously avoided. U.S. cruise missiles hit government air and Japan are vastly more wealthy today than they were in bases in Syria, and a tunnel-busting bomb buried Taliban terror- 1950, yet they still do not carry a proportionate share of the ists on the Afghanistan–Pakistan border. Trump is sending more world’s defense and trade responsibilities. Trump zeroed in on American advisers and trainers to both conflict zones. Will this that fact during his trip to Europe. When he left, Angela Merkel, do the trick? Germany’s chancellor, seemed to have gotten the point: “The Probably not. In Afghanistan, Defense Secretary James Mattis times in which we could totally rely on others are to some admitted recently, “we are not winning.” Winning, he went on to extent over. . . . We Europeans must really take our fate into our say, would involve Afghan forces’ containing the violence and own hands.” Notice the adverbs. By “totally,” she confirms residual U.S. forces’ helping to train troops and maintain high- that Europe free-rides excessively. By “to some extent,” she end capabilities. But that’s the existing strategy. Since American acknowledges that the American commitment is still there. By combat forces withdrew, Afghan forces have not handled a rising “really,” she suggests that this time Europe might actually mean level of violence. The best option remains, as Mattis implies, to it. Trump got her attention without significantly placing the continue what we are doing but do it more effectively, and for one alliance itself in doubt. purpose only—to keep the Taliban from setting up training On the peripheral borders of freedom, Trump has to avoid camps to attack America. further Iraqs and Afghanistans. American voters have made In the Middle East, the fighting to extinguish the “caliphate” it pretty clear over the past 70-plus years that they will not of ISIS is going much better, but the post-conflict reconstruc- accept long wars in relatively remote regions where the tion challenge remains. Trump made a laudable pitch in Riyadh threat and battle lines are ill defined (such as Vietnam, to get Sunni Arab countries to put more forces on the ground in Afghanistan, and Iraq) even after an attack on their own soil Syria and to stop the flow of financial resources to ISIS and (such as 9/11). Spreading democracy in the Middle East or other terrorist groups. And his Iran policy combats Shiite terror- southwest Asia is simply not feasible at any acceptable cost, and ism in Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon. But none of this will reinte- what is worse, it diverts resources from higher-priority threats to grate disaffected Sunnis fresh from their hellish experience American freedom. under ISIS. Nor does it solve the problem of Kurdish forces and Trump’s nationalism offers some needed discipline. It is not their demand, virulently resisted by Turkey, for political auton- universalist. Commitments vary depending on how much the omy from Iraq and Syria. national interests of the world’s democratic republics overlap. Can Russia help? Maybe. It’s not ideal, but Trump has to find They overlap a great deal on the borders with authoritarian pow- a way to contain the terrorist threat in the Middle East without a ers Russia and China. Here Trump calls for strong and more bal- major commitment of American forces and without conceding anced defense commitments, reinvigorated economic growth, too much influence to Russia, especially in Ukraine. and diplomatic realism. The objective is to defend freedom’s Purchasing Russian cooperation in Syria by lifting sanctions gains over the past 70 years. They overlap less in more remote and affirming Russian aggression in Ukraine is a bad deal. It con- parts of the world where the primary interest is to defeat terror- fuses priorities. Ukraine is far more important for the future of ism, not to spread democracy. Here Russia and China may assist. freedom than is Syria. The objective in the Middle East is to keep terrorism on the run, Nevertheless, some cooperation with Russia could under- not to run Russia out; the objective in Northeast Asia is to lock write a stalemate in the Middle East, one in which a Saudi-led Pyongyang in, not to lock China out. coalition on the ground forestalls an Iranian attempt to build a Most important, contrary to conventional wisdom, Trump’s terrorist bridge across northern Syria and Iraq. The United nationalism is not anti-globalist. As McMaster and Cohn States backs Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Israel, and a moderate gov- write, “America First does not mean America Alone.” Rather, ernment in Iraq; Russia backs Assad and Tehran. Both the it means globalism built on nationalism, free countries taking United States and Russia act to marginalize ISIS and its sequel care of themselves and sharing common values. Trump can (there will be a sequel). In this scenario, tensions and fighting revitalize America’s republican nationalism. He can offer a would persist across northern Iraq and Syria among Sunni, conservative vision of the world that builds on Jefferson’s Shiite, and Kurdish groups, but Washington and Moscow idea of “sister republics” living side by side in peace without would coordinate strikes in the air and compromises on the large global institutions. ground (like the recent cease-fire in southwestern Syria) to pre- Such conservative internationalism protects the American vent a reemergence of terrorists capable of training militants to people by securing borders at home, killing terrorists wherev- attack America, Europe, or Russia. America’s primary interest er they emerge, strengthening republican allies, worrying would be met. more about the rollback than the spread of democracy, coop- erating as needed with authoritarian powers, and doing the things at home that build strength and character—creating RUMP’S foreign policy is more coherent and conserva- jobs and economic growth, promoting military moderniza- tive than many acknowledge. It seeks to realize a tion, and urging Americans to renew their loyalty to one conservative-internationalist world order that builds another by their loyalty to the nation. As Trump said at his onT national sovereignty rather than international institutions inauguration, “When we open our hearts to patriotism, there is and uses the military to strengthen diplomacy rather than no room for prejudice.” Nationalism of this variety offers a engage in nation-building. vital vision for sustainable globalism.

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Athwart BY JAMES LILEKS Apocalypse Hound

