Why America Is Great
Yesterday, today, and tomorrow.
Noah Rothman 2018-08-16
Andrew Cuomo, the governor of New York, told a stunned crowd on Wednesday that the United States of America “was never that great.” He followed that flat-footed line with a series of bromides about how America will “reach greatness” when mankind ceases to stereotype, discriminate, and degrade one another, but the damage was done. Cuomo’s primary opponent, the progressive insurgent and former actress Cynthia Nixon, mocked the governor for failing in the attempt to mimic “what a progressive sounds like.” That is a telling admission. Presumably, Nixon’s idealized “progressive” would more adroitly explain why American greatness is overstated.
You might think that President Donald Trump would take the opportunity presented by Cuomo’s faceplant to wrap himself in the flag, but he opted only to mock the Empire State’s executive for “having a total meltdown.” The president’s instincts are equally revealing. After all, the phrase “Make America Great Again” concedes that America is, at present, not all that great. This is an earnest conviction on Trump’s part.
In accepting the GOP presidential nomination, Trump painted a portrait of a country that was weak and failing. Shackled by political correctness, riddled with violent crime, beset by dangerous migrants and violent refugees, subverted by craven politicians, and plagued by a crisis of confidence in its mission; Trump’s vision of the country was best summed in the most memorable line from his first inaugural address: “American carnage.” Just 19 months later, the president insists that the nation has been made whole again, which is more a function of his competence than the national character.
These two provisory expressions of patriotism share more commonalities than distinctions. Everyone has their own definition of patriotism, and love of country should not be blind. Unwavering reverence is an expression of faith, not gratitude. Patriotism must know prudent limits, or it may come to justify venality and violence. But patriotism is distinct from an understanding of what makes the United States a great and exceptional nation.
American greatness is established in its Constitution. The nation’s founding charter endures because of two conditions that prevailed at the close of the 18th Century. First, the collection of sovereign states that hammered out a national government was careful to premise a prospective Union on decentralization and federalism. That diffusion preserves local social and legal customs and, thus, domestic harmony. Second, the Constitution’s framers operated on the assumptions espoused by the Enlightenment’s leading luminaries, among them Lockean notions of legitimacy derived from the consent of the governed. These two assumptions led James Madison to conclude in Federalist 51 that “the rights of individuals, or of the minority, will be in little danger from interested combinations of the majority” even while “all authority in it will be derived from and dependent on the society.”
It was also in Federalist 51 in which Madison articulated a truth about human nature that has vexed prideful technocrats since the dawn of time: Mankind is flawed. The species cannot be perfected. Thus, “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.” The revolutionary movements that followed America’s founding held this capitulatory revelation in low esteem. They sought to create “ideal” societies in which mankind’s contradictions and baser impulses would dissolve into a new social consciousness. It is no coincidence that those “ideal” revolutionary societies eventually descended into bloodshed, oppression, and disunion while America endured.
The Constitution’s amendments are equally exceptional. With a few lamentable deviations, the amendments are a set of negative rights that proscribe governmental action rather than establish that which the government can do. That is a paradigmatic triumph; it established as America’s baseline ethos the idea that human freedoms not expressly enumerated in the Constitution are implied. They do not flow from the beneficence of some far-off potentate. They are God-granted. The concept of unenumerated rights is as revolutionary today as it was in the 18th century, and it remains an alien notion outside the Anglophonic world.
America is capable of astonishing violence and repression, but it equally adept at reconciliation and renewal. That capacity is rooted in Americans’ remarkable facility for compromise. The story of the United States is, in many ways, a story of compromise, and not all of those compromises are worthy of celebration. The facility Americans have for negotiation and concession has, however, forged a government and kept it. It is what has made the United States the most successful experiment in cultural intermixing in human history. It is what fortifies its incredible capitalist dynamism. And its commerce remains the greatest vehicle for achieving equality, meritocracy, and human flourishing ever devised.
