Saturday, September 10, 2016

Many of the Contenders for the "America's Rudest City" Title Include Cities Which Have Had No Republican Mayor for at Least the Past Half Century


Among the World's top Unfriendliest Cities are Boston, Washington (“Bobby Kennedy was right!” said a T+L reader. “[It’s] a city with Southern efficiency and Northern charm”), Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, and Los Angeles.

Meanwhile, America's rudest cities include Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, and Seattle.
Three-time-champion Los Angeles, home of road rage, went head-to-head with classically brusque East Coast cities such as Boston, New York, and Washington, D.C.—all of which landed in the top five.
Travel + Leisure explains:
Every year, Travel + Leisure sifts through tens of thousands of World’s Best Awards surveys to better understand where our readers love to go, and why. Of course, the responses say just as much, if not more, about what our readers don’t like.

We asked readers to rank 266 cities on everything from their access to art and culture to the friendliness of their people: and some cities failed to warm tourists’ hearts. Not surprisingly, many of the cities that found themselves on our 2015 Unfriendliest Cities in America list (based on separate data from our annual America’s Favorite Places survey) were also called out in this census …
Is there any likelihood that rudeness and unfriendliness, at least within the United States, is linked to this?
Reminder:
Chicago hasn’t had a Republican mayor for 85 years.
Detroit hasn’t had a Republican mayor for over 50 years.

Friday, September 09, 2016

The Era of Hope'n'Change has been one prolonged act of suicide


Am I the only one who remembers 2008, when we were promised that the election of a Democrat named Barack Obama, aka an apologizer-in-chief with the brilliant forward-looking policy of smart diplomacy, would bring back respect both for the United States and for (whoever was/is) the occupant of the White House?

Thank God the answer is no, and they include Richard Fernandez and Max Boot, along with Instapundit's Stephen Green.

Max Boot, first:
The White House is sensitive to charges that the president is conducting an “apology tour” of the world. And it’s true that on Tuesday the president didn’t actually apologize in Laos for American actions in the 1960s, but he danced right up to the line.

 … Everything Obama said was factual, and there is nothing wrong with his desire to aid Laos—the U.S. needs as many friends on China’s borders as it can find. But his rhetoric was nevertheless one-sided and disappointing.

What was lacking, above all, was any context. Someone who listened to Obama’s speech and knew nothing of Laos’s history would have been left mystified about why the U.S. dropped bombs “like rain” on that country.

 … It is certainly possible to question the utility and even the morality of U.S. bombing in Laos—but it is highly misleading for any analyst, much less the president of the United States, to criticize the U.S. in a vacuum without noting the actions of the North Vietnamese and the Pathet Lao who killed countless numbers of Laotian civilians, violated Laotian sovereignty, and ultimately overthrew the internationally recognized government of Laos in order to impose a Communist dictatorship. That dictatorship continues to rule to this day, by the way. It has made some economic reforms primarily to encourage tourism, but it remains a dictatorship that is rated “not free” by Freedom House.

To his credit, Obama did speak out about human rights during his trip although in a particularly mealy-mouthed way. He never directly criticized Laos’s human-rights record, which is poor. He never highlighted the plight of dissidents or called for democracy. Instead he spoke in oblique terms about the importance of human rights while making clear that they are not very crucial in the U.S.-Laos relationship … In other words, while saying he would speak out on behalf of human rights, Obama did not really do that.

I get what Obama is up to here. He thinks the U.S. can exercise more influence today by acknowledging past “misconduct” without directly criticizing the behavior of countries it deals with. The problem is that, in practice, this amounts to kow-towing to dictators from Cuba to Iran and buying into their fiction that the U.S. is guilty of conduct just as bad, if not worse, than what they have done. That simply isn’t true, and by shading the truth the president is failing to speak on behalf of the principles upon which the United States was founded–and which have long been our most powerful tool and selling point in international affairs.

He is also inadvertently buttressing the dictatorships he is dealing with; now they can turn to their people and say in essence, “Our problems are America’s fault–the president of the United States even said so.” What we have seen during the two terms of the Obama presidency is that by failing to speak out more robustly on behalf of freedom, the president is not winning any friends; he is simply convincing the world’s dictators that he is a patsy who can be pushed around with impunity.
As Stephen Green notes wryly,
I’m not so sure it’s inadvertent; President Pen & Phone isn’t isn’t a huge fan of representative democracy. And as Glenn [Reynolds] noted earlier, Obama “never much liked the country he was elected to run.”
In any case, for an example of a world leader considering Obama a patsy, or at least someone hardly worth of a huge amount of respect, we turn to Commentary Magazine.

If you listen to Rodrigo Duterte's now infamous rant against president Obama (start at minute 6)
writes Richard Fernandez (gracias por Glenn Reynolds),
you might be forgiven for thinking it was Howard Zinn or Bill Ayers speaking, allowing for the accent. He spoke of the "lapdogs of America" who forget that "America has one too many [offenses] to answer for". He argued that the Philippines "inherited the [Muslim] problem from the United States" and since "everyone has a terrible record of extrajudicial killing ... why make an issue of it."  He describes the massacre of the Indians, the oppression of migrants etc. as reasons for ordering the deaths of thousands proving, if there was any remaining doubt, that he learned the lesson of moral equivalence well.

From this, Duterte concluded that he wouldn't listen to lectures from the SOB leader of such a country. It's almost as if he's been listening to Obama and Obama was hoist on his own petard. The Western left has the habit of preaching from a moral height while simultaneously describing its history as one unending crime. You've heard the teaching moments. "I live in a house built by slaves." "You didn't build that!" This whole country is stolen!

