THE NEW MELTING POT by Reihan Salam Bombast and Chauvinism Must Not Prevent Compassionate Assimilation

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December 31, 2015 $4.99 Christmas!Merry CHARLES C. W. COOKE: RAMESH PONNURU: WHY SELF-DEFENSE MATTERS CRUZVS. RUBIO

YES,YES, RETHINK IMMIGRATION

The case for a new melting-pot nationalism REIHAN SALAM

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DECEMBER 31, 2015 | VOLUME LXVII, NO. 24 | www.nationalreview.com

ON THE COVER Page 22 The New Melting Pot Jay Nordlinger on Clive A. Babkirk A new culture war is breaking p. 40 out over the future of American national identity in the face of rapid and accelerating demographic change. BOOKS, ARTS To win this new culture war, conserva- & MANNERS tives must do more than embrace a 35 THE REDUCTIONIST TRAP new approach to immigration. They Daniel Foster reviews The Evolution of Everything: must offer a new conception of How New Ideas Emerge, by Matt Ridley. American nationhood. Reihan Salam 37 A NEW CHRISTIAN COVER: ROMAN GENN Sarah Ruden reviews Augustine: Conversions to Confessions, by Robin Lane Fox. ARTICLES 38 MYSTERY MAN 15 CRUZ VS. RUBIO by Ramesh Ponnuru Robert Dean Lurie reviews They are having to disagree because they are so much alike. The Political World of Bob Dylan: Freedom and Justice, 16 DISCRIMINATING DISCRIMINATION by Kevin D. Williamson Power and Sin, by Jeff Taylor and Of Donald Trump and immigration. Chad Israelson. RECLAIMING TRADITIONAL EDUCATION by Samuel Goldman 18 40 AN AMERICAN ORIGINAL Why we should study old books and beautiful things. Jay Nordlinger on a Yanke e craftsman in Virginia. 20 THE TRUE SPRIT OF CHRISMAS by Aloïse Buckley Heath Composed by Pamela, John, Priscilla, and, sometimes, Buckley Heath; 42 FILM: TRUE GRIT typed by There Mother. Ross Douthat reviews Room. 43 DOWN BY WINTER FEATURES Richard Brookhiser gets ill. 22 THE NEW MELTING POT by Reihan Salam Bombast and chauvinism must not prevent compassionate assimilation. SECTIONS 26 SELF-DEFENSE AND THE SECOND AMENDMENT by Charles C. W. Cooke Why would anyone want a firearm? 2 Letters to the Editor CLIMATE PLAY-ACTING by Oren Cass 4 The Week 28 Athwart ...... James Lileks The conference in Paris accomplished nothing much. 33 34 The Long View ...... Rob Long 31 ON EARTH PEACE, GOOD WILL TOWARD MEN by Jonah Goldberg 36 Poetry ...... Sally Cook Even metaphorically. 44 Happy Warrior . . . . . Heather Wilhelm

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DECEMBER 31 ISSUE; PRINTED DECEMBER 17

EDITOR Richard Lowry Can Peace in the Middle East Be So Simple? Senior Editors Richard Brookhiser / Jonah Goldberg / Jay Nordlinger Ramesh Ponnuru / David Pryce-Jones In “The Islamic War” (December 7), Victor Davis Hanson wonders why Islamists despise Managing Editor Jason Lee Steorts us “all the more” as the Middle East has become wealthier, the Islamic world has gained Literary Editor Michael Potemra Vice President, Editorial Operations Christopher McEvoy more knowledge of “relative global wealth and poverty,” and the U.S. has “proved post- Washington Editor Eliana Johnson Executive Editor Reihan Salam modern in its attitude about the causes and origins of war.” Roving Correspondent Kevin D. Williamson He fails to mention a more significant factor: the presence of U.S. and other Western National Correspondent Joh n J. Miller Senior Political Correspondent Jim Geraghty troops in Muslim lands. As Chas Freeman, our ambassador to Saudi Arabia during the 1991 Art Director Luba Kolomytseva Gulf War, has recounted, the proposal to station American troops on Saudi soil in response Deputy Managing Editors Nicholas Frankovich / Fred Schwarz to Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait presented a problem, given that many Saudis “interpret their Production Editor Katie Hosmer Assistant to the Editor Rachel Ogden religious tradition as banning the presence of non-Muslims, especially the armed forces of non- Research Associate Alessandra Trouwborst believers, on the Kingdom’s soil.” Shortly after the invasion, Freeman attended a meeting at Contributing Editors which King Fahd, overruling most of the Saudi royal family, agreed to allow U.S. troops to be Shannen Coffin / Ross Douthat / Roman Genn stationed in his country. This courageous decision was premised on the understanding that all Arthur L. Herman / Florence King / Lawrence Kudlow Mark R. Levin / Yuval Levin / Rob Long American forces would be removed once the immediate threat from Saddam was neutralized. Mario Loyo la / Jim Manzi / Andrew C. McCarthy Kate O’Beirne / Andrew Stuttaford / Robert VerBruggen When we failed to honor this commitment, Fahd faced serious domestic problems. Several prominent Muslim clerics who objected to Fahd’s policies were sent into exile, NATIONALREVIEWONLINE Managing Editors Katherine Connell / Edward John Craig further inflaming the religious community. Osama bin Laden began to call for the over- Deputy Managing Editor Nat Brown throw of the monarchy and stepped up his jihadist fight against the U.S. National-Affairs Columnist John Fund Staff Writers Charles C. W. Cooke / David French Virtually all of the terrorist attacks Hanson mentions occurred after the 1991 Gulf War Senior Political Reporter Alexis Levinson and during the subsequent presence of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia. The one exception— Political Reporters Brendan Bordelon / Joel Gehrke Reporter Katherine Timpf the 1983 suicide bombing in Lebanon—also involved U.S. troops on Middle Eastern soil. Associat e Editors Molly Powell / Nick Tell Digital Director Ericka Anderson None of this is to condone the jihadists. Rather, it is to suggest that the facts as they exist Assistant Editor Mark Antonio Wright should inform our methods of combating terrorism with a minimum of violence and death. If Editorial Associate Christine Sisto Technical Services Russell Jenkins you discover that your dog snaps at you when you touch him in a par ticular place, rather than Web Editorial Assistant Grant DeArmitt slapping him you might reasonably decide to pet him elsewhere. Or not to pet him at all. Web Developer Wendy Weihs Web Producer Scott McKim David E. Steuber Mineral Point, Wis. EDITORS- AT- LARGE Linda Bridges / Kathryn Jean Lopez / John O’Sullivan VICTOR DAVIS HANSON RESPONDS: I wish I could believe Mr. Steuber’s reductionist analysis, NATIONALREVIEWINSTITUTE BUCKLEYFELLOWSINPOLITICALJOURNALISM because such fantasies would surely simplify things, but for a variety of reasons I cannot: Elaina Plott / Ian Tuttle 1) Middle Eastern terrorism directed at the U.S. antedates the Gulf War well beyond “the Contributors one exception.” We were not in Saudi Arabia or at war in the Middle East when Iran took Hadley Arkes / James Bowman / Eliot A. Cohen Dinesh D’Souza / Chester E. Finn Jr. / Neal B. Freeman our hostages, Qaddafi planned to kill our diplomats in Rome, our embassy was bombed in James Gardner / David Gelernter / George Gilder Jeffrey Hart / Kevin A. Hassett / Charles R. Kesler Kuwait, or a West Berlin discotheque that American servicemen frequented was bombed. David Klinghoffer / Anthony Lejeune / D. Keith Mano 2) Middle Eastern attitudes toward the U.S. are incoherent more than systematically Michael Novak / Alan Reynolds / Tracy Lee Simmons Terry Teachout / Vin Weber predictable. Is the current Saudi complaint that the U.S. is too engaged in the Middle East Chief Financial Officer James X. Kilbridge or not engaged enough against Iran? Accounting Manag er Galina Veygman Accountant Lyudmila Bolotinskaya 3) Bin Laden adduced a number of reasons for his attacks. From The Al Qaeda Reader Business Services and Raymond Ibrahim’s translations of the bin Laden/Zawahiri written corpus, we learn Alex Batey / Alan Chiu Circulation Manager Jason Ng that they were furious over U.S. involvement in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Chechnya, Iraq, Executive Publisher Scott F. Budd Kosovo, Lebanon, Somalia—and Andalusia. They were aggrieved ove r Israel, Jews, oil, Advertising Director Jim Fowler the U.S. failure to adopt the Kyoto accord, and even the atomic bombings of World War II. Advertising Manager Kevin Longstreet Assistant to the Publisher Brooke Rogers 4) We are now at the end of 2015, about 13 years since the last U.S. soldier left Saudi Director of Revenue Erik Netcher Arabia. Have Salafist clerics and extremist members of the royal family ceased their Vice President, Communications Amy K. Mitchell stealthy support of anti-Western terrorism? PUBLISHERCHAIRMAN 5) King Fahd’s realpolitik agreement to allow U.S. assets to use pre-designated Saudi Jack Fowler John Hillen bases was not a “courageous decision,” but the bad/worse decision of a ruler without better FOUNDER William F. Buckley Jr. options. Apparently the king gambled that survival in 1990 trumped estrangement from his more radical associates. PATRONSANDBENEFACTORS Robert Agostinelli If my dog snaps at me when I pet him in the wrong place, then I either snap harder back Mr. and Mrs. Michael Conway Mark and Mary Davis at him—or get another dog. Virginia James Christopher M. Lantrip Brian and Deborah Murdock Peter J. Travers Letters may be sub mitted by e-mail to [email protected].

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n It figures: Homeland Security has the only government em ploy - ees who don’t spend enough of their workday on Facebook . . .

n Senator Cruz is rising in the polls, both nationally and in Iowa, and winning a slew of social-conservative endorsements. Having backed him early in his 2012 race for the Sen - ate, we feel a certain avuncular pride. Sentimentality aside, Cruz’s rise is a welcome departure from past presidential races, in which social and economic conservatives limited their influ- ence by parting ways. And it’s especially gratifying to see someone thoroughly marinated in conservative principles rise to a position to challenge Donald Trump, who has barely dipped his toe in them. Whether or not Cruz ultimately wins the nomination and the presidency, he has already done a service to conservatism in this race.

n Nobody doubts that Cruz is well-spoken. But he could have chosen his words more carefully when he said that “some of the more aggressive Washington neocons . . . have consistently misperceived the threat of radical Islamic terrorism and have advocated military adventurism that has had the effect of ben- efiting radical Islamic terrorists.” Cruz is certainly within his rights to think that some conservatives lack sufficient skepticism about military interventions, and that particular interventions advocated by some of them have been misguided. The attack was a typical Trumpalooza. It swamped the news cycle; Republican primaries should host that debate. Yet the use of the yet it was not as sweeping as it seemed (his shutdown would term “neocon” does more to obscure than to clarify it. Dur ing last until “our country’s representatives can figure out what is the George W. Bush administration, it became a swear word, a going on” with jihadist terror—a qualifier big enough to signpost for conspiracy theories, and—in some quarters—a squeeze a casino through). The federal government has ple- pejorative version of “Jew.” We do not believe for a moment nary power over aliens’ entering the United States, whe ther as that Cruz is using the word in any of those senses, or courting immigrants or as visitors; during the Iranian hostage crisis, those who do. But in this case, better diction would avoid President Carter slammed the window on visas for Iranians. unnecessary animosity among conservatives. What America needs now is not a blanket prohibition on a billion people, but stricter limits on chain migration and more n Senator Rubio is saying that he stopped a bailout of insurers intense ideological grilling of would-be immigrants (do they who participate in Obamacare’s exchanges. The Obamacare understand the Constitution and the ethos of this country?), as law put taxpayers on the hook if th ose insurers lost money on well as simply better vetting. A sharp, principled poli ti cian can the exchanges, and thus let insurers take the risk of pricing raise these issues in the arena. A click hog only mud dies them. their policies low in order to attract more customers. While Ru - bio has exaggerated his role in putting a temporary end to the n When Secretary of Defense Ash Carter announced that all subsidies, he took a lead in raising the issue—even when other combat jobs will now be available to women, he was defying conservatives were nervous about or opposed to cutting off the not just common sense but also considerable research showing insurers. To his further credit, he is not resting on his laurels: that mixed-gender combat units are less effective by every Instead he is sounding the alarm that the Obama administration important measure: They are less accurate with their weapons is trying to find a way to revive the subsidies. Ending them and less able to evacuate wounded soldiers from the battle- definitively would not mean the end of Obamacare, as some field. Women soldiers are twice as likely to suffer from in - overenthusiastic conservatives have suggested, but it would juries, and the strongest women are only as strong as the remove one of its props and provide taxpayers with a little pro- weakest men. The administration decided that career opportu- tection. The senator has earned the right to do some bragging. nities for women in the military matter more than the infantry’s ability to close with—and destroy—the enemies of the United n Donald Trump’s call for “a total and complete shutdown of States. A political class largely insulated from the realities of ROMAN GENN Muslims entering the United States” after the San Bernardino ground combat has made a deadly mistake.

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n Families of our dead in Benghazi say that Hillary Clinton, n As the nation reeled from the deadliest act of Islamic terror- then secretary of state, told them that the mayhem arose from ism on American soil since September 11, Attorney Gen er al protests over an offensive Internet video. They say, further, Loretta Lynch homed in on the real threat—declaring her that Clinton never mentioned that their loved ones were killed “greatest fear” to be the “incredibly disturbing rise of anti- in a coordinated jihadist attack. On television recently, Muslim rhetoric” in the U.S. and promising that her Justice Clinton said that the families were mistaken: that she never Department would “take action.” But just how common are told them Benghazi was a matter of a negative movie review crimes against Muslims? According to th e FBI’s annual Uni - gone murderously wrong. Someone’s lying. We bet it’s not form Crime Report, there were 1,014 hate-crime incidents the families. motivated by religious bias in 2014. Of those, 154—15.2 percent—were anti-Islamic, a slight uptick from 2013’s 135 inci- n Fully embracing the “rape culture” identity politics in dents (13.1 percent). Meanwhile, there were 609 anti-Jewish vogue on college campuses, Clinton has said that all women incidents. Anti-Muslim crimes are thus lower in the aggregate. have “the right to be believed” when reporting sexual assault, And while there is (roughly) one anti-Muslim crime for every so it was rather bracing when a woman stood up at a New 29,000 American Muslims, there is one anti-Jewish crime for Hamp shire town hall to ask if, ahem, Bill Clinton’s various every 11,000 Jews. There is no outcry about our epidemic of accusers should be believed. “Would you say that about anti-Jewish violence, because there is no such epidemic. Still Jua ni ta Broaddrick, Kathleen Willey, and/or Paula Jones?” less is there an epidemic of anti-Muslim violence. We should the woman asked. “Should we believe them as well?” Mrs. celebrate that fact instead of denying it. But in the wake of a Clin ton shot the woman a flinty look of death (the editors of terrorist attack, the attorney general’s re marks were another NA TION AL REVIEW fear for the brave questioner’s welfare) and indication that this administration would rather address negli- answered: “Everybody should be believed at first until they gible threats than face up to real and deadly ones. are disbelieved based on evidence,” to cheers from the Dem - o cratic crowd. So Hillary’s position is that men are guilty until n As police searched for the murderers of 14 people in San proven innocent or, in one case, until the allegations have Bernardino, Calif., mainstream media outlets noted with mostly been forgotten. alarm that, according to the crowd-sourced “Mass Shooting Tracker” available at shootingtracker.com, San Bernardino’s n In 2012, the president’s reelection team had a story—“Bin massacre marked the 355th “mass shooting” in 336 days. The Laden is dead, General Motors is alive!” as Joe Biden declared numbers are provocative—and, unsurprisingly, misleading. at the Democratic National Convention. They were determined The “Mass Shooting Tracker” defines a “mass shooting” as to stick to it, Lieutenant General Michael Flynn charged in a any in which “four or more people are shot [i.e., injured or recent interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper, even if that meant killed],” including the gunmen, thus lumping in gang shoot - ignoring reports about a new threat rising in the Middle East, outs and familicides with events such as San Bernardino. No the “Islamic State.” According to Flynn, the former head of the government agency uses such a liberal definition. The FBI Defense Intelligence Agency and the Obama administration’s does not define “mass shootings,” but by its definition of top military-intelligence official, the White House downplayed “mass killings”—three deaths, not including the offender— ISIS-related intelligence that “did not meet a narrative the there have been 67 mass killings this year. According to the White House needed . . . that al-Qaeda was on the run, and bin Congressional Research Service, “mass public shootings” Laden was dead.” During the previous administration, er rone - (mass murders committed with a firearm in a public place and ous intelligence and allegations of manipulated intelligence not attributable to an underlying criminal or commonplace led to commissions, prosecutions, and sustained media atten- circumstance, e.g., armed robbery, romantic entanglement, tion. General Flynn is lucky he got airtime. etc.) have taken place 66 times between 1999 and 2013. Over - all, murder rates, including gun-murder rates, have been fall - n When the Obama White House needs a rabbi for its annual ing for years. Press coverage of extraordinary events induces Hanukkah celebration, boy, does it know how to find one. This panic, though, and partisans with an interest in panic add to it year, they got a woman named Susan Talve, a board member of with statistical manipulation. T’ruah, which advocates “human rights in North America, Israel, and the occupied Palestinian territories.” In the White House, nThe White House confirms that, before the year is out, Talve gave a speech worthy of an Occupy activist. She said she President Obama will take executive action to implement was proud to stand “with my fierce family of clergy and Black stricter gun control. More specifically, Obama will go some Lives Matter activists who took to the streets of Ferguson.” She way toward closing what he calls the “gun-show loophole” hailed a group “working to get the guns off of our streets” and by changing the definition of “gun seller” in two portions of another “working to help clean up the fires of toxic nuclear the federal code. Under the new definition, any private seller waste that are threatening our lives.” She said, “I stand here to who sought to transfer a large number of guns would be eli- light these lights that say no to the darkness of Islamophobia, and gible for prosecution. Because the underlying statutes are homophobia, and transphobia, and racism, and anti-Semitism”— extremely tightly written, however, a serious challenge she was nice to include anti-Semitism, during a Hanukkah cele- would be all but inevitable. Moreover, the Administrative bration. And she called for “justice for Palestinians,” whereupon Procedure Act of 1946 requires that any such rule be presented she intoned “Insha’Allah. Insha’Allah. Insha’Allah. Insha’Allah.” for notice and public comment before it becomes law. Is four times the charm? Anyway, there will always be rabbis Obama will almost certainly fail to get his changes through such as Susan Talve available to leaders such as Barack Obama. by the time he leaves office, and, once they are binding, he

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is likely to watch them be gutted by the courts. In the mean- run for the governorship of Texas. Her election-season advoca- time, irritated Americans will rush out to buy more guns, as cy, Davis told Politico, still “haunts” her to this day. She is, she per usual. explained, feeling extremely “guilty.” She has, she confessed, no choice going forward but to live with the “consequences” for n In December, Wendy Davis apologized profusely for having what is now a sullied “conscience.” She was not talking about taken a morally reprehensible policy position during her 2014 her famous advocacy on behalf of late-term abortion. Instead

Up with Interest Rates!

T has been so long since the Fed last enacted an inter- 34.5 months. While short-term interest rates have moved est-rate hike—back in June 2006—that it would be the significantly, long-term interest rates barely budge, with I rare reader indeed who remembers what a tightening the ten-year Treasury rate inching up only 0.9 percentage cycle looks like. Doomsayers, of course, have entered that points. Economic momentum has, historically, clearly information void, and the Fed’s gradual move toward nor- continued to carry into past tightening cycles. The unem- malization of policy seems on cable news to be a bigger ployment rate declined 1.4 percentage points on average. threat to the future of America than terrorism. It’s not as bad A similar experience today would take the unemployment a threat as income inequality and climate change, but it is rate all the way down to 3.6 percent. Believe it or not, even not to be trifled with. investors generally do well when the Fed tightens. Once Higher interest rates do make credit-financed purchases equity markets get over the shock, they recover quickly, more expensive, and that does tend to depress both con- with stock prices increasing at an annualized rate of 8.4 sumption and investment. On the other hand, the economy percentage points on average. has to be doing pretty well for the Fed to decide to take If the Fed is confident enough to tighten, everyone else away the punch bowl. Tightening, then, should happen on is confident enough to go about their business, driving average when times are good. If the wizards at the Fed growth and prosperity onwards and upwards. So if you think times are good, losing the punch bowl is probably not find the conversation wandering toward Fed policy at a something to lose sleep over. cocktail party this holiday season, point to the data and But don’t take my word for it. Let’s look at the evidence. suggest that an interest-rate hike is like a giant Christmas To gain insight into the historical experience of tightening, present from Federal Reserve chair Janet Yellen to the we gathered economic data for every tightening cycle since American people. 1985: four full cycles in all. That date seemed a good choice, —KEVIN A. HASSETT as it starts our analysis just after Paul Volcker’s Olympian interest-rate lifts, which drove rates so high that even to - day’s most hawkish hawks should contemplate them only when medicated. Fed Tightening Cycles in How should one define a tightening cycle? Think of mon- etary policy as a noose. When interest rates are lifted, the Historical Perspective: noose tightens and tightens. When the noose is as tight as 1985 to Present it gets, the economy is still being strangled. Only when the noose is loosened has the tightening ended. So a tighten- 40

ing cycle begins with an interest-rate hike, and ends only 35 34.5 when interest rates are reduced. Using this approach, we see that there were four distinct 30

tightening cycles after 1985: one beginning in October 25 1986 and ending in May 1989; one beginning in September 1992 and ending in April 1995; one beginning in February 20

1999 and ending in December 2000; and one beginning 15 in June 2003 and ending in August 2007. 10 The chart below shows the state and evolution of several 8.4 key economic variables during a tightening cycle. On aver- 6.3 5 age, tightening began in the past with the unemployment Units (Specified at Horizontal Axis) 3.1 0.9 -1.4 0 rate at 6.3 percent. Today’s unemployment rate is at 5.0 Unemployment Fed 10-Year S&P 500 Cycle percent, so this Fed has started much later in a recovery Rate at Funds Treasury (% Annual Unemployment Duration -5 Start (%) Rate (%) Yield (%) Rate) Rate (Months) than has been the case in the past. Tightening has typically

occurred quite gradually, with the typical tightening cycle SOURCE: YAHOO! FINANCE, BOARD OF GOVER.ORS OF THE FEDERAL RESERVE lifting the federal funds rate by 3.1 percentage points over SYSTEM (U.S.), U.S. BUREAU OF LABOR STATISTICS.