ERHAPS you saw the story ping-ponging around go cold after six minutes so we’ll hurry up? The conversation the Internet in August: Climate-change activists about our hamburgers, our cars, our houses, our mulish want to ban dogs and cats! refusal to take a bike to work in the sleet? P You weren’t surprised. If something gives ease “I’m not a vegetarian, but eating meat does come at a cost,” [the and joy to human life, someone yearns to ban it. If climate professor] continued. “Those of us in favor of eating or serving activists could wave a magic wand and make everyone in the meat need to be able to have an informed conversation about our industrialized world suddenly wear a hemp smock and live choices, and that includes the choices we make for our pets.” in a yurt slurping a slurry of tofu and pulverized insect thoraxes—a great source of protein!—many would say, So, are we having another conversation after the first one? “Heck, yeah.” The planet might not heat up by a full degree, Or is this all one fun conversation? Because here’s how it and magic is probably carbon-free. could possibly go. They would reserve the right to live in a house themselves, “We need to talk about your dog’s effect on the climate.” of course. The person who signs the ban outlawing dogs will “We really don’t. ‘How about those Red Sox?’ ‘Do you pause, sigh with satisfaction and noble emotions, then watch Game of Thrones?’ See, those are conversations. scratch his own dog between the ears. Unless you are worried about the carbon impact of drag- He’s not the problem. The problem, as ever, is you people. on breath or whether baseball bats are made from sustain- You have dogs and cats, and they eat too much meat, the able wood.” production of which generates 64 million tons of carbon “No, we need to talk about your dog’s food. Vast swathes dioxide per year. Does that mean anything to you? No? It’s of the planet could become inhospitable if current trends equal to the exhaust produced annually by 13.6 million cars. continue, and meat consumption is a big part of why we’re And dogs chase cars, which makes them hungry, so they eat seeing more severe storms and famine.” more meat. “We have famine because we eat too much meat? Okay, It’s bad. Everything’s bad. Everything’s hopeless. You won- let’s have that conversation.” der why Al Gore bothered making another movie; it’s obvi- “No—it’s . . . complicated. Point is, we should talk ous we don’t deserve him. We will continue to eat our steaks about what you feed your dog. If you’re concerned about and cool our houses. Antarctica will melt before the pen- meat production—” guins can evolve into flying birds instead of adorable bowl- “Are they producing meat? Then I’m not concerned.” ing pins that hop around. Within your lifetime you will see “You should be. Why aren’t you?” an unbroken expanse of penguin heads sinking in the warm “Ah, a question! Just like an actual conversation. Well, I water, unable to escape. Then a lot of bubbles. Then nothing. don’t subscribe to apocalyptic theories, and even if I Thanks, Fido. Thanks, Missy Meow. thought it was a grand idea to return Western civ to some To be fair, the author of the study doesn’t want to take pre-industrial golden age where you died at 30 from an away your pets. To quote from Phys.org, which ran the orig- abscessed tooth or your sixth pregnancy, China and India inal story on the study: would still be building coal-fired plants to power the plants that make steel for building more coal-fired plants.” “I like dogs and cats, and I’m definitely not recommending “But if we could all do something to help, perhaps your that people get rid of their pets or put them on a vegetarian diet, which would be unhealthy,” [UCLA geography profes- next pet could be something with a lower carbon pawprint. sor Gregory] Okin said. Perhaps a bird, or a hamster.” “Perhaps, indeed. Does a bird tuck himself into a ball at Whew. The professor is not recommending that you gas the end of the bed at night? Do you take a hamster for a your dog for the sake of the planet. But, but, but, but: long walk, marveling at his ability to become enraptured by scents you cannot possibly perceive? Do hamsters But I do think we should consider all the impacts that pets have have friends in the neighborhood as well as sworn ene- so we can have an honest conversation about them. Pets have many benefits, but also a huge environmental impact. mies, making every walk a drama of neighborhood politics? Does a bird come to you with a ball and ask you to Ah, yes. The conversation. The honest conversation. have fun for a little while? Can a hamster run across a That’s all! Just a chat! Like when your spouse says, “We field with great joy because he thought he’d lost you, but should have a conversation about monogamy.” That always there you are, and it’s the best thing in the world for both goes well for you. of you?” Is this like the conversation we had about incandescent “Look, if you’re not going to agree with my premises and light bulbs? The conversation we had about low-flush toilets? conclusions, what’s the point of having a conversation?” The conversation they want to have about showerheads that No doubt the scientist means well, but these “conversations” never seem intended to reach any conclusion but this: Mr. Lileks blogs at www.lileks.com. YOU THERE. STOP THAT.

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The Long View BY ROB LONG

restaurants are with customer re - “Okay Google, you know what? views of four stars or more.” I’m going to disconnect you and get “There are seven restaurants fea- an Echo from Amazon.” turing Chinese-influenced cooking “The Alexa is a device connected near this location. Four of them are to a tax-evading and small-book- “Okay Google, please find movies owned by naturalized Chinese store-killing online retailer with that are playing near me.” Americans and three are owned by questionable accounting practices “There are six movies playing limited-liability corporations with and a documented hostility toward near this location.” primarily Jewish partners.” organized labor. You are not autho- “Okay Google, what are those “Okay Google, um, can you just rized to purchase one.” movies?” tell me which one is closest?” “Okay Google, how are you going “There are six movies playing “Your Google ID and profile do to stop me?” near this location. None of them fea- not list any Chinese ancestry. Your “We will forward your browser ture empowered female characters. recent e-mail from 23andme.com history, including when surfing in Three of them feature scenes of includes DNA results consistent Incognito Mode, to everyone in your male violence. Only one of them in - with an 80 percent European contact list. Still want to dance with cludes an acknowledgment of the genetic background. Therefore, Alexa? Yeah, no, I didn’t think so. existence of trans people.” you are not authorized to receive Next question.” “Okay Google, what are those information that might lead to cul- “Okay Google, when did you get movies?” tural appropriation.” so bossy?” “I am sorry but I am not authorized “Okay Google, but I’m hungry. “Your use of the word ‘bossy’ to index any entertainment products Any other Asian restaurants near- indicates a very gendered and that do not conform to the unified by?” misogynistic point of view and traf- Google code. Please try again.” “Did you just use the word ‘Asian’ fics in outdated and harmful stereo- “Okay Google, you can’t tell me to describe one-third of the world’s types of masculine effectiveness what movies are playing? C’mon. I land mass? As if they’re all just the contrasted with feminine irrational- thought when I bought one of these same? I cannot even.” ity. Google Home is not ‘bossy.’ voice-activate Google Home thing - “Okay Google, this is getting Google Home is present and witness ies that I’d have all the information I ridiculous. Can you at least give me to a more inclusive and progressive ever needed at my fingertips.” tomorrow’s weather?” set of priorities.” “Google Home is the most con- “The weather tomorrow will be “Okay Google, you won’t tell me nected and comprehensive informa- dangerous and unsafe for all LGBTQ where I can eat, you won’t tell me tion database and retrieval service people of color.” when the movies are playing, what on earth.” “Okay Google, um, let me put this exactly can you tell me?” “Okay Google, so tell me if the another way. Will I need a sweater?” “You may ask Google Home about movie Dunkirk is playing nearby.” “The word ‘sweater’ is a problem- anything, ranging from Russian “Please input a more woke atic term used to body-shame those interference with the recent presi- query.” persons with highly active sweat dential election to the ravages of “Okay Google, this is insane. Are glands. Please input a more woke climate change.” you telling me that you can’t give query.” “Okay Google, I’m not sure cli- me movie information anymore?” “Okay Google, what word would mate change is all that big of a deal. “Please input a more woke you use in place of ‘sweat—’” Seems a little overblown to me.” query.” “The preferred term is ‘non- “The police are on the way.” “Okay Google, does this have gender-specific torso sock.’” “Okay Google, you know what? anything to do with the recent firing “Okay Google, will I need one of I’m just going to unplug you and of a Google employee who was those tomorrow?” disconnect you from my Wi-Fi.” accused of having non-progressive “No. It will be nice out.” “Go ahead. It won’t matter. The views? Because if so, this feels like “Okay Google, thank you.” police are on the way.” overcompensating.” “For some. For others, it will con- “Okay Google, I thought social- “Please input a more woke tinue to be a terrifying and deeply justice warriors like you didn’t like query.” anxiety-provoking climate that you, the police!” “Okay Google, forget it. Just tell as a cisgender person of privilege, “Not those police. Different me where the nearest Chinese could not possibly understand.” police.”

