POLITICS Comments turned off

Schumer’s 2020 Problem By Matthew Continetti

Posted By on March 5th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/chuck-schumers-2020-problem/

Chuck Schumer has a problem: The 2020 presidential election. Not only is 13 percent of his caucus on the campaign trail — so many Democrats are running for commander in chief that Schumer’s dreams of becoming Senate majority leader are in jeopardy.

Look at Colorado. Its Republican senator, Cory Gardner, is endangered thanks to the Rocky Mountain State’s increasingly blue hue. Schumer was hoping that former Colorado governor John Hickenlooper would challenge Gardner. But Hickenlooper announced today that he’s running for president. Not only does the governor’s move deprive Schumer of a top recruit, it also boxes out Colorado’s Democratic senator Michael Bennett, who was contemplating a presidential campaign of his own. Is the 2020 Democratic field large enough to hold two Colorado progressives? It already has a socialist and a Spartacus, so why not?

Then there’s Montana, where Republican senator Steve Daines is up in 2020. Schumer wants another governor, Steve Bullock, to run for Daines’s seat. But Bullock, like Hickenlooper, is also eyeing the presidency. Bullock could tout his record as a Democrat able to win in a state that turns dark red in presidential years. That’s a story the other candidates won’t be able to tell. If he enters the race, another top Senate challenger will be lost.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Is Realignment Coming to British Politics? By Madeleine Kearns

Posted By on March 5th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/is-realignment-coming-to-british-po

In the U.K., a small group of Labour Members of Parliament joined by an even smaller group of Tory MPs have formed a politically centrist coalition, the Independent Group (TIG). Though the influence of these disgruntled and Europhile MPs is debatable, the fear of more defections may help explain why the Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn is now backing a second Brexit vote.

But beyond Brexit, it is also possible that TIG will preempt a more significant political realignment. After all, it’s happened before.

In 1981, a group of Labour MPs who were disgruntled by the increasing leftward lurch of their party broke away and formed the Social Democratic party (SDP). The SDP orientated itself as left-of-center, pro-European, and in support of a moderate and mixed economy. In 1983, under the hard-left leadership of Neil Kinnock, the Labour party set out an explicitly socialist party manifesto — in what one Labour MP famously called “the longest suicide note in history.”

That the Labour party’s explicitly socialist policies were unpopular was proven in the election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979, the year that the Conservatives won with a 43-seat majority — which was the largest electoral swing since 1945. Thatcher’s election in 1979 also began 18 years of uninterrupted Conservative rule — the longest party ruling in British history.

Learning the hard way then, by the mid-’90s, the Labour party reoriented along more centrist lines, and at the 1994 Labour party conference, then leader Tony Blair heralded the arrival of “New Labour.” New Labour rejected socialism, conceded the most popular economic policies of Thatcherism — anti-inflation, low taxation, trade-union reforms, and free-market favorability — and added progressive social values and pro-European and anti-Unionist stances (e.g. devolution for Scotland).

Such a profound change in the party was, naturally, accompanied by a profound change in its base. Under Blair, New Labour consciously ceased to be the party of the working class — as it had been historically — and rather tried to appeal to highly educated, middle-class liberals where it saw its future. But from this, disillusionment with hypocrisy and elitism followed. The working class felt disaffected. Some voted Tory instead.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Allies Worry Over U.S. Public Opinion The gap between voters and foreign-policy elites shows little sign of closing. By Walter Russell Mead

Posted By on March 5th, 2019

https://www.wsj.com/articles/allies-worry-over-u-s-public-opinion-11551741006There is no more important question in world politics than this: Will U.S. public opinion continue to support an active and strategically focused foreign policy? During the Cold War and for 25 years after, there was rarely any doubt. While Americans argued—sometimes bitterly—over the country’s overseas priorities, there was a broad consensus in both parties that sustained engagement was necessary to protect U.S. interests.

That consensus is more fragile today. Questions about the reliability of American commitments keep the lights burning late in foreign and defense ministries around the world. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo insists, as he said in Manila last week, that a Chinese attack on Philippine forces or territory in the South China Sea would activate Article 4 of the U.S.-Philippine Mutual Defense Treaty. But will the American people honor the check that Mr. Pompeo has written on their behalf?

The best answer appears to be “maybe.” A recent poll from the Chicago Council on Global Affairs found that 70% of Americans want the U.S. to take an “active part” in world affairs in the abstract. But in a 2018 Pew survey, only 32% said limiting China’s power should be an important long-term foreign-policy priority for the U.S.

Similarly, while a strong majority of Americans support membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, just over half of Americans would support military action in response to a hypothetical Russian invasion of Estonia, according to a recent Eurasia Group Foundation survey. The Kremlin studies such poll results carefully, and so do NATO allies on Russia’s borders.

