How to Fight a Real War on ISIS
Max Boot 2015-11-15
Is the phony war over at last?
That is the most immediate question we face in the aftermath of the horrific attacks in Paris, which killed more than 127 people. These attacks, in turn, come shortly after the bombing of Russia’s Metrojet airplane on a flight from Sharm al Sheikh, which killed 224 people, and after suicide bombings that killed at least 41 people in Beirut and 19 in Baghdad.
More than a year ago, in August 2014, President Obama recognized that ISIS was a real and growing threat. In retaliation for the televised beheadings of American hostages, he launched a desultory bombing campaign against ISIS and sent 3,400 U.S. advisers to Iraq to assist the Iraqi Security Forces in fighting ISIS. More recently he has announced the dispatch of 50 Special Operations Forces to Syria to work with Kurdish fighters. His goal, he claimed, was to “degrade and ultimately destroy” ISIS.
But the extraordinarily limited nature of the American response made clear that he had a different goal in mind–the president, it is obvious, was really intent on containing ISIS rather than destroying it. Obama admitted as much in a singularly ill-timed interview on Friday in which he claimed that this goal was being achieved, that ISIL was being “contained.” Then just a few hours later the jihadist gunmen began rampaging through Paris. If this is what containment looks like, then it is not a goal that we can live with. Literally. We need rollback, not containment.
As long as the Islamic State continues to administer a “caliphate” — a functioning state — it will continue to serve as inspiration and training ground for jihadists from around the world, including a substantial number from Europe and the U.S. The fact that Paris has been hit twice this year with terrible terrorist attacks — the Charlie Hebdo attack was in January — shows what everyone already knows: that it is impossible to stop terrorism with a purely defensive strategy. The French actually have a robust internal security regime with extensive surveillance powers. But even they could not stop these attacks. We are engaging in wishful thinking if we imagine that U.S. will be any more immune to such assaults.
The only way to diminish the threat is to get on offensive, to end the phony war and engage in a real war against ISIS. What would such a “real war” strategy look like? We should be inspired by the aftermath of 9/11. The U.S., recall, did not stage a massive conventional invasion of Afghanistan. Instead we sent a relatively small number of Special Operations Force and CIA paramilitaries, backed by massive air power, to work with the Northern Alliance to overthrow the Taliban.
Granted, such a strategy is much harder to carry out today and requires a greater American commitment because in neither Iraq nor Syria is there a ready-made force such as the Northern Alliance that is ready to march on ISIS strongholds. So our objective should be to bring such a force into being by making an all-out push to mobilize Sunnis in both Iraq and Syria against ISIS. We haven’t done that yet because President Obama has been too busy flirting with Iran, which the Sunnis rightly regard as their enemy. Instead of clinging to illusions that we can make common cause with the mullahs to fight against ISIS, we need to pursue a dual-track strategy to mobilize and support a Sunni uprising.
Track one is military: Increase our currently inadequate force in Iraq. We will probably need at least 20,000 personnel and they will need much more permissive rules of engagement that will allow them to go outside of their bases in order to call in air strikes and more effectively mentor indigenous forces fighting ISIS. High-end Special Operations Forces such as Delta Force and Seal Team Six will need to start targeting ISIS’s leadership directly and regularly. We may also need to put in ground combat units, at least a few brigades’ worth, to lead an assault on ISIS strongholds. If we step up our commitment, our allies are likely to do more as well, led by the newly enraged French.
Track two is political: Make an all-out diplomatic push to create a Sunni Regional Government, akin to the Kurdish Regional Government, protected by a new Sons of Iraq militia and backed by American security guarantees. This would give the Sunnis a reason to fight against ISIS, knowing they would not just be exchanging the tyranny of Iran for the tyranny of ISIS. The new Sunni region should agree to stay part of Iraq and share its water with the rest of the country in return for continuing to receive its fair share of oil revenues.
This may seem like a tall order today, but the two tracks will help enable each other: The more we commit militarily, the more leverage we will have over Iraqi politics, and the more credibility we will have with Sunnis. And the more we can do to flip Sunnis politically against ISIS, the more effective partners our military will have on the ground. We need to work not just with selected Iraqi Security Forces that have not been completely compromised by Shiite sectarians but also, and more importantly, with Sunni tribal militias, Kurdish militias, and other forces that are willing to fight ISIS.
Perhaps this is simply wishful thinking on my part. In all likelihood even now President Obama is not prepared to go nearly this far to fight ISIS. If so, the phony war will continue, and the number of ISIS’s victims will continue to grow.
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Victor Davis Hanson
“ COMMENTARY is an indispensable read on the Arab Spring, the Afghan war, the future of American conservatism, and all the other crazy stuff out there. But you already knew that. What I really love about it is that it’s a full-service operation, and its back-of-the-book guys—the fellows who write about music, literature, and all the things that make life worth living as the world goes to hell—are the best in the business. There is an observation in a Terry Teachout piece on the wonderful singer Nancy LaMott about “Moon River” that has stayed with me for almost two decades. I fished it out from the back of my mind to impress a gal at a Goldwater Institute reception only the other day, and it worked a treat. So thank you, COMMENTARY! Likewise, my differences with the arts’n’culture crew unsettle me far more than the geopolitical ones: reasonable people can disagree on how large a nuclear arsenal those wacky mullahs should be permitted to own, but I’m still agog at the great Andrew Ferguson’s mystifying praise for the New York Times obituaries page a couple of issues back. That’s COMMENTARY for you—provocative to the end, on matters large and small. In these turbulent and dismaying times, we can all use a huckleberry friend waiting round the bend, in the mailbox each month and on the computer screen every morning. For any journal of opinion, as “Moon River” teaches us, there’s such a lot of world to see. COMMENTARY sees most of it with piercing clarity: it can’t know all the answers, but it asks all the right questions, and with great farsightedness. It deserves your wholehearted support. „
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Donald Rumsfeld
“ COMMENTARY is America's most important monthly journal of ideas, period. For nearly seven decades it has published the best and most exciting writing from the most important thinkers: Saul Bellow and Lionel Trilling; Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Jeane Kirkpatrick; Paul Johnson and Ruth Wisse; Cynthia Ozick and—of course—Norman Podhoretz and Midge Decter. Is there anything remotely like it? No. It is the lamp by which America, and Israel, and the Jewish people, may find their way to safety. I'm proud to be published in its pages. „
Bret Stephens
“ Irving Kristol once called COMMENTARY the most influential magazine in Jewish history. Certainly, no publication had a greater influence on me as I evolved from adolescent reader (arguing over its articles with my father and older brother) into a “frequent contributor” who made it my intellectual home. The magazine did not exploit American freedom to escape from civilizing duty but rather activated the intertwined responsibilities of citizens and members of a group. American Jewry can boast of many contributions to the welfare of this country and the Jewish people, but few as fortifying as COMMENTARY. „
Ruth R. Wisse
“ Edward Shils noted that there are four means of education in the modern world: the classroom, bookstores (especially used-bookstores), the conversation of intelligent friends, and intellectual magazines. For me intellectual magazines were more important than any of the other three, and no magazine among them more so than COMMENTARY. I first happened on COMMENTARY as a student browsing in the University of Chicago Bookstore in 1957. I have not missed an issue since. The magazine spoke to my intellectual interests and passions, and still does. As a reader and as a writer, I should be lost without it. „
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Max Boot
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Farewell to Sister Souljah Moments
Jonathan S. Tobin 2016-04-08
According to the Washington Post, at a campaign stop in Philadelphia this week, Bill Clinton had what they called “another unforgettable Sister Souljah moment.” The reference is to the seminal moment during Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign when the Arkansas governor called out a hip-hop singer named Sister Souljah for supporting the killing of white policemen. It enabled Clinton to position his candidacy as one that couldn’t be dismissed as being in the thrall of left wing extremists. It set the tone not only for a successful election effort that took back the White House for the Democrats after a 12-year drought but also for a two-term presidency in which Clinton was often able to present himself as a centrist rather than a liberal. But that was a different Democratic Party in a different time.
When Clinton was harassed by Black Lives Matter activists who heckled the former president, he lashed out. The protestors were there to blame Clinton for the passage of his signature crime and welfare reform legislation in the 1990s. Those achievements were acclaimed at the time as an example of how bipartisanship can foster consensus legislation. But the bills are now something of a badge of shame that his wife has been trying to live down in the course of her efforts to win the support of African-American voters for her presidential campaign.
In the last years, Clinton has attempted to blame the provisions in the crime bill for mandatory sentencing for drug offenders as the fault of Republicans. But when confronted by people yelling that Hillary Clinton was “a murderer” and that he should be charged with “crimes against humanity,” the former president had had enough. He told them that their position amounted to a defense of “the gang leaders who got 13-year-old kids hopped up on crack and set ‘em out onto the street to murder other African-American children.”
Clinton is right about that. Despite their shortcomings, the primary beneficiaries of the crime bill and welfare reform were the poor and disadvantaged people that strove to reclaim their communities from criminals. Neither he nor Hillary has anything to apologize for on account of either effort.
But 2016 is not 1992. The base of the Democratic Party that once embraced a “new Democrat” identity in the form of Bill Clinton now reserves most of its enthusiasm for a socialist gadfly. And Hillary, who must depend on black voters as her firewall against white liberals who are rallying to the cause of Bernie Sanders, can’t afford to let her husband pick a fight with the Black Lives Matter movement.
That’s why the general reaction to her husband’s 13-minute rant in which he lectured his tormentors about the truth about the impact of the crime bill was that he had lost his magic political touch and proved once again to be more of an embarrassment to his wife’s campaign than an asset.
In the last year, the willingness of liberals and Democrats of all stripes to kowtow to Black Lives Matter activists or to even apologize for pointing out that we should believe that “all lives matter,” has become a matter of political orthodoxy on the left. It doesn’t matter that these extremists are doing nothing to improve their communities. Their war on police is now a sacred cow that Democrats — and especially Hillary Clinton — offends at their peril.
So it was no surprise that a day after he let loose on the group, Clinton was sounding apologetic. While not backing down on the historical record, he said he was guilty of “talking past” the audience as much as the hecklers were doing the same to him. He admitted to being not “effective” in answering the complaints.