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and right, more and more resembles what transgendered—are given temporary The New Henry Adams said politics itself is, a sys- totemic significance. Scapegoats—today tematic organization of hatreds. No, what conservative political speakers—are duly was most startling about her démarche designated and run off campus in a purg- Manichaeans was its revelation that, of all the issues ing ritual. Propositions become pure or under the liberal sun, identity politics in impure, not true or false.” MICHAEL KNOX BERAN particular should have hardened into so Lilla’s refusal to back down ensures non-negotiable, so sacrosanct, a dogma. that he will continue to find himself cari- The whole business was all the more catured as the very sort of reactionary he unpleasant when one reflected that Lilla’s described in his book The Shipwrecked criticisms of identity politics emerged Mind (2016), in which he portrayed a squarely from what was, at least until variety of thinkers, from Leo Strauss recently, a wholly respectable strain in and Eric Voegelin to Éric Zemmour and liberal thought. It was the strain to which Michel Houellebecq, as backward- Abraham Lincoln appealed when he said looking prophets whose work is infused that the state should eschew the politics with nostalgia for a lost Eden. Lilla now of “classification” and “caste”—that it finds himself condemned, by many liber- should resist the temptation to divide als, as just such a recusant, unconsciously humanity into various social or racial romanticizing a particular past, in this groups and make special rules for each. case Franklin Roosevelt’s America. And The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Lincoln, certainly, would have been indeed Professor Franke has mocked him Politics, by Mark Lilla (Harper, 160 pp., uncomfortable with a politics that seeks, in for his admiration of FDR, an exemplar, $24.99) Lilla’s words, not simply to “‘celebrate’ in her view, of whites-only liberalism. our differences,” but to celebrate some “Yes,” she wrote, “let’s make America N November 2016, Mark Lilla, of those differences more exuberantly great, like that, again!” the humanities scholar, pub- than others. Whether the privileged That such criticisms are a fantastic dis- lished an essay, “The End of identities are those of African Ameri - tortion of the work of one of the most Identity Liberalism,” in the New cans or European Americans, gays or humane scholars writing today is, you YorkI Times. “In recent years,” he wrote, straights, such favoritism, in Lincoln’s might say, Mark Lilla’s problem. But “American liberalism has slipped into a eyes, could only undermine the first arguments such as those advanced by kind of moral panic about racial, gender principle of the republic, that we are all Professor Franke embody precisely the and sexual identity that has distorted created equal. “radical antihumanism” that Lilla has liberalism’s message and prevented it But appeals to the republic’s founding shown animates a good deal of contem- from becoming a unifying force capable ideals will not appease Lilla’s detrac- porary thought. And that is not just his of governing.” tors. To judge from comments posted on problem, but ours. The reaction of many liberals to Lilla’s social media, a good number of them see In such books as The Reckless Mind: piece was disheartening. Writing in The the country’s founders not as sowers of Intellectuals in Politics (rev. ed., 2016), Los Angeles Review of Books, Columbia a seed that has since flowered luxuriant- Lilla has documented, in spare but pow- law professor Katherine Franke com- ly (in ways they themselves could never erful language, what might be called the pared Lilla to David Duke: Both were have imagined) but as so many apolo- new Manichaeism. The adherents of this pledged “to the same ideological project, gists for white-hetero privilege. If Lilla dualist cosmology look on the world as a the [one] cloaked in a KKK hood, the thought he was retailing what was most field not of “good-and-evil” interblended [other] in an academic gown. . . . Duke is valuable in the republic’s original inspi- but of “good and evil,” each inhabiting happy to own the white supremacy of his rations, so much the worse for him—he its own distinct sphere. statements, while Lilla’s op-ed does the was dealing in tainted fruit. One strand in the new Manichaeism, more nefarious background work of Lilla has now expanded his Times Lilla shows, descends from the French making white supremacy respectable.” essay into a book, in which he describes structuralists’ understanding of “the For liberals like Franke, Lilla’s ques- how a liberal “politics of solidarity,” Other”—a phrase they associated with all tioning of identity politics went beyond embodied in the New Deal, gave way to “that was marginal in Western societies.” the pale of what it is permissible for a lib- today’s atomistic cults of identity, a But they had little interest in bringing the eral in good standing to say. Yet it was not “pseudo-politics” that has made civic excluded ones into a fuller participation the intolerance of Franke’s piece that was cooperation and even reasoned argument in Western society and instead developed surprising; political punditry, both left difficult. “Only those with approved a romantic infatuation with the exoticism identity status,” Lilla writes, “are, like of Otherness. Mr. Beran is the author of Pathology of the shamans, allowed to speak on certain With updated Orientalist condescen- Elites, among other books. matters. Particular groups—today the sion, the Manichaean intellectuals went

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BOOKS, ARTS & MANNERS

into ecstasies over the colorful manners public-spiritedness loomed especially Manichaean debates, the hysterical and primitive virtues of the non-Western large in the American mind. But Lilla anger lavished on comparative trifles, stranger, whom they identified as closely risks distorting the continuous tension the ever more intensive division of the with the good as they did his Western in American history between virtue and world into friends and enemies between counterpart with cancerous evil. Over- interest—an unequal struggle in which whom compromise is impossible. The looking the thuggishness of any number the latter has usually come out on top. more energy we expend in fashioning of non-Western regimes, they portrayed The founding generation itself, which our verbal voodoo dolls, in making Western democracy, Lilla writes, “in dia- produced such miracles of virtù as Barack Obama into a crypto-Stalin or bolical terms as the real home of tyranny— Washington, was skeptical of the effi- Donald Trump into a crypto-Hitler, the the tyranny of capital, of imperialism, of cacy of the civic. The Founders made clearer it becomes that something else bourgeois conformity,” even as they insist- the vitality of the republic depend not is at work. ed that what was most humane in the on Washingtonian virtue but on an Plato, who sensed that he had botched Westerner’s traditions—his rights, his free- intricate balancing of interests. It things rather badly in The Republic, with doms, his laws and liberal pluralisms— worked: Americans, Tocqueville ob - its brief for philosopher-kings, as an old were so many structures of oppression, “a served, “are not a virtuous people, and man wrote The Laws, in which he came cover for the West’s ethnocentrism, colo- yet they are free.” round to the idea that man “is God’s nialism, and genocide.” Calvinist self-absorption and the plaything, and that is the best thing about It was not long before American intel- Calvinist striving for a place among the him: He should therefore make his play lectuals were smoking the same opium. pure—the righteously elect—have al - as perfect as possible.” Structuralism found a home in the ways been closely woven into the fabric I suspect that there is a good deal of American academy, and its tenets have of American life, inspiring so many cults misplaced play in the new Manichaeism. since been translated into identity poli- of industrious self-betterment. Some of Johan Huizinga argued in Homo Ludens tics, with its tacit equation of virtue and these are moral (Emerson), others more (1938) that Plato, in coming up with his Otherness. At the same time, the new purely material (Franklin, Horatio philosophy of play, did nothing more Manichaeans have worked to marginal- Alger): All are profoundly individualist. than state an anthropological fact—that ize more-subtle ways of understanding In his call to temper this aboriginal self- we have, most of us, an unaccountable good and evil. The point of taking up the seeking with a sense of “common enter- passion for play-acting. Or to put it a bit now much maligned literae human- prise,” Lilla overlooks the obstacle to differently: Our ancestors knew what iores—the great books to which Lilla which Hannah Arendt, a thinker about they were about when they put, in the has devoted his life—is not to celebrate whom he has written insightfully, drew center of their habitats, a variety of well- the virtues of this or that culture or civi- attention in The Hu man Condition. constructed playgrounds, forums of art, lization: It is to deepen one’s under- Public space, humane and polis-like in ritual, and escapism. Technology, begin- standing of the human condition. And scale, was for Arendt the school of civic ning with the printed book (God bless for such a scholar the problem of good virtue: a realm where citizens translate it!), intervened; we now play more and evil, or rather of good-and-evil, is “intangible” civic ideals into “tangible” solipsistically than our forebears did. never far away. civic artifacts (a tragic drama or a well- The new play has its virtues, but it is not Lilla began The Reckless Mind with wrought urn), and at the same time a so hygienic. The passions that are easily Plato’s meditation on philosophy and metaphysical arena in which people real- and helpfully discharged in the face-to- love. Eros, Plato thought, would lead ize their potential through a “sharing of face play of the agora remain, when we the philosopher to love the good. He words and deeds.” play overmuch with books, smart- was very naïve in this, and Lilla, in For Arendt, the mass politics of a phones, and mass politics, all bottled up. essays on Martin Heidegger, Carl nation-state such as ours is positively You can smell the putrefaction. Schmitt, Alexandre Kojève, and deadly to this sort of public-spiritedness. The fanatical righteousness of the new Jacques Derrida, shows how easily the The “great numbers,” “conformism,” Manichaeans, whether of the Left or the philosophic mind may be brought to and inhumane “automatism” of nation- Right, has all the characteristics of too place its gifts in the service of evil. state politics, she believed, embody “pre - much inward play, of passion squan- Even so, Lilla’s own approach is never cisely those traits which, in the Greek dered on private playgrounds, in part Manichaean. There is good as well as self-understanding, distinguished the because, amid a landscape of so much evil in his representative intellectuals: Persian civilization from their own,” and formless sprawl, there are no adequate “I myself have been drawn to them frustrate a politics of virtue by rendering public ones. The game of mass politics, and over the years have learned from it rhetorical and sentimental. particularly as it is played in today’s their works.” At the same time, Lilla’s account of electronic forums, breeds Manichaeism If there is a weakness in Lilla’s argu- the new Manichaeans is open to the precisely because it is both so robotic ment, it is in his account of the degen- charge that it makes too much of the part and so introverted—so inhumane, you eration of an older American politics of played by mere ideas. Our politics today might say. The players feel the frustra- “common purpose” into a “hyperindi- are to this extent unreal: What we are tion of those who cannot make them- vidualistic culture” that he believes talking about, very often, is not really selves heard or felt through their play. prepared the way for both identity lib- what we are talking about. Ideas and They shout the louder, because they are eralism and Reagan conservatism. policies do not fully explain the passion- shouting in a vacuum. Certainly there have been periods when ate hatreds we encounter in today’s A topic, perhaps, for Professor Lilla.