So much of what America’s critics lament about the country’s inherent flaws—its hostility toward collectivism, the ruthlessness of its entrepreneurial spirit, its manic bouts of isolationism and extroversion on the world stage, and the tensions between old and new immigrants—are outgrowths of the traits that make it extraordinary. The nation’s commitment to pluralism, egalitarianism, and unity around shared principles rather than cultural, tribal, or subnational bonds is what makes America unique among nations. It will never stop striving to achieve the ideals of its founding; ideals are, after all, often unattainable. But its shared creed is the North Star toward which the United States has looked for a quarter millennium.
All these things that make America great are hardly immutable traits, and some careless future generation may one day abandon them. But despite America’s weakness for fad and experimentation, those fundamental tenets have proven resistant to change. As Jonah Goldberg observed in Suicide of the West, Thomas Jefferson’s assertion that “all men are created equal” cannot be improved upon. Any effort to amend that claim would be a regression to a more primitive state. That and the many other gifts that the founding generation left behind ensured that the United States was a uniquely magnificent nation on day one. Don’t let any politician tell you otherwise.
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Why America Is Great
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The Rot in the Labour Party
Labour needs more than a makeover.
Sohrab Ahmari 2018-09-04
On Tuesday, Britain’s Labour party adopted the working definition of anti-Semitism that prevails across the civilized world. But don’t break out the champagne and party blowers quite yet. A formal declaration of the kind won’t wash the stain of Jew-hatred left by leader Jeremy Corbyn and his triumphant entourage of keffiyeh-clad cranks and unreconstructed Stalinists.
At issue was the definition of anti-Semitism used by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, or IHRA, and specifically the 11 examples that help clarify that definition: “Accusing the Jews as a people, or Israel as a state, of inventing or exaggerating the Holocaust.” “Using the symbols and images associated with classic antisemitism (e.g., claims of Jews killing Jesus or blood libel) to characterize Israel or Israelis.” “Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.” And so on.
Apparently these propositions are a source of great agony on the British left. The Guardian newspaper said the debate inside the party’s National Executive Committee “overran by several hours.” After two hours, “the meeting broke for tea.” You know things are tense when Britons have to break for tea mid-meeting.
In the end, the committee voted to adopt the definition and all 11 examples, but not before adding its own little addendum: “This does not in any way undermine the freedom of expression on Israel and the rights of Palestinians.” That freedom-of-expression caveat is especially hilarious in Britain, where nothing can quite boost a literary or celebrity career like bashing Israel. Just ask Roger Waters. Or Coldplay. Or Tariq Ali. Or Tilda Swinton…
Still, by the British media’s lights, the final document was an improvement over what Corbyn had in mind. He wanted to add an amendment to the effect that “it should not be considered anti-Semitic to describe Israel, its policies, or the circumstances around its foundation as racist because of their discriminatory impact.” That, of course, would have run afoul of one of the 11 IHRA examples: “Contemporary examples of anti-Semitism … include … claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.”
It’s tempting to cheer Corbyn’s procedural defeat here. And no doubt sighs of relief went out from among the dwindling ranks of British Jews who can still bring themselves to vote for Labour. But the more pertinent and astonishing fact is this: Jeremy Corbyn thinks it is not anti-Semitic to view Israel’s founding as racist. He, the leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition, would deny the right to self-determination to none but the Jewish people.
Who seriously imagines that, having adopted the IHRA definition, the Labour party will now cease to reflect Corbyn’s ideological preferences? This is the same Labour, after all, whose supporters fantasize about “rid[ding] the Jews who are cancer on us all,” whose local councilors use epithets such as “Jew boy,” according to a leaked dossier obtained by the LBC radio station and published the same day as the vote on the IHRA definition.