Say it often enough and someone will believe you. Somebody did. The trouble is you can't rise from the toilet to suddenly preach from a great moral height. It's possible to do one but not both simultaneously. Of course the liberal left can context shift and switch between sackcloth and ashes and the throne of moral superiority with the alacrity of Dr. Who. But Durterte isn't that nimble.

The clash between the two is tragi-comedy. … Duterte intuits that Obama is someone to despise and so despises him, because he neither respects nor fears the man from Chicago. Rodrigo Duterte would never call Xi a S.O.B. because he wouldn't dare. The world, as Winston Churchill knew, has people who are either at your throat or at your feet -- and that probably includes most leaders in the Third World.

 … Obama's framing of Duterte's drug war as a human rights problem, which it doubtless is, missed a key dimension. The drug war is the symptom of a national security problem: the narco invasion of the Philippines. The killings are a result and not the cause in themselves of the problem. And now that the diplomatic breach has opened the door to Chinese subversion on an unprecedented scale with incalculable consequences to regional security, it is likely to get worse.

The Era of Hope and Change has been one prolonged act of suicide. If anyone had said that Obama would manage to alienate Israel and the Philippines, lose Turkey, pay Iran a hundred billion dollars, preside over the loss of a won war in Afghanistan, lose billions of dollars in military equipment to ISIS, watch a consulate burn, restart the Cold War with Russia, cause Japan to re-arm and go the knife's edge with China, would you have believed it? If someone had told you in 2008 millions of refugees would be heading for Europe and that the UK would leave the EU after Obama went there to campaign for them to remain, would you not have laughed?

He promised "smart diplomacy" and the restoration of American prestige in the world. How did it come to this?
Glenn Reynolds has the beginning of an answer to this one:
Well, for starters, he was an unqualified community organizer who never much liked the country he was elected to run.

Thursday, September 08, 2016

One of the Most Hard-Hitting Essays of the Past 2 Generations: The Flight 93 Election

2016 is The Flight 93 Election, writes Publius Decius Mus at the Claremont Review of Books (thanks to Instapundit; and, indeed, Glenn Reynolds writes something far from dissimilar in USA TodayIf you want checks and balances, vote Trump [the civil service, though supposedly professional and nonpartisan, has become a Democratic Party monoculture]). But back to Publius Decius Mus
2016 is the Flight 93 election:  charge the cockpit or you die. You may die anyway. You—or the leader of your party—may make it into the cockpit and not know how to fly or land the plane. There are no guarantees.

Except one: if you don’t try, death is certain. To compound the metaphor: a Hillary Clinton presidency is Russian Roulette with a semi-auto. With Trump, at least you can spin the cylinder and take your chances.

To ordinary conservative ears, this sounds histrionic. The stakes can’t be that high because they are never that high—except perhaps in the pages of Gibbon. Conservative intellectuals will insist that there has been no “end of history” and that all human outcomes are still possible. They will even—as Charles Kesler does—admit that America is in “crisis.” But how great is the crisis? Can things really be so bad if eight years of Obama can be followed by eight more of Hillary, and yet Constitutionalist conservatives can still reasonably hope for a restoration of our cherished ideals? Cruz in 2024!

Not to pick (too much) on Kesler, who is less unwarrantedly optimistic than most conservatives. And who, at least, poses the right question: Trump or Hillary? Though his answer—“even if [Trump] had chosen his policies at random, they would be sounder than Hillary’s”—is unwarrantedly ungenerous. The truth is that Trump articulated, if incompletely and inconsistently, the right stances on the right issues—immigration, trade, and war—right from the beginning.

But let us back up. One of the paradoxes—there are so many—of conservative thought over the last decade at least is the unwillingness even to entertain the possibility that America and the West are on a trajectory toward something very bad. On the one hand, conservatives routinely present a litany of ills plaguing the body politic. Illegitimacy. Crime. Massive, expensive, intrusive, out-of-control government. Politically correct McCarthyism. Ever-higher taxes and ever-deteriorating services and infrastructure. Inability to win wars against tribal, sub-Third-World foes. A disastrously awful educational system that churns out kids who don’t know anything and, at the primary and secondary levels, can’t (or won’t) discipline disruptive punks, and at the higher levels saddles students with six figure debts for the privilege. And so on and drearily on. Like that portion of the mass where the priest asks for your private intentions, fill in any dismal fact about American decline that you want and I’ll stipulate it.

Conservatives spend at least several hundred million dollars a year on think-tanks, magazines, conferences, fellowships, and such, complaining about this, that, the other, and everything. And yet these same conservatives are, at root, keepers of the status quo. Oh, sure, they want some things to change. They want their pet ideas adopted—tax deductions for having more babies and the like. Many of them are even good ideas. But are any of them truly fundamental? Do they get to the heart of our problems?
 
If conservatives are right about the importance of virtue, morality, religious faith, stability, character and so on in the individual; if they are right about sexual morality or what came to be termed “family values”; if they are right about the importance of education to inculcate good character and to teach the fundamentals that have defined knowledge in the West for millennia; if they are right about societal norms and public order; if they are right about the centrality of initiative, enterprise, industry, and thrift to a sound economy and a healthy society; if they are right about the soul-sapping effects of paternalistic Big Government and its cannibalization of civil society and religious institutions; if they are right about the necessity of a strong defense and prudent statesmanship in the international sphere—if they are right about the importance of all this to national health and even survival, then they must believe—mustn’t they?—that we are headed off a cliff.

