The ISIS Campaign: More of the Same?
The ISIS campaign needs a new strategy. Is Trump pursuing one?
Max Boot 2017-03-06
During the presidential campaign, Donald Trump was bitterly critical of the Iraqi and U.S. governments for announcing an offensive against Mosul in advance. In a presidential debate, he said, “Whatever happened to the element of surprise, OK? … Douglas MacArthur, George Patton [are] spinning in their graves when they see the stupidity of our country.”
So now that Trump is president, it stands to reason that the Iraqi government has ceased announcing offensives in advance, right? Actually, on February 19, Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi told the entire world that Iraqi forces, having liberated east Mosul, were about to attack west Mosul. There was not a peep of protest from the White House.
This is a small sign of the fact that, rhetoric and bluster aside, there is a lot more continuity than change in the anti-ISIS campaign. In fact, almost nothing has changed on the battlegrounds in Syria and Iraq since Trump became president. U.S. advisers are now allowed closer to the front lines but this was a decision made by President Obama before he left office.
And what of Trump’s promise to come up with a new plan to “crush and destroy” ISIS as a step on the road toward his pledge to “eradicate… Radical Islamic Terrorism… completely from face of the Earth”? Secretary of Defense James Mattis has now submitted a plan with a range of options to accelerate the campaign against ISIS. But judging from this Washington Post report, it will be largely more of the same:
A Pentagon plan for the coming assault on Raqqa, the Islamic State capital in Syria, calls for significant U.S. military participation, including increased Special Operations forces, attack helicopters and artillery, and arms supplies to the main Syrian Kurdish and Arab fighting force on the ground, according to U.S. officials…
Officials involved in the planning have proposed lifting a cap on the size of the U.S. military contingent in Syria, currently numbering about 500 Special Operations trainers and advisers to the combined Syrian Democratic Forces, or SDF. While the Americans would not be directly involved in ground combat, the proposal would allow them to work closer to the front line and would delegate more decision-making authority down the military line from Washington.
The proposal to lift the cap on the number of U.S. “boots on the ground” is a welcome move. Such hard-and-fast troop caps were, along with the arbitrary deadlines on troop deployments that accompanied them, one of the most noxious tics of the Obama administration when it came to the use of force. Also welcome is the move to delegate more authority downward, reducing the number of decisions that must be made by the president personally. But this is hardly a radical shift. The U.S. role in the coming Raqqa offensive (also announced in advance!) appears to be similar to the one in Mosul, with U.S. troops serving as advisers and providing artillery and air strikes but not leading the offensive themselves.
The most important role for U.S. forces in northern Syria may be to act as a buffer between America’s Kurdish allies–the YPG–and our Turkish allies, who are more determined to fight the Kurds than ISIS. So far there is no sign of any alliance with Russia in Syria of the kind that Trump talked up endlessly during the campaign, no doubt because his military advisers realize that Russia’s goals do not align with America’s. Putin is not fighting ISIS; he is fighting to keep the Iranian-backed Bashar Assad regime in power.
There’s a good reason why Trump is unlikely to radically change the Obama blueprint for battling ISIS. Although Obama took far too long to mobilize against this threat, his team did belatedly implement a strategy that is showing significant signs of success in Mosul and beyond. That relieves Trump of having to make any hard decisions that would thrust U.S. ground troops into another major war. In this case, the hard decisions will come not in defeating ISIS but in dealing with the aftermath.
General Joe Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has already begun to talk about the need for the U.S. to make a “long-term” commitment to Iraqi security. Indeed, the only way to prevent ISIS or another Sunni terrorist group from rising again in Iraq is for the U.S. to learn the lesson of 2011. When Obama foolishly pulled all U.S. troops out of Iraq, he created a security vacuum that was filled by both Shiite and Sunni extremists. A continued U.S. military presence in Iraq is not a guarantee of stability. By giving assurances to the Sunni minority that they will not once again have their rights trampled by Iranian-backed Shiite sectarians in Baghdad, though, it does increase the odds.
