RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/wounding-warriors-review-ready-but-not-able-11631477839?mod=opinion_reviews_pos1

Consider a tale of two Army veterans. Jeff served two terms as an infantry soldier in Afghanistan, moved home to the Midwest, graduated from college and landed a secure job in a utilities firm. Matt fought alongside Jeff, left the Army at the same time and headed home to North Carolina. By the time he was in his 30s, though, Matt was unemployed and dependent on government checks.

Why did Jeff thrive while Matt lost his civilian footing? The answer, according to Daniel M. Gade, a retired Army lieutenant colonel, and Daniel Huang, a former Wall Street Journal reporter, is the Department of Veterans Affairs—in particular, its robust disability system. “Economists have known for decades that disability insurance benefits create a disincentive to work,” they write in “Wounding Warriors.” “Rather than foster resilience, the VA is responsible for breeding passivity.”

In their compelling exposé, the authors show in detail how a well-intended system can inadvertently lure fragile veterans, step by step, away from the worlds of work and community. The trajectory typically starts just before separation from the service. Soldiers meet with VA representatives who emphasize opportunities to collect disability compensation. Jeff, for one, wanted to “get out and get on” with his life, while Matt took the VA agent’s advice “and filed for every condition he could think of.”

Matt’s career plan had been to secure a coveted job in law enforcement, but the field was highly competitive in his hometown. So he took a job with his dad’s construction company. But the physical toll of the job was too much for the former paratrooper’s knees and back. Deeply depressed, now out of work and living in his parents’ home, Matt tried college but felt overwhelmed. Meanwhile, anxious about his future, he kept applying for, and being granted, higher disability ratings—receiving, eventually, a monthly tax-free check exceeding $3,000. One of his disabilities was listed as posttraumatic stress disorder.

https://www.city-journal.org/review-of-a-world-without-police-by-geo-maher

A World Without Police, by Geo Maher (Verso, 288 pp., $27)

It is hard to think of a slogan as dramatically unpopular as “defund the police.” As of March, just 18 percent of Americans supported the movement. Some House Democrats have blamed their party’s flirtation with it for their underperformance in the 2020 congressional election. And while some cities have slashed police budgets, more have resisted the urge; others attempting to make cuts have met with resistance from communities that don’t want violent crime in their backyards.

Geo Maher’s A World Without Police, released 15 months after the “defund” movement began, is thus best read not as a call to arms but as an epitaph. The book is a strangled cry for attention—a demand that we return to the fantasy world a few activists inhabited ever so briefly last summer, before rioting and violence snapped us back to reality.

Why get rid of the police? Much of Maher’s answer is standard-issue babble: policing’s sole purpose is to enforce “white supremacist capitalism” by harassing and murdering anyone who is not white, male, and straight, particularly black people. Maher recapitulates long-debunked claims that policing emerges out of slave patrols, and argues that even majority-black-run criminal-justice systems are obviously white supremacist.

As evidence for this argument, Maher leans heavily on various unpleasant anecdotes about the worst police brutality of the past century. Such arguments are a prime example of “sampling on the dependent variable,” using only outcomes selected on a criterion to prove the universality of that criterion. For example, if I wanted to prove that all leftists were lunatics, I can’t just use as evidence one leftist who was forced to resign his academic job after tweeting “All I Want for Christmas is White Genocide.” Lots of leftists have not written that “when the whites were massacred during the Haitian Revolution, that was a good thing indeed,” and it would be poor reasoning to infer a general principle from this.

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2021/09/13/new-yorks-descent/

The Last Days of New York: A Reporter’s True Tale, by Seth Barron (Humanix Books, 304 pp., $27.99)

From 1993 to 2013, New York City underwent a startling transformation — one that defied expectations and redefined what good public policy could achieve. The streets became safer, the city cleaner. Businesses returned, tourists flocked to visit, real-estate prices skyrocketed, and New York became a glittering symbol of promise and potential to millions. Brooklyn, in particular, became the hippest part of America’s greatest city — helping spread change far beyond the five boroughs.

Unfortunately, New York City’s many gains have dwindled over the course of the past eight years. The homeless have returned, in greater numbers and with increasing aggressiveness. Many businesses are fleeing, and tourists are choosing other destinations. The streets and alleys are noticeably dirtier, and, most significantly, crime is rising, as lawlessness has increased sharply. In July of 2020, shootings were up 177 percent over the previous year, and murders were up 59 percent. For now, Brooklyn remains hip, or at least hipper than it was in the dreary 1970s and 1980s.

