The Actual Pauline Kael Quote—Not As Bad, and Worse
John Podhoretz 2011-02-27The clearest example of the bizarrely naive quality of hermetic liberal provincialism was attributed to the New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael almost 40 years ago, and has been discussed in right-wing circles ever since. It went something like this: “I can’t believe Nixon won. I don’t know anyone who voted for him.” Several years ago, I went on an admittedly desultory search for the original quote and was unable to locate it.
On Friday, on the New Yorker’s website, the magazine’s film editor Richard Brody offers what may be the first accurate version of the quote I’ve ever seen (I’m assuming it’s accurate because it comes from the New Yorker itself): “Pauline Kael famously commented, after the 1972 Presidential election, ‘I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they are I don’t know. They’re outside my ken. But sometimes when I’m in a theater I can feel them.'”
Obviously, the paraphrase is far juicier than the original, but actually, if you think about it, the version quoted by Brody is even worse, as it indicates that Kael was actually acknowledging her provincialism (“I live in a rather special world”) and from its perch expressing her distaste for the unwashed masses with whom she sometimes had to share a movie theater. What this indicates is that, even then, liberal provincialism was as proud of its provincialism as any Babbitt.
The Actual Pauline Kael Quote—Not As Bad, and Worse
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Kamala Harris’s Single-Payer Subterfuge
The Medicare-for-all mess.
Noah Rothman 2017-09-01
Perhaps Democrats were celebrating too loudly to notice. Republican partisans almost certainly missed it over the sound of their blaring recriminations. In July, the GOP ran face-first into the iron law of entitlements: Once implemented, they’re impossible to confiscate. But even as they shuffled off into the August recess, festooned with failure and licking their wounds from the botched effort to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, the GOP rigged ObamaCare with a dead man’s switch.
Amid an overly complex process designed to compel Republicans to make good on seven years of campaign promises, the Senate GOP conference cleverly forced their Democratic colleagues to share some of the pain. Republican Senator Steve Daines put to the floor an amendment to implement a Medicare-for-all system in the United States, using the same language as a bill sponsored in the House by Democratic Rep. John Conyers. The amendment drew precisely zero votes in its favor. Fifty-seven Senators voted against it, including Democrat-caucusing Senators Joe Manchin, Joe Donnelly, Jon Tester, Heidi Heitkamp, and Angus King.
Democratic Minority Leader Chuck Schumer called Daines’s maneuver “pure cynicism” and accused him of wanting only “to get Democrats on the record,” which he achieved. “I suspect that what Senator Daines is doing is nothing more than an old political trick,” said self-described socialist and nationalized health-care proponent Bernie Sanders, “trying to embarrass Democrats.” How would voting for Conyers’s language “embarrass Democrats,” you ask? For the answer, we look to Senate novice and 2020 presidential prospect, California Senator Kamala Harris.
“I intend to co-sponsor the Medicare-for-all bill because it’s just the right thing to do,” Harris told Democrats at a town hall this week. She insisted that her support for Senator Sanders’s radical bill was rooted in prudence and frugality. “Taxpayers,” she insisted, “are paying huge amounts of money” for emergency-room care. A Medicare-for-all system would generate “a return on investment for taxpayers.” This is, to be gentle, nonsense.
When Vermont’s favorite collectivist was hawking the dream of the 20th-century left, he estimated that his single-payer plan would cost the country $13.8 trillion dollars—with a “T”—over ten years. This was exceedingly charitable. The nonpartisan Urban Institute pegged the cost of a Medicare-for-all system in America at $32 trillion in the same period, requiring an average tax hike on all Americans of $24,000 annually (to say nothing of the billions in lost economic activity as Americans tighten their belts).
ObamaCare also had to lie its way into becoming law, but the lie was an order of magnitude more modest. When Democrats pitched the public on the ACA, the “cost” estimated to taxpayers was supposedly just $848 billion over ten years after implementation, but the Congressional Budget Office insisted that the actual figure was just over $2 trillion. That’s an incredible strain on the nation’s budget, but it pales in comparison to the galactic numbers Senator Harris and her ilk heave about recklessly. She is playing to the cheap seats, but it’s telling that her instinct is to pitch a single-payer plan by insisting it is an attack on, not an endorsement of, profligacy.
