The Dems' and Pubs' basic dilemmas are the same as they've been for a while now

 At UnHerd today, Ruy Teixeira has a must-read entitled "Joe Biden's False Optimism." His main point it that Democrats are unequipped to build upon current political advantages, saddled as they are with identity politics militancy, climate alarmism and apparent indifference to the southern border crisis as well as the government's ever-worsening debt and deficit situation.

If all one is looking for is results, regardless of their implications, Biden's actually had a fairly successful run of late:

. . . Biden has embarked on a road trip to help voters “know about what we’re doing”. He has visited Michigan, Arizona, Kentucky, Ohio and Baltimore, Maryland, touting the job-creating wonders of three big bills his administration has passed: the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act; the Chips and Science Act (semiconductors) and the Inflation Reduction Act (climate). Moreover, in a play for the working-class vote, he has been at pains to emphasise the blue-collar benefits of these bills: “The vast majority of [the] jobs … that we’re going to create don’t require a college degree.”

But then there's the inability to wrest the party free from the tar pits of progressivism:

 The cultural Left has managed to associate the Democratic Party with a series of views on crime, immigration, policing, free speech, race and gender that are far removed from those of the median voter. This represents a victory for the cultural Left, but has proved an electoral liability for the party as a whole.

From time to time, senior Democratic politicians attempt to dissociate themselves from unpopular ideas such as defunding the police, yet progressive voices within the party are still more deferred to than opposed. They are further amplified by Democratic-leaning media and non-profits, as well as within the party infrastructure itself. In an era when a party’s national brand increasingly defines state and even local electoral contests, Democratic candidates have a very hard time shaking these associations.

Biden clearly intends to do very little, if not “nothing”, about this problem. His administration is much happier talking about gun control than actually getting criminals off the streets and into jail. The burgeoning backlash against ideological curricula in schools, the undermining of academic achievement standards, the introduction of mandatory, politically-approved vocabulary, the absurdities of “diversity, equity and inclusion” (DEI) programmes and the excesses of “gender-affirming care” are uniformly characterised by his party as nothing more than “hateful” bigotry rather than serious concerns. The out-of-control southern border, which is experiencing historically unprecedented levels of illegal immigration, has finally provoked an administration response, but its complicated mix of looser and tighter restrictions seems likely only to muddle things further, while provoking howls of outrage from allies in the influential immigrant advocacy community.

      So the economic happy talk prevails. But Teixeira detects a whistling-past-the-graveyard to it:

The idea that Democrats can just turn up the volume on economic issues and ignore their unpopular stances on sociocultural issues is absurd. Culture matters and the issues to which they are connected matter. They are a hugely important part of how voters assess who is on their side and who is not; whose philosophy they can identify with and whose they can’t.

Instead, for working-class voters to seriously consider their economic pitch, Democrats need to convince them that they are not looked down on, that their concerns are taken seriously and that their views on culturally freighted issues will not be summarily dismissed as unenlightened. With today’s party, unfortunately, this will be difficult. Resistance has been, and remains, stiff to any compromise that might involve moving to the centre on such issues, a problem that talking more about economic issues simply ignores.

And now, how are things going on the other side of the aisle?

Aaron Renn is a Manhattan Institute fellow, but he's based in Indianapolis and spends a great deal of time focused on Indiana politics. 

At Politico today, he asserts that the the potential for ugliness with which that state's Senate race is fraught is a microcosm of the fate-deciding struggle for the Republican Party's soul at the national level. The two most likely candidates - actually, one has already announced - represent the two forces vying for victory in that struggle:

Party officials and insiders are girding for an increasingly nasty primary battle for an open Senate seat between Rep. Jim Banks, who has declared, and former Purdue University president and former two-term Gov. Mitch Daniels, who appears increasingly poised to join the race. Daniels is expected to announce his intentions soon, according to one GOP senator. The ensuing fight could open years-old fault lines between the establishment and Trumpist wings of the party.

So often, as is the case in this Renn piece, the merest highlights of Daniels's career are offered: his stints as Indiana governor and Purdue University president. But his resume is a rich and varied chronicle of accomplishment. He was director of the Office of Management and Budget in the Reagan administration. For a while he was president of the Hudson Institute when it was headquartered in Indianapolis. He also spent some time heading up pharmaceutical giant Lilly's North American operations. 