EDUCATION, P.C.-CULTURE Comments turned off

Decline and Fall: Classics Edition By Roger Kimball On identity politics in classical studies.

Posted By on March 4th, 2019

https://www.newcriterion.com/issues/2019/3/decline-fall-classics-edition

For the study of classics, it is (if we may adapt Dickens) the best of times and the worst of times. It is the best of times because there are multiple popular initiatives, mostly outside the academy, introducing people young and old to the riches of Greek and Latin. There are even a few bright spots inside the academy, for example Princeton University’s new Latin 110, a course taught entirely in Latin: the students and teacher do not speak in English about Latin but instead conduct the entire class in the ancient but still-living language. Impressive.

But such bright spots are few and far between. Indeed, even that class at Princeton has been castigated on Twitter for catering to students who are too “fit,” too male, and probably too heterosexual. More and more, it seems, the study of classics—like the study of the humanities generally—has fallen under the spell of grievance warriors who have injected an obsession with race and sexual exoticism into a discipline that, until recently, was mostly innocent of such politicized deformations—largely, we suspect, because of the inherent difficulty of mastering the subject. (In this sense, classics is different from pseudo-disciplines like women’s studies, black studies, lgbtq studies, and the like, because classics can never be entirely reduced to political posturing. You actually have to know something.)

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

The U.S. Is Ceding the Pacific to China While Washington’s focus is elsewhere, Beijing plays the long game—that means preparing for war.

Posted By on March 4th, 2019

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-u-s-is-ceding-the-pacific-to-china-11551649516

The way to deal with China, and thus North Korea, its naughty but wholly dependent vassal, is not by a failing and provocative attempt to weaken it, but by attending to America’s diminishing strengths. Unlike the short-focused U.S., China plays the long game, in which the chief objective is a favorable correlation of forces over time and the most important measure is military capacity.

As a dictatorship, it can continue military development and expansion despite economic downturns. With big data and big decrees, Xi Jinping has severely tightened party control in expectation of inevitable variations of fortune. The hatches are battened for a trade war that would adversely effect China and the world should the U.S. not blink first or fail to reject false or delaying assurances.

POLITICS Comments turned off

Ocasio-Cortez Declines to Denounce Maduro By Mairead McArdle

Posted By on March 4th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/ocasio-cortez-declines-to-denounce-maduro/

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Monday declined to denounce socialist Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro, calling the country’s current crisis a “complex issue.”

At a press conference to mark the opening of her first congressional office in Queens, the freshman Democrat was asked about the “Venezuelan crisis” and her willingness to “denounce the Maduro regime.”

“Yeah, so I think that this is absolutely a complex issue,” Ocasio-Cortez began. “I think it’s important that we approach this very carefully.”

The congresswoman said she is “absolutely concerned with the humanitarian crisis that’s happening,” adding that it is important that “any solution that we have centers [on] the Venezuelan people and centers [on] the democracy of Venezuelan people first.”

“I am very concerned about U.S. interventionism in Venezuela and I oppose it,” she said, explaining that she particularly opposes the leadership of U.S. Special Envoy to Venezuela Elliott Abrams, who is known for pleading guilty to two misdemeanor counts of withholding information from Congress during the Reagan administration’s Iran-Contra scandal. President George H.W. Bush pardoned Abrams in 1992.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

An Executive Order on Campus Free Speech By Adam Kissel

Posted By on March 4th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/03/donald-trumps-executive-order-on-campus-free-speech/

Thinking through how such an effort should work

President Donald Trump told a CPAC audience on Saturday that very soon he will unleash an executive order “requiring colleges and universities to support free speech if they want federal research dollars.” If we concede that federal grants should exist and that the agencies themselves should exist (though they should not), what could the order do, and what should it do? It seems valuable to build these ideas from a theory perspective rather than merely react to the language of the order when it comes out.

Should the order apply to all institutions, including private religious colleges? What conditions should the order include? How could it be enforced, and how can alleged violations trigger enforcement? Having served in the U.S. Department of Education in 2017 and 2018, and having worked at the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) for five years, I can provide a basic guide to the legal boundaries and tradeoffs involved.

First, to which institutions should the order apply? Consider that federal research grants are for public benefit. The results of publicly funded research, from this perspective, do not even belong to the researcher or the college. Therefore, the government may put restrictions on the research dollars, even at private colleges and universities. (This logic also implies that the data and published papers that result from federal dollars should be free to the public and not fenced by subscription journals. Frederick Hess and Grant Addison of the American Enterprise Institute made a similar argument in 2017.)