But such a mission would involve the U.S. in precisely the kind of long-term intervention overseas that Trump denounced during the campaign. “If I become president, the era of nation building will be brought to a very swift and decisive end,” he vowed in August. Before long we will find out which imperative is more important to Trump—to defeat ISIS or to avoid nation-building? If the U.S. shies away from the latter, it won’t be able to achieve the former.
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The ISIS Campaign: More of the Same?
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Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistical Deficits
The other last refuge.
JOHN STEELE GORDON 2018-04-17
Someone in the 19th century (Mark Twain attributed it to Benjamin Disraeli, but that’s dubious) said that there are three forms of lying: lies, damned lies, and statistics. If you would like a beautiful example of the last category of mendacity, check out David Leonhardt’s April 15th column in the New York Times, entitled (try not to laugh) “The Democrats Are the Party of Fiscal Responsibility.”
In it, he compared the deficits run up by each Democratic and Republican administration from Jimmy Carter on to the present with the GDP of that time. Precisely how he did this is anything but clear. Is he, perhaps, confusing the debt with the deficit? For instance, he has the ratio for George H. W. Bush’s term as 0.4 percentage points. But the total deficits in those years were $932 billion and the total GDP was $23.9 trillion. That’s 3.8 percentage points. And how the national debt could double in eight unprosperous years under Obama while the “change in deficit, in percentage points of GDP” went down 0.1 percent is totally mystifying
Thus, Leonhardt committed the cardinal sin of statistics: using obscure methodology, which is the way people lie with statistics—presuming they are not just making the numbers up.
Whatever his methodology, Leonhardt was comparing apples and oranges. For instance, he ignores such factors as the raging inflation of the Carter years, when income tax brackets were not adjusted for inflation, pushing people into higher and higher brackets when their real income had not increased at all (This, of course, was one of the reasons why Carter carried fewer states in 1980 than Herbert Hoover won in 1932).
Leonhardt implicitly ascribed to the president the power to shape the budget and, thus, the deficit. But presidents have been effectively bit players when it comes to federal spending levels since the wildly misnamed Budget Control Act of 1974. It was not Bill Clinton who slew the deficit dragon in the 1990’s but the Congress, which the public transferred to Republican control in 1994 for the first time in 40 years following an outcry over Democratic profligacy. The Republican Congress increased spending by a mere 18 percent between 1995 and 2000, while the roaring economy increased tax revenues by 51 percent.
Nor did Leonhardt take into account the phony accounting the federal government uses to obscure reality. Officially, we ran surpluses (meaning, by definition, that income exceeded outgo) in 1998, 1999, 2000, and 2001. But the national debt went up, not down, in each of those four years.
Nor did he take into account the fact that recessions cause government spending to go up and government revenues to go down—something quite beyond the control of Congress or the President. The brutal recession of the early 1980’s (when unemployment reached 10.8 percent), for instance, skewed Reagan’s numbers while Carter’s four years were largely recession-free.
There’s plenty of blame for both parties, of course. As Jesse Unruh famously said, “Money is the mother’s milk of politics.” But in the last forty years, the only time the federal government made a serious, sustained effort to rein in the deficit was when a Republican Congress was writing the checks.
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Eating Their Own
A frontal assault on soft targets.
Noah Rothman 2018-04-17
The ubiquitous coffeehouse chain Starbucks is at the center of a scandal—the familiar kind fueled by new media’s obsessive litigation of grievances that have a perceived societal dimension. This one occurred in Philadelphia where two young black men were humiliated and led out of the café in handcuffs by police. They were accused of trespassing and declined to leave when asked, saying that they were merely waiting for a friend. The story of the incident went viral, and it became a scandal—justifiably so. The decision to prosecute this episode of harmless loitering is suspicious, and the insult these men suffered deserves redress. Asking whether racial bias was a factor here is a perfectly valid question, and that deserved to be investigated. But that’s not what has happened.