Also, a note about Renn's characterization that Daniel's represents a "genteel midwestern conservatism" is warranted. It's true enough, broadly speaking. Until the, um, unfortunate insertion of MAGA-ism into the mix, Indiana Republican politicians and party officials were reliably civil and toward. I guess "country club" makes for adequate shorthand. But Daniels has something that distinguishes him from that image. He is and always has been committed to a vision that has driven his policy formulations. Its a vision that leans more toward ideas like fiscal soundness (he's famously kept Purdue tuitions from rising for several years) than an interest in addressing cultural issues (in fact, he once suggested that America declare a "truce" on those), but he certainly hasn't given a nod to the various forms of erosion our society has experienced. (Drool-besotted MAGA columnist Kurt Schlichter did use the fact that Purdue, like virtually all higher-learning institutions has a DEI office, as a major piece of evidence that this marks Daniels as a milquetoast. I would counter that, given progressivism's entrenchment in higher ed, resisting such a move may have proved a distraction from what Daniels saw as the most valuable use of his resources as Purdue president. There were no doubt layers of board and committee votes leading up to the establishment of such an office; it's not something the school president creates or ends with a flick of the wrist.)

Jim Banks embodies my main - and deep - frustration with what MAGA has done to the conservative vision. Actual conservatives can find points of solid agreement with his positions on student debt forgiveness, health care, taxation, the environment, people who aren't born yet, and identity politics, but his support for the far-and-away-worst president in US history irreparably sullies his record. This has been especially so since the November 2020 election.

Renn has an extensive knowledge of the history of the relationship between these two men:

Banks and Daniels had a cordial phone call last week, according to four Republicans briefed on the call, during which the younger Hoosier said he respected Daniels. Banks had organized an event on a northeastern farm for the former governor ahead of his first gubernatorial run nearly two decades ago.

Daniels, who had considered initially trying to clear the field by discouraging Banks from running, did not do so on the call. The reason, according to a person familiar with the call, was that he believed he could effectively contrast himself with Banks should he choose to run.

The Club for Growth enters into the picture as well:

Further complicating matters is the Club for Growth, which has launched an ad backed by five figures that are running statewide and says Daniels is “not the right guy for Indiana anymore.” The group is willing to spend up to $10 million.

Club for Growth Action President David McIntosh and Daniels go back, as Daniels elbowed him out of the Republican gubernatorial primary in 2004. And allies of the former governor don’t hold back their pique at the spots being run.

“Club for Growth f–ked up because they basically forced Mitch to run with that ad,” this person said. “Mitch Daniels is a dude that plans out when he takes a s–t,” this person added, but the ad forces Daniels to defend his conservative record.

While Indiana Republican strategists speculated that the ad against Daniels was the result of lingering personal animosity McIntosh has for Daniels, Joe Kildea, a spokesperson for the Club, scoffed at the suggestion.

“It’s speculation, false, we won’t be dignifying it with a response, and it deserves no place in print,” said Kildea.

So both parties have deadly serious infections for which there don't seem to be any antibiotics. Dems can't shake the grip of the social-justice and climate craziness, and the Republicans are so ate up with ongoing enthrallment to the Very Stable Genius - and think it's so clever to emulate his most disgusting traits - that the American populace has understandable difficulty discerning any underlying coherent vision based on any kind of body of principles on either side.

If that needle doesn't move in the next year and a half, my voting behavior will be what it has been.

I'll stay home.

 

 

 

Sex differences, the fading of the family and the atomization of post-American society

 I've had one of those experiences over the last couple of days in which I've come across multiple articles that, taken together, present a theme.

Yesterday I read the Real Clear Investigations piece by urbanist Joel Kotkin and American Enterprise Institute scholar Samuel J. Abrams entitled "The Rise of the Single Woke (and Young, Democratic) Female." It's a statistics-rich deep dive into how "childless women are joining African Americans as the Democrats' most reliable supporters."

Their power is growing thanks to the demographic winds. The number of never married women has grown from about 20% in 1950 to over 30% in 2022, while the percentage of married women has declined from almost 70% in 1950 to under 50% today. Overall, the percentage of married households with children has declined from 37% in 1976 to 21% today.  

The Pew Research Center notes that since 1960, single-person households in the United States have grown from 13% to 27% (2019). Many, particularly women, are not all that keen on finding a partner. Pew recently found that “men are far more likely than women to be on the dating market: 61% of single men say they are currently looking for a relationship or dates, compared with 38% of single women.”  

There’s clearly far less stigma attached to being single and unpartnered. Single women today have many impressive role models of unattached, childless women who have succeeded on their own – like Taylor Swift and much of the U.S. women’s soccer team. This phenomenon is not confined to the United States. Marriage and birthrates have fallen in much of the world, including Europe and Japan. Writing in Britain’s Guardian newspaper, columnist Emma John observed that, “Singleness is no longer to be sneered at. Never marrying or taking a long-term partner is increasingly seen as a valid choice.”  

Their demographic status has fostered a sense of affinity among them:

Distinct from divorced women or widows, these largely Gen Z and Millennial voters share a sense of collective identity and progressive ideology that sets them apart from older women. More likely to live in urban centers and to support progressive policies, they are a driving force in the Democratic party’s and the nation’s shift to the left. 

