RUTHFULLY YOURS

“The purpose of government is to enable the people of a nation to live in safety

and happiness. Government exists for the interests of the governed, not for the governors.”

Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)

A recent front-page article in The New York Times dealt with the fate of yellow-cab drivers in New York. The reporter, Winnie Hu, provided a heart-breaking look at those (mostly immigrants) who bought medallions at high prices before Uber and others entered the market, and who are now suffering from fewer riders and lower prices for medallions. She did not write of the role government played, in limiting the number of medallions, which artificially inflated their price and which helped cause the upsurge in unconventional competition. She did not write of creative destruction, where new technology drives out the old, and without which our economy and productivity would stagnate. And, she did not point out the options consumers now have – more competition and greater flexibility.

Governments are facing financial crises. Debt is high, and growing. Deficits are expanding. Yet, our infrastructure needs repair and/or replacement, and our defense needs are not being met. Eleemosynary institutions that rely on government support are facing hard times. There are many reasons for this situation, but the gist is that unionized government workers, entitlements, and the bureaucracies to support them, limit options. Mandatory spending on welfare programs has risen inexorably. Union demands, especially at the state and local levels are untenable. Revenues have not kept pace. The solution lies not in more taxes, but in more robust economic growth.

Demographics add to the problem. As a nation, we are aging. In 2015, 15% of the population was 65 and older, up about three percentage points from 2000. In 2030, that number, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, is expected to be 21%. At the same time, the working-age population (18 to 64) is expected to decline from 62% to 58%. In other words, demands on government for retirement and health benefits will increase, while the number of working taxpayers decreases.

We can persist along the current path: borrowing more heavily, increasing taxes, and cutting “discretionary” spending, while increasing deficits and debt. Or we can try to extricate ourselves by changing direction: We can rein in mandatory spending (i.e. entitlements), temper union demands and employ tax and regulatory reform to let the economy grow more quickly.

Violence is one of the “messy implications of fighting for liberation.” So say the Reverend Traci Blackmon and three other authors in a remarkable op-ed piece in the New York Times that ran in the wake of the recent events in Charlottesville. (NY Times, Sept 1, 2017)

The attitude of Reverend Blackmon and her fellow authors, all Christian ministers, can be summed up as follows: Violence comes with the territory. We don’t condone it, but we understand that it is unavoidable. If our efforts inspire some to commit violence, this will not prevent us from continuing our efforts, and it should not prevent others from joining us. At least our violence is committed in the service of a just cause, which is more than can be said for the right’s violence. (Reverend Blackmon is one of the founders of Black Lives Matter, whose efforts contributed, among other things, to the murder of five police officers in Dallas in July of 2016.)

”unconscious white supremacy”

In the Times piece, the authors complain that the media, and President Trump, have promoted “a false equivalency between groups that advocate white supremacy and those that seek to eliminate it,” as though we ought not condemn violence committed by both sides, since Antifa’s violence against white supremacists is somehow justified.

But what of “those who seek to eliminate” white supremacy? Are they really on the side of the angels, as Rev. Blackmon, et al, would have us believe? It all depends on what they mean by “white supremacy,” a term, it turns out, with two very different meanings.

Reverend Blackmon is one of over 200 signers, mostly Christian ministers, of the “Theological Declaration on Christian Faith and White Supremacy,” also issued in response to the events in Charlottesville. The Declaration refers to “the recent hesitation by the president of the United States in unequivocally condemning the clear exhibition of fascism and white nationalist sympathies in Charlottesville, as well as other long held manifestations of white supremacy such as white privilege and white normalcy. It seems that “white supremacy” does not refer just to the ideology of groups like neo-Nazis and the KKK. Its manifestations include “white privilege,” which must mean that most white Americans are white supremacists.