Some may be tempted to think that the anti-anti-Semitic vote in the executive committee means that body can check the Cobynite fanatics. Except, no. The Daily Mail reported:
The candidate who won the most votes for the Labour party’s ruling National Executive Committee celebrated the Iranian revolution when hardline Ayatollahs took over the country, repressing freedom and human rights…
Yasmine Dar, who was elected top with 88,176 votes, has given speeches at an Islamist celebration of the Iranian revolution in Manchester for three years in a row.
In the most recent, in 2017, she said: ‘We are here for a celebration, a happy time. Thirty-years of the Iranian Islamic revolution. So I’m absolutely happy, it’s the third year I’ve been coming.’
The rot seeps from top to bottom. It’s structural. No self-respecting Briton, Jewish or otherwise, should support this party.
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Stop Begging Trump’s Conservatives to Sacrifice Their Credibility
A duty to posterity, not Twitter.
Noah Rothman 2018-09-04
Despite all the brooding among the anti-Trump left and the pro-Trump right over the existence of the small band of Republicans who continue to criticize the president when he’s wrong, few seem any closer to understanding these conservatives’ motivations. The simplicity of the philosophy that animates these rare types could not possibly elude the cliquish sectarians who act as though it is incomprehensible. More likely, they just find it annoying.
This weekend, the nation was again treated to some familiar pageantry. President Donald Trump took to Twitter to savage his own Justice Department for acting like a Justice Department and not an arm of the Republican National Committee. By indicting two of Trump’s earliest supporters in Congress, Reps. Chris Collins and Duncan Hunter, the president implied, Jeff Sessions had failed to do his job.
With that, the most fascinating dynamic in American politics today was again set into motion as members of Donald Trump’s party in Congress attacked their leader for seeming to subordinate the rule of law to his own insecurities. In an age of intense partisanship in Congress, these acts of defiance are a marvel deserving of intense study. Instead, they’re used as a springboard to launch into rote appeals to conformity.
For example, frequent Trump critics and Republican senators Jeff Flake and Ben Sasse attacked the president for talking about the conduct of justice in America as if he were a criminal. These displays of conscience are, however, dismissed as dishonest by Trump’s malleable defenders and derided as insufficient by his most committed opponents. A more powerful display of hostility toward this president would be, the threadbare logic goes, to oppose Trump’s works—all of them, heedlessly and without consideration for their merit. Anything else is just talk.
At the moment, the most urgent concern among those engaging in this kind of trite emotional manipulation is Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s pending nomination to the Supreme Court. Even some Republicans have joined in with those who insist that the legal cloud hanging over this president robs him of his legitimacy, and his obvious contempt for the rule of law should compel the legislature to limit his authority to shape the judiciary until voters have had a chance to register their satisfaction with the course this White House has taken. This is a political argument, not a point of constitutional order. And as such, lawmakers are obliged to approach the matter as they would any other political consideration.
To take the course urged by Trump’s most unwavering opponents would not only fail to advance the conservative principles to which these senators are devoted, but it would also sacrifice their capacity to influence the direction in which the Republican Party will evolve after Trump’s time in office is over.
Brett Kavanaugh is Donald Trump’s nominee for the Supreme Court, but he is also George W. Bush’s nominee to sit on the District of Columbia Court of Appeals and a former White House staff secretary. He was vouched for by Senator Jon Kyl, whose conservative credentials are disputed by none. The Federalist Society, a grassroots conservative movement dedicated to promoting originalist judges, vetted him, and he was selected for a high court appointment by members of that organization, including outgoing White House Counsel Don McGahn. Contrary to a short-lived conspiracy theory, there is no evidence to suggest that Kavanaugh is prepared to abandon jurisprudence to shield Donald Trump from the legal or political consequences of his actions as president.
If conservatives were to oppose this nominee not on his merits but to communicate some ancillary message to the White House, they would be guilty of betraying principle and shunning their constitutional prerogatives. In the process, they would sacrifice their scant influence within the Republican Party.