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she regretted her public (though, she now admits, insincere) of professorial reason. “I don’t usually agree with Justice Scalia's support for a bipartisan bill to make Texas the 45th state in the perspectives,” he wrote, “but we are doing him wrong on this union to permit the open carry of handguns. After all, someone one.” As McWhorter notes, the “mismatch” between students’ could get hurt. preparedness and institutional expectations often causes minority students to cluster at the bottom, especially in sciences and law. n In December, the New York Times ran an editorial on its front “Black and Latino students are often less prepared for the pace of page for the first time in 95 years. The editors’ pressing topic: the teaching at tippy-top schools because of the societal factors that need to ban so-called “assault weapons” and, thereby, put an end dismay us all,” he writes. “The question is: Do we respond to this to the “gun epidemic” in the United States. That last phrase was by nonetheless placing students in schools teaching beyond what re veal ing: Guns can indeed be found in increasing proliferation, they are prepared? The data suggest this harms more than it helps, even if gun violence has been falling. “Assault weapons” barely and that is not a racist observation in the least.” But the purpose register in the diminishing annual numbers. The Times nonethe- of shouting “Racist!” isn’t to identify racists; the purpose is to less argues not just for a ban on their sale but for the confiscation shout “Racist!” of the existing stock. Americans are likely to give this advice the same hearing they gave to the Times’s last front-page editorial: the one abhorring Warren Harding a few months before his n Professor Robert Reich, a figure of some importance in record-setting landslide. the Clinton administration and a leading light of the Eliz a - beth Warren wing of the Democratic party, has in the past n Since ISIS attacked Paris in November, the New York Daily demanded that U.S. companies be made to sign a “Cor por - News has been focused like a laser on the real enemies of the ate Pledge of Allegiance,” and is a conspiracy theorist who Western way of life: law-abiding gun owners. In the space of just believes that nefarious foreigners are using U.S. corpora- three weeks, the paper has run no fewer than four covers attack- tions as a cover to turn American policy against our inter- ing the right to keep and bear arms and blaming it for all the ests. A recent column is titled “What to Do about Disloyal world’s ills. In two of the offerings, the head of the NRA, Wayne Corporations.” The day before yesterday, Demo crats main- LaPierre, was depicted as a jihadi. In another, advocates of the tained that questioning a rival’s patriotism was the height of Second Amendment were held responsible for the actions of villainy, but Reich et al. have become quite fond of doing so, international terrorists. For good measure, one of the covers also with Barack Obama denouncing Republicans as “unpatriotic” took aim at the virtue of prayer. The god of liberalism is both an and his surrogates charging Mitt Romney with “economic angry and a jealous one. treason,” while Reich himself refers to firms that relocate out of high-tax jurisdictions as “deserters.” (Note the rhetor- n The Pew Research Center generated a round of headlines ical imposition of martial law.) Reich’s answer to corporate declaring the death of the middle class. The reality uncovered by “disloyalty”—by which he means the group’s report is less dramatic. Fewer people make between making business decisions that 67 and 200 percent of the median income: Alter those parameters, do not comport with his polit- and what disappears is not the middle class but this trend. More ical preferences—is stripping important, people’s absolute income should matter more to us firms of their legal rights. In than their relative standing, and the Pew measure could find a the broader context of a Demo - shrinking middle class even if every individual member of the cratic party that recently voted middle class was doing better. Americans have real economic to repeal the First Amend ment problems, but an obsession with equality cannot illuminate them. and that is currently attempting to prosecute Americans as n Robert Dear, accused killer of three at a Colorado Springs criminals for hold - Planned Parenthood clinic, told a courtroom, “I am a warrior for ing the wrong views the babies.” No, you are not. You are a peer of their killers. Rea- on global warm- son and justice condemn you. The great pro-life faiths condemn ing, this is worri- you. The pro-life movement, which has labored for four decades some. to break the abortion idol, condemns you. You are a madman, a disgrace to the cause you claim to uphold. May God have pity on you; here below, only a saint could. n The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), signed into law in mid December, promises to return much control of education n The party of science is having a fit over Justice Antonin Sca - policy to states and school districts. Under ESSA, the federal lia’s reference to a well-documented body of scholarly research government will maintain performance standards, but offer more showing that black and Hispanic students admitted to highly ways for schools to meet them than the current regimen of tests; selective schools that loosen their academic standards out of con- it will eliminate the rigid “adequate yearly progress” require- cern for racial diversity often do poorly, and that many of them ment, which has haunted teachers and administrators, and the would be better off attending slightly less competitive schools. “highly qualified teacher” provision, which keeps competent GETTY IMAGES / For this, Senator Harry Reid (D., Nev.) denounced the justice as, teachers out of the classroom for a lack of proper licensing; and in effect, a black-robed justice in a white hood. Professor Jesse it will allow states and school districts, instead of Washington, to Goldberg of Cornell answered with an economical “F*** you, determine the best way to bring failing schools up to snuff. The ROBIN MARCHANT Scalia.” But John McWhorter of Columbia was an unusual voice law will also put other constraints on the federal government,

1 0 | www.nationalreview.com DECEMBER 3 1 , 2 0 1 5 Unmaking of a mayor book full page and coupon1_milliken-mar 22.qxd 9/29/2015 6:43 PM Page 1 gn. As d that “The proc phere of Americ and other major d the problems o nsti- conclude n of ills that plagued New York of a Mayor is a time$22.95! capsule of the politicalportation, atmos racial bias, mismanagement, taxes, an ONLY police, and education. Buckley’s nimble dissection of these issues co CELEBRATE THE FIFTIETH ANNIVERSARY OF THE llent e CAMPAIGN THAT SAVED CONSERVATISM. GET BILL BUCKLEY’S n serv- THE UNMAKING OF A MAYOR NEW FOREWORD BY NEAL B. FREEMAN. NEW AFTERWORD BY JOE SCARBOROUGH.

onsidered by many to be one of the best political books ever written, National Review is thrilled to announce a new “Fiftieth Anniversary” edition of Bill Buckley’s classic candidate memoir, CThe Unmaking of a Mayor. Could it be a half century already since Buckley launched his famous Conservative Party effort to become mayor of New York City, an effort that revitalized—indeed, saved—the conservative moment, flat on its back from the 1964 Goldwater drubbing? It is. And the Golden Anniversary is well worth celebrating, heralding a seat-of-the-pants campaign that captivated the nation. Yes, it failed, as Bill captured just 13% of the vote on Election Day, with liberal Republican John Lindsay emerging as the next Mayor of New York. But: Did it really fail? In fact, the effort prevailed, in large, historic, and consequential ways, as Candidate Buckley, by dint of his persona, moxie, wit, verve, and intelligence, revived and resuscitated the conservative movement from coast to coast. The Unmaking of a Mayor is Buckley at his finest—in youthful prime, in the center of the maelstrom, standing athwart history, casti- gating the liberal elite, bringing the conservative message to millions, who found it . . . quite to their liking. This handsome, big (nearly 500 pages!), high-quality softcover edition, re-published in conjunction with our friends at Encounter Books, is only $22.95 a copy, and includes two terrific additions to the original printing. One is a tour-de-force Afterword by Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough, a huge WFB fan, who wrote of the effort:

But because of his own virtuoso performance on the trail, the NR editor somehow managed to turn a municipal election into a national event. Along the way, he also managed to supply a badly needed spark to what the candidate himself had called a dying ideology. The Buckley campaign would also unite a coalition of working class voters who would be labeled “Reagan Democrats” in the coming years. The conversion of these Democrats to the Conservative cause would provide an electoral road map for Republican success that would soon make Buckley’s damaged party the dominant force in American politics for a generation to come.

The other is a brilliant Foreword by frequent NR contributor and Buckley Campaign aide-de-camp Neal Freeman (“It’s been fifty years now since Bill Buckley demanded a recount. Perhaps we owe him one.”). If you want a fascinating piece of history, a National Review 215 Lexington Avenue New York, NY 10016 world-class campaign memoir, an example of w w w Buckley—the writer, the polemicist—at his very Send me ______copies of The Unmaking of a Mayor. My cost is $22.95 each (that includes best, a book that is as relevant today as it was a shipping and handling). I enclose total payment of $______. Send to: half century ago, then you must get (direct from Name NR) this new anniversary edition of The PAYMENT METHOD: o Check enclosed (payable to National Review) Unmaking of a Mayor. Address o Bill my o MasterCard o Visa HOLY WORLD WIDE WEB! YOU CAN City State ZIP Acct. No.

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among them checks on the secretary of education’s liberal regu- the sort of economic policies that Bernie Sanders dreams of, have latory powers, used and abused to educators’ and administrators’ faced shortages of everything from food staples to toilet paper. despair under current secretary Arne Duncan. Our ideal policy The opposition has promised a degree of economic liberalization would go farther than this law, but ESSA is a strong step in the and the release of political prisoners, opposition figure Leopoldo right direction. López prominent among them. Between the opposition and its aims stands President Nicolás Maduro, a protégé of Hugo n To the campus-rape alarmists, due process and free speech Chá vez who has done much to immiserate his people. Maduro make colleges unsafe for women. At least that’s the message al ready is working to stop reform: He has declared that he simply from the makers of the acclaimed documentary The Hunting will refuse to comply with any law that releases political pris- Ground, which repeats standard (and discredited) claims of a oners and is seeking a “labor stabilization” law that would forbid rape epidemic on American campuses. After 19 Harvard Law firms from firing any employees so long as Maduro is president. School professors wrote a letter noting its “unfair” portrayal of (What’s the Spanish for “I have a pen and a phone,” anyway?) a Harvard student, the filmmakers accused them of creating a Venezuela once was the world’s fourth-wealthiest country, and it “hostile climate” for women at the university. That wasn’t a lightly enjoys vast natural resources, particularly oil and gas. Its penury chosen phrase: Under prevailing interpretations of federal law, is an entirely man-made disaster. The United States should do creating a “hostile climate” is something over which a college or what it can for Venezuela’s reformers, but we should also remem- university can lose its federal funding. The filmmakers were, in ber how popular Chávez and his ideas were among our own other words, encouraging Harvard to take disciplinary action Democrats, such as Chaka Fattah and Jimmy Carter, and among against the professors for criticizing their documentary. Nothing so-called liberals such as Sean Penn, Michael Moore, and Oliver the professors said about the documentary’s fairness and commit- Stone. Chávez and Maduro built the world they dream of, and it ment to due process is re mote ly as damning as this response. is a hungry prison camp.

n Dean Skelos (R.), for- n Journalists had a ready-made line: Would the Festival of Lights mer majority leader of the take place in the City of Light? French authorities asked the Jews New York state senate, and of Paris to curtail their Hanukkah activities. The number of public his son Adam were con- menorah lightings was greatly reduced. But the big one took victed of conspiracy, extor- place: at the foot of the Eiffel Tower. The police were out in force. tion, and soliciting bribes: Paris has been the scene of murderous Islamist attacks. The Times Companies eager to do of Israel quoted a Parisian woman named Coen who said, “I’m business with the state not afraid. This is proof that the Jewish people are alive. This year, gave Adam no-show jobs Hanukkah is more significant, we have to give more light.” after being wheedled and Ar nold Schwarzenegger happened to be in town for the global bullied by Dean. The ver- climate talks. According to the Times, “he gamely danced to the dict comes a fortnight after simcha music with a flock of Lubavitch rabbis at the foot of the Sheldon Silver (D.), for- stage.” An Austrian-born American movie star and politician, mer speaker of the New York assembly, was convicted of profiting the son of a Nazi, joining Jews in Paris for Hanukkah: not bad. from an asbestos referral racket (a friendly doctor bucked cases to Silver’s law firm, which gave him millions of dollars in fees). n Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, has announced that he New York has perfected big-government bipartisanship: All vot- intends to transfer 99 percent of his shares in the company to a ers (in theory) get benefits, a few get favors, and most politicians new enterprise dedicated to philanthropy. At current share prices, get rewarded. The closest thing to a two-party system in such a that’s a donation of about $45 billion; his newborn daughter, vir- place is a zealous prosecutor (in this case, U.S. Attorney Preet tually dispossessed, would be left with a mere $450 million to see Bharara), but it’s slow work throwing the rascals out one at a time. her through. There are the usual (inevitable, really) complaints that Zuckerberg isn’t doing enough, or that he is pursuing some n In July 2010, Guantanamo Bay detainee Ibrahim Qosi—also furtively self-interested agenda. Most people will never in their known as Sheikh Khubayb al-Sudani—pleaded guilty to lives give away $4,500 at a go, much less $45 billion. Zuck er - charges, brought by a military tribunal, of conspiracy and mate- berg is going about this in an unusual way, choosing to form an rial support for terrorism. Two years later, he was released. Un - LLC rather than a tax-exempt charitable foundation, which will sur pris ing ly, two years after that he joined al-Qaeda in the deprive him of immediate tax benefits (the Kennedy-family Arabian Peninsula, which recently released a new video featur- model of charity) but will give him more flexibility in how the ing Qosi among its “Guardians of Sharia.” Qosi makes 196 for- money is used. His agenda is interesting and encouraging for a mer detainees either confirmed (117) or suspected (79) of couple of reasons: Putting equity to work on behalf of those in returning to the battlefield after their release—a recidivism rate need is preferable to simply writing large checks (it is easier to do of about 30 percent. Still, the president hopes to empty out the good with wealth than with mere cash flows), and he is pursuing prison before his time in office ends. Perhaps the 107 remaining this course at the age of 31 rather than as a retirement hobby. It is detainees will embrace a quieter retirement. the business of nitpickers to pick nits; let Zuckerberg’s critics BLOOMBERG VIA GETTY IMAGES / weigh in after they’ve donated their first dozen billions. n Venezuelans, having noticed that the cupboard is bare, have turned against Chavismo, delivering the national assembly to the n When the principal of a Brooklyn elementary school banned LOUIS LANZANO opposition in the recent elections. Venezuela, which has pursued Santa Claus, the word “Christmas,” and depictions of angels or

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stars (plus Thanksgiving and the Pledge of Allegiance for good changing and inventing lyrics at will to make clear his disdain measure), annoyed parents made her back down. In Indiana, for rock ’n’ roll, yet his performance is flawless (the same after a judge prohibited a traditional Nativity-scene tableau album contains his all-time best-seller, “My Way,” a song he enacted by students, the school presented the same tableau with reportedly disliked for its musical and lyrical bombast). A mannequins instead. And when the University of Tennessee’s childhood during Prohibition and the Depression left Sinatra Office of Di ver si ty and Inclusion—last heard from when it with an unfortunate attraction to gangsters, and he was directed UT students to use “xyr” and “ze” instead of English famously quarrelsome and wrathful; yet he was a longtime pronouns—issued de tailed instructions on how to “ensure your supporter of civil rights for African Americans (and of holiday party is not a Christmas party in disguise” (“Refresh - Israel), and a JFK Democrat who left the party when it veered ment selection should be general, not specific to any religion left, supporting Nixon and then Reagan. When it comes to or culture”), the rules were quickly replaced with a few ano- music, there is no need for balancing; he was quite simply the dyne paragraphs en cour ag ing sensitivity and understanding. best American pop singer ever. As conservatives say every Yule tide: A Christmas party is nowhere near being an es tab lish ment of religion; using the TERRORISM word “Christmas” no more amounts to praising Christ (or After San Bernardino Mass) than saying “Thursday” implies worship of Thor; and anti-religious activists should know that if you treat Christmas SIS came to the Inland Empire when Syed Farook and his like the Ebola virus, as something you must avoid every last wife, Tashfeen Malik , murdered 14 of Farook’s co-workers hint of contact with, then you’re the one who is clinging to out- I at a Health Department holiday luncheon in San Bernar - dated superstitions. dino and injured 22 others. Farook, a school-kitchen inspector, was an American-born child of Pakistani immigrants, Malik a n The career of Frank Sinatra, who would have been 100 years Pak i stani he had met in Saudi Arabia. They were shot by police old this month, paralleled that of the United States at mid-century: on a street near their home, to which they had fled—evidently a rapid rise during World War II, some post-war stumbles, to re trieve a stash of ammunition and pipe bombs. smooth sailing during the Eisenhower years, and unquestioned After the shock of slaughter came the lesser, but still disturb- supremacy under Kennedy, before being blindsided by the ing, shock of reactions. Twitter and other media filled with anti- 1960s. In 1969, by which point he seemed as outdated as an gun crusaders, mocking politicians who offered prayers for the ILIKEIKE button, Sinatra’s cover of Simon & Garfunkel’s victims (“GOD ISN’T FIXING THIS,” brayed the New York Daily “Mrs. Rob in son” typified the man: He treats the song as a joke, News). Since the rifles that Farook and Malik used had been

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while flow here to the disaffected, and possibly to sleeper cells. We must put our own house in order, and bring the fight to ISIS in its lair. To do that we need a commander-in-chief who is not running out the clock.

CLIMATE CHANGE The Paris Deal: Just Say No HE world is momentarily united in cheering the new climate-change accord—“Inspired! Historical! Game- T Changing!”—reached in Paris. Republicans should kill it. The agreement, which is to be regarded as a treaty when the Obama administration or its successors and allies seek to enforce it legally, but which is to be understood as not a treaty on the question of whether it must be submitted to the Senate for advice and consent before ratification, fails on key criteria: First, it im - poses very high costs in return for promised benefits that would be, according to the climate activists’ own models, negligible; sec ond, it does not serve the national interests of the United States, in that it would place heavy burdens on our economy while placing none on those of India and China, two of the world’s three largest emitters of greenhouse gases; third, it is San Bernardino sheriff’s deputies crouch behind a minivan after the mass shooting at the Inland Regional Center on December 2, 2015. being pressed on the United States by the Obama administration in an extralegal and unconstitutional process. On the matter of cost-benefit analysis—which is to say, the legally bought in one of the strictest anti-gun states in the nation, basic question of the efficacy of what is being proposed—the a better moral might be, put not thy trust in princes. The News evidence is, for a change, fairly straightforward. Current an aly - sank lower yet when columnist Linda Stasi vilified Nicholas sis by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Tech nol o gy Thalasinos, one of the murdered, as a “hate-filled bigot.” His (not exactly a nest of fossil-fuel conservatism) suggests that the offense: being a Messianic Jew who condemned Islamic terror. emissions cuts being agreed to in Paris would reduce that esti- Well, he got his comeuppance. mated warming by as little as 0.0°C or by as much as 0.2°C. At President Obama offered his own prayers, which shut up the a real cost of some hundreds of billions of dollars to the U.S. village atheists, and addressed the nation four days later. He economy alone, one would like to get in front of the decimal placed the attack in the context of an evolving “terrorist point. That proposed improvement is scanty in part because threat,” linking it with the Fort Hood massacre in 2009, the of the agreement’s second defect: It burdens mainly the Boston Mar a thon bombing, and June’s Cha ttanooga shootings. United States and other Western countries, while countries This was forthright and welcome. He went on, however, to say such as China and India (far larger emitters, when one makes that “the strategy we are using now” will lead to “victory.” the relevant comparison, which is economic output per ton of What strategy? He specified: air strikes; special forces’ aiding emissions) give up little or nothing. China has committed to local anti-ISIS fighters in Syria and Iraq; stricter vetting of peaking its emissions precisely when U.S. government esti- visas; cooperation with allies. mates believed they would peak anyway. India’s commitment All fine, but not nearly enough. On the ground, the Kurds represents a slowing of its recent efficiency im provements and do the best they can, and anti-ISIS Sunni tribes have begun to falls squarely in the middle of a business-as-usual forecast, stir again in Iraq. But they need the support of U.S. boots on even as the country promises to double its coal consumption in the ground. Vetting of visitors and immigrants needs a com- the next several years. plete overhaul. In the shooting’s aftermath we learned of a If the Obama administration wants to legally bind the United U.S. government policy that forbade investigators from in- States to such a deal, then it must submit the Paris agreement spect ing the social media of would-be immigrants. “They felt to the Senate as a treaty. If it refuses to do this, then Congress looking at public postings was an invasion of [an applicant’s] should make it clear that the agreement is not to be considered privacy,” a former DHS official told ABC News. What would legally binding, and that federal regulations may not be pro- it take to invade our officials’ stupidity? The gospel of PC, mulgated under it. embraced at the top, has seeped out to society as a whole. A There are things that can and should be done as prudential VIA GETTY IMAGES man working in Farook’s neighborhood noted what he thought measures against the possibility of disruptive global warming. was suspicious activity—strange Middle Eastern men coming Hobbling the U.S. economy for a rounding error’s worth of and going to the apartment—but did not report it be cause, as improvement in the forecasts isn’t one of them.