The Clintons will survive this brouhaha. But it shouldn’t pass unnoticed. In fact, it is as telling a moment in our political history as what happened in 1992. Then, the “Sister Souljah Moment” — a phrase that has become emblematic of any politician being willing to talk back to his base — was important not just because it showed Bill Clinton’s mettle under pressure but because it demonstrated that the Democratic Party was ready to shift back to the center after more than a decade of allowing itself to be a prisoner of its most extreme activists.
But, after eight years of the Obama administration — a historic presidency that was supposed to allow the country to transcend the divisions of its racial past — the Democrats have shifted decisively to the left. Part of that is seen in the way Sanders’ socialist beliefs are embraced by much of his party’s mainstream — and which Clinton’s supporters are helpless to demonize as our Noah Rothman points out — but also in a refusal to speak plainly about the way the racial hucksters of Black Lives Matter are seeking to undermine police efforts that are vital to the survival of urban minority communities.
In a different era, we might have expected responsible Democrats to respond to extremists the way Bill Clinton did to Sister Souljah and win the applause of the country. But, contrary to the Post’s cheers for Clinton, in a Democratic Party that in thrall to the left on both economic and racial issues there can be no more Sister Souljah moments. That’s a liability for Clinton in November but not one that a Republican Party that may be led by a candidate that has been guilty of pandering to advocates of racial or religious prejudice will be in a position to exploit.
All Americans — be they black or white — ought to lament the spectacle of an ex-president being forced to walk back a bout of truth-telling about the last moment in our political history when bipartisanship triumphed. At a time when both Republicans and Democrats ought to be telling off the worst elements of their coalitions, Bill Clinton’s humiliation is a sign that common sense is in full retreat on the American public square.
Everyone worth reading avidly reads COMMENTARY. Can you afford not to?
“ In 1975 the Economist said of COMMENTARY: “The world's best magazine?” Take away the question mark and that statement still stands, thirty-eight years later. It's still the magazine America's liberals dread most, and the one America's enemies can't afford to ignore. It's the point of the conservative spear in the never-ending fight against the insanity of the left, whether it's in foreign policy or economic policy, social and cultural issues, or the arts—and no one does a better job standing up for Western culture and America's interests and those of its allies, including Israel. In fact, surviving the next three years—the Obama administration home stretch—and building the foundations for an American resurgence afterward will be impossible without reading COMMENTARY in print and online. „
Arthur Herman
“ There’s an enormous amount of shouting in the wild west of conservative media. That has its place, and is often a sign of the energy on the right. But amidst the cacophony there’s a special need for serious, considered, and compelling argument, presented in the hope of persuading, not just punishing. This is where COMMENTARY has always shined, perhaps more now than ever before. It aims to tackle the best arguments of its intellectual opponents, not just the easiest targets. It’s a journal I’ve read for nearly 30 years and I can’t think of a time when I’ve valued it more. „
Jonah Goldberg
“ For decades, COMMENTARY has opened its pages to the most serious uncompromising defense of the American creed—exemplar of ordered liberty at home, pillar of the free world abroad—in an era when it has been most under attack. From the exceptionally influential manifestoes of Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Jeane Kirkpatrick to today's counterattack against the empowered advocates of the entitlement state and of American decline, COMMENTARY remains what it has been for more than a generation: fearless, informative, indispensable. „
Charles Krauthammer
“ COMMENTARY isn’t just an important magazine. It’s an indispensable one. It’s been indispensable for half a century, and it is today. It’s indispensable for understanding the moment we live in, and it’s indispensable for laying out a path forward. The challenges we confront are great, but COMMENTARY is used to facing grave challenges without fearful cowering or wishful thinking. So we need COMMENTARY today as much as we ever have, and we need it to be as strong as it’s ever been. „
William Kristol
“ COMMENTARY’s writing is predictably engaging and edgy, but its content is anything but homogeneous. Center-right perspectives characterize contributions, but not predictably so. Jewish affairs are thematic, but not always. Controversies of the day are the usual subjects, yet offered only with reflection well apart from the frenzied 24/7 news cycle. Intellectual honesty and analytical rigor characterize COMMENTARY and that is why even its political critics concede that they are still enlightened by the very arguments they often oppose. „
Victor Davis Hanson
“ COMMENTARY is an indispensable read on the Arab Spring, the Afghan war, the future of American conservatism, and all the other crazy stuff out there. But you already knew that. What I really love about it is that it’s a full-service operation, and its back-of-the-book guys—the fellows who write about music, literature, and all the things that make life worth living as the world goes to hell—are the best in the business. There is an observation in a Terry Teachout piece on the wonderful singer Nancy LaMott about “Moon River” that has stayed with me for almost two decades. I fished it out from the back of my mind to impress a gal at a Goldwater Institute reception only the other day, and it worked a treat. So thank you, COMMENTARY! Likewise, my differences with the arts’n’culture crew unsettle me far more than the geopolitical ones: reasonable people can disagree on how large a nuclear arsenal those wacky mullahs should be permitted to own, but I’m still agog at the great Andrew Ferguson’s mystifying praise for the New York Times obituaries page a couple of issues back. That’s COMMENTARY for you—provocative to the end, on matters large and small. In these turbulent and dismaying times, we can all use a huckleberry friend waiting round the bend, in the mailbox each month and on the computer screen every morning. For any journal of opinion, as “Moon River” teaches us, there’s such a lot of world to see. COMMENTARY sees most of it with piercing clarity: it can’t know all the answers, but it asks all the right questions, and with great farsightedness. It deserves your wholehearted support. „
Mark Steyn
“ COMMENTARY has played an invaluable role in American political discourse for decades, offering thoughtful analysis on issues rather than sound bites or bumper stickers. Especially when it comes to U.S. foreign and defense policy, COMMENTARY has time and time again been ahead of the crowd, anticipating trends and developments that others react to only after the fact. I can't imagine not being a COMMENTARY subscriber. „
John Bolton
“ In the midst of today’s political rancor, COMMENTARY Magazine provides a rare venue for thoughtful discussion. COMMENTARY’s talented writers provide insightful analysis of foreign affairs, domestic policy, and the politics of the day. COMMENTARY is a treasure not only for conservatives, but for anyone looking for in-depth exploration of the issues that influence America’s public dialogue and shape the nation’s future. „
Karl Rove
“ It's notorious, and true, that government officials hardly read anything. Memos, sure; nowadays, emails and tweets as well. But magazines? People barely have time to eat lunch or see their kids, so how can an intellectual monthly affect public affairs? The question is a good one. How did COMMENTARY do it? The answer is that officials, like all citizens following American foreign policy, need a way to understand the world around them. When prevailing theories fail, when conventional wisdom is clearly at variance with what they see before their eyes, the outcome for senators and congressmen and White House officials is what the shrinks call cognitive dissonance. They may say one thing but believe another, or simply be unable to square previous beliefs and policies with the clear effects of U.S. conduct. They've lost the ability to explain the world. And then came COMMENTARY, offering month after month of piercing, bracing analysis—and value judgments of right and wrong, and clear writing about American gains and losses. Here was an insistence on looking reality in the face. Here was plain argument, seeking no quarter intellectually and giving none. And it mattered. It shamed some people, and emboldened others; COMMENTARY demanded that we conform policy to the opportunities and dangers that really faced America. In years of confusion and obfuscation, that striking clarity changed policies, and changed American conduct, because it changed the way we understood the world. „
Elliott Abrams
“ For more than 60 years, COMMENTARY has been a go-to source on matters of the greatest importance to our nation and our civilization. Today, its full-throated defense of the United States and freedom is as eloquent as it was a half-century ago, and no less urgent. Issues of the day will change, news cycles come and go, but COMMENTARY remains an indispensable authority in the battle of ideas that help to shape our world. Its continued success is both an indication, and source, of the country’s intellectual health. „
Donald Rumsfeld
“ COMMENTARY is America's most important monthly journal of ideas, period. For nearly seven decades it has published the best and most exciting writing from the most important thinkers: Saul Bellow and Lionel Trilling; Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Jeane Kirkpatrick; Paul Johnson and Ruth Wisse; Cynthia Ozick and—of course—Norman Podhoretz and Midge Decter. Is there anything remotely like it? No. It is the lamp by which America, and Israel, and the Jewish people, may find their way to safety. I'm proud to be published in its pages. „
Bret Stephens
“ Irving Kristol once called COMMENTARY the most influential magazine in Jewish history. Certainly, no publication had a greater influence on me as I evolved from adolescent reader (arguing over its articles with my father and older brother) into a “frequent contributor” who made it my intellectual home. The magazine did not exploit American freedom to escape from civilizing duty but rather activated the intertwined responsibilities of citizens and members of a group. American Jewry can boast of many contributions to the welfare of this country and the Jewish people, but few as fortifying as COMMENTARY. „
Ruth R. Wisse
“ Edward Shils noted that there are four means of education in the modern world: the classroom, bookstores (especially used-bookstores), the conversation of intelligent friends, and intellectual magazines. For me intellectual magazines were more important than any of the other three, and no magazine among them more so than COMMENTARY. I first happened on COMMENTARY as a student browsing in the University of Chicago Bookstore in 1957. I have not missed an issue since. The magazine spoke to my intellectual interests and passions, and still does. As a reader and as a writer, I should be lost without it. „
Joseph Epstein
“ Why does COMMENTARY matter? Since 1945, no other monthly magazine has so consistently published serious, provocative argument and analysis. No other monthly magazine has viewed America and the world through such a wide angle, encompassing economics, politics, society, culture, religion, and diplomacy. No other monthly magazine has published such a celebrated and wide-ranging list of editors and contributors. Cerebral, critical, and committed, the point of view found in its pages is as unique as it is formidable. And in a world of Iranian nukes, rising anti-Semitism, radical Islam, American disarmament, bipartisan neo-isolationism, and disintegrating institutions, reading COMMENTARY is more than a pleasure. It is a necessity. „