But it’s quite obvious that conservatives don’t believe any such thing, that they feel no such sense of urgency, of an immediate necessity to change course and avoid the cliff. A recent article by Matthew Continetti may be taken as representative—indeed, almost written for the purpose of illustrating the point. Continetti inquires into the “condition of America” and finds it wanting. What does Continetti propose to do about it? The usual litany of “conservative” “solutions,” with the obligatory references to decentralization, federalization, “civic renewal,” and—of course!—Burke. Which is to say, conservatism’s typical combination of the useless and inapt with the utopian and unrealizable. Decentralization and federalism are all well and good, and as a conservative, I endorse them both without reservation. But how are they going to save, or even meaningfully improve, the America that Continetti describes? What can they do against a tidal wave of dysfunction, immorality, and corruption? “Civic renewal” would do a lot of course, but that’s like saying health will save a cancer patient. A step has been skipped in there somewhere. How are we going to achieve “civic renewal”? Wishing for a tautology to enact itself is not a strategy.
 
Continetti trips over a more promising approach when he writes of “stress[ing] the ‘national interest abroad and national solidarity at home’ through foreign-policy retrenchment, ‘support to workers buffeted by globalization,’ and setting ‘tax rates and immigration levels’ to foster social cohesion." That sounds a lot like Trumpism. But the phrases that Continetti quotes are taken from Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam, both of whom, like Continetti, are vociferously—one might even say fanatically—anti-Trump. At least they, unlike Kesler, give Trump credit for having identified the right stance on today’s most salient issues. Yet, paradoxically, they won’t vote for Trump whereas Kesler hints that he will. It’s reasonable, then, to read into Kesler’s esoteric endorsement of Trump an implicit acknowledgment that the crisis is, indeed, pretty dire. I expect a Claremont scholar to be wiser than most other conservative intellectuals, and I am relieved not to be disappointed in this instance.

Yet we may also reasonably ask: What explains the Pollyanna-ish declinism of so many others? That is, the stance that Things-Are-Really-Bad—But-Not-So-Bad-that-We-Have-to-Consider-Anything-Really-Different! The obvious answer is that they don’t really believe the first half of that formulation. If so, like Chicken Little, they should stick a sock in it. Pecuniary reasons also suggest themselves, but let us foreswear recourse to this explanation until we have disproved all the others.

Whatever the reason for the contradiction, there can be no doubt that there is a contradiction. To simultaneously hold conservative cultural, economic, and political beliefs—to insist that our liberal-left present reality and future direction is incompatible with human nature and must undermine society—and yet also believe that things can go on more or less the way they are going, ideally but not necessarily with some conservative tinkering here and there, is logically impossible.

Let’s be very blunt here: if you genuinely think things can go on with no fundamental change needed, then you have implicitly admitted that conservatism is wrong. Wrong philosophically, wrong on human nature, wrong on the nature of politics, and wrong in its policy prescriptions. Because, first, few of those prescriptions are in force today. Second, of the ones that are, the left is busy undoing them, often with conservative assistance. And, third, the whole trend of the West is ever-leftward, ever further away from what we all understand as conservatism.

If your answer—Continetti’s, Douthat’s, Salam’s, and so many others’—is for conservatism to keep doing what it’s been doing—another policy journal, another article about welfare reform, another half-day seminar on limited government, another tax credit proposal—even though we’ve been losing ground for at least a century, then you’ve implicitly accepted that your supposed political philosophy doesn’t matter and that civilization will carry on just fine under leftist tenets. Indeed, that leftism is truer than conservatism and superior to it.

They will say, in words reminiscent of dorm-room Marxism—but our proposals have not been tried! Here our ideas sit, waiting to be implemented! To which I reply: eh, not really. Many conservative solutions—above all welfare reform and crime control—have been tried, and proved effective, but have nonetheless failed to stem the tide. Crime, for instance, is down from its mid-’70s and early ’90s peak—but way, way up from the historic American norm that ended when liberals took over criminal justice in the mid-’60s. And it’s rising fast today, in the teeth of ineffectual conservative complaints. And what has this temporary crime (or welfare, for that matter) decline done to stem the greater tide? The tsunami of leftism that still engulfs our every—literal and figurative—shore has receded not a bit but indeed has grown. All your (our) victories are short-lived.

More to the point, what has conservatism achieved lately? In the last 20 years? The answer—which appears to be “nothing”—might seem to lend credence to the plea that “our ideas haven’t been tried.” Except that the same conservatives who generate those ideas are in charge of selling them to the broader public. If their ideas “haven’t been tried,” who is ultimately at fault? The whole enterprise of Conservatism, Inc., reeks of failure. Its sole recent and ongoing success is its own self-preservation. Conservative intellectuals never tire of praising “entrepreneurs” and “creative destruction.” Dare to fail! they exhort businessmen. Let the market decide! Except, um, not with respect to us. Or is their true market not the political arena, but the fundraising circuit?

Only three questions matter. First, how bad are things really? Second, what do we do right now? Third, what should we do for the long term?

Conservatism, Inc.’s, “answer” to the first may, at this point, simply be dismissed. If the conservatives wish to have a serious debate, I for one am game—more than game; eager. The problem of “subjective certainty” can only be overcome by going into the agora. But my attempt to do so—the blog that Kesler mentions—was met largely with incredulity. How can they say that?! How can anyone apparently of our caste (conservative intellectuals) not merely support Trump (however lukewarmly) but offer reasons for doing do?

One of the Journal of American Greatness’s deeper arguments was that only in a corrupt republic, in corrupt times, could a Trump rise. It is therefore puzzling that those most horrified by Trump are the least willing to consider the possibility that the republic is dying. That possibility, apparently, seems to them so preposterous that no refutation is necessary.