POLITICS Comments turned off

7 Reasons 2019 Is Already A Terrible Year For Trump’s Opponents In spite of a seemingly unstoppable alliance among media, bureaucrats, the House, and Never-Trumper Republicans, the left appears destined to extract defeat from jaws of victory by Adam Mill

Posted By on March 4th, 2019

http://thefederalist.com/2019/03/04/7-reasons-2019-already-terrible-year-trumps-opponents/

January seems so long ago. Back then, the air crackled with the excitement and buzz as Democrats took the House with sassy exclamations of imminent impeachment. Politico published “The Only Impeachment Guide You’ll Ever Need.”

Yet, in spite of a seemingly unstoppable alliance among the media, the House of Representatives, a network of sympathetic judges, embedded bureaucrats, and Never-Trumper Republicans, the left appears destined to surgically extract defeat from the wide-open jaws of victory. Bombshell after bombshell fizzled.

2019 is shaping up to be a horrible year for the Democrats, and the hits just keep coming. Let’s take a closer look at the bad news for Democrats.
1. Trump Got Himself More Slats in the Wall

Remember when George H. W. Bush shut down the government to avoid reneging on his promise, “Read my lips, NO NEW TAXES”? Me neither. After House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was spotted prematurely celebrating what, at the time, appeared to be a reprise of Bush 41’s humiliating acceptance of a deal to break his signature campaign pledge, it turned out that the 45th president was not such an easy touch.

President Donald Trump baited the Democrats into a shutdown fight over the wall and emerged with enough funding to demonstrate a tangible victory over Pelosi’s insistence on no more than $1.

BOOKS Comments turned off

Trumping right along by James Piereson A review of The Case for Trump by Victor Davis Hanson.

Posted By on March 4th, 2019

https://www.newcriterion.com/issues/2019/3/trumping-right-along

EXCERPTS: “Democrats across the board, along with many “never Trump” conservatives, still do not accept the legitimacy of Trump’s election, and they have worked incessantly for the past two years to nullify the verdict of the voters for daring to elect him in the first place. Some left-wing critics, including a few Hollywood celebrities, have openly hoped for the assassination of the President or for violence against his supporters and family members, while at the same time attacking him for violating established political norms. Well-known authors have turned out one book after another purporting to show that the President’s administration is in chaos, that he is unfit to hold office, or that he has committed crimes deserving impeachment. Those lonely Trump voters—some sixty-three million of them scattered across the land—have so far waited in vain for a prominent writer to step forward to make the case for the candidate they elected in the hope that he might stem the loss of their jobs, the collapse of their communities, and the overall decline of their country.Their wait is now over, thanks to Victor Davis Hanson’s The Case for Trump, an insightful, informative, and much-needed account of Donald Trump the upstart candidate and precedent-shattering president.1 Hanson, the author of many books on the history of ancient Greece and Rome and the history of warfare, including a comprehensive history of World War II published last year, writes in defense of President Trump with a degree of depth and sophistication that readers will not find in the carelessly written and unsourced broadsides attacking the President.

“After two years in office, Trump’s vocal critics are having a difficult time denying his many achievements, including a bustling economy, foreign policy successes, judicial appointments, regulatory reforms, energy independence, and a strong effort to curb illegal immigration, to name the most obvious ones. Will he succeed in rekindling the fortunes of the American worker, taming the establishment, and re-balancing U.S. national interests against international pressures? It is still too soon to tell. But, as Victor Davis Hanson demonstrates in this fascinating analysis of the past three years, no matter how things turn out this year and next, President Trump has made a good start in addressing issues in America that have for too long been ignored by both political parties.

POLITICS Comments turned off

Kamala Harris gains momentum among Democrats with proposal to legalize prostitution By Seth McLaughlin

Posted By on March 4th, 2019

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/mar/3/kamala-harris-prostitution-decriminalization-propo/

Decriminalizing prostitution — an idea gaining momentum among some Democrats, including at least one 2020 presidential contender — may one day be traced back to the hookers plying their trade under the elevated train along New York City’s Roosevelt Avenue.

That open-air market of prostitutes and johns in Queens, undeterred by the constant threat of arrest and incarceration, has been cited by New York state lawmakers mulling whether it’s time to wave the white flag in the war on the world’s oldest profession.

The decriminalization debate among Democrats spilled into the 2020 presidential race last month when Sen. Kamala D. Harris of California said she was supportive of the idea — although the legalization crowd complained that she was still too timid.

It was less than a decade ago that the Democratic Party embraced same-sex marriage and just three years ago that it formally adopted a platform plank to legalize marijuana. Rep. Raul M. Grijalva of Arizona, chairman emeritus of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, said decriminalizing sex work is on “that same trajectory.”