This gets to a pervasive misapprehension about what Trump-skeptical Republicans see as their role at this moment in history. Their conduct suggests that they value consistency over raw power, and that consistency is what irritates those whose politics is entirely situational.
How is conservatism advanced if conservatives decide to communicate their frustrations with the president’s antagonistic trade policies by opposing Trump’s decision to locate the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem or to pull out of the entirely symbolic Paris climate accords? Likewise, the Trump administration struck two blows last week for what conservatives would call justice, though not of the “social” variety. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’s extension of the rights of due process to students who are accused of violent sexual crimes and the Justice Department’s decision to join a lawsuit alleging Harvard University engaged in systematic negative racial discrimination against Asian-Americans affirm longstanding conservative principles.
What message would it convey to voters if these conservatives suddenly opposed in practice that which they have long supported in principle only to demonstrate their anxiety over Trump’s Twitter habits? Not one of coherence, that’s for sure. Indeed, it would only impart to observers the inconsistent and even trivial nature of reflexive opposition to all things Trump.
Donald Trump will not be the last American president. Conservatives who bravely irritate the leader of their party and incur the ire of his voters would only undermine their position by being indiscrete. If conservatives were to broaden their opposition toward the president to include the policies they once eagerly supported, what kind of restoration could they possibly hope to lead? By abandoning precision, Trump’s few remaining conservative opponents would only dilute the potency of their criticisms and deaden the nation’s sense of shock when the president engages in truly dangerous behaviors.
If Trump-skeptical conservatives listened to the hectoring of their most aggressive detractors, they’d end up sacrificing their credibility and moral authority. That would suit many of those detractors just fine.
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Condoleeza Rice, Political Science, and Honor
A worthy candidate.
Jonathan Marks 2018-09-04
It’s hard to believe, but the American Political Science Association (APSA) is honoring a figure who defended a war most political scientists consider immoral and disastrous. I don’t know much about it, but I think I read somewhere that this same person once opposed the war. He reversed himself and even became an all-in cheerleader for it, possibly just to escape from the political wilderness. How dare the APSA honor him?
I refer, of course, not to Condoleezza Rice, this year’s recipient of the Hubert H. Humphrey Award. Rather, I refer to Lyndon B. Johnson’s vice president Hubert Humphrey, who went from supporting withdrawal from Vietnam in 1965 to defending the Vietnam War as “a necessary fight against Communism that provided jobs, hope and prosperity to suffering Vietnamese” just one year later. Michael Brenes, who is at work on a book on Humphrey, noted that Humphrey’s own advisers believe their man came around on the war because it was “his only way back into his boss’s good graces.”
Over 130 political scientists, some of them prominent, signed a letter protesting the decision to honor Rice. I don’t begrudge political scientists their right to raise the question of who does and does not deserve to be honored. When students at Princeton questioned how Princeton honors Woodrow Wilson, some conservatives welcomed revisiting what they consider his unmerited good reputation. Any sensible person asked to decide whether Condoleeza Rice deserves an award for “notable public service” would consider whether she has served honorably and well.
Defenders of the Iraq War do not deny that its prosecution included big miscalculations. Many defenders of the war on terror concede that waterboarding and other “enhanced interrogation techniques” are torture. A person who did not think about these things in adjudicating a question of honor might be accused of being frivolous about serious things.
The committee who chose Rice reportedly said that, of course, they considered Rice’s work as National Security Adviser from 2001-2005. But they also considered that “her action and that of her fellow members of the administration was taken in the heat of war, with incomplete information, and with urgent responses needed.” They argue that, to the extent she made mistakes, they are “overmatched by her other services to the country, especially [concerning] the reunification of Germany while serving in the first Bush administration and her promotion of policies of development aid under the second.” The committee also pointed out, as I noted at the outset, that the man after whom the award is named is not without blemish. The protesters have no complaint about honoring him.