The Declaration goes on to refer several times to “unconscious white supremacy,” which hardly describes the thinking of genuine white supremacists. When the authors of this document use the term “white supremacy,” they are really referring to the dominant, “white” culture of the United States, especially America’s economic and political practices and institutions. And they are against this culture. “God’s abundance never exists in the context of hyper-individualized meritocracy,” they write. “Rather, it rises from the commons cultivated by cultures and systems of generosity, reciprocity, and profound integrity. The individualistic pursuit of prosperity distorts the good news of the Gospel itself.” (thedeclaration.net) In other words, capitalism bad, socialism good.

It is clear that the authors of the “Theological Declaration on Christian Faith and White Supremacy” aspire to a great deal more than the removal of Confederate monuments, which was the proximate cause of the trouble at Charlottesville. In their view, the American enterprise has been tainted at least since the Pequot Massacre at Mystic Connecticut in 1637. As Reverend Blackmon has said elsewhere, “The Fourth of July is a lie.”

These authors and their allies pose as opponents of racism, but what they really oppose is Americanism. And what they aspire to is the destruction of the “white,” individualist, capitalist culture that lies at the heart of Americanism. “We reject as false doctrine any teaching that the human vocation is to exploit land, people groups, or other nations for the amassing of wealth.” (thedeclaration.net) They agree with Karl Marx that capitalism, the one economic system based on voluntary cooperation among all parties, is immorally “exploitive” because it allows some to become rich while others do not.

Capitalism gives rise to inequality, which for the Left, is the greatest of all evils. If individual freedom, which is the necessary political foundation of capitalism, gives rise to inequality, then individual freedom must go—hence all the special laws in the name of “equality” for blacks, women, homosexuals, and transgenders, laws which diminish Americans’ freedom of association and other rights. If you want to know what a non-capitalist America would look like, imagine Obamacare-style regulation extended to the entire economy.

In response to the events in Charlottesville, President Trump said “We condemn in the strongest most possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides. On many sides.” (Foxnews.com, Aug. 12, 2017) For condemning both the hyper-violent Antifa and the white supremacists—for speaking the plain truth, in other words, an egregious violation of the rules of political correctness—Mr. Trump was excoriated by the mainstream media. But, as I have shown above, a proper respect for the Republic would have required that he condemn both sides even if neither had resorted to violence.

On Friday September 8, 2017 Governor Rick Scott issued a mandatory evacuation order for all residents of the barrier islands on the west coast of Florida where my husband and I live. We anxiously monitored the trajectory of Hurricane Irma and watched with horror as the colossal storm gathered strength and unexpectedly veered west. On Saturday morning we left everything behind and drove north toward safety.

The drive north on I-75 was a most extraordinary experience. The northbound lanes inched forward packed bumper-to-bumper with evacuees in passenger cars seeking safety away from the storm. In stark contrast the southbound lanes had convoys of trucks – power companies, EMS vehicles, tree companies, huge semis filled with supplies – all driving toward the deadly hurricane. It was a stunning polarity.

We drove north for fourteen hours and the convoys never ended – there were thousands of trucks. Men and women of all backgrounds, races, ethnicities and political perspectives sacrificing their personal safety and comfort in common cause to rebuild what Hurricane Irma was destroying. It made me cry. These Hurricane Heroes are authentic American heroes – men and women driving into a lethal hurricane to rebuild shattered lives. Real heroes are builders.

It was inspirational to witness their dedication and commitment and I am overwhelmed with gratitude and admiration for how these Hurricane Heroes choose to live their lives. Natural disasters have a remarkable unifying capacity. When the water recedes and the debris clears America has a choice. We can choose to be builders like the Hurricane Heroes or we can choose to be destroyers.

Weeks before Hurricane Irma devastated the Keys and slammed into the west coast of Florida the tabloid mainstream media became obsessed with the destruction of symbols of American history. It began with Confederate statues. The smashing and/or removing of statues offensive to the snowflakes who found them deeply disturbing was reported and debated incessantly. In a pathetic display of audacity left-wing liberals and anarchist dressed up in camouflage and black ski masks asserted themselves by destroying statues. Obama’s anti-American resistance “fighters” manifested their faux bravery by shattering inanimate objects! Their counterfeit bravery is laughable in the real world of bona fide American heroes. Fake heroes are destroyers.