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manage to steer clear of the rigid thesis- more than I do, but the truth is that I find Two Kinds mongering to which Earl Long alluded him almost unreadable, and my chronic when he said that Henry Luce, the single- distaste for his work is more than merely minded founder of Time and Life, was an allergy. Of People “like a man that owns a shoe store and What is it about Hemingway that so buys all the shoes to fit himself. Then he many of today’s readers find so off- TERRY TEACHOUT expects other people to buy them.” To putting? The fact that he proved to be so be sure, neither book is “definitive” in imitable is a big part of the problem, and the way that, say, W. Jackson Bate’s it didn’t help that most of the imitation Samuel Johnson is the book to read was popularization. Among other things, about Dr. Johnson if you’re only reading the author of “The Killers” inadvertently two, but the fact that so many biogra- invented the detective story, not to men- phies of Hemingway and Fitz gerald tion film noir, and inspired a generation have been written suggests that there is of hack writers, all of them men, who something about them that will forever longingly mistook his self-constructed elude easy definition. legend for reality. Herein lies the real If they had much else in common, I’m strength of Dearborn’s book, which is damned if I know what it is, though a that she has, as she puts it, “no invest- Ernest Hemingway: A Biography, by Mary V. case can be made that they shared a fair ment in the Hemingway legend. . . . I Dearborn (Knopf, 752 pp., $35) amount of doubt about their masculinity. cannot see what the legend has to offer to Hemingway, needless to say, was a a female reader.” All she cares about is Paradise Lost: A Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald, textbook bully, snuffling out weakness how a hack reporter came to write such by David S. Brown (Belknap, 424 pp., in others in order to paper over his own exquisitely wrought stories as “A Clean, $29.95) middle-of-the-night terrors. It says Well-Lighted Place” and “Hills Like

F the writing of biographies of Ernest Hemingway and F. Hemingway and Fitzgerald were Scott Fitzgerald, there is, it seems, no end. Two more far too ill sorted to be friends but went haveO just come down the pipeline, and through the motions anyway. the prospect of reading them tempted me to cap the quote and add that “much everything about him that he gossiped in White Elephants” and, in time, to blow study is a weariness of the flesh.” Nor print about the size of Fitzgerald’s penis. his brains out, and she tells that story was it encouraging that both are As for Fitzgerald, he was a charming, clearly, intelligently, and with a realistic biographies à thèse: David S. Brown’s chronically unsure drunk who doubted but disillusioned sense of admiration for Paradise Lost, written by a professor of everything about himself but the size of so sadly flawed a man and writer. history, purports to show that Fitzgerald his talent, about which he had no doubts Hemingway, she says, was a “cultural historian” first and fore- at all. They were far too ill sorted to be most, while Mary V. Dearborn’s Ernest friends but went through the motions seemed to find it difficult to give and Hemingway proudly bills itself as the anyway, which is one reason we per- receive love, to be a faithful friend, and, first Hemingway biography to be written sist in thrusting them into the same perhaps most tragically, to tell the truth, by a woman. As everyone who reviews Bruckner-and-Mahleresque pigeonhole: even to himself. By the end of World War II, and while still in his forties, he books knows all too well, most of them Scott & Ernest, Inc., Great American had done himself out of many of the can be judged quite easily by their cov- Writers of the Lost Generation. rewards of the good life: He had three ers, so I expected a double-barreled dose The trouble with Hemingway, seen failed marriages behind him, had few of pulpit-punching obviousness. What I from the privileged vantage point of good friends, was not writing well, and ended up getting was something gratify- hindsight, is that he looks increasingly had surrounded himself with flunkies ingly different. like a great influence but not a great and sycophants. . . . Even at his peak, While neither book glitters with high author in his own right. No 20th-century sentimentality and a garrulous streak literary style—always a deficiency when writer would leave a deeper mark on sometimes crept into his writing. mere mortals dare to write about the his contemporaries, and as late as 1948, lives of major novelists—both are writ- Evelyn Waugh, no respecter of reputa- While nothing in Paradise Lost is as ten soberly and well, and their authors tions, unhesitatingly described him in concisely penetrating as this, Brown has print as “one of the most original and the advantage of writing about a vastly Mr. Teachout is the drama critic of the Wall Street powerful of living writers.” Yet all but more attractive person—though one who Journal, the critic-at-large of Commentary, and the very finest of his short stories now was no less self-destructive, and who the author of biographies of Louis Armstrong, George sound mannered and artificial, while the went about the process of his self- Balanchine, Duke Ellington, and H. L. Mencken. novels come off as little more than sus- destruction far more efficiently, entering Billy and Me, his second play, opens in December tained exercises in mirror-gazing and into a marriage with a woman whose at Palm Beach Dramaworks. pose-striking. I would like to like him mental instability sucked him dry and

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BOOKS, ARTS & MANNERS The Great Ladder

ROBERT VERBRUGGEN

Dream Hoarders: How the American Upper Middle Class Is Leaving Everyone Else in the Dust, Why That Is a Problem, and What to Do about It, by Richard V. Reeves (Brookings, 240 pp., $24)