Part of the reason for the city’s recent decline is of course COVID-19, which both hit New York particularly hard and generated stricter lockdown policies there than in many other parts of the country. Another factor in New York’s decline is the city’s ultra-progressive, Red Sox–supporting, and not-that-hard-working mayor, Warren Wilhelm — a.k.a. Bill de Blasio. So argues author, journalist, and New York City resident Seth Barron in his alarming new book The Last Days of New York. As Barron shows, de Blasio is an inveterate progressive and dedicated ideologue who has systematically undermined every major institution that helped sustain the city and allow it to prosper.

In Barron’s telling, de Blasio’s reign of indolent leftist incompetence is a problem, to be sure, but it is not at the root of New York City’s problems. Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg helped turn the city around during their tenures, but they only held off the inevitable decline, while de Blasio accelerated it. The problem, according to Barron, is progressivism itself, or “the Prog,” as he calls it. New York’s progressives may have been temporarily set back, but their infiltration of the institutions has been ongoing and funded by tax dollars. As Barron explains, public funding “fuels an interlocking complex of political organizations on the left, including en­dorse­ments and campaign work.” All the politicians who run New York, and all the likely candidates to replace them, share the same worldview and will pursue the same policies. De Blasio might go away, but the policies are almost certain to stay the same in the one-party system that governs New York politics.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/09/03/an-american-soul/

A review of The Soul of Politics, by Glenn Ellmers (Encounter, 416 pages, $31.99)

The late Harry V. Jaffa, who died in 2015 at age 96, is known primarily for three things. First, for his revolutionary work on the statesmanship of Abraham Lincoln, exemplified in Jaffa’s two masterworks, Crisis of the House Divided (1959) and A New Birth of Freedom (2000). Second, for penning Barry Goldwater’s famous 1964 convention speech, including its most infamous line: “Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice.” And third, for his ornery, pugilistic written feuds with former friends (e.g., Walter Berns, Martin Diamond, Allan Bloom, and Harvey Mansfield) and eminent conservatives (Mel Bradford, Willmoore Kendall, William Rehnquist, Robert Bork, Antonin Scalia, and Edwin Messe, among others).

All of that is true but doesn’t even come close to exhausting Jaffa’s range and importance. As a scholar and teacher, he was intimately familiar with seemingly every significant book or idea from the ancient, medieval, and modern worlds. As an interpreter of the modern world and man’s place in it, he was a pathbreaker and, I would say, without peer.

Jaffa’s thought is hard to summarize, for at least two reasons. First, because he wrote no systematic book or account laying it all out in one place. To understand Jaffa one must read all of him: the three stand-alone books (in addition to the two on Lincoln, there is also one, his first, on Aquinas), plus the essay collections, plus articles written for others that he never republished, plus the many little Claremont Institute monographs, plus various lectures and other articles scattered throughout the archives of various publications too numerous to mention. The “selected” bibliography at the back of The Soul of Politics runs to 20 pages! Jaffa was so prolific that, as one despairs of finding the time to read it all (it helps to go to grad school, preferably at an early age and with the firm conviction that reading is the most important thing in the world), one wonders how he managed to write it all.

The second reason is that Jaffa’s thinking changed over time. One can see the evolution in stages as one reads, in chronological order, with the mature Jaffa emerging fully and finally only with New Birth, which is easily his most difficult work, itself impossible to summarize, and the full understanding of which requires familiarity with the rest of Jaffa’s oeuvre.

Glenn Ellmers has now done what, before he did it, I would have said could not be done. He has clearly and accessibly summarized Jaffa’s thought without oversimplifying or giving (almost) anything short shrift.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/08/nevergreen-victim-cancel-culture-strikes-back-daniel-greenfield/

“What? What was controversial?”
“It may not have been the words, per se. But your free speech created controversy.”
“Therefore it was controversial,” Luiz said.
From Nevergreen by Andrew Pessin.

7 years ago, Professor Andrew Pessin, a respected teacher of religion and philosophy at Connecticut College, criticized Hamas. Back then, cancel culture wasn’t the familiar buzzword that it is now, but when the local Students for Justice in Palestine affiliate and the college paper came after him, the college leadership sided with the mob and against their own professor.

Front Page Magazine took on the story back then, exposing the radical hate of the mob’s leaders. In the years that have passed, Pessin’s experiences have been replicated on campuses across the country. Social media mobs have spread beyond the campus, coming for ordinary people with the misfortune to appear on some social justice Twitter influencer’s radar.

And college campuses have only gotten crazier and more dangerous in the last 7 years.

Now, Andrew Pessin is back with Nevergreen. Though none of the events of the novel reproduce his own encounter with campus cancel culture (that would be life, not art), and there is no Nevergreen College (although there is an Evergreen College which was the epicenter of one of the worst radical campus meltdowns), Pessin’s novel distills the madness that has taken over campuses across the country in a still of literary satire that is all the more devastating because it’s so disarming.