Matthew Continetti
“ COMMENTARY has long been an unmissable landmark on the American intellectual landscape. These days it shapes debate, propels argument, and explains society with renewed vigor and force. It is one of the small group of essential reads for anybody engaged in politics, Judaism, foreign policy, national manners, and morals. „
David Brooks
“ Anyone looking for a definitive exposition of a significant historical moment—whether UC Berkeley's Free Speech Movement, say, or the battles over "general education" at Harvard—has at his fingertips an inestimable gift: COMMENTARY's archives, which contain countless gems of reporting and analysis. Today's generation of COMMENTARY writers is building an equally invaluable store of knowledge for future researchers and scholars. „
Heather Mac Donald
“ I first subscribed to COMMENTARY in 1973, as a recovering liberal who had invested four years of my young life in writing speeches for a constellation of McGovernite candidates and office-holders. Living in Berkeley at the time, I relished COMMENTARY as a guilty pleasure, feeling grateful that the magazine arrived each month discreetly disguised in a plain, brown wrapper that concealed its suspiciously neo-conservative content. In the militantly leftist community in which I functioned forty years ago, receiving regular monthly installments of the most degrading porn would have produced far less embarrassment than my growing devotion to the persuasive prose of Norman Podhoretz and Co. Yes, my personal journey from left to right-center involved the usual biographical factors, including the three P’s: paychecks, parenthood, and prayer. Paychecks, because they arrived with shocking subtractions in the form of onerous and incomprehensible taxes; parenthood, because responsibility for a new generation forced a longer-term perspective; and prayer, because my own growing Jewish observance led to the conclusion that my “idealistic” ’60s generation, with all its narcissism and preening self-regard, might not provide life’s ultimate answers after all. Fortunately for me, reading COMMENTARY with near-religious regularity helped to organize my onrushing insights and experience into a more coherent world view. In a dark time in our nation’s history, while surviving (temporarily) in the most unhinged corner of the continent, this incomparable publication persuaded me that I wasn’t alone. „
Michael Medved
“ Just as one begins to despair of hearing the strong voice of sanity and courage, leavened with charm and good humor, in our modern polity, COMMENTARY arrives, and once a month one can be reminded that there are indeed some clear-sighted and articulate people who seem actively to enjoy the battle for truth. „
Andrew Roberts
“ Every month in print, and every day online, COMMENTARY somehow manages to pull off a dazzling balancing act: intellectual but unpretentious, serious but never boring, timely but not fleeting. On the leading questions of the day, it offers fresh and unfamiliar insights. And on the emerging questions that will dominate the years to come, it often sees things first and clearest. It is simply indispensable. „
Yuval Levin
“ In a time of passion, COMMENTARY champions reason. Against lies, COMMENTARY speaks for truth. Confronting those who would doom to death the Jewish people, COMMENTARY is a magnificent continuing achievement of American Jewish life. „
David Frum
“ COMMENTARY has become my new go-to website for news analysis because it is measured, substantive, thoughtful, and written for news consumers of all shapes and sizes. When juggling all the issues of the day and thinking them through, I find myself going back to COMMENTARY again and again to see if there’s anything more that can help me add the ingredients needed to finalize an argument. I like the mix of foreign policy and national political news, as well as the discussions about America’s place in the world and what it should be. I’m a print subscriber and a frequent website visitor, and I follow all of the writers on Twitter. Thank you, COMMENTARY, for providing such consistently helpful content. „
Dana Perino
“ There is more commentary in the world than ever before—whether in print, on the air, or on the Internet. But there is still a dearth of serious, informed commentary that reports, analyzes, and argues without ever stooping to name-calling or vitriol. If you further narrow down the segment of the commentariat that looks at the world from a conservative and Jewish perspective—well, you’re left with only one choice. The magazine you are now reading. COMMENTARY has changed over the years—for instance, it now publishes this blog—but one thing that has not changed is its steadfast commitment to providing the best analysis from the most informed writers of the most important ideas in the world, all written in clear prose that appeals to a general audience. There is nothing else like it. Never has been, never will be. „
Max Boot
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Can Dems Re-Stigmatize Socialism?
Noah Rothman 2016-04-08
Bernie Sanders has never made a secret of his affinity for socialism. He’s always been a fan of alternatives to free market capitalism, in fact, and his Vermont constituents who have sent him to Congress for the last twenty years have never seemed to mind. While Sanders appends the word “democratic” to his preferred brand of collectivism in order perhaps to convey that his is a less murderous style of Marxism than that which plagued the 20th Century, he’s never been particularly anti-communist. He has heaped praise upon the Castros and spent his honeymoon in the Soviet Union, where he was happily photographed half-naked with party apparatchiks in a Yaroslavl banya. Like any good comrade, Sanders spent his career making a distinction between the European-style socialism he espoused and the more moderate state capitalism endorsed by Democrats. Only in September of last year did Sanders officially become a member of the party whose presidential nomination he was seeking. Now, Hillary Clinton and her allies are now doing their best to turn Sanders’ socialism into a liability. Perhaps Team Clinton might be able to remind loyal Democrats that Sanders declined for decades to self-identify as a member of the club. After seven years in which Barack Obama has done his best to rehabilitate the concept, however, the former first lady and her supporters have a hard time reminding liberal voters that socialism is a four-letter word.
New York Times reporter Jason Horowitz picked up on the nascent effort among Democrats to re-stigmatize the concept of socialism in a statement released by Clinton ally and Brooklyn-based Congressman Hakeem Jeffries. In attacking Sanders as a “gun-loving socialist with zero foreign policy experience,” it was clear that the label was applied in a pejorative sense. Horowitz noted that this messaging came on the heels of an effort by Clinton to brand Sanders a “relatively new Democrat.” While it’s a transparent attempt to gin up support for Clinton through naked appeals to tribal loyalty, it may nevertheless be an effective approach. Sanders would likely not take issue with either fact – his support for socialism, or his previously arms-length relationship with the Democratic Party. The most likely obstacle on the path to this tactic’s success, though, is the sitting Democratic president.
For the better part of his presidency, a cottage industry has flowered among the nation’s political commentary writers, all of whom committed themselves to resolving the eternal question: Is or isn’t Barack Obama a socialist. Everyone on either side of that debate believes they have the definitive answer. Writing in COMMENTARY as early as 2010, Jonah Goldberg may have penned the most compelling piece on the president’s earliest, tentative steps toward a kind of unselfconscious “neosocialism.” Even before he was elected to the White House, Obama spoke openly and favorably about “spreading around opportunity” – a redistributionist euphemism he later clarified meant, explicitly, the redistribution of income through the tax code – in order to equalize outcomes.
For conservatives, this and similar admissions of fealty to a foundational redistributionist framework was evidence of socialistic sympathies. The president’s approach to governance – a reliance on top-down solutions and Keynesian economic stimulus – merely confirmed the right’s suspicions. Nothing, however, so irritated the committed socialist as the idea that Barack Obama was one of them. There is no shortage of breathless correctives penned by self-described socialists insisting with various degrees of irritation that the president was no true Scotsman. Theirs was a neat rhetorical trick. For the left, the claim that the president’s policies so often failed to achieve their stated objectives because they were too liberal could not be countered with the notion that they failed because they were not liberal enough. Thus, the kind of European-style socialism that was once anathema in the United States – single-payer health care programs, increased subsidized housing inventory, and even the word itself – were destigmatized. To paraphrase the late Al Smith, for Democrats, the answer to the ills of liberalism was more liberalism.
By the time the president entered his final year in office and could really indulge his inner “Bullworth” — as he once admitted he had always wished he could do, but was frustratingly constrained by the bounds of American political norms and traditions – even Obama had let the veil drop. Fresh off of a historic trip to the open-air prison that is communist Cuba, the president journeyed to Argentina in late March. There, in a town hall with local Argentinians, Obama expressed his indifference toward socialism as an alternative socio-economic theory of organization.
“So often in the past, there has been a division between left and right, between capitalists and communists or socialists, and especially in the Americas, that’s been a big debate,” Obama said. “Those are interesting intellectual arguments, but I think for your generation, you should be practical, and just choose from what works.”
“You don’t have to worry about whether it neatly fits into socialist theory or capitalist theory,” the President of the United States and the leader of the free world averred. “You should just decide what works.” The president declined to deliver his declaration of apathy toward free market capitalism in Cuba, where that kind of political expression would be a direct threat to the authoritarian, socialist cabal in Havana. Eh. Whatever works, right?
Nothing the president said made anyone squirm in their seats back home, either. For Republicans, this merely exposed the president they knew and had come to terms with. For Democrats, it was a justified equivalence between two roughly morally corresponding – even compatible – economic systems. That such a statement failed to elicit even an ounce of indignation in the United States speaks to the rehabilitation of socialism as a viable, even virtuous, economic theory among Democrats.
Clinton, Jeffries, and other Clintonites may try to attack Sanders for failing to self-identify as a fellow big “D” Democrat in favor of a more European identity. For the millions of Sanders voters to whom “socialism” is an entirely theoretical and, as such, preferable alternative to capitalism, such appeals will fall on deaf ears. The Democrats buried or expelled its “Scoop” Jacksons in the effort to rebrand itself a liberal-left party. That day has arrived. It seems that Clinton and company are experiencing a bit of buyer’s remorse.
Everyone worth reading avidly reads COMMENTARY. Can you afford not to?