As does, presumably, the argument that the stakes in 2016 are—everything. I should here note that I am a good deal gloomier than my (former) JAG colleagues, and that while we frequently used the royal “we” when discussing things on which we all agreed, I here speak only for myself.

How have the last two decades worked out for you, personally? If you’re a member or fellow-traveler of the Davos class, chances are: pretty well. If you’re among the subspecies conservative intellectual or politician, you’ve accepted—perhaps not consciously, but unmistakably—your status on the roster of the Washington Generals of American politics. Your job is to show up and lose, but you are a necessary part of the show and you do get paid. To the extent that you are ever on the winning side of anything, it’s as sophists who help the Davoisie oligarchy rationalize open borders, lower wages, outsourcing, de-industrialization, trade giveaways, and endless, pointless, winless war.

All of Trump’s 16 Republican competitors would have ensured more of the same—as will the election of Hillary Clinton. That would be bad enough. But at least Republicans are merely reactive when it comes to wholesale cultural and political change. Their “opposition” may be in all cases ineffectual and often indistinguishable from support. But they don’t dream up inanities like 32 “genders,” elective bathrooms, single-payer, Iran sycophancy, “Islamophobia,” and Black Lives Matter. They merely help ratify them.

A Hillary presidency will be pedal-to-the-metal on the entire Progressive-left agenda, plus items few of us have yet imagined in our darkest moments. Nor is even that the worst. It will be coupled with a level of vindictive persecution against resistance and dissent hitherto seen in the supposedly liberal West only in the most “advanced” Scandinavian countries and the most leftist corners of Germany and England. We see this already in the censorship practiced by the Davoisie’s social media enablers; in the shameless propaganda tidal wave of the mainstream media; and in the personal destruction campaigns—operated through the former and aided by the latter—of the Social Justice Warriors. We see it in Obama’s flagrant use of the IRS to torment political opponents, the gaslighting denial by the media, and the collective shrug by everyone else.

It’s absurd to assume that any of this would stop or slow—would do anything other than massively intensify—in a Hillary administration. It’s even more ridiculous to expect that hitherto useless conservative opposition would suddenly become effective. For two generations at least, the Left has been calling everyone to their right Nazis. This trend has accelerated exponentially in the last few years, helped along by some on the Right who really do seem to merit—and even relish—the label. There is nothing the modern conservative fears more than being called “racist,” so alt-right pocket Nazis are manna from heaven for the Left. But also wholly unnecessary: sauce for the goose. The Left was calling us Nazis long before any pro-Trumpers tweeted Holocaust denial memes. And how does one deal with a Nazi—that is, with an enemy one is convinced intends your destruction? You don’t compromise with him or leave him alone. You crush him.

So what do we have to lose by fighting back? Only our Washington Generals jerseys—and paychecks. But those are going away anyway. Among the many things the “Right” still doesn’t understand is that the Left has concluded that this particular show need no longer go on. They don’t think they need a foil anymore and would rather dispense with the whole bother of staging these phony contests in which each side ostensibly has a shot.

If you haven’t noticed, our side has been losing consistently since 1988. We can win midterms, but we do nothing with them. Call ours Hannibalic victories. After the Carthaginian’s famous slaughter of a Roman army at Cannae, he failed to march on an undefended Rome, prompting his cavalry commander to complain: “you know how to win a victory, but not how to use one.” And, aside from 2004’s lackluster 50.7%, we can’t win the big ones at all.

Because the deck is stacked overwhelmingly against us. I will mention but three ways. First, the opinion-making elements—the universities and the media above all—are wholly corrupt and wholly opposed to everything we want, and increasingly even to our existence. (What else are the wars on “cis-genderism”—formerly known as “nature”—and on the supposed “white privilege” of broke hillbillies really about?) If it hadn’t been abundantly clear for the last 50 years, the campaign of 2015-2016 must surely have made it evident to even the meanest capacities that the intelligentsia—including all the organs through which it broadcasts its propaganda—is overwhelmingly partisan and biased. Against this onslaught, “conservative” media is a nullity, barely a whisper. It cannot be heard above the blaring of what has been aptly called “The Megaphone.”

Second, our Washington Generals self-handicap and self-censor to an absurd degree. Lenin is supposed to have said that “the best way to control the opposition is to lead it ourselves.” But with an opposition like ours, why bother? Our “leaders” and “dissenters” bend over backward to play by the self-sabotaging rules the Left sets for them. Fearful, beaten dogs have more thymos.

Third and most important, the ceaseless importation of Third World foreigners with no tradition of, taste for, or experience in liberty means that the electorate grows more left, more Democratic, less Republican, less republican, and less traditionally American with every cycle. As does, of course, the U.S. population, which only serves to reinforce the two other causes outlined above. This is the core reason why the Left, the Democrats, and the bipartisan junta (categories distinct but very much overlapping) think they are on the cusp of a permanent victory that will forever obviate the need to pretend to respect democratic and constitutional niceties. Because they are.

It’s also why they treat open borders as the “absolute value,” the one “principle” that—when their “principles” collide—they prioritize above all the others. If that fact is insufficiently clear, consider this. Trump is the most liberal Republican nominee since Thomas Dewey. He departs from conservative orthodoxy in so many ways that National Review still hasn’t stopped counting. But let’s stick to just the core issues animating his campaign. On trade, globalization, and war, Trump is to the left (conventionally understood) not only of his own party, but of his Democratic opponent. And yet the Left and the junta are at one with the house-broken conservatives in their determination—desperation—not merely to defeat Trump but to destroy him. What gives?