Not just a shared sense of affinity, but grievance as well:

Attitudes are what most distinguish single women from other voters. An American Enterprise Institute survey shows that married men and women are far more likely than unmarried females to think women are well-treated or equally treated. As they grow in numbers, these discontented younger single women are developing something of a group consciousness. Nearly two-thirds of women under 30, for example, see what happens to other women as critical to their own lives; among women over 50, this mindset shrinks to less than half.  

Now, just as there are more unmarried females, there are also more unmarried males. Do they share this we-gotta-stick-together ethos? Not so much:

This perception of linked fate stands in contrast to survey results regarding single men, who report that they are increasingly disconnected from each other while women bond more closely. 

Now that more than half of all higher-education students are women, the we-all-gotta-stick-together tenor is becoming increasingly institutionalized:

. . . a feminist agenda has become increasingly de rigueur in colleges. According to the  National Center for Education Statistics, the number of women’s and gender studies degrees in the United States has increased by more than 300% since 1990, and in 2015, there were more than 2,000 degrees conferred. There are widespread movements to establish women’s centers almost everywhere, even as men are abandoning college and university life in record numbers, and those who remain are hit with messaging about behavior and status from diversity, equity, and inclusion offices along with various student life offices that regularly call them toxic, aggressive, and born misogynists.  

This demographic doesn't just take a family-life-is-not-for-me-but-you-do-you approach, No, it's out to change public perceptions at large about family:

More recently, anti-family attitudes have become more pronounced. “Queer studies” often advocate replacing the “nuclear family” with some form of collectivized childrearing. Progressive groups like Black Lives Matter made their opposition to the nuclear family a part of their basic original platform, even though evidence shows family breakdown has hurt African American boys most of all.  

It turns out that Bell and Toffler were pretty prescient:

We are witnessing, as sociologist Daniel Bell noted a half century ago in “The Coming of the Post-Industrial Society,” a new type of individualism, unmoored from religion and family, something fundamentally transforming the foundations of middle-class culture. This echoes what the popular futurist Alvin Toffler in 1970 described as a growing immersion in work at the expense of family life. He envisioned a revolution in marriage that would result in a “streamlined family,” and, if children are in the picture, relying on professional child-raisers. The ideal of long-term marriage would give way, he expected, to more transient relationships and numerous partners at different stages of life.  

There seems to be a strong correlation between the economic status of single females and their view of government's role:

There is a clear economic divergence between married and unmarried women, if for no other reason than that two incomes provide more resources and children present different demands. There are plenty of renting couples and home-owning singles, but married people account for 77% of all homeowners, according to the Center for Politics. Married women tend also to do far better professionally and economically, and their rate of marriage has remained constant while those without spouses have declined by 15% over the past four decades, notes the Brookings Institution. Single-parent households, they find, do far worse. 

This economic reality impacts political choices. Not part of an economic familial unit, they tend to look to government for help, whether for rent subsidies or direct transfers. The pitch of Democratic presidents as reflected in Barack Obama’s “Life of Julia” and Joe Biden’s “Life of Linda” – narratives that advertised the government’s cradle-to-grave assistance for women – is geared toward women who never marry, with the occasional child-raising addressed not by family resources but government transfers.  

And then there's the impact of "the big sort":

The divisions between married and unmarried women are reenforced and amplified by the geographic divisions in the country – what some call “the big sort”– as Americans increasingly settle into distinct communities of likeminded individuals. Urban centers, for example, are particularly friendly to singles. In virtually all high-income societies, high density today almost always translates into low fertility rates, led by San Francisco, Los Angeles, Austin, and Boston. In urban cores like Manhattan, single households constituted nearly 50% of households, according to American Community Survey 2019 data.

Kotkin and Abrams go on to statistically show that married women are not in ideological lockstep with the SWFs. They tend to identify as conservative more frequently. Divorced women, too.

And this plays out as a collectivism-versus-focus-on-opportunity-and-economic-growth dichotomy:

Public policy may have a strong influence on this dynamic. The single, the unattached, and the unmarried are already demanding state provisions to guarantee “affordable” urban housing, more money for transit, and steps toward a guaranteed income for individuals – all of which will, in turn, provide incentives to remain unattached. In contrast, the demands of family-oriented voters may be more focused on economic growth, safety, improving basic education, and ways to save money for their offspring.  

The piece I encountered this morning, by Mary Harrington at UnHerd, takes a more predictive view of this development. It's entitled "A Sex War Is Coming."

It notes that that AWFLs (affluent, white, female liberals) have successfully completed a Gramscian long march through the institutions:

. . . technological advancements have delivered new opportunities for well-qualified knowledge workers of both sexes, even as the same changes have automated and de-industrialised away the physically more arduous work previously performed mostly by working-class men. This virtualisation of work has, overall, benefited women much more than men.