It is clear that the free exchange of opinion that once characterized university life is now being challenged. The avatars of social justice have arrogated to themselves the role of arbiter in the university curriculum. But it hasn’t stopped there. Now monuments of the past are being put through the probity of present standards as one statue after another is in jeopardy of tumbling. Here is a foreshadowing of a “new America”, one in which the evils of the past are to be redressed by the self-appointed czars of the moment.

Where this ends isn’t clear, but I have a strong belief that the revolutionaries in our midst are intent on altering the Constitution converting it into a Red Book of acceptable and unacceptable behavior.

After all, for many the First Amendment is in tatters already. Free speech no longer exists for unpopular speech or “hate speech,” even though it is precisely unpopular expression that the Constitution protects. Hate speech is loathsome, but it is protected speech precisely because any line drawn against it is arbitrary and subject to the will of the censors. Like many, I was appalled at the anticipated Nazi march through Skokie, Illinois (which never happened), but I defended the right of these barbarians to do so as First Amendment expression. As I see it, the danger of censorship was greater than the psychological damage of ugly expression.

For many Americans, the Second Amendment protecting citizens to bear arms must be modified or erased. In the minds of these revisionists guns are the problem fomenting violence in our cities. Despite the obvious point that a gun isn’t a weapon in the hands of St. Francis, but is dangerous if wielded by a felon intent on criminal behavior, gun baners rarely make distinctions.

The Fifth Amendment guarantees that due process will accompany legal charges, indictments or the sequestration of property; in other words life, liberty and property cannot be arbitrarily denied without a legal process that assures the rights of the victim. However, at many universities the due process clause is only honored in the breach. It is often sufficient for an allegation of rape or sexual abuse to be made before the accused is found culpable. Reputations are sometimes destroyed on the basis of empty allegations, but kangaroo courts of this kind have proliferated throughout higher education.

The Tenth Amendment gives to the states the powers that remain without enumeration in the other Amendments. Hence education is one such area that accrues to the state governments. Unfortunately, teachers’ unions want to consolidate power through national organizations and have been pressing in recent years for authority to be vested in the Department of Education exclusively. It is a clear and undeviating attack on federalism which has central and state governments sharing power. For extremists, the mitigating influence of the states is unnecessary.

In the aggregate these reforms and reformers constitute a revolutionary force. Their goal is to shift the organs of national power. They intend to use the vulnerability of the moment to espouse a newly created nation from the political graveyard of the past. America’s Red Guard will determine what one can believe and what is unacceptable. The Color Guard will carry the black flag of revolution and the Founders will be interred for their regressive ideas.

The vandalization of a statute of University of Virginia founder Thomas Jefferson by students and Black Lives Matter rioters suggests the Left is escalating the ugly Cultural Revolution-style upheaval that President Obama encouraged in office.

This iconoclastic insurrectionism is spreading, as angry left-wing mobs topple statues of figures from the past they dislike. In Chicago, Bishop James Dukes of Liberation Christian Center is demanding that the names and statues of George Washington and Andrew Jackson be removed from parks. Others want Woodrow Wilson’s name excised from buildings and schools because he supported racial segregation. The list goes on and on.

The disorder in Charlottesville comes as a monument in Baltimore honoring Francis Scott Key, who wrote the words to “The Star-Spangled Banner,” was spray-painted with the words “racist anthem.” Leftist writer Jefferson Morley suggested on Tucker Carlson’s TV show that the vandalism was justified, but more on that in a moment.

As about a hundred students chanted “No Trump, no KKK, no racist UVA,” the Jefferson monument on the school’s main quad was draped in black and adorned with signs reading, “Black Lives Matter,” “TJ is a racist,” and “Fuck white supremacy.”