If we take honor seriously, we should be judicious about dispensing honors. So, one need not accept the committee’s decision. It is possible to argue that some things, including torture, are indefensible. At the same time, if there is a duty to be judicious about the question of honor, there should be no special dispensation awarded.
During the Wilson controversy, political scientist Corey Robin proposed that Princeton rename the Woodrow Wilson School of Public Policy after W.E.B. DuBois., a renowned social scientist and a co-founder of the N.A.A.C.P. Yet, as Robin knew but chose not to discuss, DuBois hung on to his support for Josef Stalin after Stalin’s crimes were evident and after most on the left had abandoned him. I wrote that, if we want to take honor seriously we must not “substitute for one set of criteria for honoring public figures, perhaps not very thoughtful, another, about equally thoughtless, set of criteria.”
I doubt that very many of the signatories of the protest letter have examined Rice’s record as closely as the committee did. Some of them presumably read about her record somewhere, as I did about Humphrey’s. Their denunciation of “the deliberate and systematic lies that were told to the American public to encourage their support for the invasion of Iraq,” as well as their dismissal of the committee’s recognition of the circumstances under which decision makers operate, suggest that they subscribe to a bumper sticker “Bush lied. People died” view of the war. Moreover, they dismiss all discussions of Humphrey’s own record as “what-about-ism.”
But they’re wrong. The protesters do not just demand the rescinding of Condoleezza Rice’s award. They themselves concede that they are asserting a general principle to guide future committees and “screen out those who have participated in policies that have had the consequence of the systematic violation of the human rights of others.” To ask whether Humphrey and others, like George Washington, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Barack Obama, or Hillary Clinton could survive such a screen is not “what-about-ism.” It’s a test of the principle.
Those who declare that such a test is beside the point run the risk of seeming to be motivated by zealotry, rather than by thoughtfulness about honor.
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PODCAST: Minority Blues
Podcast: Demographic changes and good Trump.
John Podhoretz 2018-08-30A pre-Labor Day podcast finds us ready to march on the universities! You will have to listen to the end to find out why, after you hear us opine on the question of whether political scientists and the Census Bureau are falsely making Americans believe the country is becoming a majority-minority nation. Give a listen.
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Silicon Valley Is Right to Worry About Its Liberal Bias
The backlash is coming.
Noah Rothman 2018-08-30
In his now infamous internal memo, the software engineer James Damore wrote about “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber.” The document alleged that the number of women in the tech sector was disproportionate to the number of men because of individual life choices and not, as was the consensus opinion, pervasive misogyny. The memo was deemed an “anti-diversity” rant by Fortune, Vox.com, CNN, Business Insider, CNBC, and NBC News, among others, and resulted in Damore’s termination. The memo’s central claim, however, that “the overwhelming majority of the social sciences, media, and Google lean left” ignited no controversy.
In the intervening months, some of social media’s most prominent personalities confirmed Damore’s observation about the prevailing political culture in the tech sector. “Facebook and the tech industry are located in Silicon Valley, which is an extremely left-leaning place,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg confessed before members of Congress. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey agreed. “We need to constantly show that we are not adding our own bias, which I fully admit is more left-leaning,” he told CNN’s Brian Stelter. Though both social-media magnates insisted that their firms did not regulate content based on ideological considerations, the record suggests otherwise.
This week, a post on Facebook’s internal message board caught fire. “We Have a Problem with Political Diversity” blared a headline echoing the sentiments expressed by James Damore. “We are a political monoculture that’s intolerant of different views,” the item flatly declared. “We claim to welcome all perspectives but are quick to attack—often in mobs—anyone who presents a view that appears to be in opposition to left-leaning ideology.” This call to action resulted in the formation of a group of more than 100 Facebook employees dedicated to challenging what they see as their employer’s ideological homogeneity and political intolerance.