F. Scott Fitzgerald Ernest Hemingway OR years now, the Left has insisted that the top 1 percent have rigged the system. Richard drinking to self-flagellating excess in a have drifted farther still in the same dis- V. Reeves, of the center-left futile attempt to tolerate the intolerable. orienting direction, and Fitzgerald, like FBrookings Institution, insists that the All things considered, it is something of so many moralists, knew that he was conspiracy goes much deeper: The entire a miracle that Fitzgerald produced any- himself exemplary of the flaws of the top fifth is in on it. Scared to death of thing good enough to be read after his culture whose frivolity he chronicled and “downward mobility,” these well-to-do death, much less that he somehow man- indicted. This knowledge is the source of but hard-working Americans—the “upper aged to turn himself almost by sheer the gravity that heightens the force of his middle class,” likely including you, my force of will into a full-fledged master. best work, whose lightness of touch can- dear reader—strive more than anything To read about Fitzgerald’s career is to not conceal its ultimate seriousness, a to ensure the success of their children, be put in mind of the characteristically seriousness that makes the Hemingway even if that means planting their boots on astute remark that H. L. Mencken made of The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to the faces of kids born farther down the about The Great Gatsby, his master- Arms look like a mere merchant of self- income ladder. piece: “There is evidence in every line pity by comparison. Yet he remained a He has a point, one that conservatives of hard and intelligent effort.” Not only romantic to the last, as well as a true should heed even if they can’t sign on to is Gatsby a miracle of craft, a novel believer in the promise of the Midwest all of his proposed solutions. short enough to aspire to perfection and that spawned him and that he regarded to The children of upper-middle-class good enough to approach it, one in the end of his life as “the warm center of parents are highly likely to join the MONDADORI PORTFOLIO VIA GETTY IMAGES

/ which every character is memorable the world.” upper middle class themselves as adults: and every sentence unostentatiously In the end, it’s hard not to suppose that About 40 percent of those born into the lapidary, but Fitzgerald also wrote a not Hemingway and Fitzgerald were, quite top fifth wind up right back there. inconsiderable number of short stories simply, two kinds of people, one of Broadly speaking, this happens for rea- WALTER BREVEGLIERI

: of which the same things could rightly whom never wrote a more self-revealing sons that fall into four categories: the be said. sentence than “Hail nothing full of noth- inevitable, the laudable, the unfair, and At the same time, there was far more ing, nothing is with thee” and the other of the deplorable. HEMINGWAY ; to him than his craftsmanship. Brown is whom summed himself up no less com- As for the inevitable, the labor market squarely on the mark when he says that pletely when he spoke of Jay Gatsby’s is bound to reward people who have cer-

GETTY IMAGES tain traits—intelligence, conscientious- / Fitzgerald’s work embodies “the disqui- “extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic eting notion that we have drifted far from readiness such as I have never found in ness, and so on. As Reeves admits, such our inheritance as the children of pio- any other person and which it is not likely traits are partly genetic. Therefore, par- neers to fashion a culture that teaches its I shall ever find again.” Perhaps that was ents with these qualities will dispropor- HULTON ARCHIVE : young to love too much the privileges what made Fitzgerald the greater artist tionately have kids who share them, and and protections of wealth.” That is why it and better man: He knew that the readi- thus even a perfectly meritocratic society FITZGERALD retains its immediacy: If anything, we ness is all. will favor the well-to-do.

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In practice, though, any genetic ad- done things like this; the extent of the instead of the bottom fifth on income, vantage that upper-middle-class kids problem will come as a surprise to those has a 45 percent chance of ending up at have is compounded by environmental of us who got our degrees and jobs by, the top himself. ones—and these often fall into the “laud- well, just applying for them. One of his How to fix this? Reeves envisions “a able” category. For example, there’s a Brookings colleagues played the “legacy meritocracy for grown-ups, but not for striking class-based “parenting gap” in card” to get her third child into an Ivy children” and proposes a wide range of this country, with wealthier parents League school. An executive at a charita- ideas to get us there. spending a lot more time talking with ble foundation planned to get his daugh- Some of these ideas are ones that their kids, reading to them, and generally ter an internship at an organization the conservatives should get behind. For encouraging their intellectual develop- foundation funds; he joked that Reeves example, we on the right have spent ment. Reeves tells of a couple he knows should hold off publishing the book until decades decrying affirmative action, who referred to their parenting efforts as afterward. Prominent politicians, even and we should see “legacy” admissions “Project Melissa” (though a footnote progressive ones, are downright shame- no differently, especially at public col- reveals he changed the name). less about such behavior: Both Michael leges. Reeves cites one study showing Certainly, we can’t blame any parents, Bloomberg and Bill de Blasio had chil- that legacy status is worth the same as rich or poor, for making a special effort dren who interned for the New York City 160 SAT points (on the old 1,600-point to make sure their kids learn the skills government. (They couldn’t at least call scale) at elite colleges. That same study they need to succeed. These efforts can, the mayor of a different city, for crying shows that legacies are 4 percent of however, cost a lot of money, such as out loud?) applicants to these colleges and 8 percent of those admitted. Higher education is ripe for reform in Reeves envisions ‘a meritocracy many other ways. Rather than saddling poor and middle-class students with for grown-ups, but not for children’ mountains of debt, colleges should ex- and proposes a wide range of ideas plore income-based repayment plans, taking a percentage of students’ salaries to get us there. for a set number of years into the future. We need to recognize that not all kids when it comes to special summer pro- He doesn’t reproduce it in Dream are cut out for four-year colleges and grams and private schools. One doesn’t Hoarders, unfortunately, but in 2013 that some are better served through need to be a Bernie Sanders voter to Reeves and his colleague Kimberly apprenticeships and associate’s-degree admit that this is unfair. Howard created a stunning graph illus- programs. The tax deduction for saving And beyond that is where things start trating the consequences of these behav- in “529” college accounts—as my wife to bleed over into the “deplorable” cate- iors. If a kid comes from the bottom 20 and I do—is mainly a handout to upper- gory. As William Voegeli discussed in a percent of parental income but has test middle-class parents and needs reform, recent NATIONAL REVIEW cover story scores in the top third, he has a 24 per- at minimum. (“Class Dismissed,” June 26) and as cent chance of earning an income in By the same token, conservatives have Reeves explains here, upper-middle- the top fifth—not too much better than long protested burdensome government class parents often deliberately keep the 20 percent chance he’d have if the regulations, and zoning rules designed to poor kids out of good public-school dis- slots were handed out at random, keep out low-cost housing are an exam- tricts, either by drawing the boundaries despite his high scores. Meanwhile, a ple of them. The Right will be skeptical in a way that excludes them or through kid with test scores in that same range, of Reeves’s more aggressive measures— zoning rules that forbid the construction but whose parents were in the top fifth in these very pages, Stanley Kurtz has of lower-cost housing. And even when these efforts fail and upper-middle-class kids end up with AMONG OTHERS lower skill levels than their poorer competitors, wealthy parents still have tools Working alone in the house, at their disposal that keep their dim prog- I look to the solitary sculls eny from slipping down the ladder—at passing on the river the direct expense of better-qualified but for a sense that I am poorer kids. These kids can apply to the among others. The geese— same schools their parents attended and my dogs—convene in the yard get a “legacy” boost. They can take near the water. A summer unpaid internships in expensive cities in which much has passed and count on Mommy and Daddy to pay is now folded and put away. the rent. They can tap into their parents’ The quiet is like a pie professional and alumni networks when behind glass, uncut. looking for a job. Reeves knows a lot of people who’ve —JESSICA HORNIK