The assault on September 12 came a month after the deadly, misnamed, abortive “Unite the Right” rally in the same town. The campus event was organized by the Black Student Alliance after UVA turned down its demand to suspend the First Amendment by banishing white-supremacists from campus and taking out various Confederate plaques.

“One month ago, we stood on the front lines in downtown Charlottesville as all manner of white supremacists, neo-Nazis and neo-fascists swarmed the area,” one speaker told the crowd. “Two months ago, the Ku Klux Klan rallied in their safe space, fully robed and fully protected by multiple law enforcement agencies who brutalized and tear-gassed peaceful counter-protesters.”

“We can and must condemn the violence of one month ago and simultaneously recognize Jefferson as a rapist, racist, and slave owner,” said the speaker, who could just as easily have been describing the Muslim prophet Muhammad.

“The visibility of physical violence from white supremacists should not take our attention away from condemning and disrupting more ‘respectable’ racists that continue to control the structures that perpetuate institutional racism.”

This shameful attack on Jefferson, a Founding Father and intellectual leading light of the republic, as well as author of the Declaration of Independence, U.S. president, and Virginia governor, comes weeks after racial arsonist Al Sharpton demanded the federal government shut down the Jefferson Memorial in the nation’s capital because the long-dead president owned slaves.

“When you look at the fact that public monuments are supported by public funds you’re asking me to subsidize the insult of my family,” Sharpton said.

“I would repeat that the public should not be paying to uphold somebody who has had that kind of background,” Sharpton said. “You have private museums, you have other things that you may want to do there.”

Jefferson “had slaves and children with his slaves,” he continued. “And it does matter.”

Actually, not so much. Jefferson’s political enemies began circulating the story that he fathered children with his slave Sally Hemings. Jefferson, or any of two dozen of his male relatives, may have fathered the children of Hemings, according to DNA testing.

The news that Hillary Clinton was writing a 2016 memoir called “What Happened” caused rare bipartisan joy: Everyone, left and right, was eager to hear what she had to say. What’s it like to think you’re about to poke through that glass ceiling and instead have it come crashing down on your head? What’s the deal with Trump? Would she throw shade at Bernie? What would she say about presiding over a campaign whose failure was catastrophic to her and, to liberals anyway, to the country? What was the inside dirt? A joke made the rounds that the book’s working title was What the F*** Happened?

But the book only makes sense when you realize that What Happened is a fake title, a P. T. Barnum–style ruse to draw in the suckers. The real subject of this 500-page chunk of self-congratulation and blame-shifting — its real title — is “Why I Should Have Won.” If Hollywood is a place where you peel off the fake tinsel only to find the real tinsel underneath, Hillary Clinton is homo politicus all the way through. It’s all she has. It’s all she is. She earned the Oval Office, dammit, and she wants you to know it. Peel off the phony, power-addled political hack, and all you’ll find is the real, power-addled political hack underneath.

Sure, Clinton does give us a few stray morsels of what we’re looking for, mostly at the very beginning, when she describes what must have been an agony for the ages in tightly controlled, supremely measured tones. She tells us about the pain and the Chardonnay and how surreal it felt to concede on Election Night, given that she had never imagined what she might say if she lost. “I just didn’t think about it,” she writes. Also, she took a nap that evening and was asleep when the news broke that she’d lost Florida, North Carolina, Iowa, and Ohio. But it’s all fairly bloodless — she give no explanation, for instance, of why she withheld her concession speech until the next day. No doubt she cherishes her privacy, but guardedness is not what one wants in a memoir.