LOS ANGELES TIMES he told CBS, “he did not wish to racially profile.” See some- / thing, say nothing. EDITOR’S NOTE: The next issue of NATIONAL REVIEW ISIS’s homeland churns out the pornography of violence, will appear in three weeks. GINA FERAZZI beheadings as propaganda theater. Money and inspiration mean-

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grants receive legal status but not citizenship. That change, he said, would make it possible to pass immigration reform. Cruz hits Rubio for backing that “amnesty” bill. Rubio parries that giving legal status to illegal immigrants isn’t that different from giving them citizenship. Cruz says that he never really came out for legal status: The goal of his amendment was to highlight how extreme the bill was and thus kill it. He takes no position on whether illegal immigrants should get legal status, arguing that it is a question that should be addressed after a stronger enforcement regime is in place. In recent weeks, Cruz has also shifted on legal immigration levels: He used to favor increases, but now opposes any increase until more Americans are working. Both senators are, then, moving right- ward on the issue. Cruz, though, seems more in tune with the sentiments of Re - Cruz vs. Rubio publican voters, very few of whom tell They are having to disagre e because they are so much alike pollsters they want more immigration. Cruz voted for the USA Freedom Act, which ended the NSA’s storage of meta- BY RAMESH PONNURU data from millions of phone calls made to and from the United States. (Metadata REUD wasn’t talking about party decades—is ahead in Iowa in some polls; includes numbers dialed, times of calls, primaries when he coined the Rubio isn’t ahead in any state. Cruz also and so forth, but not the content of calls.) F phrase “the narcissism of small seems to be doing better among the most Under the new law, enacted this summer, differences,” but he might as well conservative Republicans than Rubio is the government must request specific have been. The similarities between doing among the less conservative ones: records from phone companies. Rubio Senators Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio are Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, and John Kasich says that Cruz’s vote weakened national demographic, biographical, and ideolog- are competing for those same voters and security; Cruz says that attack impugns ical. Both are young Cuban-American are not far behind Rubio in the polls. his patriotism. conservatives who won election to the Cruz and Rubio have sparred on three That’s a stretch, as is Cruz’s claim that, U.S. Senate by defeating more estab- issues to date: immigration, surveillance before the new law, the NSA treated all lished Republican politicians. They agree by the National Security Agency, and for- Americans as guilty until proven inno- on nearly everything. Listening to them eign policy. The first of these issues is the cent. More plausibly, Cruz says that he now, though, you would think their most politically important. wants to fight terrorism and protect pri- worldviews are fundamentally at odds. When Rubio ran for the Senate in 2010, vacy rights at the same time. He can find Cruz’s version of Rubio is an amnesty- he said he would oppose giving illegal safety in numbers. The legislation passed loving warmonger; Rubio’s version of immigrants legal status. In 2013, however, by large margins. It was sponsored by Cruz is a pandering isolationist. In reality, he co-sponsored legislation with Demo - James Sensenbrenner, who sponsored the the candidates disagree more on political crats that would have let many illegal Patriot Act right after the September 11 strategy than on policy. immigrants receive legal status and citi- attacks and had the support of now- The backbiting could get more intense. zenship. He later said that the bill was too speaker Paul Ryan. Rubio’s line of criti- Many analysts think the Republican pri- ambitious, and that Washington would cism implicitly portrays most House mary race could turn into a contest between have to prove that immigration laws Republicans as soft on terrorism. It is not the two men, with Cruz representing the would be enforced before addressing the a conclusion to which Republican pri - more conservative factions of the party and status of illegal immigrants. mary voters are naturally drawn. Rubio the “party establishment.” It is a the- Cruz opposed that 2013 bill. He said he The foreign-policy debate has taken a ory that so far has more adherents than evi- favored “immigration reform,” but that a somewhat surprising direction. Rubio has dence to back it. It depends on Donald path to citizenship was a “poison pill”: aligned himself with those Republicans Trump’s fading away, so that it’s not a Democrats had included it to keep House who believe the country must take an three-way race. It also assumes that Rubio Republicans from voting for the bill, so aggressive role in spreading liberty and will become a more serious contender than that they could keep using immigration as democracy abroad. Cruz has for a long polls currently suggest. Cruz—who has, I a political issue. He proposed an amend- time said that he stands somewhere in the ROMAN GENN should note, been a friend of mine for two ment that would have let illegal immi- wide space between John McCain and

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Rand Paul, who represent the most and constitutional inheritance and their eco- least interventionist poles of the party. nomic dynamism. And the way to change As the campaign has progressed, course is to rouse conservatives to action. though, Cruz has begun to criticize “neo- In the primaries, the rightmost elements Discriminating con” foreign policy more pointedly for of the Republican party must unify behind being too interventionist and to voice him. In the general election, he will moti- Discrimination skepticism about promoting democracy vate conservatives to vote in a way that Of Donald Trump and immigration abroad. At times, he has said, the U.S. relative moderates John McCain and should accept that dictators can be better Mitt Romney were unable to. Cruz often BY KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON than the probable alternatives: a lesser claims that millions of conservatives and evil. He has suggested that Rubio, like Evangelicals stayed home in the 2008 ONALD TRUMP has a peculiar Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, was and 2012 elections. (This is true, as mil- talent for turning good ideas wrong to favor ending the regimes of lions of potential voters of every type stay D into bad ones. Bashar al-Assad in Syria and the late home in any election; it is also true that This is related to his talent for Moammar Qaddafi in Libya. He has conservatives and Evangelicals made up salesmanship, which demands that he deal even said that Iraq was more stable when the same share of the electorate as usual.) in superlatives and simplicities. An excel- Saddam Hussein ruled it. These views Rubio also believes that Obama is lent idea such as securing the southern have drawn the “isolationist” charge leaving America in a parlous state, but border with a series of barriers becomes a from Rubio. his critique is more conventional and less batty proposition: a single point-to-point The argument on both sides is over- apocalyptic. In Rubio’s telling, Obama wall (never mind the bodies of water, can - drawn. Cruz is not a knee-jerk opponent has made unwise choices driven by a yons, etc., in the way) with a grand door in of intervention, and he is not indifferent to liberal ideology unsuited to the realities it through which a dozen million illegal human rights in other countries. He has of 21st-century American life. Our prob- immigrants will be marched out over the done a lot to publicize abuses in Iran, for lems have grown worse, and our mood course of 18 months before most of them example, and has argued for deploying more sour, because of this disconnect. are immediately readmitted, with these missile defenses in Europe. Nor is Rubio In the primaries, Rubio’s strategy is to shenanigans funded in part by pesos ex - indiscriminate in his advocacy of military assemble a coalition more akin to those torted from the government of Mexico. action: Like Cruz, he declared President of previous Republican nominees, one Trump has grunted out a similarly daft Obama’s proposed air strikes against that includes elements from every part of proposal regarding the admission of Assad in 2013 unwise and said he would the party. In the general, he is signaling Muslims to the United States as immi- vote against them. But the differences that he will employ a strategy like that of grants and visitors, calling for a “total between the men are real and reflect real past election winners: Like Cruz, he will and complete shutdown of Muslims differences among Republican voters. seek to mobilize the base; more than entering the United States.” My friend These differences over policy have con- Cruz, he will attempt to persuade non- Larry Kudlow, writing for NATIONAL tributed to the associations of Cruz with ideological voters that his agenda will REVIEW, went a step farther and called “tea-party conservatives” and Rubio with make a positive difference in their lives. for a total ban on immigration and an end “the establishment,” but they are not the Rubio seeks to modernize the Republican to the visa-waiver program, which primary reasons for those associations. party, Cruz to purify it. allows visitors from certain countries to The political style of the two men has Both men are running campaigns that enter without obtaining a visa, until the played a bigger role. In the fall of 2013, defy the political rulebook. In Rubio’s federal government develops a satisfac- Rubio went along with Cruz in tying the case, the bet is that the old rules about tory method for screening out would-be budget to Obamacare in a way that precip- needing a “ground game” no longer jihadists. Neither of those proposals is a itated a partial government shutdown. But apply: His campaign is lightly organized. good policy, but, contrary to some of the it was Cruz, not Rubio, who said that the Cruz, by contrast, has an impressive critics, neither is unconstitutional, either. skeptics of the strategy that led to the shut- organization. But he is betting that the In fact, Trump’s proposal would not down were the “surrender caucus.” endorsements from other politicians that even require additional congressional Both men are gifted speakers, which is candidates have traditionally coveted do authorization: Under the Immigration and part of their appeal to Republicans tired not matter. He is betting that he can simul- Nationality Act, the president already is of tongue-tied candidates. But Cruz is taneously do several things that have not empowered to suspend “the entry of any more likely to use combative language, been done in decades, or ever: unite the aliens or of any class of aliens into the Rubio to wax inspirational. In each case right of the party in the primaries, battle United States” if their entry “would be the rhetorical approach is matched to a the party’s leadership explicitly and bit- detrimental to the interests of the United distinctive diagnosis of the national con- terly and then win the nomination, and States.” Remarkably, the president may dition and a political strategy. win the general election with a base- do so without consulting Congress, sim- Cruz portrays an America that, thanks mobilization strategy. ply by issuing a proclamation. He can do to the Obama administration, is on the Both men, then, are in different ways this to any class of aliens he believes to be brink of irreversible decline. Its people de fying the odds. They aim to prove that detrimental for as long as he likes. The are growing too dependent on govern- what everyone said couldn’t be done can same law empowers the attorney general ment. Unless they change course now, be. Which is, in a final parallel, how they to block airlines from transporting for- they will lose their ability to reclaim their both got to the Senate in the first place. eigners to the United States if he judges

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the airline to be inadequately (and some law-enforcement) committed to enforcing U.S. projects were significantly security regulations, particu- im proved and expanded. But larly those regarding fraudu- the kind of intelligence that is lent travel documents. used to organize a drone Nor would it necessarily be attack is different from what illegal to target Muslims as a we should be using to screen class. The Supreme Court has immigrants and visitors. We repeatedly upheld the plenary aren’t looking only for active power of the elected branches malefactors but for likely po - of government over immigra- tential malefactors, not only tion. In Chae Chan Ping v. those who have done acts of United States, the Court upheld violence but those who are the constitutionality of the inclined to sympathize with Chi nese Exclusion Act, which such views. For example, forbade would-be immigrants having attended a Hamas based on their Chinese ethnici- madrassa doesn’t make one ty, regardless of their country of Donald Trump an active terrorist per se, but it origin. The Chinese Exclusion should render one persona non Act is not one of the prouder episodes in countries, but they were mainly French grata for visa and immigration purposes. American legislative history, but the con- and Belgian nationals, and mostly It isn’t a crime to be an Illinois-born stitutional reasoning behind the Court’s European-born. We could elaborate our man from a Pakistani immigrant family upholding it was, and is, sound. There is criteria for giving some entrants height- who travels to Saudi Arabia to wed a no reason to believe that a religious class ened scrutiny (or rejecting them outright), Pakistani-born Jeddah resident, but there’s should be considered invalid—during a for instance by including not only those no reason we have to rush through the time of religious terrorism—where an from countries associated with terrorism bride’s fiancée visa, either. ethnic class was allowed to stand. but also residents of other countries who Which is to say, what is needed here isn’t Prohibiting Muslim immigration to the are connected to those countries in some only a policy reform but, more important, United States categorically as a national- way, such as by family history or by their a reform of practice. Doing the necessary security measure would present some seri- having traveled or resided there. That investigative work is going to be a long, ous operational problems. It is a bit like might make us feel better, but those crite- laborious, tedious, and inevitably expen- trying to use gun licensing to prevent ria would merely be a proxy for Islam. sive process that consumes vast amounts homicide: Just as murderers are no great We should not cut off immigration of federal manpower. Getting the feds to respecters of gun laws, jihadists coming entirely, or cut off Muslim immigration actually do their jobs is no small thing. to the United States to do violence proba- entirely, though we should suspend the The visitor-visa side of the project is bly are not going to have any qualms visa-waiver program, at least for a time. going to be very difficult. The immigra- about telling a few lies to U.S. immigra- And we should be forthright about the tion side might prove a little bit easier, tion authorities to make it happen. Short fact that we are aggressively seeking to in that the mood of the country favors of that, most other countries do not iden- exclude those whom we believe to be less immigration in general, along with tify their citizens by religion on travel possible terror risks, and that in situations stronger enforcement of the law. A general documents, and most of them do not keep where the balance of evidence isn’t clear, restriction of immigration is a good policy any records that would allow them to com- we’re going to err on the side of caution. for many reasons, and it also would pro- municate this conveniently to U.S. author- Of course this means religious profiling, vide a measure of ground cover for ities. Given that the Islamic State seems to some extent; it is a practical impossibil- Muslim-specific restrictions that might to be in possession of passport-making ity to investigate whether someone is likely offend our national sense of evenhanded- machines, madrassa graduate Mohammed to sympathize with Islamic radicalism ness. Our European cousins have had al-Mohammed of Karachi could become without also determining whether he is some sobering experiences with large, ex-seminarian Paul Fernandes of Bombay Muslim. It necessitates background checks poorly assimilated populations of Muslim without too much trouble. that incorporate some religious criteria. immigrants and their descendants, both as Because of our national ethic of non - But getting the broad-strokes policy a question of national culture and in the discrimination, we resist the idea of inves- right is only a small part of the solution. specific matter of providing a hospitable tigating or restricting people, including What will end up mattering a great deal growth medium for radicalism and terror- foreigners, based on their religion. But it more in the long run is the day-to-day ism. With a few already-worrying local would not be sufficient simply to target operation of the enhanced screening exceptions (such as the dozens of Somali immigrants from jihad-exporting coun- processes we develop. It is one thing for Americans from Minnesota who have tries such as Pakistan or Egypt. That is a presidential candidate (or a president) joined al-Shabaab), the United States has because these jihad-exporters have been to say, “It shall be thus!” but experience no such population. It could do itself a CHARLIE NEIBERGALL / exporting jihadists to the United Kingdom suggests that actually getting the work favor by not importing one. and Western Europe for decades. The done is a different story. After 9/11, our That’s an argument that is too important AP PHOTO Paris killers had family ties to Muslim intelligence capacities touching military to be left to the likes of Donald Trump.

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longstanding prominence of the issue: The bubble theory is not all hot air. It “God and Man at Yale” (1951); “The would never have gotten off the ground if Degradation of the Academic Dogma” the cost of attending college had not Reclaiming (1971); “The Closing of the American increased vertiginously. Bubble theo- Mind” (1987). There were important dif- rists also make reasonable criticisms of Traditional ferences between the intellectual and reduced standards. Trendy courses sub- political orientations of William F. Buck - stitute scholarly fads for the classics, ley Jr., Robert Nisbet, and Allan Bloom, and surveys find that many students, far Education the authors, respectively, of the books from becoming “natural aristocrats,” Why we should study old books that bore those names. don’t learn much in college. and beautiful things Nevertheless, their diagnoses had The downside of the bubble theory is some common features. First, conserva- that it has become an excuse for dis- BY SAMUEL GOLDMAN tives posited that the canon was the soul missing the study of dead languages, of the university. From the medieval old books, and beautiful things. In university through the colonial col- 2011, for example, Rush Limbaugh OHN STUART MILL described leges, institutions of higher education argued that classics majors were “wast- conservatives “as being by a aimed to teach “the best which has been ing [their] time in a nothing major.” By J law of their existence the stu- thought and said,” in Matthew Arnold’s reducing college to the pursuit of prac- pidest party.” The present can- phrase. This vocation was political as tical relevance, bubble theorists on the didates for the GOP nomination seem well as intellectual. In studying master- right become unwitting allies of the determined to prove him right. pieces of Western civilization, students trigger-warning brigade. For different Marco Rubio took his shot at proving could cultivate virtues necessary to lim- reasons, both treat education as an the Mill theorem during the fourth ited government. instrumental matter of ad vancing one’s Republican-primary debate. Respond- Next, conservatives argued that in - interests—and the sooner the better. ing to a question about the minimum fluxes of students and subsidies after It would be irresponsible to ignore wage, he asserted: “Welders make more World War II diverted universities from today’s tight budgets and tough labor money than philosophers. We need more this mission. Rather than educating citi- markets. If being conservative means welders and less philosophers.” zens for self-rule, they prepared students anything, however, surely it means pre- Rubio’s claim about wages is false. for lives as workers and consumers. serving higher education from both the Philosophy majors and welders earn It followed from this argument that bean counters and the devotees of pro- comparable incomes at the beginning of we should return higher education to its gressive ideology. In Reflections on the their working life, but philosophy majors origins. With a renewed focus on tradi- Revolution in France, Edmund Burke do much better than welders over the tional subjects and methods, colleges and pointed out that radical egalitarians course of their career. Rubio would universities could moderate the despotic were not the only enemies of the pre- have come closer to the truth if he’d tendencies of modern democracy by cul- modern, apparently irrational institu- focused on theology—the lowest-paid tivating a natural aristocracy. tions that he defended. The Jacobins liberal-arts major, according to Pay- Although it informed conservative would not have gotten far if the “sophis- scale.com. But a crack at the ex pense of arguments from the 1940s to the culture ters, economists, and calculators” had religion might not have worked for a wars of the 1990s, this conception of not basically agreed with them. Republican audience. higher education is no longer authorita- But what sort of “higher” education? All politicians play games with num- tive on the right. In the last decade, a new Surely advanced seminars in basket- bers. The real problem is that Rubio’s critique has challenged it. According to weaving aren’t worth saving. But they remark reflects a deep hostility to this view, universities are vendors of cre- are far from the only thing that happens ideals that conservatives once trea- dentials that allow students to increase in our colleges and universities. At a sured. Rather than encouraging the their future income. Since chemical engi- discussion at Williams College in 1989, transformation of universities into a neers, say, earn more than English majors, during a previous round of the culture combination of vocational-training students should choose technical or pre- wars, Gertrude Himmelfarb suggested centers and sports franchises, conserv- professional subjects. Moreover, new that we speak of “traditional” education. atives should defend traditional educa- technologies make online instruction Traditional edu cation is what needs tion against an unholy alliance of cheaper than traditional courses. There - advocates—among conservative politi- utilitarian philistinism and progressive fore, we should shift funding toward cians as well as academics. activism that increasingly dominates massive open online courses and other While it’s hard to give an exhaustive American campuses. high-tech approaches. definition of this term, we can set the Criticism of higher education plays a This analysis combines populist sus- boundaries by rule of thumb: Traditional distinctive role in American conserva- picion of book learning with a business- education includes courses and disci- tive thought. Titles alone indicate the minded commitment to efficiency. It is plines that regularly require students to often summarized by describing higher consider texts, artifacts, or ideas that are Mr. Goldman is an assistant professor of political education as a “bubble,” in the dual more than about 50 years old. For under- science at George Washington University and the sense of being cut off from the real graduates, this should include physics director of its Politics & Values Program. world and being unsustainable. and mathematics.

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Traditional education, in other words, possibility that traditional education are non-traditional students who are older is about building a relationship with the has inherent intellectual value. We than usual, work full time, or both. Surely past and passing on what has already don’t have to take Matthew Arnold’s they don’t need Aristotle. been learned, as the necessary condition word for it. Contrary to the popular We should not accept this patronizing of ma king new discoveries. A commit- caricature, students in history, English, assumption. The biggest problems with ment to creating this relationship is much and philosophy classes do learn some- the lower tiers of higher education are more important than preservation of a thing. In their widely praised study low completion rates and inadequate rigidly fixed canon. Traditional educa- Academically Adrift (2011), Richard skills among those who do graduate. tion can change for the better, as it did Arum and Josipa Roksa found that stu- Although vocational programs are the when schools began teaching modern dents in traditional subjects showed darling of some reformers, they have literature in the 1920s. considerable academic progress com- relatively low graduation rates and too A Burkean attempt to develop a deep pared with those who studied business often load students with debt. A renewed connection between past and present has or education. emphasis on traditional education might implications for instruction. Although These results may be partly ex plained give better results. some technological innovations are by the fact that smarter students gravi- It’s possible that some students promising, teaching is not rocket sci- tate toward more demanding courses. wouldn’t enroll in the first place if they ence. Outside highly technical subjects, But content matters, too. When students knew they had to read challenging books. the most reliable way to ensure that stu- are confronted with something worth But those students are unlikely to suc- dents learn is to make them read worth- thinking about, they do more and better ceed in any kind of higher education. while books. thinking. In reading good writers, they Others might discover, as Rod Dreher

Traditional education is about building a relationship with the past and passing on what has already been learned, as the necessary condition of making new discoveries.

A common justification for traditional become better writers themselves. They put it in the title of his recent book, “how education, as noted above, is political. are more able to advance their own Dante can save your life.” The idea is that serious study, particu- observations after they have considered The second objection to a renewed larly of the Greek and Roman classics, the most illuminating investigations of commitment to traditional education is inculcates ethical principles and his- the human condition. that it’s a luxury we can’t afford. torical understanding essential to re - Of course, a good critique of Henry The good news is that traditional edu- publican freedom. In his eighth annual James won’t pay the bills. But the eco- cation is relatively cheap. All you need message to Congress, George Wash - nomic situation is not as bleak as bubble are tables and chairs, some paperbacks, ington urged the federal government to theorists sometimes claim. There might and a few professors. Some conserva- fund a national university that would be little demand for the specific content tives blame tuition hikes on the tenured give young people a “common educa- of traditional education, but there is faculty. The real culprits, though, are tion.” He asked: “In a republic, what plenty of demand for the skills students administrative bloat and the race to offer species of knowledge can be equally develop in old-style courses. Contrary to more and more amenities on campuses. important, and what duty more press- anecdotes about English majors’ work - Having fewer five-story rock-climbing ing on its legislature, than to patronize ing as baristas, economic research sug- walls and more classes in philosophy a plan for communicating [the science gests that there is no employment crisis might actually allow universities to of government] to those who are to be for people who know how to read care- decrease tuition. the future guardians of the liberties of fully, write persuasively, and analyze an Colleges and universities must be the country?” argument. They are in especially good accountable for making prudent use of This argument is sound as far as it shape if they know enough math to public resources. Conservatives, how- goes, but it is too narrow. A good edu- translate data into anecdotes. ever, also have a calling to defend the cation is more than civic cultivation. There are two common objections to treasures we have inherited. Burke argued And reading good books does not guar- these arguments in favor of traditional that real patriotism means making the antee that one will become a good citi- education. One is that it’s relevant only best of one’s country as it exists, even at zen. The lessons of those books also to a small elite. Although we think of the price of tolerating inefficiencies and have to be honored by the rest of soci- college as the realm of verdant quads, irrationality. We should follow his lead ety—a matter that is beyond the con- the vast majority of students in higher in defending traditional education, trol of professors. education attend community colleges, rather than sacrificing it to a misguided Since the political justification isn’t nondescript public universities, or for- ideal of economic efficiency or cus- strong enough, we might consider the profit institutions. And many of these tomer service.