Oh, right—there’s that other issue. The sacredness of mass immigration is the mystic chord that unites America’s ruling and intellectual classes. Their reasons vary somewhat. The Left and the Democrats seek ringers to form a permanent electoral majority. They, or many of them, also believe the academic-intellectual lie that America’s inherently racist and evil nature can be expiated only through ever greater “diversity.” The junta of course craves cheaper and more docile labor. It also seeks to legitimize, and deflect unwanted attention from, its wealth and power by pretending that its open borders stance is a form of noblesse oblige.

The Republicans and the “conservatives”? Both of course desperately want absolution from the charge of “racism.” For the latter, this at least makes some sense. No Washington General can take the court—much less cash his check—with that epithet dancing over his head like some Satanic Spirit. But for the former, this priestly grace comes at the direct expense of their worldly interests. Do they honestly believe that the right enterprise zone or charter school policy will arouse 50.01% of our newer voters to finally reveal their “natural conservatism” at the ballot box? It hasn’t happened anywhere yet and shows no signs that it ever will. But that doesn’t stop the Republican refrain: more, more, more! No matter how many elections they lose, how many districts tip forever blue, how rarely (if ever) their immigrant vote cracks 40%, the answer is always the same. Just like Angela Merkel after yet another rape, shooting, bombing, or machete attack. More, more, more!

This is insane. This is the mark of a party, a society, a country, a people, a civilization that wants to die. Trump, alone among candidates for high office in this or in the last seven (at least) cycles, has stood up to say: I want to live. I want my party to live. I want my country to live. I want my people to live. I want to end the insanity.

Yes, Trump is worse than imperfect. So what? We can lament until we choke the lack of a great statesman to address the fundamental issues of our time—or, more importantly, to connect them. Since Pat Buchanan’s three failures, occasionally a candidate arose who saw one piece: Dick Gephardt on trade, Ron Paul on war, Tom Tancredo on immigration. Yet, among recent political figures—great statesmen, dangerous demagogues, and mewling gnats alike—only Trump-the-alleged-buffoon not merely saw all three and their essential connectivity, but was able to win on them. The alleged buffoon is thus more prudent—more practically wise—than all of our wise-and-good who so bitterly oppose him. This should embarrass them. That their failures instead embolden them is only further proof of their foolishness and hubris.

Which they self-laud as “consistency”—adherence to “conservative principle,” defined by the 1980 campaign and the household gods of reigning conservative think-tanks. A higher consistency in the service of the national interest apparently eludes them. When America possessed a vast, empty continent and explosively growing industry, high immigration was arguably good policy. (Arguably: Ben Franklin would disagree.) It hasn’t made sense since World War I. Free trade was unquestionably a great boon to the American worker in the decades after World War II. We long ago passed the point of diminishing returns. The Gulf War of 1991 was a strategic victory for American interests. No conflict since then has been. Conservatives either can’t see this—or, worse, those who can nonetheless treat the only political leader to mount a serious challenge to the status quo (more immigration, more trade, more war) as a unique evil.

Trump’s vulgarity is in fact a godsend to the conservatives. It allows them to hang their public opposition on his obvious shortcomings and to ignore or downplay his far greater strengths, which should be even more obvious but in corrupt times can be deliberately obscured by constant references to his faults. That the Left would make the campaign all about the latter is to be expected. Why would the Right? Some—a few—are no doubt sincere in their belief that the man is simply unfit for high office. David Frum, who has always been an immigration skeptic and is a convert to the less-war position, is sincere when he says that, even though he agrees with much of Trump’s agenda, he cannot stomach Trump. But for most of the other #NeverTrumpers, is it just a coincidence that they also happen to favor Invade the World, Invite the World?

Another question JAG raised without provoking any serious attempt at refutation was whether, in corrupt times, it took a … let’s say ... “loudmouth” to rise above the din of The Megaphone. We, or I, speculated: “yes.” Suppose there had arisen some statesman of high character—dignified, articulate, experienced, knowledgeable—the exact opposite of everything the conservatives claim to hate about Trump. Could this hypothetical paragon have won on Trump’s same issues? Would the conservatives have supported him? I would have—even had he been a Democrat.

Back on planet earth, that flight of fancy at least addresses what to do now. The answer to the subsidiary question—will it work?—is much less clear. By “it” I mean Trumpism, broadly defined as secure borders, economic nationalism, and America-first foreign policy. We Americans have chosen, in our foolishness, to disunite the country through stupid immigration, economic, and foreign policies. The level of unity America enjoyed before the bipartisan junta took over can never be restored.

But we can probably do better than we are doing now. First, stop digging. No more importing poverty, crime, and alien cultures. We have made institutions, by leftist design, not merely abysmal at assimilation but abhorrent of the concept. We should try to fix that, but given the Left’s iron grip on every school and cultural center, that’s like trying to bring democracy to Russia. A worthy goal, perhaps, but temper your hopes—and don’t invest time and resources unrealistically.

By contrast, simply building a wall and enforcing immigration law will help enormously, by cutting off the flood of newcomers that perpetuates ethnic separatism and by incentivizing the English language and American norms in the workplace. These policies will have the added benefit of aligning the economic interests of, and (we may hope) fostering solidarity among, the working, lower middle, and middle classes of all races and ethnicities. The same can be said for Trumpian trade policies and anti-globalization instincts. Who cares if productivity numbers tick down, or if our already somnambulant GDP sinks a bit further into its pillow? Nearly all the gains of the last 20 years have accrued to the junta anyway. It would, at this point, be better for the nation to divide up more equitably a slightly smaller pie than to add one extra slice—only to ensure that it and eight of the other nine go first to the government and its rentiers, and the rest to the same four industries and 200 families.

