RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/voters-dont-like-trump-just-his-results-1540241748

There’s a school of thought that the economy is only a political issue when it’s bad and that prosperous times allow people the luxury of prioritizing other issues. That’s not the message in the latest poll from The Wall Street Journal and NBC News.

The consensus among professional economists is that this Friday’s third-quarter GDP report from the Commerce Department will show another strong period of growth in the U.S. economy after a blowout performance in the second quarter. Voters don’t seem to be taking it for granted. WSJ/NBC survey respondents call “the economy and jobs” the most important factor in deciding their votes in this year’s elections for the U.S. Congress. Since June, this issue has overtaken health care as the top concern for participants in the poll.

Could this mean that despite all the recent positive economic data, survey respondents actually think the economy is lousy? Not likely, because voters are giving high marks to the party that is currently in charge of the nation’s economic policy. When it comes to dealing with the economy, survey participants say that Republicans “would do a better job” than Democrats by a 15-point margin. This appears to be the largest Republican advantage recorded by this survey, which has been asking the question since at least 1991.

This doesn’t mean that voters particularly like the nation’s chief economic policy maker. In fact 68% of respondents say they don’t like President Trump. But Mr. Trump appears to be setting a modern record in the share of the electorate saying that they don’t like the President personally, but approve of most of his policies. This category of voters currently stands at 20% of the electorate. For most recent Presidents such readings were generally in the low-to-mid single digits, though Bill Clinton’s share did climb into the teens.

The Journal reports that survey results show overall approval of President Trump is increasing, and so is enthusiasm among those in his party:

Hand in hand with Republicans’ increased election interest is a rise in Mr. Trump’s job-approval rating to 47%, the highest mark of his time in office, with 49% disapproving of his performance. That is an improvement from September, when 44% approved and 52% disapproved of his performance.

If a significant number of Americans are giving the President what might be called their grudging approval, you can’t say he’s not working hard to earn it. This is not a reference to his tweeting but to the results of two of his signature initiatives on economic policy.

This column has written at length about the encouraging spike in business investment following the December enactment of his tax cuts. Recently the Trump administration provided a progress report on the other pillar of his pro-growth agenda—reducing federal regulation. This is affectionately known as swamp-draining to those outside the D.C. metropolitan area.

It seems Team Trump is exceeding its own expectations. At one point the administration was aiming to cut about $10 billion in regulatory costs during the 2018 fiscal year, which ended on September 30. Now the White House’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs reports the elimination of $23 billion in “overall regulatory costs across the government” during the fiscal year just ended. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://www.city-journal.org/kavanaugh-identity-politics-white-supremacy

The current lawsuit challenging Harvard University’s use of racial preferences in admissions is about “white supremacy,” according to the school’s supporters. So, too, was the defense of U.S. Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh against the charge of sexual assault, according to Kavanaugh’s critics. Never mind that the plaintiffs in the Harvard lawsuit are Asian-American students who were denied admission to the school despite academic qualifications superior to those of whites, and that Kavanaugh’s accuser was white herself. The roiling mass of resentments and one-upmanship that is identity politics is becoming ever more irrational in the Trump era. Whether a crack-up is imminent remains to be seen.

Harvard caps the number of Asians it admits, allege the plaintiffs—a coalition of Asian-American groups called Students for Fair Admissions—in the lawsuit against the university. As a result, Asian applicants must present higher academic qualifications than any other racial or ethnic group in order to be considered for admission. According to Harvard’s own data, test scores and a high school GPA that would give an Asian-American high school senior only a 25 percent chance of admission would provide a virtual admissions guarantee—95 percent—for an otherwise identical black applicant, a 77 percent chance of admission for a Hispanic student, and a 36 percent chance of admission for a white student. Asians would make up more than 50 percent of the admitted class if Harvard were colorblind, estimates Students for Fair Admissions, instead of the 18.6 percent Asian average maintained over recent years. The white student population would go down from 43 percent to 38 percent. Asians account for 6 percent of the national population; whites, 61 percent.

The Students for Fair Admissions lawsuit, in other words, seeks fairness for Asian-Americans, so that they can be rewarded, rather than penalized, for their academic accomplishments. Whites would lose out under a colorblind system. Yet Harvard’s defenders, including some Asian Harvard students, claim that the suit is really about shoring up white privilege. At a Defend Diversity rally held in Cambridge the day before the lawsuit began, demonstrators held signs reading “Asians Will Not Be Tools for Your White Supremacy.” A Harvard undergraduate who will testify for the defense used the identical language during the Defend Diversity rally: “I, along with so many other Asian-Americans, refuse to be tools of white supremacy.” At a pro-racial-preferences panel held at Harvard a week before the trial, the executive director of Boston’s Asian-American Resource Workshop argued that the “model minority myth is a creation of white supremacy.” An op-ed in the Harvard Crimson addressed to “fellow Asian-Americans” blamed the “structures of white supremacy” for portraying Asians as “smart and hardworking.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/10/russell-kirk-2018-political-impressions/

Remembering the words of this almost forgotten father of American conservatism.

Recently, I’ve been haunted by the memory of Russell Kirk. October 19 is the centenary of the author of The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot (1953). The spectral metaphor fits Kirk, who died in 1994. He was as celebrated for his Gothic horror fiction as for his dozens of books, hundreds of articles, and thousands of columns on philosophy, history, academe, politics, and what he liked to call “humane letters.” He made some money from his ghost stories too, which helped Kirk and his wife Annette raise four daughters and host countless guests, students, and refugees at their home in rural Mecosta, Michigan. This almost forgotten father of American conservatism gave the movement a name and an intellectual ancestry. How would he respond to the world of 2018?

My guess is he wouldn’t like it. With his capes, cravats, three-piece suits, pocket-watches, and walking sticks, Kirk belonged more to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries than to the twentieth. He was a man out of time. His friends included T.S. Eliot, Ray Bradbury, and Flannery O’Connor. His enemy was ideology — the attempt to reconstruct social order according to subjective, abstract, rationalist plans. His weapon in this battle was the “sword of imagination.” Infused with myth, poetry, history, and quotations from great works, Kirk’s prose was meant to elicit from his readers a sense of connection not only with other persons but also with generations past and generations to come. “My historical books, my polemical writings, my literary criticism, and even my fiction,” he wrote to his publisher Henry Regnery in 1987, “have been meant to resist the ideological passions that have been consuming civilization ever since 1914 — what Arnold Toynbee calls our ‘time of troubles.’”

He succeeded with this reader. I picked up The Conservative Mind as a college junior after coming across a reference to it in Jonah Goldberg’s G-File. Like many others over the last 60-odd years, I was taken by Kirk’s prose style and considerable learning. His interpretations of Edmund Burke and John Adams and Alexis de Tocqueville inspired me, even as I was leery of his attitude toward John Randolph of Roanoke and John C. Calhoun. Kirk’s reliance on tradition, prescription, and prudence sparked a heated argument with a close friend over the extent to which principle and natural right ought to inform our judgments of society. From Kirk I moved on to Richard Weaver’s Ideas Have Consequences (1948), but got lost in its attack on William of Ockham, who died in 1347. The conservatism of Kirk and Weaver was rich and thought-provoking, but it didn’t strike me as particularly relevant to the foreign and domestic politics of the early twenty-first century. Only later would I hear David Brooks’s joke that you can tell what kind of conservative you are by how far back you would turn the clock.