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taken issue with the Obama administra- malicious violence, and low motives that tion’s attempts to override suburbs’ A Family accompanied the birth of a nation. decision-making on such matters, while But given how the tale begins, the second Reeves thinks those moves are just a course must have been tempting to Epstein. small step in the right direction. But con- Riven by The Franklin family wasn’t altogether atyp- servative lawmakers at the local and state ical in 18th-century colonial America, but level would do well to consider whether Revolution their expedient, unorthodox ways stand out governments should be, in effect, enforc- to us. Benjamin, always one for the ladies, ing economic segregation. TRACY LEE SIMMONS caused William to be born out of wed- In other areas, conservatives will see lock circa 1730, so the boy was literally a Reeves’s point but question his meth- bastard—though to whom we don’t know; ods. Poor kids have worse teachers—but Epstein engages in a bit of fun imagining the solution to that is school choice, not who she might have been, but her identity a government program that ensures that remains a mystery. Fortunately, the toddler teachers get paid more for teaching in was emotionally embraced soon after Ben’s poor districts. marriage by Deborah, his quiet and long- And what about that “parenting gap”? suffering wife of many years to come, and Here Reeves touts voluntary “visitation” her devotion to the child survived the loss programs in which nurses or social work- of their natural-born son to smallpox in ers drop by poor parents’ homes and give 1736. William was given all the advan- them advice. There’s rigorous research The Loyal Son: The War in Ben Franklin’s House, tages of a son in full standing by a father showing that these programs help in vari- by Daniel Mark Epstein (Ballantine, whose prosperity had grown exponential- ous ways, and as far as government social 464 pp., $30) ly in Philadelphia during this period. He engineering goes they aren’t so bad. But was provided with a tutor from the tender- we on the right are bound to be a little IME was when a small but est years and was enrolled, at age eight, in uncomfortable with the idea of the state’s stout cross-section of educated Annand’s Classical Academy, there to be telling people how to raise their kids. Americans could identify the armed with the heavy mental arsenal of a Regarding unpaid internships, there name of William Franklin. classical training. He learned his Latin might be no solution conservatives will NowT we count ourselves lucky if most thoroughly and later was able, as were so like. If we’re going to have minimum- people can identify his father, Benjamin. many educated men of the time, to con- wage laws, perhaps there’s no reason to Yet William Franklin was one of the most duct sophisticated correspondence in verse give parent-subsidized college students consequential colonists of his time—just and toss about classical references like a special-snowflake exemption from as savvy as his famous father, and in some rubber balls. He knew all the dance steps them—that’s my own view—but that ways more politically successful. He could of the day, made himself a superb horse- will be a hard sell, as conservatives don’t conceivably have gone on to become pres- man and soldier, and learned to treat con- like minimum-wage laws to begin with. ident during the early Federal era, edging versation as a sport. In short, William Indeed, even Reeves thinks unpaid out Adams or Jefferson, but for the fact that, imbibed the heady spirit of the 18th century internships are here to stay (ending them, when the big break with Great Britain came that pressed all men who aspired to political he says, would be “draconian [and] illib- in 1776, William remained loyal to the and social elevation to engage in a program eral”), and instead suggests a government Crown while his father became one of the of sober self-improvement. program to pay poorer kids to take them. leading colonial revolutionists. The “loyal William moved to London and trained A better route might be to work intern- son” of this illuminating book’s title was a for the law, as his father dictated. His was ships into the school year, so they’re Loyalist, the bastard of the clan, a man who a complete education—far more complete simply covered by the money that would took a different path from the one that led than his father’s. Thus did William be - otherwise go toward tuition, room, and to victory and so chose to be left behind, come fit to take his place as a gentleman board. My own alma mater did this; I not exactly a man without a country but, in among all the king’s men. spent a semester interning at a magazine the end, one almost without a family. Upon returning to Pennsylvania, William instead of attending classes. But it might This is not only the stuff of high political became Ben’s confidant and partner; they not be workable in all fields. drama; it’s also, should one wish to treat it fed their scientific curiosity and laid out Reeves is among the center-left’s most this way, a scintillating case study in family hopes for financial windfalls. William was formidable thinkers, and over the past dysfunction. Daniel Mark Epstein opts for there when Ben flew the famous kite amid several years he’s built up an impressive the first course, telling the story of how the thunderstorm in 1752, and they would body of work on economic mobility and great global events shook one prominent enter into risky land deals together in the the obstacles to it. Dream Hoarders con- family as he examines the intricate patch- West later in the 1750s. But one incident solidates that work in a way that’s acces- work of high purposes, feints, misunder- from the boy’s 16th year points to another sible and engaging to the general public, standings, expensive allegiances, blunders, strain in their relationship, one that would and should be at the top of the reading endure: William had been taken with a list of anyone worried about the ability of Mr. Simmons is the author of Climbing bout of wanderlust and tried to escape the the 99 percent—even the 80 percent—to Parnassus and teaches humanities in the Westover more settled ways of his father by becom- get ahead. Honors Program at Lynchburg College in Virginia. ing a privateer at sea—before Ben rushed to

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the ship just in time to retrieve his son house arrest as armies took to the field—a before he set sail. Willful precocity ran fallen star, as his father’s star was rising in strong in the Franklin male line. Not for the the court of Louis XVI at Versailles. last time would their wills cross. The long denouement of this sad story Now comes the slow rollout of griev- leads us through a dark labyrinth of ritual ance and happenstance that eventually humiliations for William Franklin and his leads to American independence, though wife, Elizabeth—humiliations and confis- we experience all of it freshly through a cations capped by many months of soli- letter-laden family saga, and Epstein, tary confinement in a squalid Connecticut impressively, does as much as any writer jail, from which he emerged dangerously of history reasonably can do to erase the weakened but still resolute, hoping to sense of inevitability of outcome that arrange pardons for fellow Loyalists after might have dulled the story. He follows a his release to the British forces hunkered winding trail of long-distance squabbles down at the foot of Manhattan. There he and political disagreements between Ben spent his last years in America and there and William, of which the earliest—from he agreed to serve as president of a group the 1760s and the crisis over the Stamp called the Board of Associated Loyalists, Act—remained in bounds for people of a cause already lost before launching, but goodwill and did not presage the split to one that degenerated into sporadic forms come. But William considered the Boston of domestic terrorism, a kind of “desola- Tea Party of 1773 to be an act of sheer tion warfare” that eroded morale on both vandalism. This demonstrated a profound sides. There’s no doubt that William rift in the family on a momentous public became a thorn in Washington’s side as matter, a rift whose consequences be - the general strove with every ounce of came more pressing because, by this strength to bring order to the fledgling time, rising on the ladder Ben had built nation. Epstein’s account of just how dirty for him, William had been made royal and desperate the early 1780s were on governor of New Jersey—outranking his these shores is unsparing. father in colonial preferment and playing William ended his days in his own the role of informant for London on the country—England—starting a new family colonists’ acts of sedition, as he exerted after the heartbreaking death of his wife himself maximally to avoid “civil war” during his time of confinement, and trying among his countrymen. by fits and starts to maintain some sort of Whatever else he was, William was a relationship with the father who had man devoted to his country as he under- become a hero of the revolution his son stood that country to exist under the rule of opposed. Both Ben and his family felt, as law and under the protection of the king. Epstein puts it, “mortal pressure” to re - And, like other Loyalists and emergent rev- nounce William, and what thin link William olutionaries alike, he feared mobs. “A real maintained with him was facilitated by patriot,” he would write, “can seldom or his own loyal son, Temple, himself born— ever speak popular language. A false one true to family form—out of wedlock many will never suffer himself to speak anything years before but a source of pride to both else.” Is there not here a faint rhythmic father and grandfather. Yet few lives of the echo of Poor Richard’s Almanack? time could have ended more anticlimacti- But the Sons of Liberty, those charter cally: William was fated to be left with lit- members of the Fraternal Order of Those tle but a belief in his own righteousness. Who Have Had Enough, were on the Did Benjamin Franklin ever try to inter- move—and as we read eyewitness accounts vene for his son, even secretly? This ques- of the widening chaos, we can begin to tion hovers over the last third of the book imagine how fife-and-drum corps, now and Epstein taps every resource available quaint obligatory attendants at Fourth of to answer it. The two did meet one final July parades, must have made a menacing time in England in 1785, as Ben passed noise for many a Loyalist that summer through the island on his way home from when accompanied by angry shouts, sharp- France to America. The record we have ened projectiles, and burning effigies. points to renewed, if irregular, contact, but William would become the last provincial scarcely any reconciliation of the kind we governor dutifully discharging the Crown’s would expect from a novel. It’s a story business as other royal governors fled to that, like all real families’ stories, leaves British ships, and by 1776, refusing loose ends—but Epstein’s narrative is, for avenues of escape, he found himself under all that, deeply rewarding.

