Is it any surprise that Victor Davis Hanson, as a personal project, endeavors to perpetuate a hoary conservative fable: Socialism is precisely equivalent to rule by Mao, Lenin, Stalin, and Castro and even uttering the word socialist will transform the US of A into Venezuela overnight. “The gentleman doth protest to much, methinks.” Hyperventilation such as Mr. Hanson’s says one thing to me: His fear is not that a more expansive safety new won’t work but that it will. The Richmond Times-Dispatch printed this response to Mr. Hanson.
Victor Davis Hanson, “Historical Ignorance: Why Socialism and Why Now?” The Richmond Times-Dispatch, 30 August 2019, A9 (www.providencejournal.com/opinion/20190831/my-turn-victor-davis-hanson-why-socialism-and-why-now). If The Richmond Times-Dispatch posted an online version of this article, its search engine is unable to locate it. The link above is to the version that appeared the The Providence Journal.
“Hanson Offered Outdated Analysis of Socialism,” The Richmond Times-Dispatch, 7 September 2019, A10 (https://richmond.com/opinion/letters-to-editor/letters-to-the-editor-sept-7-2019-drug-price-discrepancy-infuriates-reader/article_24217b96-d6da-5b7e-bcd7-be6acf1a4ca0.html). (Scroll down).
The Grey Lady failed to smile again, this time by proxy. June of 2019 found me in the Golden West and The (San Jose) Mercury News had picked up a David Brooks column. It’s difficult not to wonder whether Mr. Brooks assumes that no reader recalls who William F. Buckley Jr. was. Mr. Man-and-God-at-Yale was many things; a paragon of tolerance wasn’t one of them.
David Brooks, “The Generation Gap and the Imminent GOP Apocalypse,” The (San Jose) Mercury News, 5 June 2019, A7 (www.nytimes.com/2019/06/03/opinion/republicans-generation-gap.html). If The Mercury News posted an online version of this article, its search engine is unable to locate it. The link above is to the version in The New York Times.
David Brooks correctly diagnoses the demographic and electoral buzzsaw into which the GOP is pushing itself through its stance on “immigration, diversity, (and) pluralism,” but he misses the mark on two points. Progressive multiculturalism is in no wise pessimistic. It merely recognizes that the sine qua non for redemption, whether for individual or society, is acknowledgment of and contrition for past misdeeds, something Mr. Brooks, with his boundless capacity for moralizing, surely understands.
Mr. Brooks, moreover, does not acknowledge how a calculated brand of intolerance has been inextricably woven into the Republican Party’s DNA since the adoption of the “Southern strategy.” The GOP has no credibility to assert an “optimistic multiculturalism.” It is rich that Mr. Brooks mentions in this context his “mentor” William F. Buckley Jr., a man whose homophobia is enshrined on videotape (see Gore Vidal) and whose racial attitudes cannot withstand cursory scrutiny.
One thing can be said about George Will: He’s consistent. His effort to balance his contempt for President Smallhands and for the Republican Party that abets his atrocities with his distaste for the left, indeed for anyone not of his ideological stripe, turns him into a logical and factual contortionist. In this editorial carried by The Richmond Times-Dispatch, he makes broad, broad strokes with his false-equivalency brush as he strives to demonize antifascism, progressivism, and popular protests. The opportunity to take another run at Mr. Will was to be relished. I did. The Richmond Times-Dispatch took another pass.
George Will, “So Much to Protest, So Little Time,” The Richmond Times-Dispatch, 9 August 2018, A9 (https://richmond.com/opinion/columnists/george-will-column-poor-portland-progressives-so-much-to-protest-so-little-time/article_7142b880-f77c-5118-b2db-f5d7a38c9df4.html).
George Will’s message is muddled. Unraveling his larger point is difficult: Comparing Oregon’s dismal history of race relations with actions of progressive activists in Portland? Insinuating that all counter demonstrators are “antifa”? Equating early twentieth-century Klansmen with activists publicly opposing white nationalists and other extremists? None of this withstands scrutiny.
Progressivism vexes Will but it seems oppressive only to those who feel their privilege threatened. Personal experience in rallies, marches, and counter-protests tells me that participants, with few exceptions, are concerned citizens who abhor violence and are merely exercising their First Amendment rights. Conflating all antifascism with “antifa” is interesting rhetorical legerdemain but anyone sensible likely harbors antifascist sentiment. Furthermore, President Trump’s flirtation with authoritarian tropes legitimizes progressives’ concerns about the country’s direction.