The reserve is likely to disappoint both those who cried on Election Night and those who spent the wee hours of November 9 spraying their homes with the contents of a case of Veuve Clicquot. Yet there is poignancy here: She had every expectation of becoming the most powerful woman in the history of the world. Instead she’ll go down in the books defined by three gigantic public humiliations: the Lewinsky scandal and two losing presidential campaigns in which she was the heavy favorite. She wasn’t even the first woman to be secretary of state. She wasn’t even the second woman to be secretary of state. History is unkind to losers — quick, ask the nearest Millennial who Geraldine Ferraro was.

As the book proceeds, though, the reader’s heart sinks. Why all this stupefying name-checking of campaign aides who never get mentioned again? Why two pages about her hairdressers, but only two clipped paragraphs about that time she collapsed on 9/11? Why is she still laying out the same policy proposals America rejected last year? Why does she keep teasing us with promises to tell us about her “mistakes,” without ever following through? Why all the ordinary-citizen tales from the Just-So Stories of Big Government, the ones along the lines of: “Then I met Jill Shlabotnik, a humble weasel rancher from Sarasota, Florida…Jill told me how [sorrow, tears, pain, injustice] . . . and that, ladies and gentlemen, is why we urgently need a 5.7 percent increase in deputy assistant EPA administrators!”

This is the norm for convention speeches, not for campaign autopsies, especially not one written from the point of view of the corpse. “In the past, for reasons I try to explain, I’ve often felt I had to be careful in public, like I was up on a wire without a net. Now I’m letting my guard down,” Clinton writes. Tantalizing! But there’s almost nothing she couldn’t or wouldn’t have said when she had to maintain her political viability, almost nothing she couldn’t or wouldn’t have said in one of those eyeball-glazers she called speeches, almost no instances where she takes stock of her flaws, except in the disingenuous manner of a job interviewee — “My biggest failing? I guess it’s just that I’m so focused that sometimes I can’t let work go, you know?” In Hillary’s case? “I had been unable to connect with the deep anger so many Americans felt,” “I was running a traditional presidential campaign with carefully thought-out positions. . . . Trump was running a reality TV show,” and (my favorite): “It’s true that I’ve always been more comfortable talking about others rather than myself. . . . I had to actively try to use the word I more.” Her big flaws are that she’s so even-tempered, thoughtful, substantive, and humble.

A merica is at culture war. The battle lines and formations are starkly visible: coastal versus inland, urban versus rural, “globalist” versus nationalist, Black Lives versus Blue Lives, pussy hats versus MAGA caps, antifa versus alt-right. There is no third camp, the partisans say. One must pick a side. Forgive me for declining to do so, seeing as neither side stands for a positive principle worth going to war over.

Writing in these pages last year (“Illiberalism: The Worldwide Crisis,” July/August 2016), I described this surge of intemperate politics as a global phenomenon, a crisis of illiberalism stretching from France to the Philippines and from South Africa to Greece. Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, I argued, were articulating American versions of this growing challenge to liberalism. By “liberalism,” I was referring not to the left or center-left but to the philosophy of individual rights, free enterprise, checks and balances, and cultural pluralism that forms the common ground of politics across the West.

Less a systematic ideology than a posture or sensibility, the new illiberalism nevertheless has certain core planks. Chief among these are a conspiratorial account of world events; hostility to free trade and finance capital; opposition to immigration that goes beyond reasonable restrictions and bleeds into virulent nativism; impatience with norms and procedural niceties; a tendency toward populist leader-worship; and skepticism toward international treaties and institutions, such as NATO, that provide the scaffolding for the U.S.-led postwar order.

The new illiberals, I pointed out, all tend to admire established authoritarians to varying degrees. Trump, along with France’s Marine Le Pen and many others, looks to Vladimir Putin. For Sanders, it was Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela, where, the Vermont socialist said in 2011, “the American dream is more apt to be realized.” Even so, I argued, the crisis of illiberalism traces mainly to discontents internal to liberal democracies.

Trump’s election and his first eight months in office have confirmed the thrust of my predictions, if not all of the policy details. On the policy front, the new president has proved too undisciplined, his efforts too wild and haphazard, to reorient the U.S. government away from postwar liberal order.