“ In 1975 the Economist said of COMMENTARY: “The world's best magazine?” Take away the question mark and that statement still stands, thirty-eight years later. It's still the magazine America's liberals dread most, and the one America's enemies can't afford to ignore. It's the point of the conservative spear in the never-ending fight against the insanity of the left, whether it's in foreign policy or economic policy, social and cultural issues, or the arts—and no one does a better job standing up for Western culture and America's interests and those of its allies, including Israel. In fact, surviving the next three years—the Obama administration home stretch—and building the foundations for an American resurgence afterward will be impossible without reading COMMENTARY in print and online. „
Arthur Herman
“ There’s an enormous amount of shouting in the wild west of conservative media. That has its place, and is often a sign of the energy on the right. But amidst the cacophony there’s a special need for serious, considered, and compelling argument, presented in the hope of persuading, not just punishing. This is where COMMENTARY has always shined, perhaps more now than ever before. It aims to tackle the best arguments of its intellectual opponents, not just the easiest targets. It’s a journal I’ve read for nearly 30 years and I can’t think of a time when I’ve valued it more. „
Jonah Goldberg
“ For decades, COMMENTARY has opened its pages to the most serious uncompromising defense of the American creed—exemplar of ordered liberty at home, pillar of the free world abroad—in an era when it has been most under attack. From the exceptionally influential manifestoes of Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Jeane Kirkpatrick to today's counterattack against the empowered advocates of the entitlement state and of American decline, COMMENTARY remains what it has been for more than a generation: fearless, informative, indispensable. „
Charles Krauthammer
“ COMMENTARY isn’t just an important magazine. It’s an indispensable one. It’s been indispensable for half a century, and it is today. It’s indispensable for understanding the moment we live in, and it’s indispensable for laying out a path forward. The challenges we confront are great, but COMMENTARY is used to facing grave challenges without fearful cowering or wishful thinking. So we need COMMENTARY today as much as we ever have, and we need it to be as strong as it’s ever been. „
William Kristol
“ COMMENTARY’s writing is predictably engaging and edgy, but its content is anything but homogeneous. Center-right perspectives characterize contributions, but not predictably so. Jewish affairs are thematic, but not always. Controversies of the day are the usual subjects, yet offered only with reflection well apart from the frenzied 24/7 news cycle. Intellectual honesty and analytical rigor characterize COMMENTARY and that is why even its political critics concede that they are still enlightened by the very arguments they often oppose. „
Victor Davis Hanson
“ COMMENTARY is an indispensable read on the Arab Spring, the Afghan war, the future of American conservatism, and all the other crazy stuff out there. But you already knew that. What I really love about it is that it’s a full-service operation, and its back-of-the-book guys—the fellows who write about music, literature, and all the things that make life worth living as the world goes to hell—are the best in the business. There is an observation in a Terry Teachout piece on the wonderful singer Nancy LaMott about “Moon River” that has stayed with me for almost two decades. I fished it out from the back of my mind to impress a gal at a Goldwater Institute reception only the other day, and it worked a treat. So thank you, COMMENTARY! Likewise, my differences with the arts’n’culture crew unsettle me far more than the geopolitical ones: reasonable people can disagree on how large a nuclear arsenal those wacky mullahs should be permitted to own, but I’m still agog at the great Andrew Ferguson’s mystifying praise for the New York Times obituaries page a couple of issues back. That’s COMMENTARY for you—provocative to the end, on matters large and small. In these turbulent and dismaying times, we can all use a huckleberry friend waiting round the bend, in the mailbox each month and on the computer screen every morning. For any journal of opinion, as “Moon River” teaches us, there’s such a lot of world to see. COMMENTARY sees most of it with piercing clarity: it can’t know all the answers, but it asks all the right questions, and with great farsightedness. It deserves your wholehearted support. „
Mark Steyn
“ COMMENTARY has played an invaluable role in American political discourse for decades, offering thoughtful analysis on issues rather than sound bites or bumper stickers. Especially when it comes to U.S. foreign and defense policy, COMMENTARY has time and time again been ahead of the crowd, anticipating trends and developments that others react to only after the fact. I can't imagine not being a COMMENTARY subscriber. „
John Bolton
“ In the midst of today’s political rancor, COMMENTARY Magazine provides a rare venue for thoughtful discussion. COMMENTARY’s talented writers provide insightful analysis of foreign affairs, domestic policy, and the politics of the day. COMMENTARY is a treasure not only for conservatives, but for anyone looking for in-depth exploration of the issues that influence America’s public dialogue and shape the nation’s future. „
Karl Rove
“ It's notorious, and true, that government officials hardly read anything. Memos, sure; nowadays, emails and tweets as well. But magazines? People barely have time to eat lunch or see their kids, so how can an intellectual monthly affect public affairs? The question is a good one. How did COMMENTARY do it? The answer is that officials, like all citizens following American foreign policy, need a way to understand the world around them. When prevailing theories fail, when conventional wisdom is clearly at variance with what they see before their eyes, the outcome for senators and congressmen and White House officials is what the shrinks call cognitive dissonance. They may say one thing but believe another, or simply be unable to square previous beliefs and policies with the clear effects of U.S. conduct. They've lost the ability to explain the world. And then came COMMENTARY, offering month after month of piercing, bracing analysis—and value judgments of right and wrong, and clear writing about American gains and losses. Here was an insistence on looking reality in the face. Here was plain argument, seeking no quarter intellectually and giving none. And it mattered. It shamed some people, and emboldened others; COMMENTARY demanded that we conform policy to the opportunities and dangers that really faced America. In years of confusion and obfuscation, that striking clarity changed policies, and changed American conduct, because it changed the way we understood the world. „
Elliott Abrams
“ For more than 60 years, COMMENTARY has been a go-to source on matters of the greatest importance to our nation and our civilization. Today, its full-throated defense of the United States and freedom is as eloquent as it was a half-century ago, and no less urgent. Issues of the day will change, news cycles come and go, but COMMENTARY remains an indispensable authority in the battle of ideas that help to shape our world. Its continued success is both an indication, and source, of the country’s intellectual health. „
Donald Rumsfeld
“ COMMENTARY is America's most important monthly journal of ideas, period. For nearly seven decades it has published the best and most exciting writing from the most important thinkers: Saul Bellow and Lionel Trilling; Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Jeane Kirkpatrick; Paul Johnson and Ruth Wisse; Cynthia Ozick and—of course—Norman Podhoretz and Midge Decter. Is there anything remotely like it? No. It is the lamp by which America, and Israel, and the Jewish people, may find their way to safety. I'm proud to be published in its pages. „
Bret Stephens
“ Irving Kristol once called COMMENTARY the most influential magazine in Jewish history. Certainly, no publication had a greater influence on me as I evolved from adolescent reader (arguing over its articles with my father and older brother) into a “frequent contributor” who made it my intellectual home. The magazine did not exploit American freedom to escape from civilizing duty but rather activated the intertwined responsibilities of citizens and members of a group. American Jewry can boast of many contributions to the welfare of this country and the Jewish people, but few as fortifying as COMMENTARY. „
Ruth R. Wisse
“ Edward Shils noted that there are four means of education in the modern world: the classroom, bookstores (especially used-bookstores), the conversation of intelligent friends, and intellectual magazines. For me intellectual magazines were more important than any of the other three, and no magazine among them more so than COMMENTARY. I first happened on COMMENTARY as a student browsing in the University of Chicago Bookstore in 1957. I have not missed an issue since. The magazine spoke to my intellectual interests and passions, and still does. As a reader and as a writer, I should be lost without it. „
Joseph Epstein
“ Why does COMMENTARY matter? Since 1945, no other monthly magazine has so consistently published serious, provocative argument and analysis. No other monthly magazine has viewed America and the world through such a wide angle, encompassing economics, politics, society, culture, religion, and diplomacy. No other monthly magazine has published such a celebrated and wide-ranging list of editors and contributors. Cerebral, critical, and committed, the point of view found in its pages is as unique as it is formidable. And in a world of Iranian nukes, rising anti-Semitism, radical Islam, American disarmament, bipartisan neo-isolationism, and disintegrating institutions, reading COMMENTARY is more than a pleasure. It is a necessity. „
Matthew Continetti
“ COMMENTARY has long been an unmissable landmark on the American intellectual landscape. These days it shapes debate, propels argument, and explains society with renewed vigor and force. It is one of the small group of essential reads for anybody engaged in politics, Judaism, foreign policy, national manners, and morals. „
David Brooks
“ Anyone looking for a definitive exposition of a significant historical moment—whether UC Berkeley's Free Speech Movement, say, or the battles over "general education" at Harvard—has at his fingertips an inestimable gift: COMMENTARY's archives, which contain countless gems of reporting and analysis. Today's generation of COMMENTARY writers is building an equally invaluable store of knowledge for future researchers and scholars. „
Heather Mac Donald
“ I first subscribed to COMMENTARY in 1973, as a recovering liberal who had invested four years of my young life in writing speeches for a constellation of McGovernite candidates and office-holders. Living in Berkeley at the time, I relished COMMENTARY as a guilty pleasure, feeling grateful that the magazine arrived each month discreetly disguised in a plain, brown wrapper that concealed its suspiciously neo-conservative content. In the militantly leftist community in which I functioned forty years ago, receiving regular monthly installments of the most degrading porn would have produced far less embarrassment than my growing devotion to the persuasive prose of Norman Podhoretz and Co. Yes, my personal journey from left to right-center involved the usual biographical factors, including the three P’s: paychecks, parenthood, and prayer. Paychecks, because they arrived with shocking subtractions in the form of onerous and incomprehensible taxes; parenthood, because responsibility for a new generation forced a longer-term perspective; and prayer, because my own growing Jewish observance led to the conclusion that my “idealistic” ’60s generation, with all its narcissism and preening self-regard, might not provide life’s ultimate answers after all. Fortunately for me, reading COMMENTARY with near-religious regularity helped to organize my onrushing insights and experience into a more coherent world view. In a dark time in our nation’s history, while surviving (temporarily) in the most unhinged corner of the continent, this incomparable publication persuaded me that I wasn’t alone. „
Michael Medved
“ Just as one begins to despair of hearing the strong voice of sanity and courage, leavened with charm and good humor, in our modern polity, COMMENTARY arrives, and once a month one can be reminded that there are indeed some clear-sighted and articulate people who seem actively to enjoy the battle for truth. „
Andrew Roberts
“ Every month in print, and every day online, COMMENTARY somehow manages to pull off a dazzling balancing act: intellectual but unpretentious, serious but never boring, timely but not fleeting. On the leading questions of the day, it offers fresh and unfamiliar insights. And on the emerging questions that will dominate the years to come, it often sees things first and clearest. It is simply indispensable. „
Yuval Levin
“ In a time of passion, COMMENTARY champions reason. Against lies, COMMENTARY speaks for truth. Confronting those who would doom to death the Jewish people, COMMENTARY is a magnificent continuing achievement of American Jewish life. „
David Frum
“ COMMENTARY has become my new go-to website for news analysis because it is measured, substantive, thoughtful, and written for news consumers of all shapes and sizes. When juggling all the issues of the day and thinking them through, I find myself going back to COMMENTARY again and again to see if there’s anything more that can help me add the ingredients needed to finalize an argument. I like the mix of foreign policy and national political news, as well as the discussions about America’s place in the world and what it should be. I’m a print subscriber and a frequent website visitor, and I follow all of the writers on Twitter. Thank you, COMMENTARY, for providing such consistently helpful content. „
Dana Perino
“ There is more commentary in the world than ever before—whether in print, on the air, or on the Internet. But there is still a dearth of serious, informed commentary that reports, analyzes, and argues without ever stooping to name-calling or vitriol. If you further narrow down the segment of the commentariat that looks at the world from a conservative and Jewish perspective—well, you’re left with only one choice. The magazine you are now reading. COMMENTARY has changed over the years—for instance, it now publishes this blog—but one thing that has not changed is its steadfast commitment to providing the best analysis from the most informed writers of the most important ideas in the world, all written in clear prose that appeals to a general audience. There is nothing else like it. Never has been, never will be. „
Max Boot
Never again miss another issue or article. Not a subscriber yet? Join the intellectual club, today.