Within 24 hours of this incident, the store’s manager had issued a formal apology. So, too, did the corporation. Twenty-four hours after that, that supervisor resigned. If there was an investigation here, it was a quick one. The store itself soon became the site of protests. “Anti-blackness anywhere is anti-blackness everywhere,” one protester chanted. “We don’t want this Starbucks to make any money today,” another demonstrator told reporters. By 1 p.m., the protesters had achieved their aim; the store was forced to close for the day.
It wasn’t long before this incident involving one Starbucks location and three people came to be seen as a reflection of this sprawling multinational company and the United States as a whole. Rosalind Brewer, Starbucks COO and a young African-American woman, called the incident a “teachable moment for all of us” and recommended “unconscious-bias” training for every Starbucks staffer. Starbucks CEO Kevin Johnson joined ABC’s “Good Morning America” to personally apologize to the men involved in this incident when protesters interrupted his appearance. “A whole lot of racism, a whole lot of crap, Starbucks coffee is anti-black,” they chanted. You can’t blame these demonstrators for noticing that the terms of engagement had broadened significantly.
Who knows? Maybe there is a culture of implicit racial bias at Starbucks. On Monday, as protesters were shutting down this Philadelphia-based branch, another Starbucks location in Los Angeles was also being accused of racial bias. In January, a white non-customer at that location managed to finagle a bathroom entry code out of a barista when a black non-customer could not. Maybe these two incidents—separated by almost four months and 3,000 miles—are related. Maybe it was wise for national news media and the chain’s protesters to skip right past personal agency and permissive local cultures to assume this is a reflection on all 13,900-plus U.S. Starbucks locations, to say nothing of the society in which they are situated. After all, that’s precisely what the chain’s executives did. In fact, the Starbucks C-suite’s willingness to lend credence to the accusation that their company was rotten with pervasive racial prejudice likely fueled the pushback that the chain received from social-justice activists.
Starbucks is one of an increasing number of firms that wears its liberal politics on its aprons. A few years back, its baristas were encouraged to write “race together” on their customer’s cups explicitly to encourage discomfiting racial dialogue in their stores. It has aggressively promoted same-sex marriage on its products and has financially backed Planned Parenthood. In response to President Donald Trump’s “travel ban,” Starbucks dedicated itself to hiring at least 10,000 refugees. The company’s increasingly impatient shareholders have routinely questioned the value of alienating socially conservative coffee-drinkers, but now it seems time to question whether its affinity for the left is yielding diminishing returns even among its allies. It is difficult to avoid concluding that the scope of these protests is augmented by the fact that, for the social justice left, Starbucks is a soft target.
Starbucks isn’t the only progressive ally that has received no special dispensation for being “woke.” A Washington Post report on Tuesday illustrates the Starbucks phenomenon with a dispatch from a liberal church dedicated to racial justice and economic egalitarianism that has come under fire from its confederates. According to the Post, the racial conflict at the 1,100-member All Souls Unitarian Church in Washington D.C. is indicative of a number of racial conflicts that the Unitarian Universalist Association has helped resolve in the last year.
The scandal involves the resignation of an African-American reverend who alleged that she was passed over for career advancement and judged more harshly than her white counterpart behind the pulpit (who, by the way, claims to have dedicated his career to the promotion of social justice). She even alleged that the congregants of this racially conscious church were themselves subtly racist because of the “micro-aggressions” she endured. Specifically, that effrontery was evinced by the number of church-goers who referred to her by her first name rather than her title. Maybe all these men and women of faith were subtly racist; maybe they were just friendly. In either case, this particular community’s predisposition to treat even dubious allegations of racial bias seriously will ensure that this grievance is resolved to the complainant’s satisfaction.