Accordingly, women have seized the opportunity. American colleges have been majority-female since the late Seventies, and today, women outnumber men at undergraduate level in most colleges, with the disparity as large as 60%-40% in some elite institutions. And this has turned out a steadily compounding supermajority of knowledge-class women, which forms an increasingly heavy-hitting part of the rising Virtual elite.

The gradual extension of ever more spheres of work to relatively equal participation is, to a great extent, an effect of the transition away from physical toward knowledge work — but is routinely framed as “progress” in an abstract sense. In suggesting a more material interpretation of this change, I’m not making the opposite argument, that this represents decline. More women in public life is not in itself a bad thing, unless you really are a misogynist. But as female graduates have embraced professional life across knowledge-economy and bureaucratic roles, and their influence has compounded over time, this shift has redrawn the political map in important ways — not least by tilting visible public discourse Left, in ways that only ambivalently reflect the electorate overall.

At undergraduate level, women are especially heavily represented among arts and social sciences courses – topics so overwhelmingly progressive that only 9% of undergraduates vote Republican. These overwhelmingly Left-wing female graduates then cluster in the institutions that set and manage social and cultural norms, such as education, media, and HR. In American nonprofits, for example, 75% are female, while HR, the division of corporate life most concerned with managing the moral parameters of everyday working life, is two-thirds female.

And those progressive graduate women who aren’t busy shaping public morals via nonprofits and HR departments are busy doing so for the next generation in schools: 76% of American teachers are women. Inevitably, given that all US states require teachers to hold at least a bachelor’s degree, these are also uniformly drawn from the female demographic most likely to be very liberal.

When Meghan McCain’s husband talked about how the Democrats will soon be dominated by “millennial girlboss energy” types and described the prospect as “crazytown”, progressive firebrand Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez was strictly correct to point out that women make up less than a third of the Senate, and millennials only 7%. But this is to miss the point.

The AWFL demographic, relatively underrepresented in the Senate, is overrepresented across media, journalism, nonprofits, HR departments, academia, and school teachers. Their views can expect enthusiastic signal-boosting and institutional support from such bodies. They’re also the demographic most overwhelmingly likely to vote Democrat. No wonder their political priorities increasingly shape Democratic political platforms: their high visibility makes it easy to mistake them for the entirety of the Left.

This makes AWFLs inclined to get involved with transgendered people's "rights," given their vested interest in blurring distinctions between the sexes, so as to disseminate the notion of any and all being equally suited to any kind of occupation or societal opportunity, 

It's also behind their stake in abortion:

. . . such women are structurally dependent on medical interventions to keep their bodies free from the rigours and long-term obligations of pregnancy, childbirth and dependent children. In other words: for AWFLs overall, abortion really is an existential issue. And making the midterms a referendum on that issue appears to have paid off. For suburban women, and indeed the electorate overall, it seems gas prices remain some way downstream of the tech-enabled reproductive “freedom”that knowledge-class Clinton feminists routinely frame as a precondition for personhood as such.

An observation after reading both articles: the highest-paying occupations (engineering, IT, finance, which are at present still male-intensive) are not necessarily the most culturally influential. The thing to pay attention to is the continuing proliferation of jobs that shape our institutions' priorities. And men aren't filling those jobs too much. Not even married women. 

This is how sweeping change happens to post-American society as most of us are busy distracting ourselves. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This is kind of a big deal

 One of the West's most agenda-driven enemies has upped its presence right here in our hemisphere in an eye-opening way:

Iran's navy is set to station warships for the first time in the Panama Canal, a critical trade route in America's backyard that has never before seen an Iranian military presence.

Rear Admiral Shahram Irani, the commander of Iran's navy, said on Wednesday that his forces will establish a presence in the Panama Canal later this year, marking the first time Iran's military has entered the Pacific Ocean.

Iran in recent years has placed a greater focus on moving its military into Latin American territories as it strengthens relations with anti-American dictators in the region, most notably in Venezuela. Iranian vessels have docked more frequently in Venezuela as Tehran's hardline regime seeks to prop up dictator Nicolás Maduro. These moves are meant to provoke the United States and signal that Tehran has the ability to station its military apparatus a stone's throw from U.S. territory.

Joseph Humire, a national security analyst who focuses on Latin American issues as executive director of the Center for a Secure Free Society think tank, said Iran has been laying the groundwork for this type of voyage by holding joint exercises with allies such as Russia and China, two nations that have also been strengthening their ties with Latin American countries.

"This is what Iran has been building in Latin America for the past 30 or 40 years" by establishing embassies and bilateral agreements with a host of nations, Humire said.

Iran's goal "has always been to have a military presence in Latin America, so it's not surprising at all for its navy to announce it's going to make moves on the Panama Canal," Humire said, noting that in addition to Venezuela and Nicaragua, Iran has opened relations with Colombia.