Unlock the rest of this article and all other COMMENTARY articles, including our entire archive dating back to 1945, and featuring so many classic, epoch-defining articles by some of the very best minds of the 20th and 21st centuries.
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Spare Us the Lecture, Mr. President
Jonathan S. Tobin 2016-04-08
For something that has zero chance of actually happening, President Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland to the U.S. Supreme Court is getting an awful lot of publicity. The White House has made the campaign for Garland a priority. They’ve made the effort to orchestrate more meetings between the president’s pick and Republican senators seem like a tense drama as some GOP senators, including incumbents facing tough re-election fights, have offered to sit down with the judge. The administration’s political operatives are doing their best to frame the controversy as a matter of disrespect being shown to the president by Republicans. In turn, Obama has also done his best to add to the mix, too. In particular, he went to the University of Chicago yesterday to deliver a talk in which he lectured Republicans about the evils of partisanship.
Obama’s partisan fans, including the cheering section in the press corps, may be applauding these stunts. But the Democrats’ effort to seize and hold what they claim to be the moral high ground is just so much hot air. If we strip away the theatrics on Capitol Hill and the president’s predilection for talking down to his opponents, it’s clear that Garland, a distinguished liberal jurist, is merely playing the role of a pawn in service to one party’s turnout efforts.
Since this fight began in the aftermath of the death of Justice Antonin Scalia, it’s been necessary to point out that hypocrisy has been dominant note of this entire discussion. Nor is it only Obama and the Democrats who are guilty of it since if it were a Republican president seeking to force a Democratic-controlled Senate to bend to the will of the executive, they, too, would be taking a completely different position.
As I’ve previously discussed, past speeches of both Vice President Joe Biden and Senator Chuck Schumer, indicating that they would oppose an election year Supreme Court appointment from a Republican president gives the lie to their righteous indignation that pair and the rest of their party are spouting about the GOP refusal to confirm Garland under similar circumstances. No amount of spin or claims that their quotes were taken out of context can gainsay the fact that they were warning that they would do the same thing Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is currently doing.
But President Obama’s hypocritical stance in his speech at the place where he used to teach law is especially egregious. The first reason for that is that the record shows that Obama is one of the chief hypocrites on this issue. During the course of his attempt to filibuster the debate over the nomination of Justice Samuel Alito, he put forth a full-throated defense of ideological reasons for refusing to confirm a judge even if they were both legally qualified and ethically pure. What Republicans are doing today is no different from what Obama did in 2006.
In his remarks, the president was right to say that a fundamental shift had occurred in the last generation that had politicized the Supreme Court nomination process. Our politics are more polarized and ideological. The kind of divided government we have now does have the potential to create an almost permanent logjam in choosing judges. That may well help to undermine confidence in the system and as a participant in this effort, the president might enhance his credibility if he included a mea culpa for his own record of doing what he now deplores.
But even if we look past Obama’s hypocrisy, his prediction of doom rings hollow. When he says that the refusal of conservatives to confirm a liberal judge may reduce the nomination process to being, “just a majoritarian exercise in the Senate of who controls the presidency and who controls the Senate,” we are forced to ask what is so bad about that? Moreover, what is the alternative that he is proposing that will enable us to transcend partisanship?
The alternative to that “majoritarian exercise” that he offers the GOP is simple: surrender. Republicans are told that they must allow a shaky 5-4 conservative majority in which a swing vote cast by an unpredictable Justice Anthony Kennedy determines close cases to become a solid 5-4 liberal majority enabled by Garland’s confirmation. They must do so, Obama says, because it is good for democracy for us to transcend partisanship. But in order for that argument to work, then both sides must do so.
The president and his apologists may say that he has done that by nominating a relatively moderate liberal in Garland, but that is mere spin. As the New York Times, the flagship of the liberal mainstream media pointed out, an analysis of his decisions show Garland is actually to the left of Justices Elena Kagan and Stephen Breyer putting him in the middle of the liberal faction, not a moderate swing vote. That makes the argument that Republicans would do better to confirm Garland rather than to risk the confirmation of an even more liberal justice by a President Hillary Clinton and Democratic Senate next year an empty threat.
So all the president offers his opponents is the right to capitulate to him, and that is something they may be forgiven for not doing. After all, “majoritarian” politics in which the branches of government may balance each other’s desires is not a Republican idea. It is the way of the Constitution and American democracy.
A GOP surrender on Garland won’t fix the system. All it will do is to enable one side of the current political divide to solidify their hold on the judiciary. That may well happen if the voters hand control of the White House and the Senate to the Democrats next year. And if so, then as much as they may not like such a result, conservatives will have no choice but to accept it. But given the unprecedented nature of this standoff — a Supreme Court vacancy that could flip control from one ideological camp to the other occurring in a presidential election year with the presidency and the Senate controlled by two different parties — waiting for the voters to decide would actually be the only way to get an outcome that all sides to the argument would admit was fair.
That’s why, although some Republican senators may decide to meet with Garland, their leadership will stand their ground and refuse to let the charade go any further than that. Both sides know that making any effort to put this issue to a vote by parliamentary procedure to be just as much of an exercise in futility as GOP votes to repeal ObamaCare.
That is also why all the discussion about senatorial meetings with the nominee and even the White House effort to keep the issue in the public eye must be put down as nothing more than theatrics intended to rile up the president’s so they will turn out to vote this November. Which is to say that what the president is doing is more of exactly the same political games that he claims to deplore. Having come into the presidency claiming to want to elevate the tone of our politics, the president spent his two terms doing the opposite, consistently demonizing his opponents and seeking to impose his ideological goals by any means necessary. We can either deplore or applaud his actions depending on whether we support those goals. But he should spare us the lectures. If he wants to know what has gone wrong in Washington, he can start by looking in the mirror.
Everyone worth reading avidly reads COMMENTARY. Can you afford not to?