There are the “atheists in the ‘Be Grateful God is Dead Club'” and a character is described as wearing “the official t-shirt of the campus tea shop, Chai Guevara, featuring the iconic image of the revolutionary leader sipping a mug of chai itself emblazoned with the Chai Guevara logo”.

A professor named “Peace” teaches conflict studies while making threats, and the students campaign for a wheelchair ramp for the high diving board.

“‘It’s for the principle, the principle of inclusion,” the earnest young woman explained when J. asked whether any wheelchair-bound person were likely to actually use the diving board.”

At Nevergreen College, 1984’s Two-Minutes-Hate is countered with an “official Two Minutes of Hate-Hate later this afternoon”. And Nevergreen’s protagonist J becomes its target.

“To help us prepare for our collective two minutes of hating hate, our Two-Minute Hate-Hate,” Corrie said solemnly, having memorized this part, “indeed to help us focus our energy on the hate we must hate, I present to you, my dear fellow haters of hate, the face of hate.”

https://www.realclearpublicaffairs.com/articles/2021/08/11/how_progressives_rewrote_american_history_789058.html

America’s Founders understood that political change is inevitable. They thought it must come about through constitutional mechanisms, with the consent of the governed, and must never infringe on the natural rights of citizens. Progressives – rejecting the idea that any rights, including the right of consent to government, are natural – accept no such limits. Progressivism insists that the principled American constitutionalism of fixed natural rights and limited and dispersed powers must be overturned and replaced by an organic, evolutionary model of the Constitution. Historical progress should be facilitated by experts dedicated to the expansion of the public sphere and political control – especially at the national level. As progressivism has grown into modern liberalism, the commitment to extra-constitutional “progress” is broadly shared across elite political, academic, legal, and religious circles. Politics is thus increasingly identified with a mix of activism, expertise, and the desire for “change.”

Progressivism insists that the principled American constitutionalism of fixed natural rights and limited and dispersed powers must be overturned and replaced by an organic, evolutionary model of the Constitution.

The progressive understanding of the American polity grew out of a transformation in American political thought that occurred in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This transformation stemmed from a confluence of ideas borrowed from Darwinism, pragmatism, and German idealism. Each of these philosophical systems rejected natural law and natural rights. They privileged inexorable historical evolution and change over continuity and fixity. In the early decades of the twentieth century, America’s intellectual classes, guided by these ideas, moved in lockstep. They scorned whatever they perceived to stand in the way of History’s march – especially the Founders’ Constitution and traditional Christianity. Government was understood to be unlimited in principle – and it certainly could not be limited by a dusty 18th-century Constitution based on the flawed theory of a fixed, and fallen, human nature. The most important forms of social, economic, and political progress came to be seen as depending on the state, and the manipulation by the state of measurable phenomena. Human flourishing was most often seen as an incident of politically engineered growth and transformation. As the idea of a formal Constitution disappeared as an object of study – and eventually of public veneration – so, too, did the realm of the private and the invisible. American Catholicism and Protestantism assimilated themselves to the progressive synthesis, in their calls for social solidarity through economic policy. Whether through the Catholic social thought of Fr. John Ryan (A Living Wage, 1906), or the social gospel of Walter Rauschenbusch (Christianizing the Social Order, 1913), significant portions of religious opinion turned against limited constitutionalism in the quest for more rational, just, and scientific state administration. This stood in contrast to the pre-progressive American Christianity that buttressed the constitutional order by linking human fallenness, or imperfection, to the need for political moderation, individual rights, personal responsibility, and limited government. Such assimilation of secular thought and theology to the aims of progressivism continues to have important ramifications.

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2021-8-21-initial-reaction-to-charles-murrays-facing-reality

As you may be aware, Charles Murray is out with a new book, “Facing Reality: Two Truths About Race In America.” I picked up a copy today. It’s not a long book, and I am already much of the way through it.

For those curious about how I got the book, I bought it at my local independent bookstore, Three Lives on West 10th Street in Greenwich Village. Of course, they did not have it in stock. But they took my order, and after a couple of weeks, the book arrived, and I went over and bought it. (This is in contrast to Abigail Shrier’s “Irreversible Damage” which, although I ordered it about two months ago, somehow has still not arrived; and to Ryan Anderson’s “When Harry Became Sally,” as to which, the clerk informed me, after studying his computer screen intently for several minutes, “we can’t get that.”)