It is easy to see why this kind of activism is more satisfying than, say, going on about Chick-Fil-A’s Christian values. Despite a six-year-long liberal campaign dedicated to educating the public on the deliciousness of its products, the benefits and time off afforded its employees, and franchising opportunities in underserved urban markets, this chain just keeps on expanding. Imagine that. Routinely rebuffed assaults on a fortified position are exhausting. They are nowhere near as rewarding as a direct attack on a receptive target that yields a quick and gratifying victory. That explains why social justice activists are increasingly focused on exacting concessions from like minds: young adult novelists, liberal filmmakers, Hollywood executives, painters, restauranteurs, university professors and administrators, socially conscious corporations, and the left-of-center politicians who have folded these activists into their core constituencies.
These intramural feuds are transforming the progressive movement from within, but it’s not clear that the social-justice movement has secured anything other than the illusion of efficacy.
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A Liberal Democracy—Or a Militant One?
The totalitarians’ arguments always end up in the same place
Kevin Williamson 2018-04-16
The great shortcoming of democracy is and always has been the demos. John Adams, like many of the Founding Fathers, abhorred the very idea of democracy, precisely because it provided the means to amplify and weaponize the demos and its vices: “It is in vain to say that democracy is less vain, less proud, less selfish, less ambitious, or less avaricious than aristocracy or monarchy,” he wrote in a famous passage. “It is not true, in fact, and nowhere appears in history. Those passions are the same in all men, under all forms of simple government, and when unchecked, produce the same effects of fraud, violence, and cruelty.” Conservatives of the more pointy-headed variety enjoy taking any occasion to tut-tut loose talk of “democracy,” insisting on “republic.” They may be pedantic on the point, but there is a point: What’s most valuable about the American constitutional order isn’t universal suffrage (a relatively recent innovation for us Americans, though it’s worth appreciating that some Swiss women were not enfranchised until 1990) or regular elections—what’s most valuable is in fact all that great anti-Democratic stuff cooked up by James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, and George Mason and sundry Anti-Federalists: a tripartite government with a further subdivided legislative branch in which unelected senators (oh, happy days!) had the power to frustrate the passions of the more democratic House; a Bill of Rights depriving the demos of the right to vote at all on certain fundamental questions such as freedom of speech and of religion; a Supreme Court empowered to use the law as a cudgel to beat back democratic assaults on liberty and citizenship; the hated filibuster; the holy veto; advice and consent.
The dread of illiberal democracy goes back at least to Polybius and his ochlocracy, and, though he did not use the word, to Plato before him. It was very much on the minds of the American founders and those of later liberal thinkers such as Karl Popper. That democracy might grow abusive and tyrannical in service to popular passions—to “the violence of faction,” as Madison called it—is a very old idea. But a curious version of that concern began to emerge in the early 20th century, most famously articulated by the German political theorist Karl Loewenstein in his “Militant Democracy and Fundamental Rights,” published in the American Political Science Review in 1937. In surveying the European politics of his time, Loewenstein identified a number of remarkably similar totalitarian movements, some of them asserting their fascism and some of them formally opposed to the self-proclaimed fascist parties of their time, the latter a case of ote-toi de la, que je m’y mette, Loewenstein thought. Loewenstein understood fascism not as an ideology but as a method, one that exploited nationalism and newly available forms of media to achieve “a supersession of constitutional government by emotional government.” The parallel with our own time need not be belabored, but Loewenstein is very much worth reading today: “The technical devices for mobilizing emotionalism are ingenious and of amazing variety and efficacy, although recently become more and more standardized,” he wrote.” Among them, besides high-pitched nationalist enthusiasm, the most important expedient, perhaps, is permanent psychic coercion, at times amounting to intimidation and terrorization scientifically applied.”