None of this is happening in a vacuum. It’s a response to the perceptible tension between these emerging media giants and the public. As information technology providers become more integrated into American’s lives, and social media demonstrates a disproportionate capacity to influence the national political dialogue, familiar patterns are emerging. Just as conservatives saw the political biases dominant in Hollywood’s social culture reflected in the film and television products they produced, politically active Republicans are beginning to gain a sense of their political isolation from the digital world. This is not a fringe phenomenon either.
A July Pew Research Center survey found that 72 percent of all Americans believe it is either “somewhat” or “very likely” that social-media companies “censor political viewpoints they find objectionable,” including 85 percent of Republican or Republican-leaning respondents. Forty-three percent of people Pew polled think major tech firms support the views of liberals over those of conservatives—a view shared by a surprising 28 percent of self-described Democratic respondents.
Those who believe that liberal political bias is pervasive in the tech industry are not without evidence to support their claim. In late July, VICE News reported that Twitter’s drop-down search function excluded the profiles of prominent Republicans, including Representatives Jim Jordan, Mark Meadows, and Matt Gaetz, as well as RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel. Activists alleged that the invisibility of these accounts amounted to a “shadow ban,” a practice in which Twitter insisted they did not engage. The social-media company did, however, admit that their efforts to “address bad-faith actors who intend to manipulate or distract from healthy conversation” may have been overbroad, and they had resolved the “shadow-ban” issue with some minor tweaks to the algorithm that filters users who engage in “troll-like behaviors.”
This past May, several former “news curators” who worked in Facebook’s news division confessed to Gizmodo that they were instructed to “inject” stories into the website’s trending news section even if these stories were not popular enough to merit the attention. “Stories covered by conservative outlets (like Breitbart, Washington Examiner, and Newsmax) that were trending enough to be picked up by Facebook’s algorithm were excluded unless mainstream sites like the New York Times, the BBC, and CNN covered the same stories,” the report read. “It was absolutely bias,” one former curator acknowledged. “We were doing it subjectively.”
As is his habit, President Donald Trump recently issued the worst possible restatement of the right’s grievance against the arbiters of news value in Silicon Valley. Somehow, the president became convinced on Tuesday that Google was actively censoring results for “Trump News” so that the search’s returns would reflect poorly on him and his administration. This wild assertion from the president of the United States, the most written-about person on the planet, compelled members of his administration to imply that they were seriously investigating potential remedies to address the alleged bias.
At best, this is kooky nonsense, which is cold comfort considering its author commands America’s nuclear arsenal. At worst, it is an effort by the executive branch to threaten a private media entity with consequences if it does not actively promote favorable coverage of the federal government. That’s un-American, and it’s not harmless. Google’s willingness to accommodate China’s censorious demands shows how morally malleable the company can be when confronted by the powerful.
It is, however, true that fringe “news” sites on the right and the left are not treated equally by Google’s automated search functions. The Resurgent’s Erick Erickson postulates that right-leaning news sites caught up in quality filters only have themselves to blame. “The reality is that progressives and left-leaning news outfits tend to build better sites,” he wrote. “They do more customization and put more thought and energy into unique sites. They use less tracking and scripts. So progressive sites play better in Google.” Further, there are compelling arguments for taking down irresponsible content from Google-owned platforms such as YouTube. Given the defamation cases proceeding against these incendiary voices, hosting this content amounts to a terms-of-service violation and may even invite legal exposure.
Conservatives with an interest in maintaining their credibility would do well to internalize these criticisms. In a marketplace that rewards attention in whatever form it takes, being notorious is good for the bottom line. And yet, the tech industry’s public-relations crisis is neither a figment of conservative imaginations nor due comeuppance. What’s more, a broad perception of industry-wide anti-conservative prejudice could generate a significant backlash.
Marveling over the internal dissent against Facebook’s political culture, Georgetown University Law Professor Randy Barnett observed that the mounting opposition “sounds like how the Federalist Society got started in law schools.” That once humble organization is currently shifting the nation’s judiciary toward the right and will leave a mark that persists for a generation or more. Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg are right to be worried.
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