The courts blunted the “Muslim ban.” The Trump administration has reaffirmed Washington’s commitment to defend treaty partners in Europe and East Asia. Trumpian grumbling about allies not paying their fair share—a fair point in Europe’s case, by the way—has amounted to just that. The president did pull the U.S. out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, but even the ultra-establishmentarian Hillary Clinton went from supporting to opposing the pact once she figured out which way the Democratic winds were blowing. The North American Free Trade Agreement, which came into being nearly a quarter-century ago, does look shaky at the moment, but there is no reason to think that it won’t survive in some modified form.

Yet on the cultural front, the crisis of illiberalism continues to rage. If anything, it has intensified, as attested by the events surrounding the protest over a Robert E. Lee statue in Charlottesville, Virginia. The president refused to condemn unequivocally white nationalists who marched with swastikas and chanted “Jews will not replace us.” Trump even suggested there were “very fine people” among them, thus winking at the so-called alt-right as he had during the campaign. In the days that followed, much of the left rallied behind so-called antifa (“anti-fascist”) militants who make no secret of their allegiance to violent totalitarian ideologies at the other end of the political spectrum.

“It’s not clear to me why the Secretary of State wishes to at once usurp the powers of the Congress and then to derail his boss’s rapprochement with the Israeli government.” — Foreign policy operative, quoted in the Washington Free Beacon.

Since he was sworn in as Secretary of State on February 1, Rex Tillerson and his advisors at the State Department have made a number of statements and policy decisions that contradict President Trump’s key campaign promises on foreign policy, especially regarding Israel and Iran.

“Tillerson was supposed to clean house, but he left half of them in place and he hid the other half in powerful positions all over the building. These are career staffers committed to preventing Trump from reversing what they created.” — Veteran foreign policy analyst, quoted in the Free Beacon.

The U.S. State Department has backed away from a demand that Israel return $75 million in military aid which was allocated to it by the U.S. Congress.

The repayment demand, championed by U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, was described as an underhanded attempt by the State Department to derail a campaign pledge by U.S. President Donald J. Trump to improve relations with the Jewish state.

The dispute is the just the latest example of what appears to be a growing power struggle between the State Department and the White House over the future direction of American foreign policy.

The controversy goes back to the Obama administration’s September 2016 Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with Israel, which pledged $38 billion in military assistance to Jerusalem over the next decade. The MOU expressly prohibits Israel from requesting additional financial aid from Congress.

Congressional leaders, who said the MOU violates the constitutional right of lawmakers to allocate U.S. aid, awarded Israel an additional $75 million in assistance in the final appropriations bill for fiscal year 2017.

Tillerson had argued that Israel should return the $75 million in order to stay within the limits established by the Obama administration. The effort provoked a strong reaction from Congress, which apparently prompted Tillerson to back down.

Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) “strongly warned the State Department that such action would be unwise and invite unwanted conflict with Israel,” according to the Washington Free Beacon.

Speaking to the Washington Examiner, Rep. Peter Roskam (R-IL) added:

“As Iran works to surround Israel on every border, and Hezbollah and Hamas rearm, we must work to strengthen our alliance with Israel, not strain it. Congress has the right to allocate money as it deems necessary, and security assistance to Israel is a top priority. Congress is ready to ensure Israel receives the assistance it needs to defend its citizens.”

A veteran congressional advisor told the Free Beacon:

“This is a transparent attempt by career staffers in the State Department to f*ck with the Israelis and derail the efforts of Congressional Republicans and President Trump to rebuild the US-Israel relationship. There’s no reason to push for the Israelis to return the money, unless you’re trying to drive a wedge between Israel and Congress, which is exactly what this is. It won’t work.”

Another foreign policy operative said: “It’s not clear to me why the Secretary of State wishes to at once usurp the powers of the Congress and then to derail his boss’s rapprochement with the Israeli government.”