Fascism, Loewenstein argued, wasn’t about nation, race, corporatist economics, or indeed any positive political agenda at all. “If fascism is not a spiritual flame shooting across the borders,” he wrote, “it is obviously only a technique for gaining and holding power, for the sake of power alone, without that metaphysical justification which can be derived from absolute values only.” Democracies, with their sense of toleration, fair play, equal treatment, liberal access to the political system, and open elections, were in Loewenstein’s view lamentably vulnerable to fascism. His program was to counteract autocratic movements with autocratic means such as prohibiting certain political parties, repressing their political communications, and limiting their participation in the political process in order to prevent them from using campaigns for propaganda purposes. “Democracies withstood the ordeal of the World War much better than did autocratic states—by adopting autocratic methods,” he wrote. “Few seriously objected to the temporary suspension of constitutional principles for the sake of national self-defense. During the war, observes LéonBlum, legality takes a vacation.” An exile in the United States, he named this model of defending liberal democracy with illiberal and undemocratic methods “militant democracy.” Translated into German, streitbare Demokratie is today an important constitutional principle of German government. It forms the philosophical and legal basis for prohibiting neo-Nazi literature and prosecuting extreme nationalists for acts that would ordinarily be unremarkable and unobjectionable parts of democratic discourse, such as holding rallies and giving speeches.
Until quite recently, it would have been unthinkable for the United States to set aside the First Amendment and allow for the suppression of unpopular political speech and the criminal prosecution of the speakers. Americans might have understood why the Germans do things the way they do, and sympathize—and they might even have thought that this was the proper model for the Germans, given their history—but the United States has never experienced a great need for streitbare Demokratie, because the American freiheitlich-demokratische Grundordnung has been robustly defended by other means. Some of those fortifications are structural and constitutional: The limited powers of the federal government and the division of those powers limits autocratic ambitions of all ideological stripes. Some of those fortifications are cultural: George Lincoln Rockwell and Richard Spencer are greeted as amusements, not revolutionaries—grotesques, not messiahs. Every American has a little Puritan in his soul, and the ostentation of fascism historically has achieved very little purchase among us.
Loewenstein did not believe himself to be an advocate of illiberalism or autocracy in an authentic and meaningful way, because what he understood his “militant democracy” as being used to suppress was not a political belief but a political technique. One hears echoes of his idea in the arguments of modern advocates of “campaign finance reform,” the very nice way we talk about suppressing and regulating political speech coming from unapproved parties at unapproved times or in unapproved contexts. They insist that they are not trying to control speech but to control the influence of money on politics—as though it did not cost a great deal of money to publish the New York Times, which exists at least partly for the purpose of influencing politics. (As, indeed, do all newspapers.) But Loewenstein’s idea is ultimately totalitarian (and the world did not and does not need yet another totalitarian ideology of German origin) as is the program of the campaign-finance reformers—as indeed is the program of those who would through legal action or through extralegal violence prohibit Charles Murray from giving a speech on a college campus, those who would ban dissident sermons about gay marriage or the wanton use of unapproved pronouns as “hate speech,” those who advocate the arrest and suppression of activists and scholars with unpopular views about climate change, presidents who threaten to sic the federal regulators on media critics and left-leaning technology companies, mayors who would use the powers of government against nonconformist evangelical chicken-sandwich merchants . . .
The totalitarians’ arguments always end up in the same place: militant democracy. If Ben Shapiro is permitted to speak on a college campus, the argument goes, then the gas chambers can only be a few days away. Well. I would like to go back to Loewenstein’s time—1937—and inform that gentleman, a German Jew in exile, that in anno Domini 2018, the great threats to American democracy are a mild-mannered Orthodox Jew with a newspaper column, a histrionic Kentish homosexual with a book to peddle, and one or two nice blonde ladies from Connecticut. I do not think he would believe that. Neither do I. And, for all the stupidity of our current moment in history, the United States today is not very much like Weimar Germany.
(It remains wise to study the European experience, which you can do if you are in Washington on Wednesday, April 18. The Cato Institute will be hosting the Danish lawyer and social critic Jacob Mchangama at noon in the Hayek Auditorium. Mchangama has done a great deal of work illuminating the idea of “militant democracy” in Europe and its ramifications for free speech in the United States.)