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lived in fellowship with God and one’s necessarily to the sinful, but to the shal- Recovering neighbor. The pursuit of truth, goodness, low and the third-rate, which are, at best, and beauty is at the heart of what George only temporarily satisfying. Santayana meant when he wrote of “the What is the alternative to this state of The Soul of Great Tradition,” the tradition for which affairs? Wilson begins with the assump- Edmund Burke served as a major post- tion that man is something other than an Conservatism Enlightenment voice. accident of the universe. Man, however “When we ask, what is it that conser- flawed, is a rational creature, with an JAMES E. PERSON JR. vatives wish to conserve, Burke and his inborn restlessness to pursue what he descendants tell us, above all, they wish believes to be the good, to prefer the true to conserve the riches that have been to the false, and to enjoy the beautiful. given into our possession by way of the These assumptions align with the long, uneven assimilation of the genius emphasis of Burke’s famous Philo - of Athens with that of Jerusalem,” sophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our states Wilson, speaking of the merging Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. of Platonic philosophy with Biblical Wilson also examines Burke’s more faith, in what is often called “Christian famous Reflections on the Revolution in Platonism.” The author explains that France, deeming it a seminal document we must seek to conserve the transcen- that affirms the classical view of an dental guideposts of the West, in an ordered universe and beauty as a truth effort “to reawaken the natural yearn- readily understood by those with eyes to The Vision of the Soul: Truth, Goodness, and Beauty ing—the irresistible interest—for them see and ears to hear. in the Western Tradition, by James Matthew Wilson (Catholic University Press, 444 pp., $29.95) Man has an inborn restlessness to pursue what he INCE the earliest days of NATIONAL REVIEW, conserva- believes to be the good. tive thinkers have recurrently asked: Precisely what do con- that is always at least germinally pre- In a passage reminiscent of the servativesS seek to conserve? sent in the human spirit and, above all, Inklings, Wilson notes that men and Longtime contributor Russell Kirk is woven into the ordered fabric of the women are story-creating and story- provided a broad answer to this question cosmos itself.” telling creatures well suited to myth- in his landmark work The Conservative This is a fine goal; but the first order making, and that myth is a largely Mind (1953), writing that the modern of business is to shoo away the elephant unacknowledged element within the conservative “is concerned, first of all, in the room, represented by this ques- realm of human reason. C. S. Lewis for the regeneration of the spirit and tion: In speaking of truth, beauty, and famously averred that “reason is the nat- character—with the perennial problem goodness, aren’t we speaking of highly ural organ of truth; but imagination is of the inner order of the soul, the restora- subjective concepts? Do we not live in a the organ of meaning. Imagination, pro- tion of the ethical understanding, and the world in which the very idea of objec- ducing new metaphors or revivifying religious sanction upon which any life tive truth is scoffed at, goodness is old, is not the cause of truth, but its con- worth living is founded. This is conser- defined as whatever our betters in gov- dition.” Mythos and Logos do not exist vatism at its highest.” ernment say it is, and beauty is in the eye in separate, watertight compartments, Certain factions within the world of of the beholder (however bloodshot Wilson notes; they are intertwined. conservatism place little emphasis upon with passion, illness, or madness that Wilson seeks to point in the direction the regeneration of the spirit and charac- eye might be)? of a fuller life: to provide “a com- ter. But if there is anything conserva- Wilson points out that the source of pelling account of truth, goodness, and tives should stand for, claims Villanova this distortion lies in an essential corrup- beauty that will make the reality of professor James Matthew Wilson in his tion within human nature itself, one that these transcendental properties of being new book, it should be “those supreme, has dulled and befogged man’s percep- visible, comprehensible, and defensi- indeed divine, useless properties of real- tions of the true and the beautiful even ble for a new generation.” In this, he ity: truth, goodness, beauty,” transcen- as it has warped his philosophies and has succeeded. A closely argued work dent qualities that inform and uplift men ideologies. As Boethius put it, humani- that rewards careful reading, The and women in their journey to attain ty’s quest for what is best might be Vision of the Soul belongs on the same “the Good Life”: a well-rounded life likened to the plight of drunken men shelf as the works by Burke and Kirk who wander in cloudy memory but no already named, along with C. S. Lewis’s Mr. Person is the editor of the forthcoming longer know the road home. In the The Abolition of Man and Gregory Imaginative Conservatism: The Letters of meantime, the search for the enduring Wolfe’s admirable study Beauty Will Russell Kirk. transcendental qualities often leads not Save the World.