Even in Harris’s home state, the Democratic Party’s infatuation with the idea of socialized health care was crushed against the immovable object of fiscal realities. In June, the state legislature tried and failed to pass a state-level single-payer system. As Democratic Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon wrote, a peek under the hood revealed that, under all the gauzy rhetoric about access to taxpayer-funded health-care coverage representing a human right, there is no feasible way to make that a reality. The bill could not address the hurdles associated with cost control, delivery of care, and how to finance the thing. The Assembly bill was estimated to cost the state approximately $400 billion every year, more than double California’s total annual budget.
While Harris may advance her own political prospects in the long-term, the immediate future now looks confused for Democrats. The opposition party has spent the last month cheering ObamaCare’s resurrection. Republicans have laid siege to the law for the better part of a decade and their every assault has been repulsed. They are in retreat. Moreover, the myriad gaps in the law are, we’re told, filled at last. Every county that lacked an ObamaCare insurer will have one in 2018 (even it if it’s only one).
So as Democrats are celebrating the success and even permanence of the Affordable Care Act, Harris is insisting that the system is broken. Whether the press demands it of Democrats or not, the party’s liberal grassroots activists will ensure that every Democrat seeking office in 2018 and 2020 will say whether they agree with this assertion or not. Is Barack Obama’s health-care reform law a triumph of progressive public policy? Or is it, as Republicans have long insisted, a poorly-conceived measure with more adverse than positive effects?
That’s where Senator Daines’s gimmick becomes a trap. Republicans don’t want to be ObamaCare’s defenders, and conservative reformers are right to resent the party’s ignoble retreat on health care. But Republicans may soon have to defend a suboptimal status quo from an unpopular liberal campaign to nationalize the health-care system. A defensive crouch is a comfortable and familiar position for the GOP.
Democrats have convinced themselves that the rising popularity of Medicare-for-all among Democrats amounts to a national wellspring of new faith in progressivism and, by extension, themselves. They’re welcome to test that proposition at the ballot box. But, first, Democrats may want to rethink their messenger.
The Left’s Activist Problem
Podcast: Nukes and normalization.
Noah Rothman 2017-08-31In the last of the week’s COMMENTARY podcasts, Abe Greenwald and Noah Rothman (John Podhoretz returns on Monday) explore the rising radicalization of the liberal left and the Democratic Party’s efforts to rein in its more self-destructive impulses. Also, North Korea’s provocative missile launch leads to increasing resignation to the nuclearization of Japan, but few have considered the pitfalls associated with widespread proliferation.
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Fake News and Asinine Polls
Not shaping opinion, but making it.
Noah Rothman 2017-08-31
There’s fake news, and then there’s fake news. For partisans, that politically-charged term is evolving at breakneck pace. What was once universally understood to mean sloppy propaganda targeting the ill-informed in social media’s cloistered information ghettos is now a blanket term describing flawed (or, not infrequently, inconvenient) journalism. The original meaning of the word does, however, occasionally reassert itself.
On Thursday, Fox News released its latest survey, and it was chock-full of its usual valuable insights into public opinion. But one question stood out not because it shed light on American attitudes but because its obvious purpose was to shape them.
“Who do you think poses a greater threat to the United States?” read the question. “White supremacists” or “news media.” Respondents were allowed to opt out of the question by replying either “same” or “don’t know,” but the vast majority opted to play the game.
If you must know, the results were incredibly disheartening. While 47 percent of the public went with violent white nationalists, a whopping 40 percent said they were more afraid of media’s potential to harm the country. This question was immediately preceded with an inquiry about who was more to blame for the “deadly violence” in Charlottesville earlier this month—a question that found 52 percent of respondents blaming “white supremacists” for the brutality and only 17 percent blaming “counter protesters.” The findings of these two questions demonstrate that a substantial number of Americans—most of them Republicans—are more suspicious of reporters than they are of violent racists. Advancing that perspective was likely the intent of the poll’s designers.
Some have tried to rationalize these findings. They’ve attempted to quantify the threat posed by a minuscule band of anti-social malcontents and compare it with the potential threat to American civic life and national comity represented by an agenda-driven press. Maybe you could convince yourself that the latter is a more urgent menace. But to engage in this kind of reductionism is to miss the point.
So what was the point of this question? To take the temperature of an ongoing debate within the United States? Obviously not, since no one is honestly gauging the threat posed by city desk editors relative to the white nationalists throwing Hitler salutes and chanting “Jews will not replace us” in front of ignominious statuary. To even imply they are counterparts be an outrageous libel. No, the point of this survey wasn’t to observe an ongoing debate but to start one. That’s a bastardization of the art of polling.
We are then compelled to ask what the likely results of this headline-grabbing survey will be, and the answers to that question are more dispiriting than the survey’s results.