"This is a tremendous escalation if it is to happen," Humire said. "Many people may discount Iran in terms of its capabilities … but I would not discount it because they have been building to this for a very long time."

I know that several camps will have their say as Congress deliberates a defense budget, but let us hope that those who understand the magnitude of the threats characterizing the lay of the land at the outset of 2023 prevail. This is no time for posturing. North Korea tested an unprecedented 95 missiles last year. Russia continues to diminish any chances it has of joining the community of civilized nations that prize international order with its atrocity-driven assault on Ukraine, and the risk of nuclear consequences continues to rise. China continues to breathe down Taiwan's neck.

It would be nice if we had enough of a sense of national unity to seriously understand the stakes, but we'll take what we can get. As I say, a US defense budget based on adult priorities would be a good start.

 

Wednesday roundup

 This is the kind of piece one can mine for new insights with multiple readings. History professor and former Canadian politician Michael Ignatieff looks exhaustively at what it means to think for oneself. There are a lot of aspects to the subject, as it turns out, such as what the quest for originality can do to one's prioritization of the truth, or the vastly different styles demonstrated by highly organized intellects and those of a more chaotic nature.

I'll just share enough such insights to tease.

How about this one?

For a start, we are confused about what thinking is. To think is not to process information. We have impoverished our understanding of thinking by analogizing it to what our machines do. What we do is not processing. It is not computation. It is not data analysis. It is a distinctively, incorrigibly human activity that is a complex combination of conscious and unconscious, rational and intuitive, logical and emotional reflection. It is so complex that neither neurologists nor philosophers have found a way to model it, and the engineers of artificial intelligence are still struggling to replicate some of the simplest forms of pattern recognition that human cognition does so effortlessly. We must beware that in our attempt to make computers think like us we do not end up thinking like them.

Nor is thinking a matter of expressing yourself or having opinions. It is not about turning on the fountain of our personality. It is an exercise in finding reasons to persuade yourself and others that something is true, or at least plausibly true. Thinking has truth as its goal and its organizing discipline. Bullshitters, as Harry Frankfurt told us, are precisely those who do not think: they simply express what comes into their minds, without concerning themselves with whether what they are saying has any relation to reality. Every university is, or should be, properly worried that their classrooms are training generation after generation of accredited bullshitters.

Nor is thinking about expressing your identity. It is not an intellectual achievement to parrot the truisms of our tribes. Indeed, thinking is about emancipating yourself from identity, insofar as it throws into question prior and unexamined ideas. Identity is a warm bath, but thinking is a discipline. Many important lines of thought are austerely impersonal, purged of the origins of those who thought them up. Think of mathematics, physics, and logic. These are great systems of thought made possible by thinkers who in the laboratory and the library discarded their identities altogether and lived, for years at a time, in the impersonal realm of signs and symbols. It doesn’t matter that perfect objectivity is impossible; imperfect objectivity, the progressive correction of biases, is certainly possible. Even in the social sciences, it is basic to our methods that we try to leave our personal biases, experiences, and histories behind, or in some way to bracket them, so as to see what the data tells us. In this work, thinking means leaving ourselves behind.

Or this?

If thinking for yourself is the goal of your life, then it pays to maintain a certain distance from the institutions in which you work and live. Distance implies wariness about received opinion, about fashions, about the recurring tides of certainty and urgency that course through the places where we work and soon have us all facing the same way, thinking the same thing. The larger point is about liberal society: if thinking for yourself is your goal, do not go looking for the warm bath of belonging or the certitude of faith. Do not expect a free society to provide these for you. Belonging is not the fondest dream of a serious intellectual. She dreams of other satisfactions first.

Lionel Shriver, writing at UnHerd, gives us a bracing upside-the-head entitled "How We Created a Self-Hating Generation." How we did it, she posits, is that we replaced character with identity as the focus of bringing up new citizens of our society:

I submit: the traditional concept of “building character” is out the window.

Once upon a time, a fully realised person was something one became. Entailing education, observation, experimentation, and sometimes humiliation, “coming of age” was hard work. When the project succeeded, we developed a gradually richer understanding of what it means to be human and what constitutes a fruitful life. This ongoing project was halted only by death. Maturity was the result of accumulated experience (some of it dire) and much trial and error (both comical and tragic), helping explain why wisdom, as opposed to intelligence, was mostly the preserve of the old. We admired the “self-made man”, because character was a creation — one constructed often at great cost. Many a “character-building” adventure, such as joining the Army, was a trial by fire.

These days, discussion of “character” is largely relegated to fiction workshops and film reviews. Instead, we relentlessly address “identity”, a hollowed-out concept now reduced to membership of the groups into which we were involuntarily born — thereby removing all choice about who we are. Rejecting the passé “character building” paradigm, we now inform children that their selves emerge from the womb fully formed. Their sole mission is to tell us what those selves already are. Self is a prefabricated house to which only its owner has a key.