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U.S. of America (world smelting pot), over books that is rooning his eyes and for in other countries from us (Europe, with the most absolutely boaring stuff England, Russia, Wildest Africa, etc. poaring, poaring, poaring into his ears. The True etc. etc.) there isn’t enough different At the same time when they breathe in population from the main to do discrim- constantly sniffing germs of namonia, Sprit of ination at. (Except by inmost feelings, chicken pocks, nefritus so they practicly hard to wipe out, unforch.) only dare breathe out (practicly impossi- Chrismas* Why do they drag in sex, one asks ble):—all of which contrary to health ourself? Because the United Nations and freedom:—then the U.N. will edict BY ALOÏSE BUCKLEY HEATH regard sex purely, like dictionaries, that this situation must CEACE! where sex is if you are a boy or a girl PRINCIPLE 3: The child shall be ANY persons our ages of 12, (you can look it up)—not the reason entitled from his birth to a name and a 10, 8, 6 think the Sprit of children are not allowed to see prac tic ly nationality. This is also in the Sprit of M Chrismas is about toys and every movie in the whole world. It is a Chrismas because it portects children presents instead of about the well-none fact that most parents comitt from being called Blooper and Kiki real sprit. These persons are immature discrimination on children by sex (by even when big, which can become and childless. As will be seen. wether they are male sex or female sex, abso lutely humalating. Ex:—:When Today at Assembly, everybody got a other words.) Ex:—:Sataday mornings, John was born our brother Jim was 4 copy and got read to, the U.N. Dec lar a- boys (M. sex) have to clean out cars in a (dificult age) and Jim liked our Uncle tion of the Rights of the Child, which icecold sub zero gerage, wile girls (F. sex) Reid so he absolutely made every one turned out it was the Chrismas present only have to vacume warm & cozy car- call John “Uncle Reid” after him from the United Nations to all the chil- pets. An d yet again about color (some- (Uncle Reid). Funny then, but how dren in the world, also which Pam, 12, times meening race, but they already would John feel nowadays if Mrs. and John, 10, have to write down about said race in this PRINCIPLE so they McLeod said in class: “Uncle Reid, constructively, and Priscilla, 8, and Buck- now meen color.); Why? Because, suppose you take the next passage?” ley, 6, be prepared to explane in there Ex:—:Some persons, who dirt shows on Like a fool. PRINCIPLE 3 also portects own words by Monday. This is our free- more than other persons because of people from the fate of Philip Nolan, thinking thoughts, for nothing is black there snow white color, are all the time who had to live on boats and not have a and white but grey. getting it in the neck (like parents say- nationality for having got mad at the The first part, before the Principles ing: “Good God, your angkles!!” venial Government once, tho not till grown- start, is very oratory and good except for sin) when that happens to be the exact up. But children’s fate, through the pas- puctuation (commas not periods after night one washed with soap! All this sage of years is to become grown-up or paragraphs) and reptitous (absolutely 5 shall end. else dead. So look before you leap, paragraphs in a row begin with “Where- One thing the United Nations for- which the U.N. does. as”). Persons that are always tearing got:—:discrimination by age, like:— PRINCIPLE 4: The child shall enjoy down, tearing down would probbly :In 2 years, could Pam, now age 12 the benefits of social security. He shall mock this instead of saying the United drive a car in S. Carolina? Yes!! In be entitled to grow up and develop in Nations did pretty good, spell ing the Conn.? No!! Could Jim, our brother of health; to this end special care and pro- long words this composition is abso - 14, marry Linda who he loves in India? tection shall be provided both to him lutely full of. Yes!! In Conn.? No!! Showing that the and to his mother, including adequate PRINCIPLE 1: The child shall enjoy U.N. forgot the main thing the child prenatal and postnatal care. This sounds all the rights set forth in this Declar a - get’s discriminated for. BUT: after all: like mostly for Mothers, but think, think, tion. Every child, without any exception nobidies perfect: just exactly where would children be whatsoever, shall be entitled to these PRINCIPLE 2 (really getting going): without prenatal Mothers? NOWHERE. rights, without distinction or discrimi- The child shall enjoy special protection And prenatal Fathers are not so abso - nation on account of race, color, sex, and shall be given opportunities and lutely necessary. The first Nowell would language, religion, political or oth er facilities, by law and by other means, to have been in a sanidary, recently-modern opinion, property, birth or other status, enable him to develop physically, men- hospital if people had only had the U.N. whether of himself or of his family. tally, morally, spiritually, and socially in then. The Massa cre of the Holy Inno - Those who think will easly see th at who a healthy and normal manner and in cents would be absolutely an object of their talking about is none other but the conditions of freedom and dignity. Their forbiddance and mortal sin, under penalty going to start some laws, and unless of the law. quite a few parents wise up, we happen PRINCIPLE 5: The child who is phys - * Composed by Pamela, John, Priscilla, and, to know quite a few parents (including ically, mentally, or socially handicapped sometimes, Buckley Heath; Typed by There by marrage) that will end up incarser- shall be given the special treatment, Mother. ated. Because when the U.N. finds out, education, and care required by his par- surely soon, that every single child in ticular condition. In the intersts of the A Christmas story by the late Aloïse Buckley Heath is the world spends absolutely the best questioning mind, one has to ad mit that an NR tradition. This story was first published in years of his life from infantry to adultery this principle is hard: because:—“phy - 1967. sitting on a hard seat, bending his head si cally handicapped” means crippled

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and those children, they say, have to go would not be very fair to Wildest Africa to special schools for crippled chil- children.) Wrong thing No. B:—(the part JAY NORDLINGER’S dren:—“mentally handicapped” means about play and recreation). Unforch, as retarded, and those children have to go even the dumbest know, play and recre- C H I L D R E N to special schools for retarded chil- ation that is directed always turns out o f MO N ST ER S dren:—“socially handicapped” means into one thing:—RELAY RACES. Negro in the South, but, as is well- PRINCIPLE 8: The child shall in all An Inquiry into the Sons known, those children have to come out circumstances be among the first to re - and Daughters of Dictators of special schools for Ne gro children in ceive protection and relief. Vere dig num the South. Does that make sense for et justum est. (Altarboy’s joke by John. physicals and mentals to go in yet for Others except priests look it up.) socials to come out? Not that who are PRINCIPLE 9: The child shall be we to critisise, never less, may be protected against all forms of neglect, grown-ups should clarify there thinking cruelty, and exploitation. He shall not on the topic. be the subject of traffic in any form. (It PRINCIPLE 6: The child, for the full is a known fact that sometimes children and harmonious development of his per- run right strate across without looking sonality, needs love and understanding. both ways: Think: nothing is black and He shall, wherever possible, grow up in white: all is grey.) Next part: The child the care and under the responsibility of shall not be admitted to employment his parents, and in any case in an atmos- before an appropriate minimum age. phere of affection and of mor al and This is one of the most absolutely Sprit material security. Payment of state and of Chrismaslike things the U.N. ever other assistance toward the mainte- said in its life. For NOTE:—Em ploy- nance of children of families is desir- ment means working for money. How able. This one may seem to say a lot of far far worse indeed, therefore, is the things one already knew, like “love and involatory slavitude children have to do t’s a fascinating question: What’s it like understanding,” etc. etc. etc., but the Satadays, not only for no money, but to be the son or daughter of a dictator? important thing af ter all, is that it is still not getting their riteful allowance if The offspring of a . . . Stalin? Or Mao? IOr a tin-horn dictator from an African hell- on the side of chil dren, other words: they don’t. This also shall be changed hole? Jay Nordlinger’s answers to these and Sprit of Chris mas. One may well ask by law. other questions are engaging, witty, insight- ful, and make for a hell of a good read. ourself, although, about assisting (pay- PRINCIPLE 10: The child shall be Here’s praise from outstanding historians for ing) pe ople of large families (personally brought up in a spirit of understanding, Jay and his outstanding book: in our fa vor), which if they do, they have tolerance, friendship among peoples, MARK HELPRIN: “A magnetic page- to make there mind up about popula- peace, and universal brother hood, in turner that nonetheless is complex and tions exploding. For, besides the joys of full consciousness that his energy and deep. The fascinating and horrific details parenthood, if you get paid too, where talents should be devoted to the service Nordlinger unearths flow together to pose important and disturbing questions about will it all end? of his fellow men. These sweet and nob- love, loyalty, history, and human nature.” PRINCIPLE 7: The child shall be ble words show how the Uniteds have given an education which will promote even improved the Sprit of Chris mas. ANDREW ROBERTS: “This extraordinary book makes us all ask of ourselves: his general culture and enable him on a For in olden days, you were supposed What would we do if we realized that our basis of equal opportunity to develop his to love your fellow men (even the ones beloved father was also a blood-stained abilities. The child shall have full oppor- you couldn’t stand) yet use your energy tyrant? . . . Jay Nordlinger’s exceptional investigation into the children of 20 mod- tunity for play and recreation, which and talents for you and yours, which ern dictators grips and convinces.” shall be directed to the same purposes you had to, the world be ing such a as education. It is hard to see how the mess. In our day, you only have to have PAUL JOHNSON: “Jay Nordlinger is one of America’s most versatile and pun- U.N. missed the things wrong in this, a sprit of tolerace, friendship, etc. etc. gent writers.” unless there wrist was getting tired from etc., and even that you only have among writting. Wrong thing No. A:—There peopleS, much more practical than The late ROBERT CONQUEST: “Few writers are well qualified to write about absolutely just isn’t anything equal in among peoplE, if you get our meaning the world’s cultures, and none more so people’s opportunity to learn culture (see letters we put in capitals). Also, the than Jay Nordlinger.”

that would be general. Like in West new laws of the Gov ern ments of the U.N. BERNARD LEWIS: “Nordlinger Hartford, U.S.A., culture is French, will take care of things like nutrition, offers a unique combination of depth Myth ology, Music, Hi a wa tha, and things housing, and other postnatal care of you and accuracy of knowledge with clarity and elegance of style. It is a pleasure to like that but in Wildest Africa culture is and yours, so there will be nothing left to read sophistication without affectation.” Hunting lions, Shrink ing heads, Build - do except be devoted to the service of ing huts of clay and wattles made, and your fellow men. things like that, none of which there is Thus we see, the U.N. Declaration of ORDER TODAY AT AMAZON OR any of in West Hart ford. (Even if there Rights of the Child is in the true Sprit of AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE was some way this could be arranged, it Chrismas, and also cinchy.

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The New Melting Pot Bombast and chauvinism must not prevent compassionate assimilation

BY REIHAN SALAM

NEW culture war is breaking out in America. Unlike class cities and towns across the country are struggling to absorb the culture wars of the recent past, this one isn’t about them. Before the federal courts stepped in, President Obama signed A the place of Judeo-Christian values in our public life, an executive order shielding roughly half of all unauthorized the regulation of abortion, or the recognition of same- immigrants in the U.S. from the threat of deportation, a move he sex unions. Those conflicts are still with us. But they’ve been over- had previously suggested was out of bounds. And now the U.S. is shadowed by the fight over the future of American national experiencing yet another wave of Central American arrivals. Bor - identity in the face of rapid and accelerating demographic change. der P atrol officials report that many unauthorized immigrants This new culture war will define the contest for the Republican believe that the U.S. is going to welcome them with open arms, and presidential nomination in the months to come, as it has for the who can blame them given the president’s rhetoric? The ongoing better part of the last year. And in all likelihood, it will shape our crisis in Syria has prompted a fierce debate over Muslim refugees, politics for decades to come. and the San Bernardino attack has shone a bright light on our The most visible manifestation of this new culture war has been immigration bureaucracy’s decision to admit one of the killers, the rise of Donald Trump. By focusing his candidacy almost Tashfeen Malik, an Islamic radical from Pakistan. entirely on immigration, the billionaire entertainer has energized For years, elite conservatives have ignored grassroots opposi- millions of voters who love him as a bold truth-teller or damn him tion to mass immigration, and Trump’s rise is their reward. That as a vicious and dangerous bigot. Trump’s recent, opportunistic GOP primary voters are in revolt over immigration, and that so discovery of an interest in illegal immigration is ironic, as Trump many of them are spurning elected Republicans they no longer has been quite comfortable with the use of unauthorized immi- trust, should come as no surprise. grant labor on his various mega-projects. Does this mean that all conservatives need to do is call for clos- But Trump and his clownish provocations aren’t really the issue. ing the borders, and then all will be well? Not by a long shot. If His emergence as the voice of the anti-immigration Right is a Republicans who favor mass immigration have been blind to its reflection of the failure of the Republican establishment to grapple downsides, many of those who are opposed to it have themselves with lawlessness at the border and half a century of mass immigra- been blinded by nostalgia—they have failed to recognize that the tion. Consider the events of the past two years. Child migrants have more culturally homogeneous America of the 1980s, when many LUBA MYTS surged into the United States from Central America, and working- older conservatives came of age, is gone.

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The result is that anti-immigration conservatives have alienated MERICA’S current immigration policy serves the interests potential allies. Many centrist and liberal African Americans of low-wage employers and immigrant voters looking to share conservatives’ skepticism about immigration, yet they are bring family members to the U.S., yet it fails to account reluctant to join forces with a movement they see as racially Afor the challenge of integrating immigrants and their descendants exclusive. Many Hispanics and Asians, whether foreign- or into American life. The challenge is not that today’s immigrants native-born, see the virtue in reducing less-skilled immigration come from Latin America, Asia, and Africa rather than Europe. It while easing the way for skilled workers. Political scientists Jens is that the United States has absorbed far more less-skilled immi- Hainmueller and Daniel Hopkins have gathered considerable grants than any other affluent market democracy, while the chil- evidence that support for such a policy is widespread among dren of less-skilled immigrants often struggle to climb into the Americans of all backgrounds. Yet immigration advocates have middle class. Countries such as Canada and Australia have admit- deliberately framed the immigration debate as all-or-nothing, ted more immigrants per capita, but they cherry-pick skilled ones. and conservatives have let them get away with it. In contrast, the U.S. has welcomed large numbers of less-skilled To win this new culture war, conservatives must do more than immigrants just as global economic integration and automation embrace a new approach to immigration. They must offer a new have put the wages of less-skilled workers under intense pressure, conception of American nationhood. Just as the melting-pot and as the family lives of college-educated and non-college- nationalism of the 1900s forged a new American identity that educated adults and their children have sharply diverged. Had natives and immigrants of various European nationalities could the post-1965 immigration wave consisted solely of people with embrace, a new melting-pot nationalism is needed to counter the higher-than-average levels of literacy and numeracy, its effect on ethnic and class antagonisms that threaten our society today. U.S. society would have been markedly different, even if we had admitted the same number of people from the same countries. To be sure, today’s immigrants have a higher level of educational EGARDLESS of where you stand on immigration, there is no attainment than those who arrived in 1965. Specifically, the Pew question that the post-1965 immigration wave has trans- Research Center reports that while only half of newly arrived formed American society. Roughly 13 percent of the U.S. immigrants in 1970 had at least a high-school diploma, by 2013 Rpopulation is foreign-born, up from 4.7 percent in 1970. And this that share had increased to over three-quarters. And while only a share is set to increase substantially in the years to come. If any- fifth of immigrants had graduated from college in 1970, 41 per- thing, this number understates the impact of immigration on cent had done so in 2013. Immigration advocates often point to American society. Had the post-1965 immigration wave never such facts as cause for optimism, particularly when conservatives come, the U.S. population would today be 252 million rather than express concern about immigrants’ skill levels. 324 million. Over the next 50 years, demographers at the Pew Are the immigration optimists right—are the skills of recent Research Center anticipate, new immigrants and their descendants immigrants actually quite strong? The answer is no. Skilled immi- will account for 88 percent of all population growth. Part of the grants have fared extremely well in America in recent decades. But reason is that the birthrate among native-born Americans has fallen skilled immigrants have been very much in the minority in the to unprecedentedly low levels, so immigration is a much bigger post-1965 era. Given that the U.S. is a desirable place to live, the part of our demographic picture than it would be had the birthrates U.S. could quite easily use its immigration system to raise its aver- of the post-war decades persisted into the present. This confluence age skill level by recruiting immigrants with literacy and math of falling birthrates and surging immigration explains why the cul- skills above the U.S. average, not below it. But we don’t. tural character of America is changing so rapidly. So far, the policy debate over immigration has focused on the Many of the more strident immigration advocates style them- question of whether less-skilled immigrants reduce native wages. selves as fighters for civil rights or racial justice—they suggest that This is not the right question to ask. Given that the U.S. admits a calls for reducing immigration are driven by racial animus. So it is finite number of immigrants, the right question to ask is which mix worth keeping in mind that regardless of what happens to our of immigrants will most serve U.S. national interests. immigration policy, non-Hispanic whites will become a minority The most widely cited evidence we have on the impact of immi- of all Americans in the decades to come. The U.S. Census Bureau grant labor on U.S. wages is from the economists Gianmarco projects that the U.S. population will become majority-minority in Ottaviano and Giovanni Peri, whose work is often invoked by 2044, a projection that factors in an ongoing immigrant influx. Yet immigration advocates. Their findings suggest that immigrant America’s majority-minority future is already with us in majority- workers have a modestly positive impact on native wages and a minority states such as California and Texas, and also in younger modestly negative one on the wages of previous immigrants. generations. The population of Americans younger than five is These numbers can be misleading, as much depends on the skill majority-minority today, and the same will be true of the popula- level of the immigrants and natives in question. For example, tion of Americans younger than 18 by 2020. A disproportionately many researchers believe that less-skilled immigrants allow large share of this rising generation is composed of immigrants, skilled natives to increase their productivity by lowering the cost but the native-born children of immigrants are the chief drivers of of child care, food preparation, and other services. demographic change. What about the notion that less-skilled immigrants displace What kind of majority-minority society will we become? Will less-skilled natives? Here the story is more complicated, be - we live in a racially divided America characterized by high levels cause less-skilled natives often establish new economic niches of segregation and inter-ethnic distrust? Or will we become a that reflect their skills. Broadly speaking, less-skilled immigrants more cohesive society united by language, culture, and a sense with low levels of English-language proficiency tend to specialize of shared fate, with ethnic distinctions blurred by ties of friend- in jobs that don’t require them to interact with English-speaking ship and kinship? customers. Less-skilled natives, meanwhile, often gravitate to jobs

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that make use of their language skills. These two groups can be HY haven’t recent less-skilled immigrants followed the complementary, as in the case of the immigrant busboy working path of the less-skilled Europeans who settled in the alongside the native server in a restaurant. U.S. in the late 1800s and early 1900s? There are many There are other subtle aspects of the impact of immigration on Wcontributing factors. The labor-market prospects for less-skilled the labor market, however. The availability of low-wage immi- workers have greatly deteriorated in recent decades, but we also grant labor can obviate the need for labor-saving innovation. If have a more extensive safety net to support low-income house- middle-class American families could hire chauffeurs at low holds. A century ago, immigrants who failed to flourish in the U.S. cost, for instance, as affluent families do in poor parts of the labor market or who wanted to maintain stronger ties to their developing world, there would be less effort devoted to the ethnic communities often returned to their native countries. Today, invention of self-driving cars. Machines can substitute for low- safety-net benefits greatly ease the pain of not earning enough to wage workers, but consumers and employers will make the support a family, and new communications technologies ensure switch only if it makes economic sense to do so. Less-skilled that immigrants can easily retain ties to their ancestral homelands. immigration ensures that for many routine tasks, it is cheaper to But the most important reason that today’s immigrants have had hire a low-wage immigrant worker than to invest in technology. such a different trajectory from those of earlier eras is that in 1921 This helps explain why firms in societies with a more restrictive and 1924, Congress passed legislation that sharply curtailed immi- approach to immigration, such as Denmark, Japan, and South gration. Take the contrast between Mexican Americans, a commu- Korea, are often quicker to deploy labor-saving technology than nity that has greatly increased in size due to immigration over the their U.S. counterparts. past 40 years, and Italian Americans. Roughly 35 percent of What immigration advocates often gloss over is that immigrants Mexican Americans were born in Mexico, and roughly another are not merely workers who can be just as good as machines at third are the U.S.-born children of Mexican immigrants. In con- performing certain tasks. They are also taxpayers and consumers trast, the vast majority of Italian Americans were born in the U.S. of public services. The low wages commanded by less-skilled In Replenished Ethnicity, Stanford sociologist Tomás Jiménez immigrants are a boon for parents who need child care or urban argues that one of the main differences between the Mexican-origin professionals looking for a cut-rate manicure. The flip side is that population in the U.S. and the white-ethnic descendants of immi- families headed by less-skilled immigrants earn extremely low grants who arrived in the early 1900s is that because mass European incomes. There is a substantial gap between the incomes of less- immigration ended more than 80 years ago, Italian Americans do skilled immigrants and the level of consumption they need to lead not generally find themselves in social worlds dominated by recent lives most Americans would consider decent. And it is the public Italian immigrants. The result is that Italian-American identity is sector that is called upon to close this gap. largely symbolic and optional, and Italian Americans are perceived Steven Camarota of the Center for Immigration Studies has as indistinguishable from other white Anglos. The end of immi- carefully documented that immigrant-headed households are far grant replenishment led to sharp increases in inter-ethnic marriages more likely to make use of means-tested safety-net programs, for Italian Americans and other white ethnics. Mexican Americans, such as Medicaid and SNAP, than are native-headed households. in contrast, are part of an ethnic community that until recently was Drawing on data from the Census Bureau’s Survey of Income constantly being replenished by new Mexican arrivals, which in and Program Participation, Camarota finds that 49 percent of turn has sharpened the distinctiveness of Mexican identity. immigrant-headed households access these programs (as This dynamic applies to other ethnic groups as well. In 2007, opposed to 30 percent of native-born households), and that the Zhenchao Qian of Ohio State and Daniel T. Lichter of Cornell share rises to 72 percent for immigrant-headed households with found that over the course of the 1990s, the percentage of Asians children. This high rate of immigrant reliance on safety-net pro- marrying whites, and Hispanics marrying whites, fell sharply, a grams is not a product of fraud or deception on the part of immi- development they attribute to rising immigration. As the size of an grants. It simply reflects the fact that the U.S. immigrant ethnic group increases, in-group contact and interaction increases. population is less skilled than the native population, and safety- This in turn strengthens in-group ethnic solidarity while reducing net programs are designed to give a lifeline to poor families that intermarriage. Qian and Lichter found that the skills gap between can’t provide for themselves. immigrants and natives also plays a role. For example, native-born The question immigration advocates haven’t seriously consid- Hispanic women with a college education were more than three ered is whether it is wise to welcome large numbers of new less- times as likely to be married to whites as native-born Hispanics skilled immigrants when millions of less-skilled immigrants with less than a high-school education. already here find it impossible to support themselves and their What these differing rates of intermarriage suggest is that eth- children without public assistance. Indeed, one could argue that nicity and class are merging. Several decades from now, the de - children of poor immigrants will need increasingly expensive scendants of educated native-born Hispanics will probably have labor-intensive services in the years to come. In recent years, lib- blended into the American mainstream—yet the descendants of erals have embraced the cause of universal early-childhood educa- the less educated may find themselves as a separate and distinct tion. They argue that children raised by less-educated and population, isolated from the corridors of power and concentrated less-affluent parents are often poorly prepared for academic suc- among the poor and working-class. cess, and so these children will need a series of expensive interven- For centuries, African Americans have been concentrated in the tions to have any chance of entering the middle class. Who will bottom half of the U.S. income distribution while the top half has pay for these interventions? It certainly won’t be less-skilled immi- been largely white. This has contributed to a sense of permanent grants, who already rely on safety-net programs in large numbers outsider status among many African Americans, who feel wounded and who earn wages so low that the tax revenues they generate are and at times angered by their exclusion from the American Dream, quite modest. and for good reason. This black–white racial divide is so familiar

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and so deeply embedded in our nation’s history that we take it for of skilled immigrants. The result is that the latter countries have granted. But could it prove to be just the tip of the iceberg, a pre- immigrant populations that have integrated far more successfully view of other ethnic conflicts that could emerge as the children than America’s. The U.S. can learn from their experience. Indeed, and grandchildren of less-skilled immigrants face discrimination moderately increasing the influx of skilled English-speaking and economic hardship? It is all too easy to imagine a future in immigrants who command high wages and reducing less-skilled which poor Hispanics and blacks grow ever more resentful of white immigration could be complementary strategies. While less- wealth and power, while wealthy whites come to see poor blacks skilled immigration increases the number of Americans who and Hispanics as members of rival tribes rather than compatriots. need public assistance, skilled immigration can ease the burden of financing these social programs. There will have to be more to melting-pot nationalism than just conservative immigration ONSERVATIVES must offer an alternative to clashing ethnic reform. But conservative immigration reform can serve as the tribalisms. Just as melting-pot nationalism helped forge a foundation on which this new nationalism rests. common American identity in the middle decades of the Are any of the Republican presidential candidates capable of talk- Clast century, we need a new melting-pot nationalism suited to our ing about our fractured national identity in an intelligent and com- own time. And this new nationalism must begin with a fresh pelling way? So far, two candidates stand out. Ted Cruz has gone the approach to immigration policy. Anti-immigration rhetoric tends to farthest in outlining a detailed agenda for strengthening immigration frame high levels of immigration as a threat to natives, not as a bar- enforcement and limiting less-skilled immigration. For that, he rier to integration, assimilation, and upward mobility for the tens of deserves great credit. Marco Rubio, one of the architects of the millions of immigrant families that have settled here. That needs to Gang of Eight immigration bill, has much to answer for. The bill he change. The ongoing influx of less-skilled immigrant workers puts championed would have sharply increased immigration, including economic pressure on the less-skilled immigrants who already less-skilled immigration, and it would have granted millions of ille- reside in our country, and it reinforces their cultural separation gal immigrants a path to legal status without first guaranteeing that from Americans who belong to other ethnic groups. Moreover, future illegal immigration would be reduced. Yet it is Rubio who is less-skilled immigration strains the fiscal capacity of government. best positioned to make the case for melting-pot nationalism, By reducing less-skilled immigration, we could tighten the mar- mostly because of his optimistic and inclusive tone. If conserva- ket for less-skilled labor and increase the likelihood that immi- tives are to win the war over our national identity, they will do so grants will interact with people outside their own ethnic groups. by appealing to a hopeful vision of a more united and prosperous Keep in mind that sharply curtailing less-skilled immigration America, not by catering to fear and resentment. If they fail to do needn’t entail a drastic reduction in immigration levels overall. so, if they allow bombast and chauvinism to drown out the compas- While the U.S. has welcomed large numbers of less-skilled immi- sionate case for integration and assimilation, conservatives won’t grants, Canada and Australia have welcomed an even larger number just lose elections—they will endanger the American future.