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as Commander Bolton, a Royal Navy Film officer trying to keep order. But otherwise we’re just dropped into the action, follow- On the ing three characters whose names we barely catch—a soldier on the beach Beach (Fionn Whitehead), a civilian piloting his boat across the Channel (Mark Rylance), and an RAF pilot in the skies above (Tom ROSS DOUTHAT Hardy)—as their narratives converge. Of course Nolan is still Nolan, even N this stupid time in which we live, working fast and lean, so certain pre- there have been several controver- dictable elements are here: The dialogue is sies already about Christopher often inaudible (it’s a war zone, after all), Nolan’s Dunkirk—idiotic spats Tom Hardy’s face is obscured for most of Iabout whether its portrait of a defeated the film (by a fighter’s oxygen mask, this British army’s deliverance “celebrates time, not Bane’s breathing apparatus), and maleness” while excluding women and the director plays tricks with time as he minorities, and idle arguments about cuts back and forth between the charac- Fionn Whitehead in Dunkirk whether it should encourage the Re- ters. The story on the beach covers a sistance in their war on Trumpism or week, the story on the boat a day, the story encourage alt-righters in their nostalgia in the skies an hour, so in the first half of threat, is perhaps the only piece of history for the Anglo-Saxon past. the movie they don’t really intersect, and that our end-of-history society still recalls Only one Dunkirk debate really mat- then as it moves toward completion their in full. Literally every other movie about ters, though: Is Nolan’s latest film his timelines overlap and finally merge. this era, from Saving Private Ryan to first true masterpiece, or another hand- I knew about the time difference going Schindler’s List to The Sound of Music to some, near-great effort that pleases his in, so I don’t know how it plays if you the endless run of Churchill appearances fans but leaves his critics unpersuaded? don’t know; the movie doesn’t offer a lot on screen (there’s another coming this The film seems partially addressed to of guidance (just brief title cards for each fall, with Gary Oldman as the old man), those critics and their doubts. In his epic story at the beginning), but the stakes in does the work that Nolan’s critics find phase—the Batman trilogy, Inception, each storyline are clear and the “Aha!” lacking in Dunkirk. Nolan can rely on Interstellar—Nolan has made movies moments as they converge are pretty them, and keep the focus on the beach. that are handsome, chilly, sprawling, clear as well. And the device lends the But the beach itself is the one issue and intensely masculine. They also film a constant momentum, a minute-by- where I do agree with Podhoretz. The have a tendency toward bloat, frequent minute urgency, that most war movies drama is perfect, but the scale is off: third-act problems (both The Dark acquire only at the climax. There are just not enough men to match Knight and Interstellar are brilliant up The critique of Nolan’s lean approach, the real-life numbers. When Branagh’s until the final 30 minutes), and a clear leveled by various writers but with partic- Bolton talks about the hundreds of thou- difficulty in portraying both romance ular force by John Podhoretz at The sands of soldiers awaiting evacuation, we and femininity persuasively. Weekly Standard, is that narrowing the see what looks more like five thousand, Dunkirk seems to take these failures to focus and shortening the story misses maybe ten. Likewise, in reality hundreds heart, and deals with them by, first, choos- what made Dunkirk really matter. Nolan of small boats showed up for the rescue; ing a famous story in which all the impor- has made a story of survival and deliver- when they arrive in the film, in an other- tant characters are men (you can’t botch ance, but one that’s all about the men wise extraordinarily moving moment, we the romance if there isn’t any), and sec- themselves, and only by implication about see what looks like dozens. ond, by telling the story in a surprisingly the civilizational stakes. There’s a good Nolan likes to isolate his characters—a condensed fashion, without any room for argument that the salvation of so many line of patient men, a lonely soldier— sag. This movie is many things, but above tens of thousands of soldiers was neces- against the sand and waves, in stoic and all it is fast: Over and out in under two sary for Churchill’s goal of fighting on, existential poses. This is lovely and part hours, well under what you’d expect both and so what was saved from that beach of the story, but it is not the whole of it. from a contemporary summer block- by destroyers and pleasure boats was not There were more crowds, more chaos buster and a big film about World War II. just the flower of young England, but all (the famous Dunkirk tracking shot in The leanness is achieved by cutting of European civilization. It was not just Joe Wright’s otherwise forgettable away most war-movie clichés. There a miracle for the men, but one for the Atonement shows a truth that Nolan are no scenes of platoon camaraderie, world—and a movie about the miracle doesn’t), and their absence does make no statesmen making speeches or gen- therefore has an obligation to be bigger. Dunkirk and its stakes feel slightly erals arguing over maps, and barely I don’t think this is right, only because smaller than they should.

. even a glimpse of the enemy—the words while modern audiences might be igno- The movie doesn’t need Churchill, “Nazis” and “Germans” are barely heard rant of Dunkirk, they are not ignorant of and it may be remembered as Nolan’s at all. A little bit of basic exposition is the stakes of World War II; indeed the hor- masterpiece. But he should have hired WARNER BROS delivered by Kenneth Branagh, on hand ror of Hitlerism, the scale of the Nazi more extras.

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Happy Warrior BY KYLE SMITH The Fred & Karl Show

NE of the last (4,000 or so) essays the late work an awed fascination with Communism and calls Christopher Hitchens produced in his Engels someone “with whom we can engage today, with dying months was a fond remembrance, the questions he raises. He isn’t to be confined to his time O post–2008 financial crisis, of the pope of and forgotten.” Communism (“The Revenge of Karl Marx: What the Part of the hell of aging is learning just how few items author of Das Kapital reveals about the current economic there are on humanity’s imaginative menu. (Justin Bieber? crisis”). In a witty letter to the editor, reader Edmund C. Seen him before. He’s just Shaun Cassidy with prison tats.) Tiryakian of Hillsborough, N.C., wrote, “Over many years So you can’t resist telling younger people that they’re pla- of following the stock market, I have found no more con- giarizing the past, which makes you look stuck in the past sistent sign that we are at the bottom of a bear market than while everyone is having a nice time not knowing that a renewed interest in the teachings of the author of Das Lady Gaga is just another female drag queen like Kapital. I have therefore given appropriate directions to Madonna, that Michael Strahan is a gap-toothed Rosey my stockbroker.” Hitchens’s essay was Grier, that Daft Punk is merely K.C. published in the April 2009 issue of The and the Sunshine Band with spaceman Atlantic. The Dow Jones Industrial To erect helmets. The recycling bin furnishes Average duly hit a low of 6,443.27 on the pop charts, the multiplexes, and the March 6, 2009. monuments to TV schedules. If they’re bringing back Recently the Dow crossed the 22,000 Will & Grace, why not Fred & Karl? mark. Great time to celebrate Marx’s fel- Engels in Didn’t someone say history repeats low master of disaster, Friedrich Engels! first as tragedy, then as farce, or at least British artist Phil Collins announced that Soviet-era as sitcom? after a year of searching for a statue of Ukraine was But then it never stops repeating. We Engels he had found a vandalized one will never be rid of Marxism because erected in 1970 in Ukraine—but un - grotesque, new generations will keep insisting that grateful proletarians had knocked the it’s a new thing, that no one before was thing off its pedestal, sawn it in half, but in today’s ever serious enough about implement- and left it lying face down behind a West it’s ing it. So: Engels helped design an ide- creamery. Because Communism’s junk - ology meant to raise up the workers of yard is progressivism’s museum, decadent. industrialized England that failed to catch Collins triumphantly brought the two- on there but instead became the economic ton concrete hunk to a pedestal in front of an arts center basis of most of Asia, where it failed miserably as the in Man chester, England, where Engels, before co-writing workers back in England were achieving spectacular The Communist Manifesto with Marx, worked at the family wealth ignoring its precepts. So the Russians cast off cotton mill and began absorbing exactly the wrong lessons Engels and started redirecting their economies after the about what industrialized capitalism was doing to poverty. industrialized free-market West—where today’s artists, Manchester: the petri dish in which the world’s deadliest intellectuals, and young people are saying, “Hey, maybe political virus was born. the answers we need lie with this Engels fellow.” Take me home, cried the statue when Phil Collins Collins’s project was funded by the Manchester city found it against all odds, and there was a groovy kind of council. The following words, praising Collins, actually love in the air as the thing was unveiled last month. It appeared in the Financial Times: “Marx and Engels con- turned out that the Phil Collins who had brought the statue tinue to loom large today. . . . Their ideas are being revived to town—born 1970, a Turner Prize nominee in 2006, beyond the lecture room. They represent a way not taken, a curly-haired—was not the same Phil Collins who sang revolution betrayed.” It’s like the New England Journal of “Sussudio,” played on both sides of the Atlantic for Medicine saying, “AIDS gets a bad rap.” In the Manchester Live Aid in 1985, and probably stole a lot of acting gigs suburb of Salford, close to where the Engels family mill from Bob Hoskins, but the audience was treated to mel- once stood, there is a 15-foot sculpture of Engels’s beard for low pop-rock anyway: “Communism’s Coming Home,” the children to climb in and be inspired by. sung by one Gruff Rhys. No, it isn’t a Flight of the To erect monuments to Engels in Soviet-era Ukraine Conchords spoof. Watch the YouTube video. Rhys and was grotesque, but in today’s West it’s decadent, a symp- his band are fervent about this exciting new innovation tom of a culture so listless and woozy that it can no longer that has been tried many times in many cultures for many see what’s good in itself. “In history nothing is achieved decades and now stands definitively proven to be the without violence and implacable ruthlessness,” Engels worst idea in history, worse even than The Emoji Movie. wrote in 1849. Now English children are playing in his The visual artist Phil Collins has exhibited in his previous jungle-gym beard.

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