What amazes is Will’s failure to mention the two men murdered on a Portland train in May 2017 when defending two teenage women of color from a racist tirade by an alleged white supremacist. Will’s reference to the Faulknerian epigram on the past’s omnipresence is on point but perhaps not as he intends. Trump has emboldened white nationalists, white supremacists, neo-Nazis, and neo-Confederates, movements meriting relegation to the past yet moldering in the present’s dark recesses. Does Will believe that this should pass without rebuttal by citizens of good will?
Will’s distaste for Trump has made him a man without a country politically. He has abjured the Republican Party, but his affinity with the right seems intact, his compulsion to demonize the left is unshaken, and his safe port appears to be the framing of questionable equivalences. Will is fond of apothegms. Perhaps he should ponder the words of conservative icon Edmund Burke: “When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.”
My Better Half and I found ourselves, as per custom, in Portsmouth-Norfolk for the Fourth of July holiday. On the day, we bought a copy of The Washington Post. It contained an editorial by Meghan McArdle on how to modulate one’s nationalism properly. I doubt that I can add anything to what others have said about Ms. McArdle. I thought the op-ed was clueless and wrote a letter to that effect. The Washington Post exercised a peremptory strike against it.
Megan McArdle, “The Nationalism We Need,” The Washington Post, 4 July 2018, A17 (www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/america-needs-more-patriotism/2018/07/03/aa16f54e-7f00-11e8-b0ef-fffcabeff946_story.html).
Megan McArdle’s political myopia is rivaled only by her capacity to frame a specious equivalence. Her exhortation that all genuflect to national symbols to preserve American unity is absurd. She conveniently forgets that labeling political opponents as unpatriotic is a particular impulse of the right and long predates the current moment. Is it difficult to draw a line from George H. W. Bush’s vow to be the “pledge-of-allegiance president” to Sarah Palin’s courting of “real Americans,” then to the political zero-sumism of the Tea Party movement and House Freedom Caucus, and then finally to the current chief executive’s casual demonization of all dissenters without gainsay from a supine national GOP? When Mr. Trump applies the Stalinist pejorative “enemy of the state” to a free press, blithely obliterates democratic norms, and openly admires dictatorial rulers, open expression of dissent is not only patriotic but also a bulwark against creeping authoritarianism. Will Ms. McArdle next propose a national loyalty oath to sustain our tribal cohesion?
I have never been well disposed toward George Will. I have regard for his knowledge of and reverence for baseball but his politics are appalling. A chasm separates his experience from that of most Americans and he seems unperturbed by this void in knowledge.
My distaste for his political commentary, both print and broadcast, is of long vintage. An anecdote from the way-back machine explains why. Sam Donaldson, the former ABC News correspondent, was skillful at exposing Mr. Will’s absurdities. During the Iran-Contra imbroglio, Mr. Will undertook the task of defending the indefensible Oliver North. He suggested that Mr. North had merely engaged in a justified act of civil disobedience and the left’s umbrage at the colonel’s conduct was hypocritical when considered alongside its tolerance toward acts of civil disobedience by sixties radicals. Ever the culture warrior, our Mr. Will. Mr. Donaldson made an obvious yet devastating point rhetorical point: The core principle of civil disobedience is acceptance of legal consequences for breaking the law the civilly disobedient has deemed unjust, in effect having the courage of one’s convictions. Mr. North was cravenly determined to evade responsibility for his actions; his doe-eyed presentation of himself as a cruelly victimized patriot was Oscar worthy. Mr. Will was rendered speechless, a delicious rarity. Despite his Brahmin mien, his education apparently had been a bit light on Henry David Thoreau. Sometimes the mask slips.
It was likely inevitable that Mr. Will would join the great migration of the Never Trump conservative punditocracy in the months following the 2016 election. Once Fox News made the pivot to become what Chris Hayes calls “Trump TV,” it was no longer welcoming for those of Mr. Will’s ilk. There was a stampede to secure spots at centrist or left-leaning outlets. MSNBC assembled a stable of these types: Steve Schmidt, Charlie Sykes, William Kristol, Rick Wilson, Jennifer Rubin, Bret Stephens, David Frum, Mr. Will, others.
Mr. Will was among the least successful of these commentators. There was an unmistakable tension inherent in his commentary. He had a tough circle to square. He simultaneously felt compelled to register his contempt for President Bone Spur while his ideology fueled his undisguised disdain for anyone not subscribing to his narrow brand of movement conservatism, effectively an attack on his new audience.