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strict gun control into the Constitution, the Founders did not acci- dentally insert a matter of quotidian rulemaking into a statement Self-Defense of foundational law; rather, they sought to secure a fundamental liberty whose explicit recognition was the price of the state’s construction. To understand this, I’d venture, is to understand immediately why the people of these United States remain so And the Second doggedly attached to their weapons. At bottom, the salient question during any gun-control debate is less “Do you think people should be allowed to have rifles?” and more “Do you think you Amendment should be permitted to take care of your own security?” A five-foot-tall, 110-pound woman is in a certain sense Why would anyone want a firearm? “armed” if she has a kitchen knife or a baseball bat at her dis- posal. But if the six-foot-four, 250-pound man who has broken into her apartment has one, too, she is not likely to overwhelm BY CHARLES C. W. COOKE him. If that same woman has a nine-millimeter Glock, however? Well, then there is a good chance of her walking out unharmed. From the perspective of our petite woman, there is really no F all the ill-considered tropes that are trotted out in way for the state to endorse her right to defend herself if it anger during our ongoing debate over gun control, deprives her of the tools she needs for the job. O perhaps the most irritating is the claim that the In the sixth century, the Byzantine emperor Justinian com- Constitution may indeed protect firearms, but it piled the monumental Digest of Roman Law, cataloguing the says “nothing at all about bullets.” laws that had developed over centuries of Roman jurispru- On its face, this is flatly incorrect. Quite deliberately, the dence—among which was this rule of thumb: “That which Bill of Rights is worded so as to shield categories and not someone does for the safety of his body, let it be regarded as specifics, which is why the First Amendment protects the having been done legally.” When it comes to the police and the “press” and not “ink”; why the Fourth covers “papers” and armed forces, this principle is widely acknowledged, which is “effects” instead of listing every item that might be worn why most nations are happy to let their cops walk around with about one’s person; and why the Fifth insists broadly that one semi-automatic handguns and an array of advanced tactical may not be deprived of “life, liberty, or property” and leaves gear. Within the civilian context, however, the same idea has the language there. The “right of the people” that is mentioned become strangely controversial. Think of how often you hear in the Second Amendment is not “to keep and bear guns” or Second Amendment advocates being asked with irritation why “to keep and bear ammunition” but “to keep and bear arms,” they “need” a particular firearm. Think, too, of how infrequently which, per Black’s Law Dictionary, was understood in the gun controllers focus on keeping weapons out of the hands of 18th century to include the “musket and bayonet”; “sabre, hol- ne’er-do-wells rather than on limiting the efficacy of those ster pistols, and carbine”; an array of “side arms”; and any available to the good guys. This makes no sense whatsoever. If accoutrements necessary for their operation. To propose that a a 15-round magazine and a one-shot-per-trigger-pull sidearm government could restrict access to ammunition without gut- are necessary to give a trained police officer a fighting chance ting the Second Amendment is akin to proposing that a govern- against a man who wishes him harm, there is no good reason ment could ban churches without hollowing out the First. If a that my sister shouldn’t have them, too. free people are to enjoy their liberties without encumbrance, As it happens, exactly this parity is presumed by America’s the prerequisite tools must be let well alone. founding documents. The Declaration of Independence estab- Without doubt, the vast majority of those who offer up the lishes that all men are born in possession of certain unchallenge- “But bullets!” talking point are doing little more than repeating able rights, and that among them are “life, liberty, and the pursuit memes that they have encountered. Yet at the root of their of happiness.” This phrase, as with so many promulgated during provocation is a serious misconception that needs to be seri- the revolutionary era, is lightly adapted from John Locke, the ously reckoned with. In most of the world’s countries, firearms English Enlightenment intellectual on whose philosophical pre- are regulated in much the same way as are, say, cars, radios, and sumptions the United States was in large part built. Inter alia, lawnmowers: as everyday tools whose utility can be evaluated Locke held that every individual has a right to control and to without prejudice. In the United States, by contrast, the govern- defend his body, and that any government that attempted to deny ment’s hands are tied tight. To those who are unfamiliar with the that right was by necessity unjust. “Self defense,” Locke wrote in contours of Anglo-American history, this can be understandably his Two Treatises of Government, “is a part of the law of nature” confusing. “Why,” we often hear it asked, “would the architects and in consequence cannot be “denied the community, even of the Constitution put a public policy question into the national against the king himself.” In Locke’s view, this principle could charter? Do we really have to stick with a regulatory scheme that be applied both on an individual level—against, say, intruders originated before the invention of the light bulb?” and other attackers—and on a collective level, against govern- The answer to this question is a simple one: “Yes.” Why? ments that turn tyrannical. Crucially, unlike Rousseau, Locke Because, our contemporary rhetorical habits notwithstanding, the and his ideological heirs did not consider the establishment of right to keep and bear arms is not so much a right in and of itself the state to be a justification for the restriction of this principle. as an auxiliary mechanism that protects the real unalienable right To peruse the explanatory strictures of the Founders’ era is underneath: that of self-defense. By placing a prohibition on to discover just how seriously the right to protect oneself was

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taken in the early Anglo-American world. Writing in his 1768 and militarized police departments. Despite progressivism’s end- Commentaries on the Laws of England, the great jurist less march, the spirit of John Locke is alive and well. William Blackstone contended that “self-defence” was “justly But not, alas, omnipresent. Unfortunately, it has become com- called the primary law of nature” and confirmed the Lockean monplace over the last few decades to hear opponents of the right contention that it could not be “taken away by the law of soci- to keep and bear arms recite aggregate statistics as their case ety.” In most instances, Blackstone observed, injuries inflict- against individual liberties. A particularly egregious example of ed by one citizen on another could wait to be mediated by the this came with Colorado’s post-Aurora gun-control debate, dur- “future process of law.” But if those “injuries [are] accompa- ing which a state legislator named Evie Hudak casually informed nied with force . . . it is impossible to say, to what wanton a female survivor of rape that, mathematically speaking, she lengths of rapine or cruelty outrages of this sort might be car- was more likely to hurt herself with her concealed firearm than ried, unless it were permitted a man immediately to oppose to forestall another attack. “Actually, statistics are not on your one violence with another.” side even if you had a gun,” Hudak told the stunned hearing. These conceptions were carried over wholesale into the “Chances are that if you had had a gun, then he would have been American colonies and cherished long after independenc e had able to get that from you and possibly use it against you.” been won. In Federalist No. 28, Alexander Hamilton affirmed This approach is entirely inconsistent with America’s found- the importance of the “original right of self-defense which is ing ideals. If it is the case that free people have the right to paramount to all positive forms of government” and conceded defend themselves regardless of whether they are likely to pre- that, in extreme circumstances, it may even be asserted legiti- vail, then what their elected representatives think of their mately “against the usurpations of the national rulers.” This endeavors is irrelevant. To take any other approach is to strip conceit was explicitly established in New Hampshire’s consti- from mankind what the great American jurist Henry St. George tution of 1784, which, astonis hingly enough, included an enu- Tucker, echoing Blackstone, termed the “first law of nature,” merated right to revolution: “The doctrine of nonresistance and to do so in the name of unwarranted superintendence. against arbitrary power, and oppression,” its signatories That those who would engage in such supervision do so with acknowledged, “is absurd, slavish, and destructive of the good good intentions is neither here nor there. When, in their infinite and happiness of mankind.” Similar statements were subse- wisdom, the legislators of New Jersey passed the draconian per- quently added to the charters of Kentucky, Pennsylvania, mitting requirements that have led to their constituents’ waiting North Carolina, Texas, and Tennessee. months for the chance to buy a gun, they presumably believed For almost all of American history, this idea remained uncon- that they were striking a strong blow for public safety. In truth, troversial. When, in the early 19th century, certain large cities however, they were overstepping their legitimate bounds and took it upon themselves to establish police forces, they presented condemning a handful of American citizens to ignominious their initiatives as complementary to, not in lieu of, the status death. One such citizen, a diminutive woman named Carol quo. Likewise, when the architects of Reconstruction wondered Bowne, found this out firsthand in June of this year, when, having aloud how free blacks would defend themselves against the waited long beyond the statutory processing window, she hostile white majority, their first instinct, to paraphrase Yale law watched her stalker of an ex-boyfriend come into her driveway GETTY IMAGES

/ professor Akhil Reed Amar, was to make minutemen out of with a knife and stab her to death. “Who does not see that self- freedmen. Today, the Supreme Court continues to affirm the right defense is a duty superior to every precept?” asked Montesquieu to defend oneself, refusing to hand that task over exclusively to in his magisterial Spirit of the Laws. Judging by our present CASS GREENE the armed agents of the state, even in the age of the standing army debate, the answer to this question is “Too many.”

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dramatically weakened the case for the Left’s climate agenda. In parallel, conservatives are discovering that climate science Climate offers them firm ground from which to argue, forcing those who advocate costly symbolic action to move toward ever shakier attempts to inspire fear. A new set of questions should dominate the 2016 discussion: Play-Acting How bad a deal did President Obama get for the Amer i can people? How will U.S. “leadership” trigger international action that The conference in Paris accomplished is no longer even under negotiation? And could someone please nothing much reassure Bernie Sanders that the planet will remain “habitable”?

BY OREN CASS HE proposition is admittedly bizarre: The international summit to combat climate change did not have as its goal the mitigation of climate change. Instead, it OALPOSTS move all the time, but rarely are they dis- Taimed to burnish the legacies of participants and justify the assembled and carted away, leaving the teams to enormous sums of political capital expended on the process. G circle aimlessly while the crowd roars and the com- Con sid er three pieces of evidence that make sense only under mentators prattle on as if nothing had changed. this interpretation. That’s what happened at the just-concluded Paris climate talks, which managed to produce an agreement but also marked Exhibit A: By design, the negotiating process provided no the collapse of a 25-year effort to catalyze collective global mechanism for the world to act collectively on the reduction of action on climate change. The collapse settles the long-running greenhouse-gas emissions. debate over whether strong “leadership” by the United States After the spectacular collapse of the Copenhagen talks in would induce developing countries to make sacrifices for the sake 2009, negotiators could have continued in pursuit of a substan- of reducing emissions; it didn’t. By the time leaders jetted from tive agreement under which the nations of the world would hold around the world to the opening ceremonies, such actions were hands and jump together toward lower emissions. This path had not even on the table. no guarantee of success—indeed, skeptics of international coop- Countries such as India and China won applause for merely eration on the issue have long predicted failure. But at least the making emissions pledges, but those pledges amounted to effort and the purported goal would have aligned. promises to continue with business as usual. Taken in aggre- Instead, negotiators abandoned all pretense of substantive gate, the world’s Paris commitments are estimated to reduce negotiations. They adopted a “pledge and review” process, by warming in this century by 0.0 to 0.2°C. Indeed, as the politi- which countries proposed their own “Intended Nationally De ter - cians, activists, and reporters strode proudly through their mined Contributions” (INDCs) for emissions cuts. Those pro- Potemkin conference, the goal of actually mitigating climate posals were made at each country’s discretion and required no change seemed far from their minds. The political accomplish- particular format, metrics, or baseline for comparison. The con- ment of a signed agreement, never mind its contents, had tributions were not legally binding, and no consequences were become the end in itself. established for noncompliance. The outcome leaves President Obama’s climate policy in This approach plainly fails to motivate collective action. It shambles. The underlying rationale for his domestic climate purports, according to one preliminary negotiating document, to action, from blocking the Keystone XL pipeline to imposing the “enable an upward spiral of ambition.” But as economists more Clean Power Plan, has always been to display “leadership” and rationally observed in Nature: “History and the science of coop- inspire other countries to follow with sacrifices of their own. As eration predict that quite the opposite will happen.” EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy explained when asked how What incentive does any country have to make economic sac- the Clean Power Plan could affect global temperatures: “The rifices—indeed, why even continue with high-profile interna- value of this rule is not measured in that way, it is measured in tional conferences—if each country is free to choose its own showing strong domestic action which can actually trigger course? Pursuing such a framework makes sense only if the global action.” existence of an agreement has become more important than the But if international negotiations no longer demand or even agreement’s contents. attempt such global action (as opposed to global talks, or glo bal accords agreeing to future global talks), what exactly are we Exhibit B: While the process should in theory have “named and doing? Securing a “legacy” for a president, perhaps. Un for tu- shamed” countries that made inadequate commitments, even nately, that legacy will be—as in so many areas for Oba ma—a the weakest pledges received full credit. short-sighted political victory that accomplished little and left Any defense of the INDC process must hinge on its capacity the American people with a massive bill. to produce action through “peer pressure.” The plausibility of Paris should be an inflection point in the climate debate. that theory is questionable, given that the actors are not 13-year- While news reports talk of a “historic breakthrough” and “a old girls but nations struggling to lift their populations out of turning point for humanity,” the actual shift in terrain has poverty. Still, it’s a theory. Unfortunately, instead of exerting pressure by confronting Mr. Cass is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. countries that made nonsensical pledges, conferees allowed the

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submission of literally anything to earn a passing grade. desired. Looking for a legacy-defining international accord? President Obama proudly declared that “180 countries . . . That will be $100 billion per year, please. show[ed] up in Paris with serious climate targets in hand.” How Concern for one’s taxpayers, or for the incentives facing serious were they? developing countries, would argue against such a blank check. China pledged that its carbon dioxide emissions would peak Concern for getting an agreement signed at all costs would not. “around 2030,” which is exactly when a prior study by the U.S. And so as negotiators worked late into the night, the hag- government’s Lawrence Berkeley National Lab ora tory suggested gling was not over how far to cut emissions. In fact, there was they would peak anyway. It also offered to reduce its carbon no negotiation over the emissions themselves. Instead, the dioxide emissions per unit of GDP (“carbon intensity”), but U.S. fought with China and India over whether the latter two analysis by Bloomberg New Energy Finance found that this should even have to report transparently about their ever-rising commitment lagged behind where the country was already emissions levels. headed. Just before the conference began, China announced that Defining the resolution of such issues as success is one way to it was burning 17 percent more coal—an extra Germany worth achieve a successful negotiation. But celebrating the result as a of emissions each year—than previously reported, but no, it breakthrough makes a mockery of the campaign to “act on cli- would not revise its pledge. None the less, President Obama held mate” and insults the intelligence of millions of people. It’s as if a joint appearance with China’s Pres i dent Xi at the start of the President Kennedy had quietly revised his goal to be putting a conference to laud China’s “consistent cooperation.” man “on my lawn,” but a visit by astronauts to the Rose Garden India said nothing about its emissions path. It offered only a earned MEN WALK ON MOON headlines anyway. 33 to 35 percent improvement in carbon intensity—a decline At any time in the past 25 years, negotiators could have slower than its present trajectory, and squarely in the middle of redefined their goal to be achieving something like Paris, and preexisting forecasts. The New York Times inexplicably reported then quickly reached it. This is called saving face, not saving the pledge as “India Announces Plan to Lower Rate of Green - the world. house Gas Emissions.” President Obama made sure to appear with India’s Prime Minister Modi as well, and offered only words of praise. DDING together a lot of zeroes yields zero, so, unsur- Continuing down the list of major developing countries, one prisingly, the aggregate impact of the world’s INDC finds empty pledge after empty pledge. Pakistan showed particu- commitments is approximately nil. More-optimistic lar chutzpah, submitting a single page months after all deadlines estimatesA have been derived by comparing the commitments had passed with no commitments of any sort beyond the truism with unrealistically high-carbon alternative scenarios, or by that it would “reduce its emissions after reaching peak levels to including an assumption that countries will take more aggres- the extent possible.” When Secretary of State John Kerry sive actions sometime in the future. The United Nations itself defended the deal by saying, “186 nations in the world came has played this game, claiming progress by showing that the together to submit a plan, all of them reducing their emissions,” growth rate of global emissions will slow. But as the U.N.’s own he was simply not telling the truth. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change explained two Advertising such empty promises as progress generates years earlier, such a slowdown was expected anyway. applause for doing nothing, while absolving the parties of fur- The Massachusetts Institute of Technology produced a credi- ther obligations. It fatally undermines both parts of “pledge and ble assessment by running their model with and without INDCs review”—pledges are not scrutinized, so review then becomes a and found an improvement over the upcoming century of only pointless exercise of confirming that nations have done as little 0.2°C—from 3.9°C of warming to 3.7°C. But even that might as they said they would. The approach makes no sense, unless overstate progress, because their starting point for global emis- one’s primary objectives all along were applause and absolution. sions is a bit higher than the baseline forecast established by the IPCC in 2000. Using the IPCC baseline with the MIT model, Exhibit C: The developed world agreed to transfer hundreds of warming is about 3.7°C with or without the INDCs. billions of dollars to poor countries, notwithstanding the low So where has all the U.S. leadership led? The justification quality and ambition of those countries’ INDCs. for rejecting the Keystone XL pipeline, as explained by the “Six years ago,” explained Christiana Figueres, the executive State Department, rested on the assertion that “granting a secretary of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Presidential Permit for this proposed Project would undermine Change, in advance of the talks, “rich countries pledged to pro- U.S. climate leadership and thereby have an adverse impact on vide $100 billion [per year] to poorer countries by 2020. encouraging other States to combat climate change.” If costly . . . Paris needs to provide certainty, clarity, and confidence that U.S. action does not spur developing countries to take costly this promise will be met.” action themselves, then by the Obama administration’s own The final agreement reiterates this commitment and declares standards, its climate policy makes no sense. $100 billion to be the annual “floor.” It does not specify where When the international agreement was a hypothetical future the money will actually come from or to whom it will be sent. event, domestic climate action could be sold with lofty promises What are taxpayers in rich countries gaining from such pay- of what an agreement might contain. But now that the ink in ments? Certainly not a reduced risk of climate change, as the Paris has dried, it is all too easy to see how little we got for our non-binding non-action embedded in developing-world INDCs trouble. If backers of the Obama agenda argue that this agree- makes clear. It seems instead that developing nations established ment to agree to meet again was the goal all along, they look the wealth transfers as the price they would charge to sign the foolish. Admitting that their approach failed is obviously no agreement that leaders of developed nations so desperately better. But the only other option is to double down and suggest

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yet more leadership, which begins to look blindly dogmatic and instance, hidden deep within a regulatory analysis, the Obama will become prohibitively costly as well. administration’s own estimate of the cost in 2100 from a 3°C The commitments of billions in “climate finance” only add temperature increase is less than 2 percent of GDP. That’s costly insult to injury. Most Americans will be shocked to learn that not but hardly catastrophic, since the economy grows about that only did their government pledge strong emissions cuts and ask much each year; the prosperity otherwise achieved in 2100 for none in return, but it is using their tax dollars to grease the would be postponed by climate change only until 2101. wheels. Not by accident has President Obama scrupulously Estimates like that are unlikely to produce support for a avoided any mention of this topic in front of domestic audiences. government-led reorganization of the economy. So Bernie The full scope of the catastrophe will emerge only in the years Sanders stood up at a debate and warned that “the planet that to come. One of the agreement’s few binding provisions is a we’re going to be leaving our kids and our grandchildren may requirement for countries to gather and review their commit- well not be habitable,” an assertion at least as far from the truth ments and their adherence to them every five years. Given the as outright refusal to acknowledge any warming of the climate. caliber of the pledges, that promise of review has little value; New York mayor Bill de Blasio traveled to the Vat i can to warn countries that promised to proceed on their existing trajectories that action was “a matter of survival” and critical to “preserv- will pass with flying colors. But the United States, whose coming life for future generations.” mitments far exceed what even the aggressive Obama agenda is The EPA reports that climate change could lead to at least expected to produce, will be the nation off track. 12,000 additional heat-related deaths of Americans each year Americans will be incurring the costs of action. Americans by 2100, which translates to an economic cost of $200 billion. will be sending money overseas. And then countries that pocket The conclusion rests on embarrassingly foolish assumptions the funds while doing the least will get to condemn the United that relatively small increases in temperature could cause the States as the country not doing its part. rate of heat-related deaths to skyrocket while Amer i cans did nothing to adapt: Pittsburgh’s heat-related-death rate in 2100 would supposedly be 60 times higher than that currently faced N the eve of the conference, the New York Times in New Orleans, while people in New York would be dying of announced that “Two-Thirds of Americans Want U.S. heat 50 times more frequently than people in Phoe nix today. to Join Climate Change Pact.” But the poll did not This is not serious. Oexplain the nature of the pact under consideration, describing One could go on. The New Yorker, eagerly blaming climate only “an international treaty requiring America to reduce cha nge for the Syrian civil war and ISIS, cited a study warning emissions.” One could forgive respondents for assuming that that some Middle East cities would be “virtually unlivable in a other countries would be likewise obligated. matter of decades.” Except, as the researcher in question had Morning Consult tried asking the question but first explained: already taken pains to explain, this interpretation was com- pletely untrue. “I’m learning my lesson in dealing with the The agreement could require the United States and other developed media,” he told Eric Holthaus of Slate. nations to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions and provide financial aid to help developing nations reduce emissions in their own countries. At the same time, developing nations, like India and F China, may not have to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions at the topic of conversation is climate policy, conservatives the same level as the United States and other developed nations. should be winning. They will need to show endless pa tience in the face of ever more bizarre hyperbole—a Rea gan esque Only 22 percent of registered voters thought America should I“There you go again” is probably about right. And they will sign regardless of whether developing countries were required need to confidently describe an affirmative policy agenda, to reduce emissions; in fact, only 26 percent of Democrats sup- preferably emphasizing research and development that might ported the president’s approach. identify new technologies so cheap and clean that developing Facing an indefensible deal and therefore an irrational policy countries will want to use them along with tools for adapting agenda, Democrats are trying to shift the debate back to the sci- to whatever climate change does bring. ence—where they can fare well against those Re pub li cans who There they have an important ally in Bill Gates, who doubts question whether human-caused climate change is even real. But that the current generation of wind and solar technology will fewer and fewer Republicans are making that substantive and offer a long-term solution and instead calls for heavy investment political mistake; rather, they’ve discovered that the science in new research and development. In Paris, Gates announced the offers firm ground from which to make their case. creation of a multibillion-dollar private-sector investment fund. This change produces amusing results, as when NPR covered Smart government policy would likewise redirect the subsidies hearings held by Representative Lamar Smith (R., Tex as) in the for solar and other renewables toward laboratories and innova- House Science Committee on the topic of the Paris talks. tion programs developing the tech nol o gies of tomorrow. This approach contrasts starkly with Hill a ry Clinton’s proposal to HOST: What was the agenda here? Was this “the climate de niers increase solar-panel installations sevenfold, an idea whose pri- have their say”? REPORTER: No, not climate deniers, John. This was a meeting to mary value is that it sounds impressive. say: “Look, climate change is real, we all accept that (even if that Conservatives shouldn’t be afraid to talk about climate surprises you), but that Paris won’t help.” change just because they lack easy solutions. There is no shame in not having all the answers—especially not when the other And as the Right gets better at explaining what the science side has spent the decade “acting” on climate in a way that only says, the Left is forced to adopt ever more extreme claims. For a Broadway audience would admire.