Here's what we should say to a kid who says he or she doesn't know who he or she is:

There’s nothing shameful about being an empty vessel when you haven’t done anything and nothing much has happened to you yet. Telling children, “Of course you don’t know who you are! Growing up is hard, full of false starts, and all about making something of yourself. Don’t worry, we’ll give you lots of help” is a great deal more consoling than the model of the ready-meal self. We demand toddlers determine whether they’re “girls or boys or something in-between” before they have fully registered what a girl or boy is, much less “something in-between”. Placing the total onus for figuring out how to negotiate being alive on people who haven’t been given the user’s manual is a form of abandonment.

Adults have an obligation to advise, comfort, and inform — to provide the social context that children have none of the resources to infer and to help form expectations of what comes next.  Instead, we’re throwing kids helplessly on their primitive imaginations. The first time I remember being asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, I clearly remember answering, “a bear”. I wasn’t trying to be a wiseass. I just wasn’t up to speed on the ambitions to which I was expected to aspire. Little wonder that kids are now “identifying” as cats. Next, they will be identifying as electric lawnmowers, and we will have asked for it.

Ethics and Public Policy Center fellow Brad Littlejohn contemplates what true authority might be. 

The year 2020 did not kill authority in American public life; it had been on life support for some time. This was merely the year authority tried to rise from its sickbed, in defiance of its terminal condition, and then expired from the strain. Needless to say, the Biden administration has not succeeded in resurrecting it.

Our contemporary crisis of authority runs much deeper than most realize. It is not just the product of institutional rot in Congress; of a swamp in Washington, D.C., that needs to be drained; or of inept leadership by grandstanding celebrity politicians. Nor is it simply the result of the radically democratizing effect of digital media, of a world in which likes and retweets matter more than credentials or even elections — although this is, as we shall see, a key part of the problem.

More fundamentally, our problem is that we no longer know how to recognize an authentic claim to authority, even if one dares show its face — which it almost never does. Without recognition of authority, there can be no legitimacy. Without legitimacy in our authoritative institutions, we cannot know how or why to act — a paralysis we experience as a loss of freedom even as we rage against the authorities we fear pose the greatest threats to our freedom.

He says it's crucial to distinguish between authority and power:

What is political authority? Before we answer, we must distinguish between two key concepts: authority and power. If we fail to do so, we will misunderstand the relationship between authority and freedom, perceiving them as antagonistic to one another when in fact they go hand in hand.

We may define power as a capacity for action in the broadest sense. The idea of power is thus quite close to that of freedom, for freedom clearly involves a capacity to act; indeed, we can use the phrases “power to act” and “freedom to act” interchangeably in certain contexts.

Some have disputed this characterization of freedom, arguing for a purely negative understanding of the term as the absence of compulsion. Yet under this definition, the quadriplegic is considered perfectly free to walk around so long as no one prevents him from doing so. This, of course, is absurd, and does violence to our well-grounded intuitions about what freedom must entail.

Because power and freedom are so similar to one another, they can readily stand in an oppositional relationship. One person’s power is perceived as (and quite often is in fact) a threat to another person’s freedom. There is, at least in some measure, a zero-sum game at work here.

That is not the case, however, when it comes to authority.

The concept of freedom adds to that of power the idea of rationality — freedom is the capacity for meaningful, rational action. We do not ordinarily think of the insane as “free”; indeed, it is precisely their radical un-freedom that can justify restraining or confining them. But from whence arises this meaning? Where do we find our reasons for acting? Not, as modernity is so fond of telling us, from within the freedom of our own will, for that is simply circular. No, it is authority (in the very broadest sense of the term) that provides us with reasons for action, and which thereby makes free action possible.

Authority is thus, in the pithy formulation of theologian Oliver O’Donovan, “the objective correlate of freedom.” Whereas one person’s power can limit another’s freedom by compelling him to act against his will, authority elicits free action by giving him reasons to act. Although it may be the authority that summons me to action, I can then recognize that action as my own. Power is thus far weaker than authority.

Authority gives us reasons for free action in two main guises: as epistemic authority and as political authority. Due to their systematic conflation over the past century, both types of authority are in a state of crisis.

In "From Environmentalism to Climate Catastrophism," Ruy Tiexiera says that as a society we did a good job of cleaning up actual pollution, but that alarmist swooning has diminished our capacity to address actual, specific problems and solve them.

A piece by Isaac Ariaril Reed and Michael Weinman at Hedgehog Review posits that as we as a society lose our grasp of any kind of common significance, we as individuals stake out positions we find comfortable, but that are untethered to evidence or reason. 

Coleman Hughes, writing at The Free Press, asserts that "Actually, Color-Blindness Isn't Racist." Such a statement ought to have a strong well-duh quality to it, but, in our age, it needs to be fleshed out in an essay.