“Militant democracy” is meant to address the purported inability of democracies to contain fascism; a more immediately pressing question is whether liberalism can contain democracy—it is mass democracy itself, not jackbooted stormtroopers, that poses the most dangerous threat to freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, property rights, and other fundamentals of citizenship. It is the democratic mob, not an autocratic elite, that demands conformity in life and thought and speech, and brooks no dissent. Donald Trump’s worst autocratic tendencies are a product of the same kind of hysteria—that very same “supersession of constitutional government by emotional government”—as is the garment-rending and teeth-gnashing that greets Ann Coulter every time she feels the need to step out in public and top up her bank accounts. It isn’t only Trump’s crowds chanting “Lock her up!”
This is not a dystopian possibility at some unhappy future date but the facts of the case today. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has called for prosecuting Charles and David Koch as traitors and war criminals for their political activities. And it’s not just loose talk and heated rhetoric: The Competitive Enterprise Institute, a free-market think tank, was subjected to subpoenas (including demands for information about its donors) because the nation’s Democratic attorneys general don’t like what its former patron Exxon has had to say about global warming in the past. ExxonMobil remains under investigation for its activism and advocacy on climate change. As attorney general of California, Kamala Harris illegally demanded donor lists from conservative nonprofits for the obvious purpose of subjecting them to political bullying. The IRS harassment of Tea Party groups and the National Organization for Marriage is not a hypothetical—it is history.
The regnant political assumptions of the moment call to mind the worst of the Wilson era, when the risible “fire in a crowded theater” standard was invented as a fig leaf for imprisoning peace activists and draft protesters (and, as in the Baltzer case, those who organized petitions criticizing incumbent politicians), while the cultural currents of the time are pure Red Scare (minus the Reds, who were, alas, all too real). The rough beast, its hour come at last, slouching toward Washington to be born is a democracy a good deal worse than merely militant—it is vicious, merciless, and total.
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Ideas in Exile
But not forever.
Noah Rothman 2018-04-16
The occasion of House Speaker Paul Ryan’s retirement from Congress at the end of this term has spawned a variety of premature conclusions about the evolutionary trajectory of the Republican Party. The most common are those that contend this is only the latest sign that Ryan’s ideology—a small-government ethos espoused by modest public servants—is dead; this is Donald Trump’s party now. Well, that’s no earth-shattering revelation. The power of the presidency is such that both parties inevitably become reflections of their most prominent elected officials. Perhaps all GOP resistance to Trump and Trumpism has finally been stamped out, but you wouldn’t be able to reach that conclusion from listening to Ryan’s exit interviews. For anyone who isn’t invested in ushering Paul Ryan’s vision into an early grave, the Speaker has made it clear that the ideological confrontations between Trump’s allies and conventional conservatives are far from over.
“I can’t speak to that,” Ryan told NBC’s “Meet the Press” host Chuck Todd on Sunday when he was asked if he shares the president’s vision for the future of the GOP. Ryan sought to highlight the policy areas in which the pre-Trump GOP was united with the post-Trump GOP, but he was not unwilling to draw distinctions. “It’s a big-tent party, and we represent different corners of the tent.”
At face value, this would seem like a live-and-let-live view of how Republican officials should operate going forward. And yet, there are at least some ideational inclinations that Ryan would not countenance. Todd noted that Ryan and some of his retiring Republican colleagues, including Trump-skeptical officeholders like Sens. Jeff Flake and Bob Corker, declined to treat their Democratic opponents like “the enemy.” Without correcting him, Ryan launched into an assault on what he seemed to perceived Todd to be describing: identity politics.
“Do not fall for identity politics,” Ryan said. “Identity politics was, I think, a craft of the left for a while. . . but it’s now a practice on the right.” The outgoing speaker attacked the tactical political considerations that lead polemicists on both sides of the aisle to “exploit divisions between people,” and those divisive effects are being amplified by new mass-communication technologies such as social media. “No, I don’t think identity politics is right,” he closed. “Unfortunately, it’s been proven to work here and there, but I don’t think it’s the right way to go and I think it’s something that we all as Americans need to confront.”