The gist of Murray’s book is not complicated to summarize. The “two truths about race” that Murray refers to are, in the words of the Table of Contents, “race differences in cognitive ability,” and “race differences in violent crime.” Murray’s point is that it is impossible to have an intelligent discussion about race in America without recognizing the truths about the large differences between and among races on these two metrics.

Even as I was making my way through Murray’s book, I came across today, via Maggie’s Farm, a recent review of it at Quillette by a guy named Razib Khan. The guy who posted the link at Maggie’s to Khan’s piece, who goes by the name “The Barrister,” calls it “a thoughtful review.” But then Barrister says, “it seems unfair to expect Murray to offer solutions.” What Barrister refers to is this excerpt, which is the heart of Khan’s review:

Murray’s narrative suffers from a similar failing—it identifies problems, but leaves the vexing elaboration of innovative policy solutions to others. It drops the data at our feet like a ticking time-bomb, but the prescriptions to defuse the device are like an instruction without a manual.

Well, it’s a lot worse than just that it “seems unfair” to expect Murray to offer solutions. Can we just state here what should be obvious to everyone? — THERE DOES NOT EXIST ANY “INNOVATIVE POLICY SOLUTION” THAT IS GOING TO SOMEHOW “SOLVE” OR “FIX” THE DIFFERENCES BETWEEN AND AMONG RACES IN COGNITIVE ABILITY OR VIOLENT CRIME. Nor does there exist any “policy solution” (“innovative” or otherwise) that is going to solve or fix any time soon the differences in life outcomes between and among racial groups that flow from the two underlying truths that Murray identifies.

It just seems to be nearly universally accepted among our progressive elites that all human problems are subject to being promptly solved or fixed by having the government hire some group of self-proclaimed experts who will devise some “innovative policy solutions” and, with the added magic of infinite government resources, voila!, the problems will be solved. If somehow the first trillion dollars or ten trillion or a hundred trillion hasn’t fixed the problem, it must therefore be an issue of not having tried quite the right solution, or of not having been given enough funding.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/hero-of-two-worlds-review-lafayette-american-revolution-11629475529?mod=article_inline

Most readers of The Wall Street Journal will recognize Lafayette by name. One of the few non-Americans counted among the heroes of the Revolution, dozens of American towns, counties and streets are named for him. But what of the niceties of the Marquis’s eventful life, spanning 1757 to 1834? Those who take up Mike Duncan’s comprehensive, birth-to-death biography will find this French-born nobleman, soldier and statesman to be a fascinating and paradoxical character. Fusing revolutionary energy with a tendency to seek moderation, even compromise, he was as extraordinary as the times in which he lived.

Mr. Duncan—famous for his podcasts “The History of Rome” and “Revolutions”—is the bestselling author of “The Storm Before the Storm: The Beginning of the End of the Roman Republic.” Now, in the three-part doorstopper “Hero of Two Worlds” he shows how a youthful, “restlessly defiant” Lafayette evolved into an even-tempered, moderate reformer, while always keeping true to his ideals. Lafayette early embraced the American Revolution (1776-83), later helped instigate the French Revolution (1789-99) and, later yet, encouraged France’s July Revolution (1830). Given his half-century of wide-ranging, trans-Atlantic activities, it is not surprising that Lafayette’s contemporaries and modern historians alike offer widely differing assessments of a career that thwarts easy summation.

Part I (1757-86) introduces Lafayette’s French context and unpacks his formidable role in the American Revolution. Born at the Château de Chavaniac, in Auvergne, the infant aristocrat was baptized Marie-Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Motier. Lafayette jested: “I was baptized like a Spaniard. But it was not my fault. And without pretending to deny myself the protection of Marie, Paul, Joseph, Roch and Yves, I more often called upon Saint Gilbert.” Independence would be Lafayette’s calling card, perhaps inevitably. When he was a toddler, his father died fighting in the Seven Years’ War. Lafayette’s only sibling, a younger sister, died too. With the death of his mother, in 1770, young Gilbert was orphaned, “left emotionally and psychologically alone in the world.” Still, resilient, he was commissioned an officer when 13. Great wealth helped too. Relocating to Versailles, he married into the powerful Noailles family and pursued a military career.

Mr. Duncan admits “it is hard to pin down the precise moment Lafayette latched on to the great ideas that animated the rest of his life: liberty, equality, and the rights of man.” By age 19, Lafayette had shed any “clumsy adolescence.” Having changed his coat-of-arms motto to “Cur Non” (“Why Not?”), in 1777 he sailed across the Atlantic seeking action in America’s War for Independence. Befriended by George Washington—the two maintained a lifelong friendship—he also “hit it off” with Alexander Hamilton, and others, like John Laurens and Thomas Jefferson.