At Precipice, I republished a Christmas-Eve piece I'd originally posted at Medium back in 2017. It's entitled "How I Made My Peace With God Being An Absolutist."

 

 

 

 

The third rail re-enters the national conversation

 It hasn't taken much time for the question "What moves might a GOP-majority House make on entitlements" to emerge:

Republicans don’t plan to alter benefits for current Social Security and Medicare recipients, according to Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas).

“What we have been very clear about is, we’re not going to touch the benefits that are going to people relying on the benefits under Social Security and Medicare,” Roy said Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “But we all have to be honest about sitting at the table and figuring out how we’re going to make those work, how we’re going to deal with defense spending and how we’re going to deal with nondefense discretionary spending.”

The Republican Study Committee proposed a budget for fiscal 2023 that would gradually increase the eligibility ages for Social Security and Medicare, and change the Social Security benefit formula for people 54 and younger, while not changing it for people closer to receiving benefits.

Democrats are likely to oppose those changes, as well as any cuts to Social Security and Medicare, and an ensuing standoff could result in another government shutdown. The 2018-2019 lapse in federal funding lasted 35 days after a fight over former President Donald Trump’s border policies and immigration.

What other course of action is there? Platitudinous insistences that Frances Perkins promised that money to Americans in perpetuity do not make for workable policy.

This is not a new conversation by any means. In the 1990s, much bristling ensued when the idea of freezing benefits was floated:

Back in 2001, I served on the staff of President George W. Bush’s Commission to Strengthen Social Security. While the commission did not agree on a single reform plan, two members — economists John Cogan of Stanford University and Olivia S. Mitchell of the Wharton School — argued for freezing the value of Social Security benefits in inflation-adjusted terms. Benefits wouldn’t be cut, but Americans retiring in the future wouldn’t receive higher benefits than today’s retirees, as the current benefit formula requires. That single change would have restored Social Security to long-term solvency.

The argument was not universally well received:

But freezing Social Security benefits came with the risk that seniors would have little else to rely upon in old age. In 1995, for instance, the New York Times warned of a “great retirement crisis . . . widely anticipated for the Baby Boomers who begin to reach retirement age in 2010.” Even wealthy seniors would not escape this crisis of inadequate incomes, the Times feared. Reducing Social Security would only worsen the problem of poverty in old age. The same fears, and the same arguments, are heard today.

But its veracity has been borne out:

Yet new data from the Congressional Budget Office show that, had Social Security benefits been frozen in 2001, retirees’ average household incomes in 2019 would have been reduced by just 3.9 percent. Seniors still would have been better off than ever before, while knowing that their Social Security benefits were secure, rather than facing a 20 percent potential cut when Social Security’s trust funds run out in the mid-2030s.

In late October, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released new household-income figures compiled from Internal Revenue Service data. The CBO figures, running from 1979 through 2019, include salaries, investment income, welfare payments, Social Security, and even Medicare benefits, while subtracting the various federal taxes that Americans pay.

The CBO data show that in 1979, the average American over age 65 had a household income after taxes and transfers of $43,000 (all dollar figures are inflation-adjusted to 2019). Seniors’ incomes averaged 23 percent below those of working-age Americans. Retiree households were more than twice as likely to live in the poorest fifth of the overall population as to live in the richest fifth. The 1970s stereotype of retirees eating cat food, if not accurate, at least reflected some semblance of seniors’ reality.

Four decades later, the picture is radically different. By 2019, average incomes for over-65 households had grown to $97,300, a 126 percent increase. For non-elderly households, average incomes rose from $58,795 to $104,297, just 77 percent higher than 1979. The income gap between seniors and working-age Americans in 2019 shrank from 23 percent to just 7 percent. Today, seniors are nearly twice as likely to live in the richest income quintile as to live in the poorest quintile.

This boils down to a significant degree to being a case of the diminishment of human agency. The great industrial leap of the 20th century gave us an advancement in comfort, convenience, safety and longevity unlike any our species had previously see. But for many, it cultivated a mindset that vocation was the core of human existence, and that, in some form, to some degree, one would be working for some organization that would, in addition to compensating one for performing some act of value, set one up with health insurance and retirement benefits. It was an easy addition for many people to make to incorporate Social Security, and later, Medicare, into this picture of what life should look like. 

The entitlements' unfunded liability problems are a modern situation. Three hundred years ago, we didn't have air conditioning, plane travel or transplant surgery, but the state's control over our destiny was not among our concerns. 

 

 

 

Well, Republicans, this is what you get when you prioritize performative gestures over adherence to principle

 The vote for House speaker has turned into a real cluster-you-know-what, hasn't it?

After three inconclusive votes yesterday - something that hasn't happened in over a century - he insists he'll undergo a second day of humiliation. 