This attack on the practice of identity politics by both parties is an expression of a long-standing conservative critique of Donald Trump’s political style. Conservatives with wildly divergent opinions about how Donald Trump has handled himself in office were not shy about calling out Trump’s identity-obsessed campaign for what it was. By stoking American fears about foreign labor stealing jobs, foreign competitors rendering them obsolete, foreign hordes itching to infiltrate the United States with murderous designs, and the personal hatred for the “forgotten man” espoused by the domestic political opposition, Trump wasn’t running on a platform as much as an affectation.
Trump would surely like to revive the New New Nationalism for his 2020 bid, but that is the kind of campaign only a non-incumbent can successfully run. Identifying select groups who have been underserved by government and transforming them into righteous and aggrieved victims deserving of recompense is harder to pull off when you’re the representative of that government. Moreover, Republicans seeking to contrast themselves with their Democratic opponents will find a stark and simple point to be made in focusing on Democrats’ preoccupation with American tribes.
The Democratic Party’s grassroots energy is derived from groups that cannot divorce themselves from toxic figures like the cop-killer Assata Shakur and the anti-Semite Louis Farrakhan for fear of alienating potential allies. It’s the party that cannot express unqualified support for local police without appending a caveat about the legitimacy of the Black Lives Matter movement. This is a party that cannot debate issues such as access to housing, economic adversity, or energy policy without auditing the relative impact of those policies by demographic group. Republicans will be naturally inclined to highlight this divisive absurdity. That incentive may naturally render Donald Trump’s appeals to identity politics an aberration. Even if Trump remains committed to his 2016 themes, though, these conditions will ensure that many more aspiring Paul Ryans will one day follow in his footsteps.
What’s more, the idea that Ryan or small government conservatism has no constituency is an aspiration, not analysis. The most recent survey of GOP voters (from late December via SSRS, sponsored by CNN) found that Ryan has a 66-percent approval rating among Republicans with only 19 percent disapproving. That 19 percent is no doubt overrepresented among opinion makers in the mainstream and alternative conservative press, but Ryan does not inspire the kind of hostility among average Republican voters that he does on conservative airwaves.
Nor are Republican voters hostile to the small government conservatism to which Ryan adheres. His philosophy is lent legitimacy and gravity as a result of the acute challenges it seeks to address: local control over education funding as a result of a decline in student outcomes; a reduction in the power of unions to curb their ability to dictate the terms of labor and pension regulations; a robust and extroverted engagement in the world to prevent threats from metastasizing; and, of course, a proactive approach to the looming debt and entitlement crisis. These positions aren’t born of nebulous political theory but of necessity. Donald Trump has proven that he can be persuaded by the uncompromising logic of the crises that gave birth to them. Those conditions are not going away, and they will continue to give rise to new Jack Kemps and Paul Ryans in the foreseeable future.
As Paul Ryan walks off into the sunset, beware triumphalism over his exit. This is contrived jubilation. It’s most certainly Donald Trump’s GOP today—a reality that even many of the president’s most committed supporters would admittedly prefer to the conservative alternative. But that is by no means a permanent condition. Paul Ryan’s GOP is routed but not demoralized. Just ask its members.
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Comey Comey Comey Comey Comey Chameleon
Podcast: James Comey and Syria.
John Podhoretz 2018-04-16James Comey is going to sell 2 million books or something, but it’s far from clear his inadvertently revealing interview with George Stephanopoulos did him any favors. On our podcast, we discuss the ways in which Comey injured his own case for himself by showing us his narcissism and the sheer number of bad decisions he has made. We also look at the raid on Syria and on the continuing dream on the part of liberals that Trump is done for. Give a listen.
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