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On Earth Peace, Good Will Toward Men Even metaphorically

BY JONAH GOLDBERG

N the opening sequence of the 1988 film Scrooged, there’s a trailer for a movie called “The Night the Reindeer Died.” I In this fictitious made-for-TV movie, Santa’s workshop is attacked by machine-gun-wielding terrorists. Amid heavy artillery fire, Mrs. Claus races to the gun locker to hand out Al ‘Red Dog’ Weber as Santa in The Night the Reindeer Died heavy weapons to the elves. Suddenly, Lee Majors, the Six Million Dollar Man, rides up on a snowmobile. They cancel Christmas pageants. They leave baby Jesus in a As the bullets fly, Majors asks Santa, “Is there a back way out cardboard box in the church basement (but see nothing wrong of this place?” with celebrating the winter solstice). And then, when people Kris Kringle responds, “Of course there is, Lee, but this is complain about this undeclared war on Christmas, the aggres- one Santa who’s going out the front door.” sors mock and ridicule them for paranoia and hyperbole. Majors nods silently in admiration of Santa’s grit. But he warns Saint Nick, “Look, it don’t matter a hill of beans what happens to me, but the world couldn’t afford it if anything hap- EFORE I continue, I should get some disclaimers out of pened to you. Now you stay put.” the way. The war on Christmas is a fraught issue for a “Aw, that’s very nice of you, Lee,” Santa says gratefully. He right-wing guy named Goldberg. So let me disclose then adds, “And, Lee, you’re being a real good boy this year.” fully.B I am Jewish, albeit with some considerable emphasis on Majors then sets off to vanquish the enemies of Yuletide. “Eat the “ish.” My father insisted my brother and I be raised Jewish. this,” he grunts as he mows down the baddies with his modern- I went to a Jewish day school and was duly bar mitzvahed. But ized Gatling gun. my Episcopalian mother insisted we celebrate Christmas. So Now that’s my kind of war on Christmas. while many of my friends at school had “Hanukkah bushes” Alas, today’s “war on Christmas,” which has become for instead of Christmas trees, we had a Christmas tree with a sin- cable news an annual ritual, is merely another one of those gle modification. My parents cut out a jokey headline from a metaphorical wars, like the wars on women, poverty, cancer, local newspaper and taped it to a flat cardboard Christmas-tree global warming, history, energy, religion, and science. Of ornament. It read, “Santa Knows We’re Jewish.” We have a sim- course “metaphorical” doesn’t mean fictional. The “war” on ilar policy in my own home. Every year we light the Hanukkah poverty is—or was—a real thing; it just wasn’t a war. Of candles. And their glow has not once scared off Santa, who course, the Left has always loved its metaphorical wars, ever dutifully eats his cookies and leaves his presents. since William James announced the pressing need for the So there’s that. But the disclosures go on. I’m also a Fox “moral equivalent” of war. The moment when the tail-chasing News contributor. Some of my colleagues—a generous term I dog ate himself came when Obama declared a lexicological war use for people far more important and famous than yours on “war,” changing the “war on terror” to “overseas contin- truly—are generals in the War to Save Christmas. More on that gency operations.” Terrorist attacks became “man-caused dis- in a bit. asters,” and American reprisals were euphemized as “kinetic Lastly, let me just say that I love Christmastime and I take military operations.” It was, to borrow a phrase, a metaphorical no offense whatsoever when someone says to me, “Merry war to end all literal wars. We’ll know that battle has been won Christ mas.” Indeed, I think it is written somewhere in the when we start talking about the Domestic Contingency Talmud that if you make someone feel bad for sincerely wish- Operation against Christmas. ing you a merry Christmas it means you’re a miserable, joy- The war on Christmas represents a special kind of passive- less ass (it sounds more high-minded in the original Hebrew). aggressive jackassery, because the aggressors deny they have Of course, there’s a flip side to that. If you know someone is declared a war. They simply take offense at Christmas cheer. not Christian or hates Christmas for some reason and you say “Merry Christmas” out of spite or vindictiveness rather than This article was adapted from an essay in the new book The Christmas Virtues: with joy and good cheer, then you are the one putting the “ass” A Treasury of Conservative Tales for the Holidays, edited by Jonathan V. Last. in “Christmass.”

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And that is part of the genius of the Left’s passive-aggressive became the kind of bacchanalia that would have made a great war on Christmas. By forcing Christmas-lovers—Christian and backdrop for a Damsels Gone Wild video series. non-Christian alike—to take time out of their day to marshal a That wasn’t the onl y problem with Christmas. Protestants metaphorically martial defense of Christmas, they further didn’t like the way Catholics observed the holiday, and vice undermine the whole point of the holiday, and the Holy Day. versa. When Cromwell took over, he banned the holiday entirely, Turning Christmas into a battleground in the culture war com- something the ACLU only dreams of doing today. pounds the damage they’re already doing. Cromwell’s ban was lifted, but for a long time the popularity Jews have a lot of experience in dealing with the challenges of of Christmas dwindled in the New World and Britain. By 1820, living in societies where they are religious bystanders and non- the English poet and essayist Leigh Hunt wrote that it was a hol- conformists. One of the lessons Jews learned is that respect is a iday “scarcely worth mention.” It wasn’t quite as forgettable as two-way street. In decent societies, the majority shows respect to Arbor Day or the WNBA championships, but it wasn’t the big the minority. But part of the bargain is that minorities also show deal we think of today, either. And the person most responsible respect to the majority. This lesson is worth taking to heart when for reviving it wasn’t a religious figure at all, but a literary one: thinking about the war on Christmas. The conflict has never really Charles Dickens. been about Christmas: It’s been about how a society tolerates Published in 1843, Dickens’s A Christmas Carol was a stag- conflicting visions of what kind of society people want. gering literary success. By Christmas of 1844, there were no The war on Christmas can best be understood as the point at fewer than nine stage productions of it in London. It popular- which several tectonic plates of the culture grind together. The ized the salutation “Merry Christmas.” There’s a fascinating plates have been grinding together for generations, and they go debate about how religious A Christmas Carol really is. There by many names: secular humanism, nihilism, relativism, pro- are a great many subtle scriptural allusions in the book that are gressivism, Cthulhu, and others. The opposing forces have a lot lost on most people, including me; I wouldn’t have caught of monikers as well: traditionalism, Christianity, conservatism, many of them were it not for Stephen Skelton’s annotated ver- and, my favorite, the Good Guys. sion of the story. On the other hand, while Dickens was a faith- Christmas just happens to be one of the places where the Good ful Christian, the story is deeply ecumenical, even secular. Guys and Cthulhu fight on ground really favorable to the Good The key to the novella’s appeal was its overpowering sense of Guys. That’s because, properly speaking, Christmas should be nostalgia. Dickens had a famously rough childhood, and his sto- about as controversial as puppies, kittens, motherhood, and ries were often child-centric. And so was his idea of Christmas. Scotch: just one of those things everyone agrees is a good thing. Until A Christmas Carol, Christmas was more of a community Indeed, that’s the underlying assumption among Christmas’s celebration, a time for revelry—a lot like what New Year’s Eve cable-show champions: Christmas used to be something that is today. But Dickens carved out Christmas as a special time for united us—but not anymore, thanks to the killjoys. And that’s children. In the tale, the Ghost of Christmas Past takes Scrooge absolutely true. Christmas was uncontroversial for a while. Then to his own childhood, where he sees himself abandoned as all it was controversial. Then it was uncontroversial. And so on. the other kids have gone home to be with their families. “The That’s because Christmas is in fact older than cable TV. school is not quite deserted,” the Ghost observes. “A solitary child, neglected by his friends, is left there still.” Scrooge sobs at the sight. The Ghost then takes poor Ebenezer to see children HERE’S no mention of Jesus’s birthday in the Bible. playing and making merry with their family. Scrooge exclaims, According to the Christmas scholar Stephen Nissenbaum, “What would I not have given to be one of them.” his birthday became a priority for the Church only when Thanks to Dickens, Christmas became a time when parents peopleT started to believe he wasn’t a real person but rather a thought about the Christmas they wished they had had when spirit or some such. Real human beings are born, not invented. they were kids. And so they set out to deliver it to their own The Church reckoned that celebrating Jesus’s birth would be a children. That’s one of the keys to Christmas’s enduring popu- good way to underline the fact that he was born flesh and blood. larity. I have no objection to Christians’ seeking to keep the The iconic crèche-and-manger scenes so associated with “Christ in Christmas,” but it seems to me that today’s effort Christmas didn’t become commonplace until the 13th century. against the war on Christmas has less to do with a desire to keep As for December 25, the Internet, among other sources, tells the holiday somberly sacred than with maintaining an idea of me in a fairly unified voice that the date was picked because it “America, the Way It Used to Be.” aligned with numerous pagan holidays associated with the As a conservative, I get that. And it is absolutely true that the winter solstice. We’ve all heard these theories before, and while people who bang their hemp spoons on their high chairs at scholars can debate around the edges, it doesn’t seem as if any- “Merry Christmas” tend to be humorless prigs. And I’m not nor- one truly disputes the notion that Christmas co-opted a whole mally in the habit of giving advice to Christians about how to lot of Germanic and Nordic traditions. The iconic Santa is observe their faith. But as a tactical matter, if you want to put the inspired more by Odin than by the Turkish Saint Nicholas, and Christ back in Christmas, my advice would be to follow Jesus’s the Christmas tree has its historical roots in the saturnalian prac- exhortation to turn the other cheek. The best offense against tice of bringing holly into the home. humorless prigs isn’t countervailing humorless priggery. It’s The Puritans had huge problems with Christmas. Because the good cheer. If someone gets angry when you say “Merry holiday takes place in winter, when there’s not much for farmers Christmas!” chuckle and tell him, “For your sake, I won’t tell to do, it became a kind of spring break in the 16th and 17th cen- Santa about this.” turies. In England, a country with a long and honorable tradition The whole point of Christmas is not to have arguments. of looking for reasons to get drunk, the twelve days of Christmas That’s what Thanksgiving dinner is for.

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Athwart BY JAMES LILEKS Feel the (Non-Fossil-Fuel) Bern!

HE Paris climate-change agreement is a re - work in nuclear plants; Sanders wants them closed. (If markable document. If every printed copy were there’s one thing that terrifies the Party of Science, it’s sci- wadded up into a gigantic ball, it could be stuffed ence.) Anyway, we won’t need juice from nukes. Why, by T down the chimney of a Chinese coal plant, 2024 or 2037 or 2059 or Stardate 42568 we’ll have so much reducing its emissions to zero. If they printed a few hun- solar power that electricity will be shooting out of uncovered dred million more copies, they could be laid on the shores sockets, vaporizing house pets in a puff of fur. of vulnerable islands and soak up all the rising water. Sanders would also require cars to get 65 miles per gallon Thirty-one pages to reduce the temperature 0.2 degrees within ten years. This is easily done. All vehicles shall be Celsius, you say? Remarkable. Why stop there? A 62-page made out of balsa wood with holes in the floor so you can accord would have pushed it down 0.4 degrees. But what if Flintstone your way to work, and the government will require someone fell asleep at the photocopier and 6,000 pages were all trips of more than six miles to be downhill. If Detroit can’t printed off? A new ice age, glaciers in Kansas, mastodons solve the problem, Bernie could take a page from the land of roaming Times Square—no, 31 pages is just right. And thus the Soviets, where he took his honeymoon. Engineers will be the Earth is saved! put on trial and shot in the basement of the Not so fast, says Bernie Sanders. If you Capitol if they don’t meet the standard. assumed he would nix the agreement for Thirty-one Sanders’s site adds: “The measure insufficient coercive enforcement mea- would put a price on fossil fuels by sures and opportunities to shave shekels off pages to reduce imposing a tax on carbon pollution.” your salary and shovel them into the maw Imagine that: a price on fossil fuels. of the state, you were right. It goes “no - the temperature Imagine the ruinous cost of outfitting where near far enough,” he said before 0.2 degrees every single gasoline pump at every sin- launching into an attack on the Victrola gle service station with a device that record company, which he claimed had a Celsius, you takes credit cards. The man’s mad. monopoly on needles. After shifting to a He wants high-speed passenger rail, of demand to power the nation’s strategic say? course. The progressive dream: You take Zeppelin fleet with gaseous ambergris, he Remarkable. a fast train to another city, where you returned to the subject of climate: board a streetcar to get to the bike-rental “In the United States we have a Repub - Why stop there? place, and then you bike to your desti- lican Party which is much more interested nation, which is a physician-assisted- in contributions from the fossil fuel industry than they care suicide center. Because there’s just no point to life anymore. about the future of the planet,” he said on his website, which It won’t happen, any of it. And even if it did, it wouldn’t no doubt is powered by virtuous hummingbirds beating their change a damned thing. Here’s the grim truth: wings to move turbine blades. You expect him to wander off into a tirade about the need to break up the Petroleum Jelly Even if every single American citizen biked to work, car- pooled to school, used only solar panels to power their Trust, but no: He gives specifics. “Sanders introduced legis- homes—if we each planted a dozen trees—if we somehow lation in the U.S. Senate which would cut U.S. carbon pollu- eliminated all of our domestic greenhouse-gas emissions— tion by 40 percent by 2030 and 80 percent by 2050 from guess what? That still wouldn’t be enough to offset the carbon 1990 levels.” pollution coming from the rest of the world. If all the industrial Wow. He doesn’t just talk the talk, he walks the walk—and nations went down to zero emissions, it wouldn’t be enough. so will you, because it’ll be too costly to drive. There are several ways to achieve this cut in CO2: That was John Kerry on December 9, explaining why we Trucks driving around every major urban center spraying should pour billions down our low-flush toilets and ban the a dense fog of aerosolized Ebola; welding shut the door to stuff trees like to breathe. It’s those damned developing every manufacturing plant; putting sugar in the tank of 97 nations. They want to be more prosperous. They want to be percent of all automobiles; a new carbon tax that requires you like the West so they can stop worrying about food and disease to saw off a finger or toe for every tank you buy; force Uber and build a society so secure its self-hating intellectual class to move to a rickshaw model. And so on. can devote itself entirely to figuring out ways to drag every- According to the Wall Street Journal, there’s more. one back to mud huts and dung fires. There’s only one way to Sanders would “ban natural gas and oil exports” and “force stop the developing world, and that’s the return of imperialism. states to ban fracking.” Don’t worry about jobs; those dis- Invade; conquer; set up governments that think right-thoughts. placed filthy-power serfs will get good work in clean energy, Sure, imperialism was bad before, but that’s because the rea- hosing eagle guts off the windmill blades. They won’t get sons were bad. This time it’s with regret. As the parent about to spank sometimes says: “This hurts me more than it hurts you.” Mr. Lileks blogs at www.lileks.com. The spanker actually believes it. The spankee never does.

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The Long View BY ROB LONG

TO: grammyh@otherclintonemail - cameraphone footage of my friend server.biz praying to “Satan, the Dark Lord” for FROM: sidblume@sbloompartners - help. So, to recap: My friend drove llc.ae drunk, with a woman who was not his RE: FBI and etc. wife, into an orphanage and an animal From DO NOT DO THAT! Repeat: DO shelter, destroying both, and has been NOT do that. We’re tracking the FBI seen worshiping the devil. Anything https://wikileaks.org/ probe and have a strategy. For the next we can do for him? clintonemailserver/ small Friday leak, we’ve prepared Bill several large-format photo graphs of P.S. There were no survivors. Does re coveredemails/index Trump’s most recent colonoscopy, that make it easier or harder to mas- which we will release (anonymously) sage, etc.? to the press, drowning out any and all TO: [email protected] leaks that may or may not come from TO: bubbalicious@otherclinton - FROM: bubbalicious@otherclinton- the FBI probe. The next seven days emailserver.biz emailserver.biz will be dominated by a debate over FROM: sidblume@sbloompartners - RE: account transfer whether those are “the classiest polyps llc.ae Sid: you’ve ever seen,” and the FBI news RE: Friend needs help Was hoping to get $10 million trans- will be history. Easier. I’ll send a mariachi band to ferred to my personal account from When the larger one re: Benghazi the Trump rally this morning, along the wire transfer we’re getting from comes, we’ve already put into place a with a Mexican journalist wearing a the Saudis. I’ll also need about $500k sequence of events kicking off with sombrero. My gut tells me that what- in cash for a little trip I’m taking with Trump’s first appearance on Rachel ever happens then will be big news some of the guys. Worried that intense Maddow’s show. The inevitable for the next four or five days, long scrutiny, with H’s campaign, may Trump behavior, and the resulting enough for your friend to be able to make this impractical. Don’t want a media attention, will be enough to pay off the various players involved lot of attention to this transaction for bury any larger leak. in his accident. But please do tell him obvious reasons. Thoughts? That strategy is almost certainly that the mariachi band/sombrero plan Bill going to work, but on the off-chance was being held back to deal with Hil- that it doesn’t, we’ll have one of our lary’s indictment, so this really is a TO: bubbalicious@otherclinton- journalist friends ask Trump what he big favor he’s asking. emailserver.biz really thought of the movie Pre - Sid FROM: sidblume@sbloompartners - cious, Based on the Novel Push by llc.ae Sapphire. Our feeling is, this should TO: sidblume@sbloompartners- RE: account transfer inspire some very colorful and mem- llc.ae Not impossible. Am sending a orable comments which will un - FROM: [email protected] woman in a full burqa to a Trump rally doubtedly dominate the next seven RE: Question next Tuesday. She will probably be days of news coverage. At which Dear Sid: roughed up and he will almost certainly time, any FBI revelations will be The President and I were wonder- say something about her. Will domi- “old news.” ing if you could think of any way to nate the next news cycle, so suggest Sid give us some breathing room, in the you make transfer as soon as you see media, from all of the recent events first tweet re: Trump rally and burqa TO: [email protected] regarding terrorism, gun control, Is - lady. No one will ever know. FROM: bubbalicious@otherclinton - lamic you-know-what, and immigra- Sid emailserver.biz tion screw-ups. We’ve been admiring RE: Friend needs help your work with the Trump coverage, TO: [email protected] Sid: and are hoping you’d be willing to FROM: grammyh@otherclinton- Yesterday, a very dear friend of share him with us, on a temporary emailserver.biz mine—and longtime associate—left a basis. RE: FBI and etc. “party” in the company of a young Valerie Sid: lady, a little worse for wear in the Am concerned about the FBI probe drinking department, and he lost con- TO: [email protected] into the emails and the fundraising. Not trol of his car and somehow ran FROM: sidblume@sbloompartners - sure how to handle the inevitable leaks directly into an orphanage, burning llc.ae that keep occurring on Fridays, domi- the entire structure to the ground. RE: Question nating the Sunday talk shows etc. Am Some of the burning pieces of the Dear Valerie: thinking of holding a press conference orphanage flew into the air and land- I wish I could. But, honestly, there to address these issues once and for all. ed on the roof of an animal shelter, are some things that even Trump can’t Thoughts? burning that to the ground as well. In drown out. H the ensuing chaos, there is somehow Sid