So Mr. Will in a column exhorted people to vote against the GOP – note, not to vote for anything – in the 2018 midterm elections in order to thwart Mr. Trump. That was all well and good. That’s what the voters should have done and by and large did. However, the efficacy of the message is undercut by the Never Trumpers’ lack of a constituency, as Sam Seder points out. Had the Never Trumpers been significant numerically, The King of Queens would never have been elected president and pundits like Mr. Will would still be opining at right-wing outlets. At least Mr. Will had the courtesy to make his plea general. Other Never Trumper pundits had the gall to define type of candidates the Democratic Party would need to put on offer to garner their votes, a tacit threat either to vote Republican or to sit out the election. In their view, beggar was by right chooser. Never Trumpism is clearly weak tea.
The Richmond Times-Dispatch routinely runs Mr. Will’s columns, which afforded an opportunity to unload on him. I did. The paper passed on it. “I can’t imagine why,” the Bourbon Progressive repeats ironically.
George Will, “This November, Cast Your Vote Against the GOP,” The Richmond Times-Dispatch, 24 June 2018, E3 (https://richmond.com/opinion/columnists/george-will-column-this-november-cast-your-vote-against-the-gop/article_8ec57b8d-843d-599c-80ce-c4d4054327c7.html).
George Will’s call to reject the GOP in the 2018 midterm and thwart President Trump’s quasi-authoritarian antics is welcome. He also properly chastises the Republican Party for fecklessness. No one, however, should harbor illusions about Mr. Will’s brand of “never Trumpism.”
Mr. Will affects high dudgeon at the ugliness Mr. Trump has exposed, yet one wonders whether the wellspring of his disaffection with his onetime party is found more in the ascendancy of a chief executive who offends his priggish sensibilities, who, as Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell quipped in 2016, refuses to “stick to the script.” [1]
The selfsame George Will has penned apologias for the race-baiting, segregationist presidential campaigns of George Wallace and Strom Thurmond, [2] has insinuated that President Obama’s race inoculated him from criticism, [3] and then has had the effrontery to accuse liberals of suffering from “Tourette’s syndrome” in matters of race. [4] Can we believe that Mr. Will was taken unawares when Mr. Trump incited intolerance and rallied broad support by substituting a bullhorn for the dog whistle used by the GOP since President Nixon’s hatching of the “Southern Strategy,” a political modus operandi in which Mr. Will’s complicity is more than tacit? Mr. Will suffers either from singular absence of self-awareness or impressive intellectual dishonesty. He is talented. Perhaps he manages both.
Should 2020 or 2024 offer Mr. Will a Republican president he admires, one wonders whether he will forgive all and scurry to a sinecure in the Conservative Punditocracy Industrial Complex. He labels a 2019 House potentially controlled by Democrats – a party operating in good faith – as a “basket of deplorables.” The Right Wing Noise Machine beckons with a “basket” in which he himself can rest companionably. If George Will’s politicized maundering represents the acme of “conservative intellectualism,” how can it not be deemed an oxymoron?
[1] Jordain Carney, “McConnell on Trump: ‘I’m Not a Fan of the Daily Tweets,’” The Hill, 17 February 2017 (www.thehill.com/blogs/floor-action/senate/320114-mcconnell-on-trump-im-not-a-fan-of-the-daily-tweets).
[2] George Will, “Robert Sarvis, Virginia’s Other Choice for Governor,” The Washington Post, 23 October 2013 (www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/george-f-will-robert-sarvis-virginias-other-choice-for-governor/2013/10/23/1544f8d6-3b5c-11e3-b6a9-da62c264f40e_story.html?utm_term=.300984fb5eac&wprss=rss_homepage); Oliver Willis, “George Will Whitewashes Racism from Pro-Segregationist Presidential Campaigns,” Media Matters 24 October 2013 (www.mediamatters.org/blog/2013/10/24/george-will-whitewashes-racism-from-pro-segrega/196578).
[3] Elspeth Reeve, “Actually George Will Has Been Obsessed with Race for a Long time,” The Atlantic, 2 October 2012 (www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/10/actually-george-wills-been-obsessed-race-long-time/322988/).
[4] Ian Schwartz, “George Will: Liberals Have ‘Tourette’s Syndrome’ When It Comes to Racism,” Real Clear Politics, 13 April 2014 (www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2014/04/13/george_will_liberals_have_tourettes_syndrome_when_it_comes_to_racism.html).
The Grey Lady strikes again, and I was even trying to be nice. Drat. Dang, double dang, triple dang. Whatever. One of The New York Times’ reporters, Laurie Goodstein, wrote an informative bit on the Red Letter Christians, a group of evangelicals who emphasize the words of Christ, the dialogue printed in red in fancier Bibles. This proclivity leads them to push back against The Fantasist in Chief. The article was a corrective against the tendency to consign all evangelicals to the same basket.
