Friday roundup

If there's an exceptionally exceptional piece by Kevin Williamson out on a given day - everything he writes is exceptional - we lead with it in a roundup. I can't remember a more thorough summing up of  one of the basic differences between the American Right and Left than what he offers this morning. The Left tends to view things on a national scale, where as the Right tends to look at things microcosmically, starting with individual sovereignty and moving up through the cultural distinctions of various locales and regions, and setting great store by the sovereignty of states.
He reminds us that we must consider history's nuances. For all the keep-it-local impulse that the Republican Party, particularly since the modern conservative movement has been impacting it, is informed by, there's a corporatist / grand-scheme element that dates back to the great Abraham Lincoln:

The Republican party of President Lincoln’s time had a wing that was recognizably conservative in the contemporary sense of that word, but President Lincoln, like his fellow Republican President Eisenhower a century later, was very much interested in what he called “improvements,” meaning mostly what we now call “infrastructure,” canals and railroads in one century and the federal highway system in the next. These projects were thought of as being national in the sense that they would improve the economic productivity and public life of the nation as a whole by enabling the easy movement of goods and people — and, if necessary, soldiers: It’s the Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways.

And the argument can be made that some degree of nationwide uniformity has been necessary:

Projects that are national in scope in a country as large and complex as the United States inevitably require standardization and regimentation. In the early days of railroads, different railways used different gauges of track, a situation that was of relatively little practical consequence until the railroad network grew extensive enough that the discrete systems began to interconnect. Different parties had different political and economic interests in particular configurations of track — hence the so-called Erie Gauge War — but competition among the railroads and the economic power of the major industrial and agricultural concerns inconvenienced by incompatible tracks were sufficient to ensure almost universal standardization. The emerging Internet had standardization needs that were in many ways similar.

In our time, we think of progressives as being anti-business, or at least skeptical of the political and economic power of big corporations and business alliances. But the political thinking of the Progressive Era was profoundly influenced by the business philosophy of the time, which was not the libertarian-oriented business thinking we are used to hearing from Charles and David Koch or the Chamber of Commerce. The experience of building out the railroad network had left a profound mark on American business culture, as had the emergence of such techniques as the use of standardized and interchangeable parts in machine construction (one of Samuel Colt’s many contributions to American life), assembly lines (particularly in the automobile industry), and more systematic approaches to business management. Frederick Winslow Taylor’s “scientific management” philosophy was ascendant, and business and government alike was consumed with efficiency, rooting out waste and redundancy, and coordination. Many of the leading business thinkers of the time were frankly corporatist (the railroads had been a textbook example of corporatism in action), decrying “destructive competition,” duplication of effort, and the general messiness of free markets. You can still hear the echoes of that when Senator Sanders decries the many available brands of deodorant. 

Add in the foundation to this provided by the progressives - Thorstein Veblen, Richard T. Ely, Herbert Croly, John Dewey, Woodrow Wilson et al - which posited that in an age of urbanization and industrialization, the Constitution alone was no longer a sufficient operating manual for federal government and that a cabal of pointy-headed experts needed to be appointed to executive-branch agencies to guide the nation on matters ranging from energy production to transportation to health care to education to management-labor relations, and you have a one-size-fits-all policy:

If you believe that what the world needs — what America needs — is efficient expert management, then you will pursue policy goals that emphasize size, scale, homogeneity, systematization, and regimentation. And your preferred instrument almost always will be the federal government; 50 states doing things 50 different ways is incompatible with your vision of intelligent expert administration.

This explains some of the Left's current obsessions, the Electoral College and the Senate:

It is unsurprising, then, that most of the foregoing Democratic arguments are mere demands for greater political power disguised as calls for “fairness,” an infinitely plastic concept. And we can be reasonably confident that if certain shoes had been on other feet — if Democrats enjoyed a commanding position in the states, or if Mrs. Clinton had won in the Electoral College with a couple million fewer votes than Donald Trump — that the intensity of their complaints would be diminished. But this is not only naked political calculation: The belief that the United States should be administered as a single unitary entity and that the 50 states are 50 impediments to national progress and efficient national administration is deep in their political thinking. In fact, it may even be the case that their political calculation is a lagging indicator driven in part by their policy vision: Being so focused on Washington, it is natural that the Democrats have allowed the atrophy of their political muscle in the states, leading to diminished power in them. At the same time, the people in the more rural states have not failed to appreciate that the Democrats’ Washington-first approach devalues them and their communities — precisely the problem that our constitutional order was designed to ameliorate. 

At Townhall, Allie Stuckey invites us to contemplate the sheer arrogance of this:

A viral tweet listed Republicans for which white women voted in the midterms and concluded, “white women gonna white.” 

Don’t worry, though. The Women’s March is here to help us out: “There’s a lot of work to do, white women. A lot of learning. A lot of growing. We want to do it with you.”

What this amounts to is the essential leftist message: "You will be made to get your mind right." There will be no room for this:

The claim is that we are voting against our own interests. But this assumes our interests are liberal interests—abortion, closing the “gender pay gap,” gun control, etc. And they’re just not. We women who vote Republican do so because, in general, we believe in things like the Second Amendment, lower taxes and restrictions on killing the unborn. We are not oppressed. We’re just not progressive. 

And these people will be erased from your memory:

These are the same people who completely ignore successful conservative women like Nikki Haley, Condoleezza Rice, or Carly Fiorina–not to mention the Republicans who ran in the midterms. Martha McSally, colonel in the Air Force, congresswoman and Arizona senatorial candidate certainly isn’t trying to repress women. The first female governor of Alabama, Kay Ivey, doesn’t seem to be relegating women to the kitchen. Young Kim, Congress’s first Korean-American representative, isn’t exactly a slave to the patriarchy. These women, though, just don’t fit the narrative.

Rachel Larimore at The Weekly Standard says that the disgusting and insulting calling out of Mia Love (among other Republican Congressional candidates who lost on Tuesday) as having lost because she was insufficiently loyal to him (" . . . gave me no love and lost. Sorry about that, Mia.")  puts the lie to the idea that he gives an actual diddly about abortion.

The relentless march of the campus jackboots:

At Colorado State University (CSU), administrators have designated the common greeting "long time, no see" as non-inclusive language.

That's according to a student, Katrina Leibee, who writes for the campus paper, The Rocky Mountain Collegian. Leibee met with Zahra Al-Saloom, director of diversity and inclusion at CSU, who showed her a list of terms and phrases considered contrary to the university's mission of fostering inclusion.

"One of these phrases was 'long time, no see,' which is viewed as derogatory towards those of Asian descent," wrote Leibee.

Leibee also noted that administrators discouraged use of "you guys" in favor of "y'all," which is gender neutral (and ungrammatical, but this is apparently less of a concern). Her column does not claim that administrators force students to use the gender neutral terminology, just that such terminology is preferred.

Al-Saloom did not respond to a request for a comment.

Not that it will persuade the Very Stable Genius, but John Yoo, George Conway and Clarence Thomas all think the VSG's appointment of Whitaker as acting AG is unconstitutional.

And the indispensable Heather MacDonald, writing at City Journal,  (I'm currently reading her new book The Diversity Delusion, and it's excellent) says that firing Jeff Sessions was a dumb move on the VSG's part, that the VSG couldn't have asked for a more reliable ally on immigration policy and basic law and order.