Why put members of the press on the same moral plane as violent racists in the first place? Obviously, to retroactively justify an effort on the part of the White House and its acolytes aimed at discrediting an adversarial institution. This survey will surely validate those who have cashed in on attacking the increasingly ubiquitous phenomenon of “fake news.” That will not be this survey’s only destructive effect.
It would be a mistake to suggest that the pro-Trump right’s frustrations with the press are the result of a partisan delusion. The Washington Examiner’s Becket Adams kept a rather extensive log of media errors from January 20 to April 11. It is illustrative of a cultural problem when all of those errors cut in the same direction, and reflective of an impulse on the part of the press to assume the worst of Donald Trump and his administration. This impulse wasn’t just the result of bias and antipathy but genuine fear of the coming Trump era.
Regardless of whether that fear is misplaced, it was and remains real—particularly among center-left residents of the coasts, who make up the majority of the political press. That fear will only be compounded by the fact that reporters now believe approximately two-fifths of the American public see them as the equivalent of neo-Nazis. How would any human being react to that revelation? Even if they were to take it in stride, it will be internalized and might shape how they do their work.
This survey will harden the cultural divisions between mainstream news media and those who consume it and the populist press and its supporters, resulting in a self-perpetuating cycle of mutual mistrust and hostility. In fact, that had to be the desired effect of this survey. Why else ask the question no one else was asking? Which leaves us with one final question: cui bono?
If we define “fake news” not as an effort to inform but to agitate, then a lot of bad journalism can be lumped in with the foreign propaganda that originally gave rise to the term. So, too, can this poll question and those like it.
Beware Iranian Sleeper Cells
The writing is on the wall.
Michael Rubin 2017-08-30
Iranian sleeper cells are nothing new.
In 1992, as German Foreign Minister Klaus Kinkel relaxed German sanctions on Iran, the Iranian leadership activated a Berlin-based cell and assassinated several Iranian Kurdish dissidents at Berlin’s Mykonos Café.
The 1994 Iranian attack on the Jewish cultural center in Buenos Aires relied, in part, on Hezbollah operatives living in the triple border area where Brazil, Paraguay, and Argentina meet.
The 1996 Khobar Towers attack, which killed 19 U.S. Airmen in Saudi Arabia, was conducted by Saudi Hezbollah operatives who had been recruited and trained by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. In effect, they were a sleeper cell for Iran in Saudi Arabia, which the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps operationalized to kill Americans and embarrass the Kingdom.
More recently, Arab states have complained about a resurgence of Iranian sleeper cells. In 2008, several Gulf Cooperation Council states accused Iran of establishing sleeper cells in their territories and, in 2010, Kuwait repeated the charges. After stating that it was monitoring Iranian cells in its territory, it subsequently rolled up an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps cell. In 2015, Kuwait said that they had interrupted a terror cell directed by the Iranian embassy in Kuwait City.
With Iran fully resourced by the lifting of many sanctions, new Asian and European investment and the cash provided by the Obama administration as ransom for American hostages, it seems Iranian efforts to sponsor cells in Africa and across the Middle East are increasing. Earlier this summer, Kuwait arrested alleged Iran and Hezbollah terror cell members.
Bahrain, too, is facing an increasing Iranian challenge that now seems to have hijacked and increased the lethality of the domestic unrest that erupted in 2011. Just last week, Bahrain broke up a ten-member terror cell. While some in the United States and Europe dismiss Bahraini complaints about Iranian provocations because of Bahrain’s sectarian troubles and previous human rights violations, each of the Bahraini interceptions of weaponry has turned out to be true. Simply put, non-violent oppositions do not need explosives and Kalashnikovs; terrorists do.
It seems blatantly obvious but, in a day and age where denial reigns supreme, it bears repeating: The presence of Iranian sleeper cells has long been the barometer of Iranian intention and the forerunner to Iranian terror attacks. They serve no other purpose. European leaders might consider Iranian President Hassan Rouhani a pragmatic or reforming voice inside the Islamic Republic, and Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif can woo more naïve diplomats and journalists enthralled with his personality and convinced of his sincerity. But it is the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and intelligence ministries which call the shots, and the direction they are steering Iran is becoming all too clear.
The Age of Nuclear Multipolarity
Instability and chaos.