Laurie Goodstein, “Confronting the Flock over a Zeal for Trump,” The New York Times, 29 May 2018, A11 (www.nytimes.com/2018/05/23/us/anti-trump-evangelicals-lynchburg.html).
It was refreshing and uplifting to meet in Laurie Goldstein’s article a band of Christian evangelicals committed to their faith’s most foundational principle. In a possibly quixotic effort to persuade conservative evangelicals to reconsider their support for President Trump’s most objectional policies, the Red Letter Christians are an embodiment of amor alienum, the absolute love of others, the boundless compassion for the most downtrodden and the least among us. Jesus himself was ultimately a “social justice warrior” of the type now routinely derided by conservatives and misunderstood, perhaps willfully, by Mr. Trump’s more rabid evangelical adherents.
Michael Gerson is among a coterie of Never Trumpers – many of them onetime party apparatchiks – willing to assign some blame for the rise of The Facebook President to movement conservatism, yet not too much blame. If the intention is to deliver a mea culpa, perhaps it should be a mea culpa, not a John Ehrlichman-ish “modified limited hangout.” These political post mortems by Never Trumpers often come across as self-serving. Mr. Gerson’s is no exception. A self-professed evangelical Christian, he tried to explicate the evangelical movement’s seemingly unshakeable bond with the most morally and ethically challenged and irreligious of modern presidents. Mr. Gerson somehow failed to mention the strand of evangelicalism with the most intimate affinity to the Republican message, prosperity gospel. The letter addresses this.
Michael Gerson, “The Last Temptation,” The Atlantic, April 2018, 42-52 (https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/04/the-last-temptation/554066/).
Michael Gerson’s recounting of evangelical Christianity’s recent history is fascinating more for what it doesn’t say than for what it does. A telling omission makes his picture of the movement’s entanglement with politics seem willfully soft-focused and airbrushed.
Mr. Gerson does not devote a single word to prosperity gospel, a strain of evangelicalism exerting outsize influence on GOP politics. John Hagee, Kenneth Copeland, Rod Parsley, Paul Crouch, et al., have no place in Mr. Gerson’s constellation of evangelical leaders. A central tenet of prosperity theology, that tithing and a proper relationship with God produce material benefits, dovetails well with GOP predilections regarding social justice. This belief’s corrosively empowering corollary – affluence as indicator of moral rectitude and poverty as sign of moral depravity – shows that casuistry was not the exclusive province of medieval scholastic theologians.
This omission dooms Mr. Gerson’s portrait of President George W. Bush to incompleteness. He is silent on the Manichaean and messianic elements in Mr. Bush’s weltanschauung, proclivities difficult to disconnect from the president’s response to 9/11 and the country’s descent into the quagmire of Iraq. Giving proper weight to prosperity gospel is not merely necessary in setting the record straight on the Bush administration. President Trump has among his counselors Paula White, a prosperity gospel leading light, and he has an affinity for Joel Osteen, perhaps its most influential apostle.
Foiled by the Grey Lady again. Drat. The Republicans engaged in procedurally dubious, middle-of-the-night ramming through of their 2017 tax bill. Political hypocrisy is undying. Bush the Younger’s 2001 and 2003 tax giveaways cleared the Senate through reconciliation as did this turkey, yet the Republicans hyperventilated in 2009 when Mr. Obama availed himself of the process to enact the Affordable Care Act and the GOP cried foul again when Mr. Biden resorted to it for the American Rescue Plan.
Anyway, the wee-hour shenanigans afforded another opportunity to hiss at the GOP’s Swiss Army Knife policy: Tax cuts yesterday, tax cuts today, tax cuts forever!
Jim Tankersley, Thomas Kaplan, and Alan Rappeport, “G.O.P. Scrambles to Push Tax Bill Through Senate,” The New York Times, 2 December 2017, A1, A12 (www.nytimes.com/2017/12/01/us/politics/senate-tax-bill.html).
Would that the GOP’s passage of “tax reform” under cover of darkness could be read as political farce, not as an act of stark political cynicism. Nothing now obscures the GOP’s obeisance to plutocratic donors. No one need any longer take the Republican Party’s claim of principled fiscal responsibility as anything beyond politically useful but empty Pablum. How can Congress, as a coequal branch, blunt President Trump’s worst impulses when its majority party cannot restrain its own baser instincts and in fact tolerates Mr. Trump’s dangerous antics so that its donors can be satisfied?
Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III was the gift that kept on giving, until he didn’t. His elevation to Generalissimo El Trumpo’s – apologies to Ted Rall – cabinet left his Senate seat open. The GOP primary to fill it was a freak show. Yet, it was more than a freak show. It was a syllabus of the Republican Party’s vices and the race grew more perverse as it proceeded. The revelation of “Judge” Roy Moore’s alleged high regard for young, delightfully young, women came later. On the plus side, the GOP tomfoolery opened the lane for Doug Jones to secure the seat, a good, albeit temporary, outcome. The Washington Post passed on this missive too. I can’t image why, he mutters to himself once again ironically.
Robert Costa, “Trump’s Fraying Relationship with GOP Colors Ala. Special Election,” The Washington Post, 14 August 2017, A1, A4 (www.washingtonpost.com/powerpost/trumps-feuding-base-faces-showdown-in-alabama-senate-race/2017/08/13/b37a6f24-7ed6-11e7-83c7-5bd5460f0d7e_story.html).
Perhaps the special election for the US Senate seat in Alabama would be a sadly amusing farce were it not an image in microcosm of the maladies besetting the GOP: a religious bigot and homophobe (former Alabama Supreme Court Justice Roy Moore) vies with a Tea Party zealot (US Congressman Mo Brooks) to unseat a hard-right apparatchik (US Senator Luther Strange) installed by a rank family-values hypocrite (former Alabama Governor Robert Bentley) to serve in place of an unqualified and ethically compromised US Attorney General (Jefferson Beauregard Sessions) who may have perjured himself in his confirmation hearing, each candidate kowtowing to Mr. Trump for his endorsement, each candidate posturing as more Trumpian than Trump. This reality is made sadder by the probability that the Republican Party primary may as well be the election itself in deep red Alabama. With candidates and a political culture such as these, how can President Obama’s forlorn wish for the breaking of the GOP’s “fever” ever be realized?
This is the first of several failures to connect. It is also my maiden effort to send something to a magazine, The Atlantic.
The letter addresses an article by Peter Beinart, a moderately conservative writer. Mr. Beinart, it seemed to me, was suffering from a malady common to Never-Trumpers following President Two Corinthians’ electoral ascent. Horrified by the incivility of it all, he was grappling with how to account for the ugliness of the politics without implicating movement conservatism as a culprit. This is a quintessential grasping-at-straws project. Mr. Beinart landed on cratering attendance at churches and burgeoning secularism as his analytical magician’s wand. The intersection of religion and politics fascinates me, so I dashed off a response.
The critiques to level against Mr. Beinart’s analysis are legion; the letter hits some high points.
Peter Beinart, “Breaking Faith,” The Atlantic, April 2017, 15-17 (https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/04/breaking-faith/517785/).
Peter Beinart’s fascinating analysis of the political effects of declining church attendance and growing secularism leaves many germane issues unaddressed. He identifies a coarsening of political impulses but offers no solution, unless one infers a “re-churching” of America as his tacit wish; however, it should not be assumed willy-nilly that even ugly, high-volume political dialogue is a problem or even especially aberrant across the nation’s history.
Mr. Beinart concedes many evangelical voters’ animus toward African Americans, Latinos, Muslims, and the LGBT community, but needs to explain the grand value of those attending church being slightly less intolerant than evangelicals outside church. He might also consider whether non-churchgoing evangelicals were already more intolerant than their regularly attending brethren. Mr. Beinart, moreover, ignores another source of the vitriolic intolerance found in corners of the right: the GOP’s progressive stultification of its voters through rejection of every inconvenient fact and its playing of culturally charged, dog-whistle politics since the late sixties, tactics employed particularly to motivate evangelical voters. The GOP’s seemingly calculated failure to fulfill promises to evangelicals makes locating a wellspring of unreasoning anger unchallenging. Mr. Beinart should also remember that political incivility flows top downward as easily as bottom upward. Has either major party been a paragon of civility in recent years? How many political norms can Mr. Beinart name not yet violated by the country’s elected officials?
Like many right-leaning commentators, try as he might, Mr. Beinart seems unable to resist drawing a fallacious equivalence between the “insurgencies” of the left and the right. A long-persecuted minority culture’s drive to embrace and preserve its identity cannot be equated with a majority culture’s sense of entitlement and prejudice.
Mr. Beinart finally must explain why voters across the political spectrum should not gravitate more toward “revolution” than “reform” when confronted by two corporatist parties awash in donations, neither seeming responsive to the individual voter’s travails. Mr. Beinart seems nostalgic for a mythical past during which politics was played by Marquess of Queensbury rules when in fact, across its history, America’s political game has often been, sometimes by necessity, a freestyle cage match.