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then far less consequential than its zealots can do—forecloses all manner of adapta- The purport. As the cognitive psychologist and tions. It’s simply “too late,” in the cosmic philosopher Jerry Fodor, leader of the sense, for salmon to evolve into German Darwinist skeptics, bids us ask: What if shepherds, even if the Atlantic Ocean Reductionist Darwinian evolution through natural starts to “select for” shepherdly traits. selection is reducible to the mere combi- Natural selection is additive, conserva- Trap nation of statistics and natural history? tive. It moves like the king on the chess- Fodor, like biologist Stephen Jay Gould board, one step in any direction. And there DANIEL FOSTER and others before him, seizes on two prob- are, of course, other pieces at play, which lems for Darwinism, one conceptual and the further limit the king’s movement by other empirical. On the former, he choos- blocking off particular avenues of advance es as his analogy what can be called the and escape. Natural selection alone doesn’t “spandrel problem.” Spandrels are the tri- give us a theory of what those other pieces angular spaces between dome-supporting might be or how important they are. columns in classical architecture. We As a layman, I won’t speculate on ex - know that the spandrels—while carefully actly how problematic the empirical and adorned and lovely—were by-products conceptual problems are for working evo- of the columns. Roman architects, in lutionary biologists. But I can say they other words, “selected” the columns, and rear their ugly heads time and again as the spandrels came along for the ride. But Ridley tries to extend the adaptationist we can’t tell any such story about traits framework to cover nigh every process “selected for” in the adaptationist story of that’s ever played out on Planet Earth. The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas biology, because, as Fodor says: This is evident most starkly when Rid - Emerge, by Matt Ridley (Harper, ley discusses evolutionary phenomena not 368 pp., $28.99) There is, by assumption, no architect to with genes as the units, but with conscious do the deciding. If cathedrals weren’t beings—that is, us. In a section on the evo- HE author of this always- designed but grew in the wild, would the lution of language, for instance, he men- informative new ode to Dar - right evolutionary story be that they tions the case of the change in meaning of have arches because they were selected winism took a doctorate in “prevaricate” from “lie” to “procrastinate.” for having spandrels? Or would it be zoology at Oxford. I am a that they have spandrels because they Ridley says, “Nobody thought up this rule; Tgrad-school dropout who took geology were selected for having arches? Or nei- it is the process of evolution.” Except (Rocks for Jocks!) to avoid math as an ther? Or both? that’s not right. There really was a first per- undergrad at George Washington Uni - son to use “prevaricate” this way, just like versity. So it’s gingerly that I suggest The same sort of worry is illustrated in there really was a first person to tell a Matt Ridley calm down a bit on the cases of selective breeding. One oft-cited “knock-knock” joke, and a first person to explanatory power of evolution by natur- example is Russian husbanders who bred eat moldy, curdled milk. It may be that a al selection. wild foxes for docility. They learned in neuron misfired and that first person Ridley has written a number of books short order that a number of other traits— meant to say “procrastinate” after all, just more narrowly focused on genetics and floppy ears, distinctive coloration, and as it may be that the knock-knock joke biological evolution, and, even having the l ike—piggybacked on docility. But emerged from some humorous misunder- skimmed through them, I can say they are we also know, because breeders have standing and cheese was born from the more careful on the subject than this lat- informed us what they were thinking or accidental storing of milk in the improp- est free-for-all. demonstrated it, that those traits were not erly cleaned stomach of a cow. But in The central question about a cosmology the thing selected for. these cases there was still a listener who of ideas in which evolution has the catbird But we have no such recourse when properly decoded the speaker’s “prevari- seat—in which it is asked by Ridley to nature is the breeder. There’s nobody we cate” in context, resulting in a successful account for everything from religion to can ask. Thus adaptationist pictures are, communication; still an audience member government, the economy, and morality— as Gould and others have pointed out, nar- who internalized the knock-knock struc- is whether the vast array of phenomena rative frameworks imposed as a regula- ture and repeated it to good effect; still an that can be usefully described in evolu- tive fiction on the chaotic mass of facts. Adam or Eve of cheesemongers. tionary vocabulary is an indication of that Then there’s the empirical limitation on We’re not very good at hypothesizing theory’s profundity, or of its banality. the explanatory power of Darwinism. In about how incidents such as these turn into There is a minority report on Darwin, short, it’s that the evolution of creatures is full-fledged cultural institutions—first, not dominant in the discourse but nag- path-dependent. The evolutionary history because those causal chains are composed gingly fascinating, in which the theory is of salmon—indeed, the even more basic of so many fine links, and are viewed from not false but minor: if not trivial exactly, biochemical facts of what salmon genes such a remove, that they appear to be con-

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tinuums, with neither beginnings nor ends; progressive lands us well past teleology result of a complex amalgam of planned second, and relatedly, because vague- and into the realm of destiny. But we know processes and improvisations, group ness is endemic in our conceptual appa- that species do not begin flawed and dynamics and individual agency, context ratus. Evolutionary biologists know evolve unto a state of perfection. Rather, and contingency, iron laws of man and there were australopiths and then there Darwin tells us that the only kind of per- nature and one-time, black-swan mira- were hominids, but there is no correct fection that matters is fitness, and fitness is cles. It becomes downright odd, then, to answer about when the one became the radically context-dependent. Dinosaurs see Ridley compulsively driven to end other, just as there is no correct answer and trilobites are no more or less perfect these always cogent and often provoca- about the precise number of beans that suf- than Homo sapiens living in London at the tive mosaics on the great flux of history fices for a “heap” or the number of hairs beginning of the 21st century. They are with one fell swoop of reduction, often you’d have to add to Sir Patrick Stewart’s only more or less fit to their niches. coming close to punctuating sections and head before he was no longer bald. Lots of the “weakly” evolutionary pic- chapters with the exclamation “Evo - This might sound like a niggling com- tures Ridley paints—weak, again, in the lution!” and some jazz hands. plaint. Why does it matter? It isn’t that sense sketched above—are perfectly un - Focusing on the undirected, unplanned evolutionary theory—at least in the weaker controversial. For example, Ridley’s idea aspects of phenomena leaves Ridley blind sense I would propose—isn’t a plausible that “Mozart could not have written what to deeply significant levels of analysis and and fruitful way of talking about these he did if Bach and his like had not written judgment in human affairs. He tells a plau- things. It’s that Ridley is at pains to what they did, nor could Beetho ven have sible story, for instance, of how agricul- explain just about everything as a “bottom written his music without drawing upon tural and economic conditions in different up,” not a “top down,” process—one dri- Mozart” is hardly something that would parts of the world exerted selective pres- ven by local information and local deci- have scandalized Europe be fore Darwin. sure toward polygamy; how monogamy sions, with almost no efficacy assigned at But others clearly beg the question of emerged initially with Christianity, and all to overarching human designs. Ridley plan versus improvisation. And many of then only finally with the rise of bourgeois needs this to be true, or at least seems to the dynamics Ridley shows to emerge merchants; and of how competitive pres- strongly believe this needs to be true, to from the bottom up are also present in sures can explain the prevalence of vio- bolster his political commitments, which organizations planned from the top lence between the monogamous West and are, broadly, reductive atheism in the mold down. Here, surely, the planning is doing the polygamists at its periphery (funda- of Dawkins and Dennett, free-market eco- some of the work. Ridley has a long mentalist Islam) and in its midst (the early nomics, and what he calls “a vague sense section on innovation as an essentially Mormon Church). But readers will recog- of progress” that he sees underlying all bottom-up process, an arena of evolu- nize here the trap of the materialist. The evolutionary processes. tionary accidents. But it would be un - fact that a phenomenon admits of a struc- I’m interested in bolstering some of usual if a carefully constructed team at tural or a statistical description, among these things, too (you can guess which). IBM set out to design the next great others, does not make that description the But the others I’m not so sure of. The idea microprocessor and wound up producing essential, much less the morally relevant that evolution is “progressive,” in particu- the next great R&B jam instead. one. Michelangelo’s David is a lump of lar, blows through the big Darwinist no-no Time and again in human contexts, non-foliated metamorphic rock. But to of using teleological language to describe Ridley rehearses some great triumph— understand David this way—as to under- natural selection. Indeed, Ridley’s sugges- global economic growth, the invention of stand marriage as an accretion of eco- tion that the evolution of moral, political, the Internet, the emergence of modern nomic incentives—is to miss something and religious norms (including even the government—and finely and commend- of great beauty and consequence. move away from religion) is in some sense ably summarizes outcomes that are the This materialist myopia is most offensive whenever Ridley discusses faith, as he does compulsively and pathologically. WINTER SONG His chapter on the evolution of religion would require a book-length rebuttal. As we unfreeze our rosy faces Suffice it to say that Ridley’s operating We envy friends in warmer places, assumption is that every theistic thinker Though we are wont to wish them well, who ever existed assumed, without evi- Even those toasting toes in hell. dence, that God and God alone was the guarantor of virtue and morality. This does We feast on heavy meat, creamed peas, Fried potatoes, sauce, and pasta, casual and plenary violence to a millenni- Roast extra garlic, steam our teas, um or three of Western philosophers who Hug our dreams of rose and hosta. wrestled consequentially with the question of whether the good precedes the godly. Make up a rhyme for pungent onion, Nietzsche styled himself “the hammer Recall those times when we were happy, of the gods.” Ridley is keen to grant Know we’re stuck with chilblain, bunion, Darwin that honorific. Not surprising, Till the trees ar e leafed and sappy. then, that every realm on which Ridley brings the naturalist to bear should look —SALLY COOK like a nail.

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upheavals of late antiquity. They seem the sial by (entirely false) rumors that he A New unlikely outcomes of huge blanks (he was still a crypto-Manichaean—had approached quite near to his “conver- played an obscene cultic prank on two sion” without, for example, knowing important correspondents in Italy, a cou- Christian anything about monastic communities or ple in a pious mariage blanc who were the Nicene Creed, which was a ritual founding a religious community with SARAH RUDEN secret), brilliant confusion, and pragmatic their vast wealth. readjustments—as well as of a hyper- To cover so much ground, Fox adopts a concentrated intelligence and a passion- device that wouldn’t work in less deft ate love of God. hands. At intervals he pursues biographies The haloed theologian on the one hand of two men of the same era whose simi- and the ruthless ascetic fully explicated by larities to and differences from his main Freud on the other—those prevailing subject are particularly telling. images—are far less interesting than the Libanius (c. 314–c. 392) was of aristo- man who emerges in Fox’s account. If cratic heritage, a lifelong pagan, and a God could do all this with a hormone- Greek literary scholar. On all these counts, fogged, smart-aleck, self-pitying, lower- he would have despised the obscurely middle-class boy from North Africa, striving, Latin-speaking (and rather hope- Augustine: Conversions to Confessions, by Robin during one of civilization’s seemingly lessly Greek-swotting) Augustine, born to Lane Fox (Basic, 688 pp., $35) least propitious eras for doing anything a Christian mother and marked instantly with anyone, what couldn’t He do? for the catechumenate (the period in UST a few things are widely known about Augustine of Hippo (354–430 A.D.), whose designa- If God could do all this with a tions are as lofty and sweeping as saint,J doctor (= “teacher”) of the Church, hormone-fogged, smart-aleck, self- and the greatest of the Church Fathers. He refined the doctrine of original sin, pitying, lower-middle-class boy from the logic that connects mankind’s eternal North Africa . . . fate to offenses in the Garden of Eden. He saw sex as a mammoth obstacle to a Fox has produced a fanatically well- advance of baptism). But both were fully Christian life. (Who hasn’t heard researched new account of Augustine up rhetoricians, and thus members of a of his youthful prayer, “Give me chastity to the time the Confessions were dictated profession very important to ancient and continence, but not yet”?) And the (which, he argues, was 397). There is, for culture and education, especially under crucial resolve came to him in a garden, instance, a painstaking but accessible sur- the Roman Empire. when he heard a child’s voice from near- vey of Manichaean literature and prac- City chairs of rhetoric were public by chanting, “Pick it up, rea d it!”—and tice. Augustine spent an early long span offices; Libanius held the one at Antioch, picked up and read a command in Paul of years as a subordinate “hearer” in this and Augustine the one at Milan before of Tarsus’s letters to leave the dissolute nominally Christian sect. To explain renouncing this possible path to imperi- life behind. globally his remarks about it in the Con - al administrative heaven (once a posh But Robin Lane Fox, perhaps the most fessions (such as that its leaders claimed marriage would secure the cash and con- helpful living popularizer of ancient his- to “belch out angels”) is a scholarly task nections to start the climb). Moreover, tory and culture, points out that Augustine equivalent to mastering multiple ver- Libanius, like Augustine, wrote an aston- may here have made a mistake in inter- sions of Scientology’s Dianetics in Old ishing amount, including a summary of pretation (one of many, as it appears). The Persian and several contemporary but his life with arguments about its meaning. Latin words he heard can also mean, far-flung languages and then laying out Independent of ideology, a sufficient “Take away, gather,” or “Pick up, gather.” for non-specialist readers the entire sense of the private—or publicly pri- (I’m stimulated to note another possibil- mythology and ritual, along with their vate—self had made such an undertaking ity, “choose” instead of “gather”; several background and reception. conceivable by this time. kinds of children’s games shared between But Fox nails it—the religion Mani Synesius (c. 373–c. 414) was a fellow many cultures would in fact fit a non- founded, and every other major influ- Christian bishop in North Africa and a “read” translation.) ence on the young to early-middle-aged striking example of the divided world Be that as it may, Augustine’s achieve- Augustine. He even, hilariously, gives Augustine occupied. He was a wealthy ments over the next four decades, as a pretty solid evidence for an episode that and prominent diplomat, a tireless hunter, moral, intellectual, and institutional I wouldn’t dream of spoiling for readers and a brave military leader. Allowing authority, were foundational, and they with up-front details. One scandal himself to be drafted as a Christian cleric, show up much more strikingly because obliquely addressed in the Confessions he stipulated that his lifestyle would they are almost pitifully unlikely amid the appears to have been that Augustine, hardly change; he would even continue near the time he became sole bishop of to have sex with his wife. In technically Sarah Ruden is a visiting scholar at Brown University. Hippo—a succession made controver- the same church, Augustine felt guilty

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even gazing with interest at a dog chasing that period—particularly “Blowin’ in the a hare in a field, and lobbied a former pro- Mystery Wind,” “The Times They Are a- tégé as urgently against marriage and a Changin’,” “The Lonesome Death of secular career as a parent today would Hattie Carroll,” and “Only a Pawn in lobby against enlistment in a drug cartel. Man Their Game”—were taken to heart by But Synesius and Augustine shared a the civil-rights movement. On the more calling to pagan philosophy: Synesius ROBERT DEAN LURIE militant end of the activist spectrum, the had studied with the great Hypatia (who domestic terrorist organization The was later murdered by a Christian mob). Weather Underground took its name In late adolescence, Augustine was en- from an offhand line in the Dylan song flamed with idealism not by the Bible “Sub terranean Homesick Blues.” In the (whose crude style in Latin he despised ensuing years, numerous political candi- when he finally confronted it, as he’d dates, and even a couple of sitting presi- had the still-standard pagan high-literary dents, have quoted from Dylan’s lyrics in schooling) but by Cicero’s Hortensius, a efforts to bolster their positions. For dialogue about the glories of philosophy. these reasons and many others, Bob Augustine delayed his “catholic” (from Dylan’s politics, or at least the political the Greek word for “universal”) baptism views he has put forward in his songs, partly because of excruciating doubts merit close attention. about the “substance” of God and related Enter The Political World of Bob The Political World of Bob Dylan: Freedom and philosophical preoccupations. His strug- Dylan, by Chad Israelson and Jeff Taylor. Justice, Power and Sin, by Jeff Taylor and gle for celibacy was informed less by In this first full-length treatment of the Christian rules (as urged by his pious Chad Israelson (Palgrave Macmillan, subject, the authors have performed a mother, Monica, from whom he literally 320 pp., $105) small miracle in teasing a consistent fled, sneaking away from her across the political philosophy out of a seemingly sea to Italy) than by the dualism of pagan RITING about Bob Dy - chaotic life. The popular narrative goes Greek thinkers: Pure contemplation was lan’s politics would seem like this: Robert Zimmerman, a young on one side, and on the other was the ani- to be a thankless task. man of Jewish background from northern malistic life of physical sensation and The famously curmud- Minnesota, appeared on the public stage practical activity. Wgeonly songwriter claims to know and as “Bob Dylan,” a folksinger who quickly The words he read in the garden, with care little about the subject, and what he came to be associated with the New Left. which the Jewish Paul had echoed basic, has said comes across as confused and However, owing to his contrarian nature, long-established rules (and only against contradictory. He distrusts authority and he rebelled against those who sought to illicit sex, where sex was concerned), empathizes with the underdog; score pigeonhole him and proceeded to cycle had little or nothing to do with this world- two for the Left. He is a Barry Gold- through a series of sharply delineated view—but Augustine made the link; water fan and feels alienated from the personas: drug-addled trickster, family- somewhat as, over the decades to come, counterculture he helped create; score oriented traditionalist, outlaw trouba- he would make poetic, emotionally two for the Right. He has kind words for dour, and, most controversially, born- appealing, but theoretically weak links George W. Bush . . . but he likes Obama, again Christian. The only through-line between the Bible (usually in bad Latin too. “[Obama] loves music. He’s per- seems to have been Dylan’s restless nature translations) and his inner needs and the sonable. He dresses good,” Dylan told reasserting itself every few years. Church’s outer ones. His greatest achieve- Rolling Stone when prodded to share Taylor and Israelson maintain that this ment subsisted in the overall movement some thoughts on the president; but then is merely a surfac e caricature. Through from airless abstraction to populist reli- he added, “What the f*** do you want close listening, careful examination of gion. This movement was no doubt insti- me to say?” Dylan’s published statements, and new gated by his role as an active cleric. As And that would seem to be the point. interviews with a number of Dylan’s any cleric will profess, nothing works Bob Dylan is not a political theorist or his- colleagues, they persuasively demon- with a congregation except the evidence torian. He’s not a TV commentator or an strate how, even during the tumult of that you love them; for Augustine, the opinion columnist. He is a musician. So radical stylistic changes, Bob Dylan’s great gift of love was his words. why are we asking him? music has retained its core preoccupa- The Confessions is a masterpiece of Well, there is that “Voice of a Gen - tions with justice, the plight of the under- preaching that enacts the ideas of love and eration” label that was foisted upon dog, the limitations of human power, grace more than it pushes them explicitly. Dylan by the press and his fans in the and, later, the urgent need “to reconcile And it is an unprecedentedly intimate yet early 1960s. The songs he wrote during with divine law.” open prayer, witty and colorful as well. The book is divided into two sections. Look, it said to King Alfred and Martin Mr. Lurie, a musician, is the author of No The first, written primarily by Israelson, Luther and countless others, I am God’s Certainty Attached: Steve Kilbey and The analyzes the political aspects of Dylan’s but I am still myself; what a miracle this Church, and a co-author (with Ray Fisher) of life and work prior to his Christian con- life is, and how unlikely yet obvious is its The Edge: Life Lessons from a Martial version in 1978. Displaying both a far- connection to eternity. Arts Master. ranging grasp of history and a deep

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immersion in Dylan’s music, Israelson gotta serve somebody.” As he sang in the goes a long way in reconciling Dylan’s song of that title, “it may be the Devil or it seemingly contradictory personas. may be the Lord, but you still gotta serve Through Israelson’s lens, we see that somebody.” Regarding Dylan’s long-run- these transitions were rejections more of ning involvement with Chabad, Taylor form than of content. Case in point: opines that Dylan’s “occasional partici- Dylan may have largely abandoned the pation in events for Hasidic/Orthodox genre of protest songs and become disen- Judaism does not indicate a rejection of chanted with the accompanying activist Christianity. It seems to be tied to family culture of the 1960s, but that does not and to a shared moral outlook.” While it mean he abandoned the concerns underly- is tempting to dismiss this as an over- ing these songs. Indeed, civil rights (the simplification, Taylor’s explanation is only “political movement of the 1960s . . . perhaps the only plausible one in light Dylan unequivocally supported,” accord- of the evidence. The fact that Dylan ing to Israelson) remained a preoccupa- cheekily elected to perform a gospel tion, one that would resurface multiple song on a Chabad telethon further sup- times in later work. Hand in hand with his ports Tay lor’s assertion. concern for the underrepresented ele- The “Christian anarchist” thesis will no ments of society, critical views of the doubt prove controversial with many U.S. justice system and of U.S. foreign Dylan fans. Yet the impressive volume of policy have remained consistent and pro- Taylor’s supporting evidence, along with nounced throughout all phases of his the work he has put into connecting the songwriting career. dots, ensures that it cannot be easily refut- What may have changed is any kind of ed. He overplays his hand somewhat, faith in human means of correcting these though, in his insistence on deploying the failings. And here we come to one of the rate Dylan’s lyrics to the present day. “Christian” label at every turn. His repeti- most intriguing, and seemingly random, Furthermore, Taylor has managed to track tion of the phrase “Bob Dylan remains a phases in Dylan’s career: his dramatic and down and interview David Kelly, Dylan’s Christian” (or variations thereof) betrays highly public conversion to Evangelical former personal assistant, who provides a defensiveness that is perhaps under- Christianity. Even at the height of his prior crucial insight into the singer’s conver- standable, given common perceptions of affiliation with the New Left, he never sion. Taylor’s purpose in focusing so Dylan, but it ultimately isn’t necessary. proclaimed a cause quite as loudly as he heavily on the religion question is to Furthermore, Chad Israelson’s documen- did during his gospel tours of 1979–80, demonstrate how Dylan’s Christian belief tation, in his earlier section, of Dylan’s when the usually tight-lipped Dylan loud- system complements his preexisting dis- antipathy toward virtually all organized ly testified to audiences on behalf of his trust of consolidated political and finan- movements might lead one to conclude new lord and savior, Jesus Christ. cial power. In such early songs as “Only a that Taylor, a devout Christian, has fallen In subsequent years, this brief ministry Pawn in Their Game” and “Masters of prey to the behavior that characterized came to be regarded as yet another phase War,” Dylan articulated the popular view Dylan’s fans on the New Left: a desire to and something of an aberration—an odd that moneyed interests and the political nail his hero down to a specific movement side trip before Dylan returned to his elite pull the strings. His later belief in the and position, when the songwriter prefers Jewish roots. And this view would seem Book of Revelation prompted him to con- to dance around these subjects in ways to be backed by solid evidence: Shortly clude that “politics is an instrument of the that are far more subtle and idiosyncratic. after the Christian proselytizing period, devil. . . . Politics is what kills; it doesn’t Despite this flaw in tone, Taylor and Dylan became involved with the Chabad- bring anything alive.” Israelson’s achievement with this book is Lubavitch sect of Orthodox Judaism, a Taylor calls this view “Christian anar- considerable: They have pored through group not known for its open ness chism” and devotes much of his half of Dylan’s life and work like medieval kab- toward Christian–Jewish syncret ism. He the book to a thorough analysis of this balists and have mapped out the underly- also recorded a pro-Israel song for his philosophy. It is perhaps too complex and ing pattern. We could be forgiven for 1983 Infidels album titled “Neighbor - nuanced a subject to be unpacked here, thinking that Bob Dylan, like so many of hood Bully” that seemed to reveal a not- but the gist is that a “Christian anarchist” us, is simply a man who finds himself so-subtle Zionist streak. agitates for a decentralized state because pulled in many directions and changes his Yet Jeff Taylor provides a forceful, fallen man cannot be trusted with power; mind a lot. After reading this deeply con- rarely heard counterargument. And he too only Jesus Christ can rule with justice. sidered book, I have come to believe that has solid support for his position, assidu- Long time followers of Bob Dylan’s work there is at least some method to the mad- GETTY IMAGES / ously documenting Dylan’s many unam- will recognize that only the second half ness. It is a shame that this provocative biguously Christian statements from of that formulation represents any kind of tome has been targeted and priced to the post-1980 interviews and, more impor- new development for the songwriter. His academic market, for it is probably the CONTRIBUTOR / tant, the strong Christian imagery—often antipathy toward those in power was most interesting and challenging work on skewed heavily toward the Book of already well established; what changed Dylan to arrive in quite some time. It VAL WILMER Revelation—that has continued to satu- was his post-1978 conviction that “you deserves a wide audience.