“ In 1975 the Economist said of COMMENTARY: “The world's best magazine?” Take away the question mark and that statement still stands, thirty-eight years later. It's still the magazine America's liberals dread most, and the one America's enemies can't afford to ignore. It's the point of the conservative spear in the never-ending fight against the insanity of the left, whether it's in foreign policy or economic policy, social and cultural issues, or the arts—and no one does a better job standing up for Western culture and America's interests and those of its allies, including Israel. In fact, surviving the next three years—the Obama administration home stretch—and building the foundations for an American resurgence afterward will be impossible without reading COMMENTARY in print and online. „
Arthur Herman
“ There’s an enormous amount of shouting in the wild west of conservative media. That has its place, and is often a sign of the energy on the right. But amidst the cacophony there’s a special need for serious, considered, and compelling argument, presented in the hope of persuading, not just punishing. This is where COMMENTARY has always shined, perhaps more now than ever before. It aims to tackle the best arguments of its intellectual opponents, not just the easiest targets. It’s a journal I’ve read for nearly 30 years and I can’t think of a time when I’ve valued it more. „
Jonah Goldberg
“ For decades, COMMENTARY has opened its pages to the most serious uncompromising defense of the American creed—exemplar of ordered liberty at home, pillar of the free world abroad—in an era when it has been most under attack. From the exceptionally influential manifestoes of Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Jeane Kirkpatrick to today's counterattack against the empowered advocates of the entitlement state and of American decline, COMMENTARY remains what it has been for more than a generation: fearless, informative, indispensable. „
Charles Krauthammer
“ COMMENTARY isn’t just an important magazine. It’s an indispensable one. It’s been indispensable for half a century, and it is today. It’s indispensable for understanding the moment we live in, and it’s indispensable for laying out a path forward. The challenges we confront are great, but COMMENTARY is used to facing grave challenges without fearful cowering or wishful thinking. So we need COMMENTARY today as much as we ever have, and we need it to be as strong as it’s ever been. „
William Kristol
“ COMMENTARY’s writing is predictably engaging and edgy, but its content is anything but homogeneous. Center-right perspectives characterize contributions, but not predictably so. Jewish affairs are thematic, but not always. Controversies of the day are the usual subjects, yet offered only with reflection well apart from the frenzied 24/7 news cycle. Intellectual honesty and analytical rigor characterize COMMENTARY and that is why even its political critics concede that they are still enlightened by the very arguments they often oppose. „
Victor Davis Hanson
“ COMMENTARY is an indispensable read on the Arab Spring, the Afghan war, the future of American conservatism, and all the other crazy stuff out there. But you already knew that. What I really love about it is that it’s a full-service operation, and its back-of-the-book guys—the fellows who write about music, literature, and all the things that make life worth living as the world goes to hell—are the best in the business. There is an observation in a Terry Teachout piece on the wonderful singer Nancy LaMott about “Moon River” that has stayed with me for almost two decades. I fished it out from the back of my mind to impress a gal at a Goldwater Institute reception only the other day, and it worked a treat. So thank you, COMMENTARY! Likewise, my differences with the arts’n’culture crew unsettle me far more than the geopolitical ones: reasonable people can disagree on how large a nuclear arsenal those wacky mullahs should be permitted to own, but I’m still agog at the great Andrew Ferguson’s mystifying praise for the New York Times obituaries page a couple of issues back. That’s COMMENTARY for you—provocative to the end, on matters large and small. In these turbulent and dismaying times, we can all use a huckleberry friend waiting round the bend, in the mailbox each month and on the computer screen every morning. For any journal of opinion, as “Moon River” teaches us, there’s such a lot of world to see. COMMENTARY sees most of it with piercing clarity: it can’t know all the answers, but it asks all the right questions, and with great farsightedness. It deserves your wholehearted support. „
Mark Steyn
“ COMMENTARY has played an invaluable role in American political discourse for decades, offering thoughtful analysis on issues rather than sound bites or bumper stickers. Especially when it comes to U.S. foreign and defense policy, COMMENTARY has time and time again been ahead of the crowd, anticipating trends and developments that others react to only after the fact. I can't imagine not being a COMMENTARY subscriber. „
John Bolton
“ In the midst of today’s political rancor, COMMENTARY Magazine provides a rare venue for thoughtful discussion. COMMENTARY’s talented writers provide insightful analysis of foreign affairs, domestic policy, and the politics of the day. COMMENTARY is a treasure not only for conservatives, but for anyone looking for in-depth exploration of the issues that influence America’s public dialogue and shape the nation’s future. „
Karl Rove
“ It's notorious, and true, that government officials hardly read anything. Memos, sure; nowadays, emails and tweets as well. But magazines? People barely have time to eat lunch or see their kids, so how can an intellectual monthly affect public affairs? The question is a good one. How did COMMENTARY do it? The answer is that officials, like all citizens following American foreign policy, need a way to understand the world around them. When prevailing theories fail, when conventional wisdom is clearly at variance with what they see before their eyes, the outcome for senators and congressmen and White House officials is what the shrinks call cognitive dissonance. They may say one thing but believe another, or simply be unable to square previous beliefs and policies with the clear effects of U.S. conduct. They've lost the ability to explain the world. And then came COMMENTARY, offering month after month of piercing, bracing analysis—and value judgments of right and wrong, and clear writing about American gains and losses. Here was an insistence on looking reality in the face. Here was plain argument, seeking no quarter intellectually and giving none. And it mattered. It shamed some people, and emboldened others; COMMENTARY demanded that we conform policy to the opportunities and dangers that really faced America. In years of confusion and obfuscation, that striking clarity changed policies, and changed American conduct, because it changed the way we understood the world. „
Elliott Abrams
“ For more than 60 years, COMMENTARY has been a go-to source on matters of the greatest importance to our nation and our civilization. Today, its full-throated defense of the United States and freedom is as eloquent as it was a half-century ago, and no less urgent. Issues of the day will change, news cycles come and go, but COMMENTARY remains an indispensable authority in the battle of ideas that help to shape our world. Its continued success is both an indication, and source, of the country’s intellectual health. „
Donald Rumsfeld
“ COMMENTARY is America's most important monthly journal of ideas, period. For nearly seven decades it has published the best and most exciting writing from the most important thinkers: Saul Bellow and Lionel Trilling; Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Jeane Kirkpatrick; Paul Johnson and Ruth Wisse; Cynthia Ozick and—of course—Norman Podhoretz and Midge Decter. Is there anything remotely like it? No. It is the lamp by which America, and Israel, and the Jewish people, may find their way to safety. I'm proud to be published in its pages. „
Bret Stephens
“ Irving Kristol once called COMMENTARY the most influential magazine in Jewish history. Certainly, no publication had a greater influence on me as I evolved from adolescent reader (arguing over its articles with my father and older brother) into a “frequent contributor” who made it my intellectual home. The magazine did not exploit American freedom to escape from civilizing duty but rather activated the intertwined responsibilities of citizens and members of a group. American Jewry can boast of many contributions to the welfare of this country and the Jewish people, but few as fortifying as COMMENTARY. „
Ruth R. Wisse
“ Edward Shils noted that there are four means of education in the modern world: the classroom, bookstores (especially used-bookstores), the conversation of intelligent friends, and intellectual magazines. For me intellectual magazines were more important than any of the other three, and no magazine among them more so than COMMENTARY. I first happened on COMMENTARY as a student browsing in the University of Chicago Bookstore in 1957. I have not missed an issue since. The magazine spoke to my intellectual interests and passions, and still does. As a reader and as a writer, I should be lost without it. „
Joseph Epstein
“ Why does COMMENTARY matter? Since 1945, no other monthly magazine has so consistently published serious, provocative argument and analysis. No other monthly magazine has viewed America and the world through such a wide angle, encompassing economics, politics, society, culture, religion, and diplomacy. No other monthly magazine has published such a celebrated and wide-ranging list of editors and contributors. Cerebral, critical, and committed, the point of view found in its pages is as unique as it is formidable. And in a world of Iranian nukes, rising anti-Semitism, radical Islam, American disarmament, bipartisan neo-isolationism, and disintegrating institutions, reading COMMENTARY is more than a pleasure. It is a necessity. „
Matthew Continetti
“ COMMENTARY has long been an unmissable landmark on the American intellectual landscape. These days it shapes debate, propels argument, and explains society with renewed vigor and force. It is one of the small group of essential reads for anybody engaged in politics, Judaism, foreign policy, national manners, and morals. „
David Brooks
“ Anyone looking for a definitive exposition of a significant historical moment—whether UC Berkeley's Free Speech Movement, say, or the battles over "general education" at Harvard—has at his fingertips an inestimable gift: COMMENTARY's archives, which contain countless gems of reporting and analysis. Today's generation of COMMENTARY writers is building an equally invaluable store of knowledge for future researchers and scholars. „
Heather Mac Donald
“ I first subscribed to COMMENTARY in 1973, as a recovering liberal who had invested four years of my young life in writing speeches for a constellation of McGovernite candidates and office-holders. Living in Berkeley at the time, I relished COMMENTARY as a guilty pleasure, feeling grateful that the magazine arrived each month discreetly disguised in a plain, brown wrapper that concealed its suspiciously neo-conservative content. In the militantly leftist community in which I functioned forty years ago, receiving regular monthly installments of the most degrading porn would have produced far less embarrassment than my growing devotion to the persuasive prose of Norman Podhoretz and Co. Yes, my personal journey from left to right-center involved the usual biographical factors, including the three P’s: paychecks, parenthood, and prayer. Paychecks, because they arrived with shocking subtractions in the form of onerous and incomprehensible taxes; parenthood, because responsibility for a new generation forced a longer-term perspective; and prayer, because my own growing Jewish observance led to the conclusion that my “idealistic” ’60s generation, with all its narcissism and preening self-regard, might not provide life’s ultimate answers after all. Fortunately for me, reading COMMENTARY with near-religious regularity helped to organize my onrushing insights and experience into a more coherent world view. In a dark time in our nation’s history, while surviving (temporarily) in the most unhinged corner of the continent, this incomparable publication persuaded me that I wasn’t alone. „
Michael Medved
“ Just as one begins to despair of hearing the strong voice of sanity and courage, leavened with charm and good humor, in our modern polity, COMMENTARY arrives, and once a month one can be reminded that there are indeed some clear-sighted and articulate people who seem actively to enjoy the battle for truth. „
Andrew Roberts
“ Every month in print, and every day online, COMMENTARY somehow manages to pull off a dazzling balancing act: intellectual but unpretentious, serious but never boring, timely but not fleeting. On the leading questions of the day, it offers fresh and unfamiliar insights. And on the emerging questions that will dominate the years to come, it often sees things first and clearest. It is simply indispensable. „
Yuval Levin
“ In a time of passion, COMMENTARY champions reason. Against lies, COMMENTARY speaks for truth. Confronting those who would doom to death the Jewish people, COMMENTARY is a magnificent continuing achievement of American Jewish life. „
David Frum
“ COMMENTARY has become my new go-to website for news analysis because it is measured, substantive, thoughtful, and written for news consumers of all shapes and sizes. When juggling all the issues of the day and thinking them through, I find myself going back to COMMENTARY again and again to see if there’s anything more that can help me add the ingredients needed to finalize an argument. I like the mix of foreign policy and national political news, as well as the discussions about America’s place in the world and what it should be. I’m a print subscriber and a frequent website visitor, and I follow all of the writers on Twitter. Thank you, COMMENTARY, for providing such consistently helpful content. „
Dana Perino
“ There is more commentary in the world than ever before—whether in print, on the air, or on the Internet. But there is still a dearth of serious, informed commentary that reports, analyzes, and argues without ever stooping to name-calling or vitriol. If you further narrow down the segment of the commentariat that looks at the world from a conservative and Jewish perspective—well, you’re left with only one choice. The magazine you are now reading. COMMENTARY has changed over the years—for instance, it now publishes this blog—but one thing that has not changed is its steadfast commitment to providing the best analysis from the most informed writers of the most important ideas in the world, all written in clear prose that appeals to a general audience. There is nothing else like it. Never has been, never will be. „
Max Boot
Never again miss another issue or article. Not a subscriber yet? Join the intellectual club, today.
Unlock the rest of this article and all other COMMENTARY articles, including our entire archive dating back to 1945, and featuring so many classic, epoch-defining articles by some of the very best minds of the 20th and 21st centuries.
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Atrophied Military Courts Disaster
Max Boot 2016-04-08
When a military chief of staff warns that his forces are at “high risk” of not being able to perform their mission in defense of the nation, it should be big news. General Mark Milley, the Army chief of staff, delivered just such a warning to Congress on Thursday, and yet it received almost no coverage outside the defense industry press.
That’s a big problem. Attention needs to be paid to what General Milley is saying because it’s not hyperbole. “On the ‘high military risk,’ to be clear, we have sufficient capacity and capability and readiness to fight counterinsurgency and counterterrorism,” Milley told the Senate Armed Services Committee. “My military risk refers specifically to what I see as emerging threats and potential for great power conflict and I am specifically talking about the time it takes to execute the task … and the cost in terms of casualties.”