Will this work? Ask a pessimist, get a pessimistic answer. So don’t ask. Ask instead: is it worth trying? Is it better than the alternative? If you can’t say, forthrightly, “yes,” you are either part of the junta, a fool, or a conservative intellectual.

And if it doesn’t work, what then? We’ve established that most “conservative” anti-Trumpites are in the Orwellian sense objectively pro-Hillary. What about the rest of you? If you recognize the threat she poses, but somehow can’t stomach him, have you thought about the longer term? The possibilities would seem to be: Caesarism, secession/crack-up, collapse, or managerial Davoisie liberalism as far as the eye can see … which, since nothing human lasts forever, at some point will give way to one of the other three. Oh, and, I suppose, for those who like to pour a tall one and dream big, a second American Revolution that restores Constitutionalism, limited government, and a 28% top marginal rate.

But for those of you who are sober: can you sketch a more plausible long-term future than the prior four following a Trump defeat? I can’t either.

The election of 2016 is a test—in my view, the final test—of whether there is any virtù left in what used to be the core of the American nation. If they cannot rouse themselves simply to vote for the first candidate in a generation who pledges to advance their interests, and to vote against the one who openly boasts that she will do the opposite (a million more Syrians, anyone?), then they are doomed. They may not deserve the fate that will befall them, but they will suffer it regardless.

Wednesday, September 07, 2016

The Great Switch hypothesis: The theory that the perpetually racist South suddenly changed party allegiance because of “civil rights” reforms is simply not supported by the facts


In an attempt to break the Democrats’ near monopoly on the black vote, Donald Trump last week visited a black church in Detroit and held a roundtable meeting with black civic leaders in Philadelphia.
Then Benny Huang gets to the meat of the matter:
But it was his remarks in Everett, Washington that really got Democrats’ knickers in a bunch. “It is the Democratic Party that is the party of slavery, the party of Jim Crow and the party of opposition,” said Trump.

Democrats can’t deny these historical truths so they try to render them irrelevant by resorting to the Great Switch hypothesis. Yes, they will admit, the Democrats used to be a bunch of racist dirtbags but the parties have “switched,” so please don’t bring it up.

To be sure, there was a “switch” in American politics but it occurred within the Democratic Party. For the great majority of its history, the Democrats were a white grievance party that discriminated against blacks but from the 1960s onward they despised and scapegoated whites instead. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. Today they offer blacks preference—a commodity that Republicans, most of whom still believe that people should be treated without regard to race, can’t compete with. Judging by voting patterns, blacks appear to like preference quite a bit. Whites who don’t like being treated as second class citizens are labeled “racists”and treated as the ideological heirs of Jim Crow.

That’s not of course how Democrats tell the story. According to their childishly simple version, white southerners were, are, and ever shall be racist. If you want to know which party pushes a racist agenda just take note of which party white southerners prefer. The South has traditionally voted as a bloc (the “solid South”) because it has always been animated by racism–or so the legend goes.

The Great Switch supposedly happened sometime in the 1960s when the Democrats repented of their bigoted ways and the Republicans rushed in to woo the racist voters they left behind. The precise moment that the Great Switch took place is hard to pinpoint though 1964 is often cited because it was the year of the Civil Rights Act. Democrats never explain how exactly the Republicans won over the racist South by voting 80% in favor of the Civil Rights Act (a horrible law, by the way), but that’s their story and they’re sticking to it. Another year often cited is 1968 when Richard Nixon employed a so-called “southern strategy”—coded appeals to southerners’ latent racism—to win election.

The South’s messy breakup with the Democratic Party is a lot more complicated than Democrats would have you believe. It involves third parties, double-talking politicians, and divergent party wings. It also involves imprecise definitions of what constitutes the South. For the purposes of this article, I will define the South as the eleven former Confederate States of America: Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, and Virginia.

A perspective on the South’s political transformation can be found by examining Electoral College returns. Anyone who examines the evidence, I believe, will find that the Democrats’ tidy “switch” hypothesis disintegrates under examination.

The solid South really was solidly Democratic from the end of Reconstruction through 1924. Democratic unity, however, began to exhibit cracks when the party nominated Al Smith for president in 1928. Smith, a Catholic, lost five out of eleven southern states. While anti-Catholic bigotry may have played a role in his disappointing returns, Smith won only one state outside of the South. Southerners were in fact Smith’s biggest supporters.

Franklin Roosevelt was enormously popular in the South, winning every southern state in four consecutive elections. According to today’s liberal Democrats’ logic, I must conclude that Roosevelt was a racist; and as a matter of fact, he kind of was—at least toward Japanese-Americans. Is that why the solid South supported Roosevelt? Well, no.

Race isn’t now and wasn’t then the be-all and end-all of southern politics. The South supported FDR because they were blind supporters of the Democratic Party and because the South benefited from the New Deal’s transfer of wealth from rich states to poor states.

In 1948, the South was again fractured with the Democratic incumbent Harry Truman winning seven southern states and losing four to the Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond. In late July of that year Truman had issued an executive order desegregating the armed forces and still he managed to win seven states and a supermajority of their electoral votes. Truman was less popular in the South than Roosevelt but he was still popular. I don’t know how this could possibly have happened unless southern politics was not singularly focused on the issue of race as we have been led to believe.
 