Noah Rothman 2017-08-30
“The U.S. has been talking to North Korea, and paying them extortion money, for 25 years,” President Donald Trump averred on Wednesday. “Talking is not the answer!” So, concerned Americans may be wont to ask, what is? Preemptive military intervention and the carnage that may follow it certainly isn’t a pretty picture. That leaves America and its allies with the unreliable prospect of deterring a regime that has not demonstrated a willingness to be deterred. Some are starting to think the American nuclear umbrella won’t be enough and that the club of responsible nuclear nations must expand. This course carries with it its own risks.
This week, North Korea engaged in one of the most flagrant acts of provocation the world had seen in many years when it fired an intermediate-range ballistic missile over Japanese territory. It’s the third missile launch of its kind and, as the Wall Street Journal editorial board noted, each of those provocations (in 1998 and 2009 respectively) resulted in a substantial response from Tokyo. In concert with the news that Pyongyang likely possesses the capability to deliver a nuclear warhead onto a target at long range, North Korea’s assault on Japan’s sovereignty may be the tipping point.
Tokyo might conclude its security won’t be guaranteed by relying on the United States, which is itself in the grip of an isolationist fervor. “Some Japanese politicians are already talking about their own nuclear deterrent,” the Journal observed. Cravenly, ranking Obama administration officials, including Susan Rice and James Clapper, are resigned to the prospect after spending eight years allowing the North Korean threat to metastasize.
Optimists conclude that another nuclear power in Northeast Asia would put the fear of God into Beijing and could compel China to engineer a peaceful resolution to the crisis on the Korean Peninsula. Maybe. Or maybe it will result in the paralytic stalemate that has typified nuclear parity throughout history. Some political observers are reassured by the fact that adversarial nuclear powers have been able to keep one another’s arsenals in their silos by developing a reliable second-strike capacity. That is the essence of “MAD.” The guarantee that an aggressor nation will not survive a nuclear first strike has kept the peace and it could very well continue to do so.
The only problem with this theory is that it is founded on the assumptions that result from the study of bipolar dynamics. A nuclear Japan, however, would usher in a brand new era of atomic gamesmanship.
There are roughly three modes of international organization, each of which brings with it varying degrees of stability. Unipolarity, or hegemony, is one. We are blessed to live in one of those incredibly rare states of nature in which one nation eclipses all others in terms of hard power. The Pax Romana and the Pax Britannica are two similar periods of hegemony in which the prohibitive power of Rome and London, respectively, maintained a global order and kept aggressive wars of conquest to a minimum.
Bipolarity is another. Think of the Cold War. This is a period characterized by two competing poles, and the competition between them is usually a bloody one. Nuclear weapons did keep the peace between the United States and the Soviet Union. When apprised of the likely scenarios, anyone tempted to invite Götterdämmerung was quickly disabused of the idea that a decisive battle would have a winning side. That does not mean bipolarity is peaceful; it’s not. Proxy conflicts ranging in size from minor to significant proliferate in these periods as each competing pole seeks its own advantage or tries to maintain the balance of power. That balance is easy to measure, moreover, because there are only two competing powers to observe. That is not the case with the third and least stable system.
A multipolar system is the most dangerous. By way of examples, think of the complex matrix of rivalries that characterized pre-World War I and World War II Europe. There are a lot of moving parts in a multipolar system. Alliances form and dissolve rapidly with no greater purpose than keeping every other power off balance. Multipolar systems tend to devolve into warfare precisely because of their complexity. In this structure, there is the significant risk that one or several actors may miscalculate themselves into a conflict from which there is no face-saving off-ramp and that quickly spirals out of control.
Japan’s ascension to the nuclear club would transform Asia into a complicated, intersecting web of antipathies and alliances.
Japan is allied with the United States, and both are hostile toward China and North Korea. China is, however, also hostile toward India—a nuclear power—and India is hostile toward Pakistan—another nuclear power. Pakistan maintains major non-NATO ally status with the United States, but the U.S. has been cozying up to India at the expense of that relationship. This might push Pakistan into Chinese arms, which would alienate Japan and may allow North Korea a pathway to ending its isolated status. This is to say nothing of South Korea, which, due partly to its historic suspicions of the Japanese, might be persuaded to develop its own nuclear deterrent.
Imagine all of these powers in a state of shifting alliances and each with nuclear weapons pointed at one another. Variables at that stage proliferate, and the ability to predict how the system will perform in the event of a crisis becomes virtually impossible.
Nuclear multipolarity would be a new and unstable phenomenon and one that policy makers do not appear to have contemplated deeply. They should. The consequences of such a shift in the nuclear dynamic will be far-reaching.