Those “emerging threats” are already here, especially in the form of Russia, which has rebuilt its armed forces and has shown them off in wars in both Ukraine and Syria. “The chief admitted he believes the US military is out-ranged by Russian ground-based, direct- or indirect-fire systems, tanks and artillery,” Defense News noted.
While American airpower can make up some of the difference in ground-based systems, the U.S. Air Force is also far too small to meet all of its commitments. And even if we had more aircraft, they could not compensate for the lack of soldiers and combat-ready units.
Milley noted “that only a third of the Army’s Brigade Combat Teams (BCTs) are ready to deploy and only a couple of those are ready to deploy immediately.” There are also far too few troops to meet existing commitments.
The army is due to drop to 450,000 active duty soldiers along with 335,000 in the National Guard and 195,000 in the Reserves. Actually, unless sequestration is repealed for next year, the army’s active-duty component would fall to just 420,000, which is far below any reasonable red line. And even if sequestration cuts are held off, the army will still be short 220,000 soldiers — including 50,000 active-duty soldiers — of what it needs to meet its commitment, Milley testified.
It would not be cheap to get the army the soldiers it needs; every 10,000 active-duty troops cost $1 billion. But it would be far more costly to not be ready to meet our basic security commitments, from fighting ISIS to deterring Russia. If there is one thing that U.S. history should have taught us, it is the price of unpreparedness. It makes conflict more likely and, when war does come, it makes it more costly especially in casualties early on.
Everyone worth reading avidly reads COMMENTARY. Can you afford not to?
“ In 1975 the Economist said of COMMENTARY: “The world's best magazine?” Take away the question mark and that statement still stands, thirty-eight years later. It's still the magazine America's liberals dread most, and the one America's enemies can't afford to ignore. It's the point of the conservative spear in the never-ending fight against the insanity of the left, whether it's in foreign policy or economic policy, social and cultural issues, or the arts—and no one does a better job standing up for Western culture and America's interests and those of its allies, including Israel. In fact, surviving the next three years—the Obama administration home stretch—and building the foundations for an American resurgence afterward will be impossible without reading COMMENTARY in print and online. „
Arthur Herman
“ There’s an enormous amount of shouting in the wild west of conservative media. That has its place, and is often a sign of the energy on the right. But amidst the cacophony there’s a special need for serious, considered, and compelling argument, presented in the hope of persuading, not just punishing. This is where COMMENTARY has always shined, perhaps more now than ever before. It aims to tackle the best arguments of its intellectual opponents, not just the easiest targets. It’s a journal I’ve read for nearly 30 years and I can’t think of a time when I’ve valued it more. „
Jonah Goldberg
“ For decades, COMMENTARY has opened its pages to the most serious uncompromising defense of the American creed—exemplar of ordered liberty at home, pillar of the free world abroad—in an era when it has been most under attack. From the exceptionally influential manifestoes of Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Jeane Kirkpatrick to today's counterattack against the empowered advocates of the entitlement state and of American decline, COMMENTARY remains what it has been for more than a generation: fearless, informative, indispensable. „
Charles Krauthammer
“ COMMENTARY isn’t just an important magazine. It’s an indispensable one. It’s been indispensable for half a century, and it is today. It’s indispensable for understanding the moment we live in, and it’s indispensable for laying out a path forward. The challenges we confront are great, but COMMENTARY is used to facing grave challenges without fearful cowering or wishful thinking. So we need COMMENTARY today as much as we ever have, and we need it to be as strong as it’s ever been. „
William Kristol
“ COMMENTARY’s writing is predictably engaging and edgy, but its content is anything but homogeneous. Center-right perspectives characterize contributions, but not predictably so. Jewish affairs are thematic, but not always. Controversies of the day are the usual subjects, yet offered only with reflection well apart from the frenzied 24/7 news cycle. Intellectual honesty and analytical rigor characterize COMMENTARY and that is why even its political critics concede that they are still enlightened by the very arguments they often oppose. „
Victor Davis Hanson
“ COMMENTARY is an indispensable read on the Arab Spring, the Afghan war, the future of American conservatism, and all the other crazy stuff out there. But you already knew that. What I really love about it is that it’s a full-service operation, and its back-of-the-book guys—the fellows who write about music, literature, and all the things that make life worth living as the world goes to hell—are the best in the business. There is an observation in a Terry Teachout piece on the wonderful singer Nancy LaMott about “Moon River” that has stayed with me for almost two decades. I fished it out from the back of my mind to impress a gal at a Goldwater Institute reception only the other day, and it worked a treat. So thank you, COMMENTARY! Likewise, my differences with the arts’n’culture crew unsettle me far more than the geopolitical ones: reasonable people can disagree on how large a nuclear arsenal those wacky mullahs should be permitted to own, but I’m still agog at the great Andrew Ferguson’s mystifying praise for the New York Times obituaries page a couple of issues back. That’s COMMENTARY for you—provocative to the end, on matters large and small. In these turbulent and dismaying times, we can all use a huckleberry friend waiting round the bend, in the mailbox each month and on the computer screen every morning. For any journal of opinion, as “Moon River” teaches us, there’s such a lot of world to see. COMMENTARY sees most of it with piercing clarity: it can’t know all the answers, but it asks all the right questions, and with great farsightedness. It deserves your wholehearted support. „
Mark Steyn
“ COMMENTARY has played an invaluable role in American political discourse for decades, offering thoughtful analysis on issues rather than sound bites or bumper stickers. Especially when it comes to U.S. foreign and defense policy, COMMENTARY has time and time again been ahead of the crowd, anticipating trends and developments that others react to only after the fact. I can't imagine not being a COMMENTARY subscriber. „
John Bolton
“ In the midst of today’s political rancor, COMMENTARY Magazine provides a rare venue for thoughtful discussion. COMMENTARY’s talented writers provide insightful analysis of foreign affairs, domestic policy, and the politics of the day. COMMENTARY is a treasure not only for conservatives, but for anyone looking for in-depth exploration of the issues that influence America’s public dialogue and shape the nation’s future. „
Karl Rove
“ It's notorious, and true, that government officials hardly read anything. Memos, sure; nowadays, emails and tweets as well. But magazines? People barely have time to eat lunch or see their kids, so how can an intellectual monthly affect public affairs? The question is a good one. How did COMMENTARY do it? The answer is that officials, like all citizens following American foreign policy, need a way to understand the world around them. When prevailing theories fail, when conventional wisdom is clearly at variance with what they see before their eyes, the outcome for senators and congressmen and White House officials is what the shrinks call cognitive dissonance. They may say one thing but believe another, or simply be unable to square previous beliefs and policies with the clear effects of U.S. conduct. They've lost the ability to explain the world. And then came COMMENTARY, offering month after month of piercing, bracing analysis—and value judgments of right and wrong, and clear writing about American gains and losses. Here was an insistence on looking reality in the face. Here was plain argument, seeking no quarter intellectually and giving none. And it mattered. It shamed some people, and emboldened others; COMMENTARY demanded that we conform policy to the opportunities and dangers that really faced America. In years of confusion and obfuscation, that striking clarity changed policies, and changed American conduct, because it changed the way we understood the world. „
Elliott Abrams
“ For more than 60 years, COMMENTARY has been a go-to source on matters of the greatest importance to our nation and our civilization. Today, its full-throated defense of the United States and freedom is as eloquent as it was a half-century ago, and no less urgent. Issues of the day will change, news cycles come and go, but COMMENTARY remains an indispensable authority in the battle of ideas that help to shape our world. Its continued success is both an indication, and source, of the country’s intellectual health. „
Donald Rumsfeld
“ COMMENTARY is America's most important monthly journal of ideas, period. For nearly seven decades it has published the best and most exciting writing from the most important thinkers: Saul Bellow and Lionel Trilling; Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Jeane Kirkpatrick; Paul Johnson and Ruth Wisse; Cynthia Ozick and—of course—Norman Podhoretz and Midge Decter. Is there anything remotely like it? No. It is the lamp by which America, and Israel, and the Jewish people, may find their way to safety. I'm proud to be published in its pages. „
Bret Stephens
“ Irving Kristol once called COMMENTARY the most influential magazine in Jewish history. Certainly, no publication had a greater influence on me as I evolved from adolescent reader (arguing over its articles with my father and older brother) into a “frequent contributor” who made it my intellectual home. The magazine did not exploit American freedom to escape from civilizing duty but rather activated the intertwined responsibilities of citizens and members of a group. American Jewry can boast of many contributions to the welfare of this country and the Jewish people, but few as fortifying as COMMENTARY. „
Ruth R. Wisse
“ Edward Shils noted that there are four means of education in the modern world: the classroom, bookstores (especially used-bookstores), the conversation of intelligent friends, and intellectual magazines. For me intellectual magazines were more important than any of the other three, and no magazine among them more so than COMMENTARY. I first happened on COMMENTARY as a student browsing in the University of Chicago Bookstore in 1957. I have not missed an issue since. The magazine spoke to my intellectual interests and passions, and still does. As a reader and as a writer, I should be lost without it. „
Joseph Epstein
“ Why does COMMENTARY matter? Since 1945, no other monthly magazine has so consistently published serious, provocative argument and analysis. No other monthly magazine has viewed America and the world through such a wide angle, encompassing economics, politics, society, culture, religion, and diplomacy. No other monthly magazine has published such a celebrated and wide-ranging list of editors and contributors. Cerebral, critical, and committed, the point of view found in its pages is as unique as it is formidable. And in a world of Iranian nukes, rising anti-Semitism, radical Islam, American disarmament, bipartisan neo-isolationism, and disintegrating institutions, reading COMMENTARY is more than a pleasure. It is a necessity. „
Matthew Continetti
“ COMMENTARY has long been an unmissable landmark on the American intellectual landscape. These days it shapes debate, propels argument, and explains society with renewed vigor and force. It is one of the small group of essential reads for anybody engaged in politics, Judaism, foreign policy, national manners, and morals. „
David Brooks