The solid South once again failed to live up to its name in the 1950s. In the first of two matchups between Dwight Eisenhower and the liberal Democrat Adlai Stevenson, the South was divided with Stevenson winning seven states and Eisenhower winning four. Four years later, Eisenhower fared slightly better in the South. In both elections, Stevenson was trounced almost everywhere outside of the South.

The 1960 election is problematic for the proponents of the Great Switch hypothesis because their darling John F. Kennedy was the racist party’s candidate—this being still four or eight years before the supposed switch took place. The electoral map that year was a patchwork—six southern states plus five faithless electors going to Kennedy, three states going to Nixon, and two states—Mississippi and Alabama—going to Virginia Senator Harry F. Byrd, who wasn’t actually a declared candidate. Who was the racist candidate in this election? This being pre-switch, I guess it would have to be Kennedy. How else could he have won a majority of southern states and a supermajority of southern electoral votes?

In 1964 the South was again split, with six states going to Johnson (who was pretty racist, by the way) and five going to Barry Goldwater. Goldwater had voted against the Civil Rights Act though his party didn’t. Johnson, on the other hand, had a long history of segregationist sympathies and he belonged to the party that filibustered the bill, though he signed it into law. Who’s the racist here? We can’t tell simply by looking at which candidate southerners preferred because they were divided. Also, was this election pre-switch or post-switch? That depends on whom you ask.

Dixieland was once again divided in 1968 when one state voted for Humphrey, five for Nixon and five for the independent George Wallace, a former Democrat who would later return to his party. Nixon crushed Humphrey across the map.

If Nixon had courted racist southerners in 1968, he burned them by introducing minority hiring quotas in his first term. I don’t mean to imply that Nixon’s support for discriminatory hiring practices (against whites) is in any way laudable but it does seem an odd way to win the redneck vote. And yet the South voted overwhelmingly for Nixon in 1972—just like the rest of America. That’s right, every southern state broke for the guy most responsible for minority hiring quotas. Southerners gave him more support than they had four years earlier. What happened?

Things got really weird in 1976 when the South was once again solid and blue. Four years after all eleven southern states voted for the Republican Nixon, ten switched back and voted for the Democrat Carter. As a southerner himself, Jimmy Carter knew how to talk to southern audiences but he was no conservative and certainly not a a crypto-segregationist. How could this have happened post-switch? Either the Democrats became racist again for one election cycle or the South stopped being racist for one election cycle.

The South turned on Carter in 1980 much like the rest of America though his home state of Georgia stuck by him. Southern support for the Democrats would continue to plummet through the elections of 1984 and 1988 but would resurge again with the candidacy of another liberal southern governor, Bill Clinton.

The theory that the perpetually racist South suddenly changed party allegiance because of “civil rights” reforms is simply not supported by the facts.

A more plausible explanation is that racial issues were never the sole driver, or even the primary driver, of southern voting trends.

Southerners did begin to leave the party in the 1960s and 1970s, though mostly because the Democrats were well on their way to becoming the anti-Christian party, the job-killing party, and the blame-America-first party.

But here’s another idea—is it possible that white southerners began to leave the Democratic Party because they found that the party had already rejected them? It’s a theory worth exploring.

Monday, September 05, 2016

Good-Bye, Friend: Phyllis Schlafly (1924-2016)

Phyllis Schlafly, whose latest book comes out Tuesday, has died, age 92 (thanks for the Instalink).

A compendium of NP posts linking to Phyllis Schlafly writings:

• The feminist goal was never equal pay for equal work but always was for more pay for less work

• Single moms want their babies and confidently expect Big Brother to provide for them

• We get more illegitimate babies supported by taxpayers every year; This striking change in our social structure is the primary reason that government budgets are so bloated

• The more the divorced mother prevents the father's contact with their kids, the more child support she receives

• Welfare state spending is a major cause of our debt, and it is also morally costly because it chases fathers out of homes

• Federal and state laws and subsidies that undermine marriage are the biggest fiscal as well as cultural issue of our times
  
• Marriage under assault by unilateral divorce, family courts' bias against dads, & taxpayer-paid financial incentives subsidizing illegitimate births

• Feminist Pork: Women who make domestic violence accusations are not required to produce evidence and are never prosecuted for perjury if they lie

• Colleges adopt the feminist theory that in all sexual controversies or accusations, the man is guilty unless he proves himself innocent

Any man who is accused of domestic violence loses a long list of constitutional rights accorded to ordinary criminals

• Overruled: Government Invasion of Your Parental Rights (video)

Look Who's Really Waging War on Women

One of Obama's fundamental goals is to transform America from one nation under God to a totally secular nation 

• Phyllis Schlafly's Rules for Addressing Amnesty

Beware Constitutional Convention!

Sunday, September 04, 2016

Protests at the 1968 Olympics: the Podium Protest Against America Is Remembered, Even Sanctified, While the Protest Against the Kremlin Is Forgotten

If you were told to speak about Olympians protesting against their country, whether you were American or not, you would likely remember the black and white 1968 photo of a Black Power salute raised on the winners' podium. By two Olympic sprinters who are referred to nowadays as nothing less than heroes.

So, it is amazing to learn (Dekuji, Instapundit) that there was another protest on a podium that year, one by a Czech Olympian, indeed by record-holding superstar Věra Čáslavská, against the USSR.

As the Daily Telegraph tells it,
her competitive career, however, came to an abrupt end over her public opposition to the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968.

 … Vera almost did not make it to the Mexico games. In April 1968, she had signed a declaration protesting at Soviet involvement in Czechoslovakia.

When the Red Army invaded in August, two months before the start of the games, she was in a training camp in Moravia and, told she might be arrested, went into hiding in the forests where she maintained her fitness by lifting bags of coal, swinging from tree branches and even practising her floor routine in a field.

