RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.aier.org/article/the-property-instinct-and-the-utter-futility-of-socialism/

If you are like me, you regularly interact with people who remain unphased by America’s recent giant strides towards authoritarian socialism, of an economy run largely by, and for, state actors and their corporate minions. Those who bother to engage the problem at all eventually exclaim something like “Well, no society has ever tried ideal socialism,” by which they mean a system that truly redistributes wealth according to everyone’s needs.

A new book from Chapman University law and economics professor Bart Wilson entitled The Property Species nowhere mentions communism, Marx, or socialism but nevertheless provides a powerfully cogent explanation for why socialism, especially “ideal” socialism, can never work — it’s inhuman because it doesn’t account for humanity’s property instinct.

Classical liberal comebacks to the ideal socialism canard tend to focus on the reasons why socialism cannot possibly succeed. Check out Don Boudreaux’s “The Inevitable Failure of Socialism” for many powerful economic reasons that socialism, even “ideal” socialism, cannot increase the living standards of the masses as quickly as market economies can.

To disparage socialism is not, of course, to embrace the status quo. Our overly powerful governments regularly enrich one party at the expense of others. Corporate welfare is particularly galling, if not well enough understood by the general public, but so too is its enabler, the grabbing hand of government. America can reduce rent seeking without going full bore socialist, which has always proven itself just another system for extracting rents from the masses for the benefits of elites. But the human property instinct renders even “ideal” socialism impossible.

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2021/10/04/the-enigma-of-robert-e-lee/#slide-1

“ In a short review, it is impossible to do justice to Guelzo’s splendid work. He has done what we ask biographers to do: provide an incisive look at a complex man, neither secular saint nor moral monster. Of course, complexity is the human condition. Thanks to Allen Guelzo for providing the definitive look at the life of a complex man who mostly deserves our respect.”

Robert E. Lee: A Life, by Allen C. Guelzo (Knopf, 608 pp., $35)

Of all the American icons that have been pushed off their pedestals lately, none has fallen farther and harder than Robert E. Lee. Over the years, Lee was admired by even those who certainly had no sympathy for the cause for which he fought. Long viewed as an exemplar of soldierly virtue, integrity, magnanimity, and humanity, Lee has recently come under relentless attack and his alleged virtues have been called into question.

He was once regarded as not only a regional but even a national hero, a Christian gentleman as well as a magnificent commander who eventually succumbed only to an army with superior resources. Now we are treated to essays such as “The Myth of the Kindly Robert E. Lee,” accusing him of being a racist slave-beater, as well as to denunciations by Army officers such as David Petraeus who, having once lauded him, now dismiss him as a traitor.

Fortunately, Lee is the subject of a new biography by the prolific Allen C. Guelzo, one of our most accomplished Civil War historians and a foremost Lincoln scholar. Guelzo, the senior research scholar at the Council of the Humanities and the director of the Initiative on Politics and Statesmanship in Prince­ton’s James Madison Program, is the first three-time winner of the Lincoln Prize, for, among other works, his Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery in America (2005), which remains the definitive treatment of that document.

As a staunch Lincoln man, Guelzo might be expected to join in the Lee-bashing. But that is not his style. He has instead provided a fair treatment, placing Lee’s remarkable life in its proper context. He praises what should be praised and criticizes what should be criticized.

Guelzo seeks to address the “mystery” of Robert E. Lee: How did a man whose character, dignity, rectitude, and composure created a sense of awe in most of those who observed him also exhibit characteristics such as insecurity, petulance, impatience, contempt, and, on at least one occasion, violent anger? Also, how did a man of honor commit the crime of treason?

https://www.city-journal.org/review-of-america-transformed-by-ronald-j-pestritto

America Transformed: The Rise and Legacy of American Progressivism, by Ronald J. Pestritto (Encounter Books, 288 pp., $28.99)

It is no secret that American public life is fracturing. The fissures can be seen in our gladiatorial-like Supreme Court nomination hearings, the collapse of confidence in our institutions, and the mounting sense that many have that elections won’t change the country’s fundamental trajectory. These disputes are merely symptoms, however, of a broader problem, the roots of which extend back decades.

As Ronald J. Pestritto, graduate dean and professor of politics at Hillsdale College, argues in America Transformed, our present-day clashes reflect a fundamental “divide over first principles,” which he traces to the rise of the Progressive Movement in the late nineteenth century. Pestritto makes a convincing case that the Progressives—including Woodrow Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt, Herbert Croly, and John Dewey—sought to “revolutionize both the theory and practice of American government.”

The Progressives had their differences and factions: consider the fierce 1912 presidential campaign between Wilson and Roosevelt. Yet they adhered to a “coherent set of principles, with a common purpose.” They unleashed a “direct assault on the core ideas of the American founding,” openly rejecting the natural rights teachings of the Declaration of Independence. Wilson once told an audience that “if you want to understand the real Declaration of Independence, do not repeat the preface”—the same preface that contains the most concise articulation of the Founders’ political theory.

Pestritto argues that, for progressives like education reformer Dewey, the Founders’ “great sin” was to think that principles such as a natural human equality in rights and government by consent transcended “the particular circumstances of that day.” Influenced by Hegel’s philosophical idealism, they argued that historical progress had shown that what the Founders thought were universal truths were in fact simply ideas of their time. In fact, the principles of the American Founding, and the Constitution built to reflect them, actively prevented government from taking the swift action that the public now demanded.

Pestritto suggests that “native influences” had already compromised the American immune system by the time the Progressive Movement emerged. A toxic mix of Social Darwinism, pragmatism, and the rejection of social compact theory in New England and the antebellum South prepared American intellectuals and politicians to accept an alternative account of politics that seemed better able to meet the challenges of modern society. The Progressives claimed that historical progress necessitated a dynamic and perfectible human nature, an idea that the Founders rejected. James Madison’s claim in Federalist 10 that the prevention of majority tyranny would always be a problem in political life was simply false, they believed. Thus Woodrow Wilson and political scientist Frank Goodnow sharply criticized the Constitution’s separation of powers and the slow, methodical lawmaking process the Framers had put in place, which they saw as hopelessly out of step with the public will and too often stymied by a combination of political machines, big business, and other special interests.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/09/americas-revolutionary-mind-jason-d-hill/

Author’s note: In his most recent book, America’s Revolutionary Mind: A Moral History of the American Revolution and the Declaration That Defined It, C. Bradley Thompson gives us perhaps the most compelling moral interpretation of the American Revolution and the foundational principles of the Republic. In reconstructing the logic and principles of the Declaration of Independence, he establishes that which has rarely been given sufficient attention: the fact that America’s revolutionary war was primarily moral rather than economic or political.

The story of America’s victorious fight for independence and its success in achieving its exceptional status as a Republic is the story of a unique phenomenon: the creation of the American Mind.

Thompson does a brilliant job of weaving together the modes of reasoning that led to agreements in the minds of the Founders about the foundational and first principles in which the country would be rooted. In the end, we are left with a picture of the revolutionaries not just as profound political thinkers, but as moral giants—both as persons and as philosophic thinkers. Unanimously they perceived the correct nature of man as a human being who needed fundamental and indisputable resources and rights for a life of flourishing. This established them as epistemological geniuses. Out of that perception came the creation of the political system most consonant with that rational nature.

C. Bradley Thompson is the BB&T Research Professor in the Department of Political Science at Clemson University and the Executive Director of the Clemson Institute for the Study of Capitalism. He received his Ph.D from Brown University, and has also been a visiting scholar at Princeton and Harvard universities and at the University of London.

I interviewed him recently about America’s Revolutionary Mind.

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.