“ Anyone looking for a definitive exposition of a significant historical moment—whether UC Berkeley's Free Speech Movement, say, or the battles over "general education" at Harvard—has at his fingertips an inestimable gift: COMMENTARY's archives, which contain countless gems of reporting and analysis. Today's generation of COMMENTARY writers is building an equally invaluable store of knowledge for future researchers and scholars. „
Heather Mac Donald
“ I first subscribed to COMMENTARY in 1973, as a recovering liberal who had invested four years of my young life in writing speeches for a constellation of McGovernite candidates and office-holders. Living in Berkeley at the time, I relished COMMENTARY as a guilty pleasure, feeling grateful that the magazine arrived each month discreetly disguised in a plain, brown wrapper that concealed its suspiciously neo-conservative content. In the militantly leftist community in which I functioned forty years ago, receiving regular monthly installments of the most degrading porn would have produced far less embarrassment than my growing devotion to the persuasive prose of Norman Podhoretz and Co. Yes, my personal journey from left to right-center involved the usual biographical factors, including the three P’s: paychecks, parenthood, and prayer. Paychecks, because they arrived with shocking subtractions in the form of onerous and incomprehensible taxes; parenthood, because responsibility for a new generation forced a longer-term perspective; and prayer, because my own growing Jewish observance led to the conclusion that my “idealistic” ’60s generation, with all its narcissism and preening self-regard, might not provide life’s ultimate answers after all. Fortunately for me, reading COMMENTARY with near-religious regularity helped to organize my onrushing insights and experience into a more coherent world view. In a dark time in our nation’s history, while surviving (temporarily) in the most unhinged corner of the continent, this incomparable publication persuaded me that I wasn’t alone. „
Michael Medved
“ Just as one begins to despair of hearing the strong voice of sanity and courage, leavened with charm and good humor, in our modern polity, COMMENTARY arrives, and once a month one can be reminded that there are indeed some clear-sighted and articulate people who seem actively to enjoy the battle for truth. „
Andrew Roberts
“ Every month in print, and every day online, COMMENTARY somehow manages to pull off a dazzling balancing act: intellectual but unpretentious, serious but never boring, timely but not fleeting. On the leading questions of the day, it offers fresh and unfamiliar insights. And on the emerging questions that will dominate the years to come, it often sees things first and clearest. It is simply indispensable. „
Yuval Levin
“ In a time of passion, COMMENTARY champions reason. Against lies, COMMENTARY speaks for truth. Confronting those who would doom to death the Jewish people, COMMENTARY is a magnificent continuing achievement of American Jewish life. „
David Frum
“ COMMENTARY has become my new go-to website for news analysis because it is measured, substantive, thoughtful, and written for news consumers of all shapes and sizes. When juggling all the issues of the day and thinking them through, I find myself going back to COMMENTARY again and again to see if there’s anything more that can help me add the ingredients needed to finalize an argument. I like the mix of foreign policy and national political news, as well as the discussions about America’s place in the world and what it should be. I’m a print subscriber and a frequent website visitor, and I follow all of the writers on Twitter. Thank you, COMMENTARY, for providing such consistently helpful content. „
Dana Perino
“ There is more commentary in the world than ever before—whether in print, on the air, or on the Internet. But there is still a dearth of serious, informed commentary that reports, analyzes, and argues without ever stooping to name-calling or vitriol. If you further narrow down the segment of the commentariat that looks at the world from a conservative and Jewish perspective—well, you’re left with only one choice. The magazine you are now reading. COMMENTARY has changed over the years—for instance, it now publishes this blog—but one thing that has not changed is its steadfast commitment to providing the best analysis from the most informed writers of the most important ideas in the world, all written in clear prose that appeals to a general audience. There is nothing else like it. Never has been, never will be. „
Max Boot
Never again miss another issue or article. Not a subscriber yet? Join the intellectual club, today.
Unlock the rest of this article and all other COMMENTARY articles, including our entire archive dating back to 1945, and featuring so many classic, epoch-defining articles by some of the very best minds of the 20th and 21st centuries.
Enjoy every new issue—either in print, on our responsive website, or on our beautiful, hand-crafted iPad edition, enriched with multimedia and other web-exclusive content.
Already a subscriber? Sign in to unlock this article.
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Trump Claims Another Soul
Noah Rothman 2016-04-08
For all the damage that Donald Trump’s candidacy is doing to the Republican Party’s brand, not to mention the fracturing of the conservative coalition that has resulted from the celebrity candidate’s eccentric White House bid, he is performing at least one public service. His remarkable political success as a novice presidential candidate has led those who would give up not merely bedrock conservative principle but even personal integrity for a taste of power to reveal themselves.
If endorsing Trump is a Faustian bargain for his prominent Republican supporters, it is not entirely clear what they get out of the deal. At least the figure of German legend secured every manner of earthly reward in exchange for his soul. For Trump backers, their incalculable sacrifices must be surrendered up front.
Dr. Ben Carson made a career as a man of achievement, studiousness, and unimpeachable character. As an accomplished surgeon, not to mention a man of morality and grace, Carson was a rare thing: a role model for all the right reasons. Today, as a Trump surrogate, Carson is reduced to defending a person who linked his psychological state to that of a “child molester.” He has dismissed Trump’s vacillations on issues like the right to life, shielded from criticism alleged batterer and Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, and even renounced his once unshakable commitment to civil discourse and honesty. “It gets you where it got me,” this broken man confessed, “nowhere.”
Carson is far from the only figure who sacrificed a hard-won legacy for the fleeting beneficence of a reality television star. New Jersey Governor Chris Christie’s displays of self-abasement are truly beyond description. As I wrote at the time, Christie’s early and pivotal endorsement of Trump was an even more dramatic betrayal of conservatism, because he had a record of remarkable achievement as a two-term conservative governor of a deep blue state. Christie successfully restructured public-sector union privileges, reformed legacy debt burdens, and even de-funded Planned Parenthood. He crafted for himself the image of a “straight talker,” particularly on moral and fiscal imperatives like the nation’s underfunded entitlement liabilities. For such paltry trinkets as a brief extension of his time in the limelight and the opportunity to stick it to the younger upstarts within the GOP who wounded his remarkably fragile ego, Christie threw all that work away.
Many other erstwhile conservatives have joined the procession of self-flagellators shuffling behind the real estate heir, but few have been so humbled by their experience as these two. Moreover, few have so deserved their humiliation before now. Their ignominious ranks have just grown by one. The latest to back Trump deserves all the scorn Chris Christie and Ben Carson earned and more, and he seems to know it. Perhaps that is why the former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani divulged his support for Trump with so many provisos, but he is owed none of the indulgences he is requesting.
In an interview on Thursday, America’s Mayor revealed to New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman that he intends to vote for Donald Trump when New York holds its primary on April 19. If that sounds like an endorsement to you, Giuliani would ask your forbearance. He’s not endorsing Trump, per se, but merely declaring his intention to vote for his friend because, in the former mayor’s words, the reality television star is a better presidential prospect than Ted Cruz and a more realistic one than John Kasich.
Giuliani would not outright endorse Trump because he does not believe Trump to be a figure worthy of endorsement. He specifically contended that Trump’s decision to condone the mockery of Heidi Cruz’s physical appearance was untoward. What’s more, Giuliani apparently does not agree with either Trump or Cruz on the issue of immigration—a matter central to Trump’s appeal. Despite all this, the former mayor compared Trump favorably to Ronald Reagan and called the celebrity candidate, who has perhaps irreparably debased American political discourse, a “gentleman.” Here, Giuliani revealed his own capacity for shame; a facility that seems woefully absent in many other Trump endorsers. The former mayor wants to have it both ways. He would like to be seen as supporting Trump without the associated compromises demanded of those who came before him. Specifically, Giuliani would prefer to avoid the Sisyphean torment of having to defend the celebrity candidate’s serial mendacity, his incivility, his fluid principles, or his incoherence on policy matters in public.
There is a special incongruity in former New York City mayor, who famously led the city through one of the worst attacks on American soil, embracing a September 11 conspiracy theorist. As a vehicle for landing a few glancing blows on Jeb Bush, Trump entertained the notion that George W. Bush could have prevented those attacks but, through negligence or something more malevolent (Trump will not elaborate), failed to do so. No less a figure than Richard Clarke, a former Bush administration national security official who became a fierce critic of the 43rd President, dismissed this notion in testimony before the 9/11 Commission. Trump rehabilitated the views of paranoid cranks formerly consigned to the dimly lit basements where they belong. Giuliani, too, has now lent these conspiracy theorists undue credibility.
Perhaps more bizarre than that development is the fact that New York City’s most successful prosecutor of the city’s Mafioso would climb into bed with a man who for years was on the wrong side of that fight. In the 1980s, when Donald Trump was affixing his name in gaudy gold letters to every high-rise he could anchor into Manhattan bedrock, he was also doing business with the mobbed-up concrete industry. In December 2015, Trump admitted he knew his associates in the construction industry were “supposedly associated with the mob.” Trump cultivated business relationships with the confederates of convicted Mafia boss Nicky Scarfo to advance his business interests in Atlantic City. “Trump seemed aware of this,” PolitiFact reported, “calling [investment banker Kenneth] Shapiro ‘a third-rate, local real estate mafia’ and [labor boss Daniel] Sullivan ‘the guy who killed Jimmy Hoffa.’” Felix Sater, a former executive with Trump enterprise partner Bayrock Group, who had known ties to the Bonanno and Genovese crime families, was convicted in 2007 of fraud (after a 1993 conviction for assault with a broken margarita glass). Trump continued to work with Sater even after his criminal associations were revealed.
For Giuliani, the former United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York who famously broke the backs of New York’s “Five Families,” to legitimize Trump is the act of an arsonist.
Many a Republican voter in 2008, including myself, judged Giuliani to be the most competent inheritor of the legacy of George W. Bush. The Giuliani campaign’s Florida first-last-and-only strategy certainly called his political instincts into question, but, for the campaign’s supporters, never was the mayor’s personal integrity in doubt. Until now. The mayor seeks special dispensation from the press and the public for his qualified Trump support, but he does not deserve it.
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