“A tree that had fallen became my beam,” she recalled. “I ran up to vault on a forest path. I turned the forest into a gym.”

A last minute change of heart by the Czech regime allowed her to join the rest of the team in Mexico City in time for the opening Olympic ceremony in October.

After all, they could hardly ignore an athlete who had single-handedly won Czechoslovakia three out of its five gold medals (in all-around gymnastics, vault and beam) at the 1964 Olympics.
[Read also about the Soviets' method for winning medals:
Doctors had discovered that pregnant women could gain an advantage in muscle power, suppleness and lung capacity, because they produced more red blood cells. In 1994 Olga Kovalenko, a gold medal winner at the 1968 Olympics, told a German television interviewer that all the members of the Soviet women’s gymnastic team, two of whom were 15 at the time, had been forced to become pregnant before the Olympics: if they did not have a husband or boyfriend, they were made to have sex with a male coach. Anyone who refused was thrown off the team. After 10 weeks of pregnancy every gymnast had an abortion. … “In any other country it would have been called rape,” one of the Soviet coaches admitted later.]

 … Meanwhile, when she went up to receive the gold medal for her floor exercises, the news was broadcast that the score of the Soviet Union’s Larisa Petrik had been upgraded and the two would share the title. When the Soviet Union’s national anthem was played, Vera Caslavska stood with her head down and turned away in a silent but unmistakable protest.

On her return to Prague she gave her four gold medals to the Czech leaders of the “Prague Spring”, who had been replaced by Soviet puppets. Retribution was swift. She was barred from travelling abroad and for many years denied any coaching post, bringing an end to her international career.
Is it wrong to point out that most American protestors protesting against "oppression" never incurred such ignominy?

Moreover, while the images of Tommie Smith and John Carlos protesting on the podium are ubiquitous, a Google Image search for Caslavska finds next to nothing of her standing with her head down and turned away as the Soviet anthem plays (I had to take two screen shots of  an ABC video to get the ones on this post).

And why is the general public, inside the United States as well as outside, not familiar with this protest? Could it be because it was against a communist nation, whose leaders had "good intentions", as well as because it would be distract from the true menace of the planet — that dastardly greedy capitalist society, the United States of America?

Protests at the 1968 Olympics: the Podium Protest Against America Is Remembered, Even Sanctified, While the Protest Against the Kremlin Is Forgotten

If you were told to speak about Olympians protesting against their country, whether you were American or not, you would likely remember the black and white 1968 photo of a Black Power salute raised on the winners' podium. By two Olympic sprinters who are referred to nowadays as nothing less than heroes.

So, it is amazing to learn that there was another protest on a podium that year, one not by two sportsmen who would otherwise have remained relatively unknown in the great sports pantheon but by a record-holding superstar, the Czechoslovak Olympian Věra Čáslavská, against the USSR.

As the Daily Telegraph tells it,
her competitive career, however, came to an abrupt end over her public opposition to the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968.

 … Vera almost did not make it to the Mexico games. In April 1968, she had signed a declaration protesting at Soviet involvement in Czechoslovakia.

When the Red Army invaded in August, two months before the start of the games, she was in a training camp in Moravia and, told she might be arrested, went into hiding in the forests where she maintained her fitness by lifting bags of coal, swinging from tree branches and even practising her floor routine in a field.

“A tree that had fallen became my beam,” she recalled. “I ran up to vault on a forest path. I turned the forest into a gym.”

A last minute change of heart by the Czech regime allowed her to join the rest of the team in Mexico City in time for the opening Olympic ceremony in October.

After all, they could hardly ignore an athlete who had single-handedly won Czechoslovakia three out of its five gold medals (in all-around gymnastics, vault and beam) at the 1964 Olympics.
[Read also about the Russians' method for winning medals:
Doctors had discovered that pregnant women could gain an advantage in muscle power, suppleness and lung capacity, because they produced more red blood cells. In 1994 Olga Kovalenko, a gold medal winner at the 1968 Olympics, told a German television interviewer that all the members of the Soviet women’s gymnastic team, two of whom were 15 at the time, had been forced to become pregnant before the Olympics: if they did not have a husband or boyfriend, they were made to have sex with a male coach. Anyone who refused was thrown off the team. After 10 weeks of pregnancy every gymnast had an abortion. … “In any other country it would have been called rape,” one of the Soviet coaches admitted later.]

 … Meanwhile, when she went up to receive the gold medal for her floor exercises, the news was broadcast that the score of the Soviet Union’s Larisa Petrik had been upgraded and the two would share the title. When the Soviet Union’s national anthem was played, Vera Caslavska stood with her head down and turned away in a silent but unmistakable protest.

On her return to Prague she gave her four gold medals to the Czech leaders of the “Prague Spring”, who had been replaced by Soviet puppets. Retribution was swift. She was barred from travelling abroad and for many years denied any coaching post, bringing an end to her international career.
Is it wrong to point out that most American protestors protesting against "oppression" never incurred such ignominy?

Moreover, while the images of Tommie Smith and John Carlos protesting on the podium are ubiquitous, a Google Image search for Caslavska finds next to nothing of her standing with her head down and turned away as the Soviet anthem plays (I had to take two screen shots of an ABC video to get the ones on this post).

And why is the general public, inside the United States as well as outside, not familiar with this protest? Could it be because it was against a communist nation, whose leaders had "good intentions", as well as because it would be distract from the true menace of the planet — that dastardly greedy capitalist society of racists, the United States of America?