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“and then Mum would fry ’em in a little Unfortunately, neither Clive nor Lois An bacon fat for lunch.” can remember what the movie was. An uncle had a shortwave radio. It got That datum has been lost to history. Germany. Clive heard someone yelling Lois does remember, however, that American on it—Hitler. Whenever there was a they had brownies and strawberry ice pause, Clive asked, “What’s he doing?” cream afterward. Original The uncle would answer, “He’s getting a They were married in 1947, when mouthful of sauerkraut.” Clive was 19 and Lois was 21. Clive Several years before he learned to likes to remind his wife that she’s older JAY NORDLINGER drive a car, Clive learned to fly a plane. than he. But he does this with great affec- He was taught by a trapper—Freddie tion. “I’ve always liked older women,” Anderson, the Flying Trapper. he says. New Market, Va. Clive’s mother was born Ellen Lois is not related to an opera star, but LIVE A. BABKIRK is a Yankee Nordica Norton. That peculiar middle she is related to a literary star: Ralph in the South. He and his name came from her great-aunt, Mad - Waldo Emerson. Also the Win chesters, wife, Lois, are Mainers who ame Lillian Nordica. Madame Nordica of rifle fame. She wonders, humorously, live in the Shenandoah Val - was born Lillian Allen Norton in Farm - why no money made it down to her. Cley of Virginia. Each has a marvelous ington, Maine. A soprano, she became With work unavailable in Maine, Down East accent—the kind you hardly the first American opera singer to Clive and Lois moved down to New hear anymore in New England, to say nothing of Virginia. It so happens, Clive is one of the most eloquent people I know. Also one of the An uncle had a shortwave radio. most likeable. I tell him I want to come It got Germany. Clive heard someone down and see him. He says, “When are you coming? As they say down here, I’ll yelling on it—Hitler. get a hold of a woodchuck, and we’ll have woodchuck stew.” achieve world renown. She was known Hartford, Conn. Clive had job after job, Clive is a designer and maker of fur- as “the Yankee Diva” (as Joyce Di - as a tool-and-die maker. But he really niture. He also designs and makes Donato, a mezzo-soprano from Kan sas, liked to fiddle with wood. I ask him smaller things. He can create virtually is today). whether his father had this talent. “No,” anything out of wood, and has. His According to Clive, his mother could says Clive, “he couldn’t saw a straight business card says, “50 years of creat- sing, too. She would sing when she was line on a board.” But Clive had the tal- ing happiness.” I’ll tell you a little of down on her hands and knees, scrubbing ent, and so do his children. his story. the floor. When he was a boy, Clive Clive and Lois had five children. One He was born in Berlin, N.H., in 1928. heard this every day. of them, Dale, died at the age of 20. He His father was from Maine, but was Madame Nordica was one of the first was killed in a car accident. He was a working in that town at a paper mill. celebrity endorsers of Coca-Cola. In very talented woodworker, as the things The baby’s mother had a couple of rea- fact, she was featured in the first national he made prove. sons to call her newborn “Clive.” First, magazine ad that Coke ever ran—the When Clive was fiddling around, he there was a movie star, Clive Brook. year was 1905. Today, Clive and Lois made bookends, pipe racks, cribbage Second, there was “Clive of India,” the have a commemorative item on their boards, and other such objects. They British general and statesman in the wall: Aunt Lillian, advertising Coke. caught the notice of a buyer for G. Fox 18th century. A clever boy, Clive graduated from & Co., the department store in Hartford. Clive goes by both Clive and “Kirk,” high school when he was 15. He had one He took them to a trade show in Chi- his nickname. As the “Kirk” part tells teacher he thought was nothing but “a cago. Soon after, Clive heard from the you, he’s Scottish. He’s also Swedish, lousy old maid.” Her name was Vera chief buyer at Neiman-Marcus, in French, and Irish. Whenever he talks Peterson, and when Clive got older, he Dallas—who wanted as much as Clive about saving money, he says it’s the realized that she had taught him a great could make. This led to orders from Scotch coming out. deal. She was the best teacher he ever Marshall Field’s, I. Magnin, and the rest In the teeth of the Depression, the mill had. Clive never went to college, but he of the big stores. in New Hampshire went bust. Clive was went far. In the mid 1960s, Clive decided to three at the time. His father took the When he was about 17, he was work- leave tool-and-die–making behind and family back up to Maine—to the very ing down in the lower part of the state. A go full time into woodworking and fur- top, Stockholm, Maine, in Aroostook friend was dating a girl named Ruth. niture. The family decamped to New County. This was potato-growing coun- One night, they were going to the Hampshire, settling in Epsom. There, try. In all, the family had four children. movies. Would Clive like to go along, Clive presided over a village: a village At least they wouldn’t starve to death. with Ruth’s younger sister, Lois? Sure, of craftsmen. There were blacksmiths, Times were lean, though. “We had said Clive. And they have been together potters, and more. Clive accepted a lot rolled oats for breakfast,” says Clive, ever since. of hippies into his village. When they

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came to him, “you could hardly see ’em for hair.” He told them to clean up and fly right—which, says Clive, they did. His operation was known as the House of Kirk. He and his crew made everything from tables to pipe organs, from beekeep- er’s benches to armoires. They sold to ordinary people and to the country’s most prominent families—including the Firestones, du Ponts, and Mellons. “Which pieces are you proudest of?” I ask Clive. He thinks of a series of roll- top desks he made. In 1985, he and Lois moved down here to Virginia. Why? “For the wood,” says Clive—it was diverse and plentiful in this region. Also, he and Lois had gotten to love the Shenandoah Valley, on various trips. They came to New Market and bought a building that was intended to be a warehouse. Then it was a roller- skating rink. Then it was Clive’s shop and factory. The facility sits on a Civil War battlefield. Eight Confederate soldiers were killed on the very spot, says Clive. And there are three ghosts in the place. They didn’t like the new occu- pants, the “damn Yankees.” But ghosts and Yankees have made their peace, says Clive. They are living harmo- niously together. The shop is loaded with furniture- making machinery, and patterns, and wood. There are also antiques—includ- Clive A. Babkirk in his shop. He is standing next to the final piece of furniture he made. In his left hand is his ing two streetlights from Boston, com- ‘briefcase’—a piece of wood with a natural handle in it. plete with their stanchions. These are exceedingly rare. Virtually all the other streetlights and stanchions were melted might give one to “someone that’s hurt- It could be that Americans in every down during World War II. Everything ing,” says Clive. generation have thought this. Maybe it was needed for the war effort. He is a believer in God, and goes to will be true, someday? Maybe it’s Clive figures these things are worth Him in prayer. He is also a man of true now? quite a lot. “Mother and I could live tremendous compassion toward others. But Clive is anything but a sourpuss. good off them.” He also knows a thing or two about He has come through a number of hard- In addition to working with wood, he hard work, and business success. Back in ships, and has coped with physical pain works with plants and trees, as a hobby. New Hampshire, Clive knew several for a long time—yet he will not be He has tended one ponytail palm for 50 politicians, including Meldrim Thomson, talked into gloom. “I found out in life years. (It has a name, “Palmie.”) There the governor during the 1970s. Thomson that you can smile and be cheerful or is also a banana tree and a night- was a rock-ribbed conservative. He you can be down in the dumps. And blooming cereus. inscribed a copy of his memoir, Live Free when I get down in the dumps, it Clive stopped making furniture about or Die, to Clive: “a great American who doesn’t take long before I say, ‘Come five years ago, and is now making is an outstanding proponent of the free- on, Kirk, this isn’t going to get you smaller pieces—“gift items,” as he says. enterprise system.” anywhere.’” And then he’s back to his This is the way he started out, back in I ask Clive whether he’s optimistic cheerful self. Connecticut. He has lazy Susans and about the country. No. Among the Anyone who visits him will feel a flying geese and whatnot. His latest pro- young, there is too much “disrespect,” similar lift. I don’t know if they broke ject is an ornament—not a Christmas even “hate.” And “it’s hurting our coun- the mold with Clive—an exemplary ornament. He has done those in the past. try, terribly.” Too many young people, American—but there probably aren’t This is a “forever ornament,” as he says, says Clive, “have no allegiance to what many more of him than there are of JAY NORDLINGER and it has the word “Hope” on it. You we’re all about, where we come from.” those streetlights and stanchions.

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Except that the devil is out there too, of narration but succeeds in showing us the Film course: “Old Nick” (Sean Bridgers), their world—perfectly enclosed and then violent and self-pitying captor-father, shockingly enlarged—through Jack’s True who appears nightly to rape Ma while transfixed, transfixing gaze. Jack is kept hidden (at his mother’s de - As in the book, there’s a little more Grit mand) inside the wardrobe. Old Nick also critical distance for the audience after the brings (through magic, according to Ma’s escape attempt, in the falling action that mythmaking) their food and clothes and tries to complicate ideas of happy end- ROSS DOUTHAT the occasional Sunday treat—such as the ings, to show us the depths of adjust- ingredients for the cake with which they ment that our wider world requires. HE movie poster for Room celebrate Jack’s fifth birthday. Here the story, while still interesting, shows a young mother, head tilt- That celebration opens the movie, and becomes something more familiar, with ed back, garbed in comfortable- it turns out to be the beginning of their predictable beats and complications— looking gray, swinging her captivity’s end. Events intervene that the pain of a broken family, the claustro- Tlittle boy in her arms. He’s wearing a force Ma to reveal the truth (or some of phobia of ordinary life, the ins and outs of plaid jacket, a raccoon hat, and a cute-as- it) to her son, and then to use him in a des- post-traumatic stress. the-dickens smile. The sky above them is perate bid for freedom, whose mix of high But while the familiarity or even pre- a weave of clouds and azure; autumnal anxiety and total wonder as Jack encoun- dictability breaks the story’s spell a little trees fan out behind them; a flock of birds ters the world beyond Room makes for an bit, it also lets us realize just what an soars. “Love knows no boundaries,” runs the tagline. The only dissonant note is a faint intersection of lines above them and to the left, suggesting a glass box around the pair. But you have to look for it to notice it. I like to imagine how long it would take for an unwary moviegoer, presented with just that poster, to guess what Room is actually about. Maternal love and some sort of triumph of the human spirit—that much they could figure out. But it would probably take a lifetime’s worth of guesses to get from there to the movie’s horrifying hook. That hook consists of what the title advertises: a room, probably ten-by-ten, in which the mother (Brie Larson) and her son, Jack (Jacob Tremblay), eat and sleep and wash and play and do, well, absolutely everything, because it’s where Jacob Tremblay and Brie Larson in Room they’ve been held prisoner for years by an Ariel Castro–style kidnapper. But only extraordinary combination—as if the incredible performance Larson gives as the mother—she has a real name, Joy, but scenes of childhood in Terrence Malick’s Ma, as Joy—because there’s nothing the to the boy she’s only “Ma”—was actually Tree of Life somehow retained their least bit rote or obvious about her work kidnapped; Jack was born inside the haunting ecstasy while also acquiring the here. To believe the story, to have it room, fathered on his mother by her furious tension of a Hitchcock sequence. escape the sentimental and the sensa- rapist, and the enclosed space is the only But the movie is intense long before the tional, you have to believe that someone world he’s ever known. escape attempt arrives. The material is so very ordinary, a teenage girl plucked out Yet it’s a space that his mother has raw and primal, the plot’s fairy-tale clarity of a suburban idyll, could pull off what enchanted, with stories, drawings, and a so stark, that anyone who’s been a parent her character pulls off—the incredible mythologizing eye that turns every object or a child will find himself wrung almost feat of maternal strength, of imagination into a capitalized landmark (Toilet, Ward - too raw to get the distance required for in the service of survival. robe, Teevee, etc.) in her son’s nutshell of critical judgment on the art. Through Larson’s work, you believe it. infinite space. And “Room” itself is capi- Which itself implies a kind of judg- Her character doesn’t cut her son’s hair talized, since so far as Jack knows it’s the ment—an admiring one. Credit for that inside their prison, telling him that, as world entire: Everything on the television goes to Emma Donoghue, the Irish novel- with Samson, it’s his Strong. Which is is just imaginary, and beyond the walls ist responsible for the film’s source what she is for him, and what Larson is and out-of-reach skylight there’s only material, and to Lenny Abrahamson, the for the movie: a reason to enter this har- CAITLIN CRONENBERG / outer space and the heaven from which director, whose adaptation uses only a rowing fairy tale, the reason to surrender 24 A he, her angel, was sent down. little of the book’s child’s-eye first-person to its spell.

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before five o’clock makes daylight, like soup and a half sandwich, chopped liver City Desk wakefulness, a fleeting acquaintance. on challah; California roll and kake You try at moments of resolve to go soba. Like the U.N., minus demagogy Down by through the motions of normal life, but and anti-Semitism. can only sleepwalk. I have written all my I read my wife Sherlock Holmes sto- life, I can write anytime. I wrote on 9/11, ries. I have read them all aloud several Winter I wrote with an office mate who liked times (except for the ones without Wat - to play pop-classical piano music full son, which I read only once, disdainful- blast. So I wrote when I was sick— ly). We are not such aficionados that we Russo–American relations, the Recon - know from the first sentence which story struction amendments, campus craziness, it is; there are preliminary feints, some terrorist murders—but as soon as I quite elaborate (the addict in the opium clicked to send, it was back to bed. I did den). But once the woman in distress or a few things that were foolhardy. I went the noble lord settles into the proffered to the gym a couple of times. Sometimes chair, we know where we have been and a workout picks you up. Not these times. where we are going: the remarkable Every press felt simultaneously like an bequest of the eccentric millionaire to enormous effort and as if I were watching red-headed men; the doctor who is the RICHARD BROOKHISER a film of someone making an enormous scion of one of the oldest Saxon families effort. I was both tried and detached. I in England; the ailing machine for pro- HAVE flown into the city dozens of times, but this time—slam—it felt like a crash-landing in my ears. You try at moments of resolve to go Nothing—yawning, swallowing, Ithose little rubber ear screws that make through the motions of normal life, you look audio-animatronic—worked. After we landed I heard as through a but can only sleepwalk. glass, darkly. Not hearing is like a little imprisonment. went out at least once a day to my favorite cessing fuller’s earth; the fat amusing It is not all bad. Happy hour in your restaurant, a short walk—three blocks, employer and the electric blue dress. favorite restaurant is now endurable. one-seventh of a mile. But going and What keeps us coming back? Nostalgia: Nevertheless it is bad. Home conversation coming I heeded every “Don’t Walk” servants, telegrams, hansoms, smoking. becomes a comedy sketch on marriage sign, I yielded the right of way to every Anglo philia: The Empire girdles the and/or old age. “. . . .” [Nothing] “. . . .” oncoming pedestrian. I might as well globe, and India, Australia, and, yes, the [Nothing] “. . . !” “I CAN’T HEAR YOU!” have surrendered my passport; where is United States, are the homes of weirdos, After a few days of this I went to the doc- this guy from, Iowa or someplace? We cultists, and savages. Moral order: The tor. The cabbie, an immigrant, recognized went out to dinner once. The other couple fog may be thick and the gaslights dim, me from a TV talk on one of my more is entertaining and international (Italian, but nothing is noir; there is justice, and it obscure subjects. Quick, without looking Czech). I sat on the wall side of the table, almost always prevails. But of course the it up, who was Gouverneur Morris? in a corner, smiling and answering every main attraction is the eternal dyad: intel- Isaac from Ghana knows. That was cheer- question put to me, but I could not have ligence, intensity, loneliness vs. conven- ing. The doctor was not cheering, but he passed a Turing test. “My instructor was tion, limitation, empathy. Holmes studies was the next best thing, which is clear. The Mr. Langley, and he taught me to sing a the world, Watson studies Holmes. We inner tubes of my ears had swollen, trap- song. Daisy, Daisy . . .” have all been both. ping fluids. The three treatments from Look, this should be the worst thing A sick person in the city is surrounded most to least aggressive were poking small that ever happens to me. My wife was by security. There are 300 apartments in holes in my eardrums; taking oral steroids; sicker than I was, her early-winter virus my building, the avenue beneath my bed- or a regimen of decongestants, nasal presenting itself as a hacking asthmatic room window never falls silent; food, sprays, and gum chewing (innard calis- cough. Together, we became connois- work, and medicine are only a phone call thenics). We went with Number Three. seurs of takeout. The doorman buzzes. I or a quick cab ride away. But the sick per- But this was only the herald of the ill- give the okay to send the delivery man up. son does not feel secure. Sleep affords no ness. The illness itself, which came in its I wait by the door until I hear the freight dreams and little rest; adjusting pillows train, was one of those early-winter viruses elevator, then I lean out into the hall to brings change only, not comfort. Time is without fever, coughing, sneezes, or guide the meal and its bearer to their the one cure, and time cannot be hurried. any symptom except exhaustion. We are destination. Some delivery men—immi- The other day I heard a phone pinging. meant to sleep at night, but in the care of grants all—have startlingly feudal man- The fax? My wife’s office phone, behind a winter virus, every day has inserted ners. One young man took his tip with a two closed doors? No, I have heard this within it a little night, with its own sleep; little bow. He will learn. Then to the table phone before. It is someone’s cell, high sometimes two. And the fact that at this with the repast: classica pizza, half pep- and clear enough to carry, in another apart- time of year, in these latitudes, the sun sets peroni; spaghetti al limone; matzoh-ball ment. Maybe the illness is lifting.

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Happy Warrior BY HEATHER WILHELM The Philosopher Suffers a Toothache

IKE many writers, I spend a fair amount of time So what’s the good news? It starts with a trip to the dentist each day combing through Twitter, one of the I made last week. No, really, bear with me. It was a workday, planet’s more frenetic social-media locales. In case and I had spent all morning on the Internet, reading and L you have never darkened its door, I’ll explain that researching for my next column. Everything was dreadful. Twitter offers a frothy, unholy mix of breaking-news updates, The news was dreadful. Politicians were dreadful. College on-point opinion pieces, barely-there hot takes, giddy Internet students were dreadful. The world was dreadful. If one were absurdities, and a daily crop of short homemade videos, often to judge by the dour parade of content popping out of the featuring things such as piano-playing cats—or, in the case Intertubes like a sad stream of forlorn digital prairie dogs, of one recent viral sensation, Donald Trump getting struck America was going down the drain, and fast. by fake lightning, his orbital sockets lighting up from inside Well, I can tell you this: American dynamism was alive his skull like a macabre, half-price Christmas ornament. and well at my dentist’s office. The staff was friendly, Twitter, in short, has its highs and its lows. If Twitter competent, and diverse. Everyone got along and seemed magi cally became sentient one day and you asked it the to like America. There was even a smiley college intern classic job-interview question “What’s your greatest weak- who did not look like she wanted to punch anyone over ness?” it certainly wouldn’t be smart enough to reply, like some microaggression. This multiracial bunch also the hundreds of thousands of college graduates in the somehow, amazingly, did not seem on the verge of hold- decades before it, that it works too hard or cares about the ing a random outrage-based sit-in. There were even a few job too much or can’t stop secretly bringing the boss-man jokes drifting through the air, gently wafting above the giant, sagging bags of untraceable gold doubloons. buzz of the drills. Twitter couldn’t answer the question at all, in fact, because I walked into the appointment room, sat in the dreaded of its greatest weakness: It simply can’t focus. You could ask dentist’s chair, and was immediately treated to the musical any question six ways to Sunday, and Twitter, a hive mind of talents of Enya. Remember Enya? She was all over the millions, would be way too busy talking over itself, interrupt- place in the 1990s. Enya has, according to Wikipedia, a ing its own sentences, and splitting into multiple runaway “distinctive sound, characterized by voice-layering, folk trains of thought weaving on and off the tracks like a bunch melodies, synthesized backdrops and ethereal reverbera- of haphazard Harlem Globetrotters. No, no; that’s not quite tions.” She’s kind of spa-like and Zen, I guess. No offense, right. What’s the hapless team that plays the Harlem Globe - but she’s also kind of terrible. trotters, and always loses, and is constantly changing its “Ugh, Enya,” said the dental assistant, rolling her name? Twitter is that team, but more popular. It is a basket eyes, before putting approximately 67 different sharp- case, with a bad habit of bounce-passing important ques- ended instruments into my mouth. “Want me to change tions to the craziest guy in the room. the channel?” I kid, I kid. I like Twitter, most of the time. Here’s the bad “Oh, no!” I mumbled, grateful. I thought about politics; I news: As 2015 shuffles to a close, many Americans suspect thought about the news. “Keep it. Keep her. KEEP ENYA!” that social-media outlets, for all their insanity, serve as a And so I spent an hour at the dentist, listening to Enya symbolic and revealing microcosm of our greater national and getting sharp instruments applied to my teeth, and I’m debate. Here’s another dose of bad news: There is certainly not going to lie: I have never been more relaxed in my life. no shortage of craziest guys in the room. Next, just for fun, I went to the neighborhood grocery store. We have Mr. Trump, of course, a crafty, plotting sort who There, again, I saw it: Americans of all races, ages, political lurks and waits until the national conversation reaches a tip- affiliations, religions, and levels of craziness working ping point—just this close to veering into a substantive, together, at peace, united. crucial discussion—before he kicks in the door, bellows You find this, it turns out, when you step out into America. something mean about all of our mothers, shoots out the Our country is still an incredible place, even if certain chandelier with a paintball gun, and sucks all the air out of Internet bubbles might hide that fact. A new study published the room. There’s President Obama, who, judging by his in Public Opinion Quarterly and authored by political sci- last nationally televised address, appears to have launched entists from Penn and Stanford notes that “Americans per- his aura onto some more peaceful planet, or at least into ceive more polarization with respect to policy issues than some luxurious, first-class lunar orbit. He is adrift, serene, actually exists, a phenomenon known as false polarization.” detached, and patiently waiting for the first tee time of Similarly, numerous studies have shown the simple, clarify- January 20, 2017. ing mental-health benefit of taking a 90-minute walk outside. Then there is Bernie Sanders, who should need Next time you feel on the brink, remember these things. no explanation. Take a walk. Head to the hardware store. Talk to some people. If you’re really, really desperate, maybe listen to some Enya. Heather Wilhelm writes from Austin, Texas. She is a syndicated columnist with Okay, maybe not. Maybe I just did that because I was at RealClearPolitics and a senior contributor to the Federalist. the dentist.

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Preserving and promoting the legacy of William F. Buckley Jr.

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Prevention of Alzheimer’s disease. _ Cure for prostate cancer. _ Prevention of strokes. _ Prevention of asthma. _

Medical research is the beginning of hope for patients suffering from serious illness. Over the years, research through the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has resulted in spectacular progress—a 70% reduction in death rates for coronary heart disease and stroke, a 40% reduction in infant mortality, and a 30% decrease in chronic disability among seniors. Life expectancy has increased, death rates from cancer are declining, and new treatments have virtually eliminated transmission of the HIV virus from mother to child and made HIV/AIDS a treatable, chronic disease.

Today, federal support for research through the NIH amounts to just $94 per American. Imagine the progress that could be made through increased funding. It’s one of the best investments we can make in our future.

Congress: Make medical research a national priority. Increase funding for NIH.

RESEARCH MEANS HOPE

AAMCtoday MORE FUNDING TODAY. MORE MIRACLES TOMORROW.