Here's his essential problem: He has a firmly established reputation for blowing with the wind.

His main appeal to those focused on the direction of the GOP is as a fundraiser. He knows how to schmooze and bust loose the cash.

But he's lukewarm when it comes to actually standing for anything. In 2015, he pretty plainly stated that the main purpose of forming a committee to investigate Benghazi was to knock down Hillary Clinton's poll numbers. When he came in for the resulting opprobrium, he apologized and said the committee's formation was not politically motivated. Well, which is it? When you state that it was politically motivated on Sean Hannity's show, you sounded pretty pleased about it.

We probably ought to heed the words of Bill Thomas, who held the House seat that McCarthy now occupies immediately beforehand, and for whom McCarthy worked on his congressional staff, as well as serving as a district director. They were friends as well. Here's Thomas on McCarthy now:

A former mentor to House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy blasted the aspiring speaker in remarks published this week for a profile of McCarthy.

“You never know what’s inside, really,” former California Rep. Bill Thomas (R), who employed McCarthy for years, told the New Yorker in a piece published on Monday. “Kevin basically is whatever you want him to be. He lies. He’ll change the lie if necessary. How can anyone trust his word?”

McCarthy's behavior since January 6, 2021 has been the main cause of his current troubles. From his call to Trump from the House floor as the riot was unfolding, in which he screamed "do you know who the f--- you're talking to?" only to have the Very Stable Genius respond, "Well, Kevin, I guess they're more concerned about the election than you are," to his temporary position of agreeing with Trump that the election was invalid, to his coming around to conceding that Biden had won, to his shameful pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago a few weeks later, he solidified his bona fides as a phony.

Empty suits usually wind up pleasing nobody. A handful of performative yay-hoos - Gaetz, Boebert, and those of similar odor -  is catalyzing this paralysis in the House. But there is also a group of moderate Republicans that find just a bit too much of this odor wafting off of McCarthy.

But what are we looking at if it becomes unmistakably clear that he can't muster the votes? Are either Jim Jordan or Steve Scalise - both drool-besotted throne sniffers - really viable possibilities? 

Of course, this all emboldens Democrats. Their job of basing policy, as fleshed out in legislation, on identity politics militancy, climate alarmism and wealth redistribution just got easier.

But I can't work up much emotional investment in any of this. Whatever kind of solution the Republicans cobble together to get a Speaker in place and begin conducting business is not going to result in a united and principled conservative counterforce to progressivism. The next two years is going to consist of existential battles over table scraps. 

I realize that politics is the art of the possible, and that the well-advised basis for voter behavior is to support the candidate for any particular office most closely aligned with one's principles. But conversations about any kind of foundation that ought to be our starting point for a program, any irreducible reason for favoring a program, platform or agenda take place well off the main stage. 

So this current situation boils down to power desperation as practiced by an assemblage of people for whom I could not have less respect.

No needle of any importance gets moved, no matter how this turns out.

 

George Santos's fraudulence - initial thoughts

 Doesn't sound like remorse is among the top drivers of his current decision-making, does it?

The calls are intensifying for Congressman-elect George Santos to step down after he admitted to lying on his résumé.

The Long Island Republican turned the blue district red.

And in the face of questions about campaign fraud and deception, on Tuesday afternoon his campaign told CBS2 he still has every intention of being sworn in next week.

Santos said he's sorry he "embellished" his résumé, but he believes he still deserves to serve the voters of Long Island and northeast Queens who elected him.

Last week, the New York Times reported that the 34-year-old Republican falsely claimed he graduated from Baruch College, that he is the descendant of a Holocaust survivor, and that had worked for Goldman Sachs and Citigroup.

"If I was trying to defraud the people like everyone is saying, I could have listed bigger names," Santos said.

In a Fox News interview Tuesday night, he said he is "not a fraud" and "not fake."

"I made a mistake, and I think humans are flawed and we all make mistakes," he said. "In order to move past this and move forward and be an effective member of Congress, I have to face my mistakes."

But when the interviewer, former congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, asked Santos if he had no shame, he quickly tried to deflect.

"I can say the same thing about the Democrats and the party. Look at Joe Biden. Joe Biden's been lying to the American people," he said.

Now, no one has ever been quite so flagrant about riding to election on a bundle of fabrication, but what this episode really points up is how easy it is to distract voters from glaring questions about a candidate's past. 

Republicans, of course, see him as crucial to their razor-thin House majority having any effectiveness. So, once again, they're practicing the art of the gloss-over:

Joseph Cairo Jr., the chair of the Nassau County Republican Committee, expressed disappointment, including the Holocaust claim, but is standing with Santos, saying, in part, "I expected more than just a blanket apology. Residents want him to deliver tax relief and pass laws that will make our neighborhoods and nation safer. What's more, George Santos will have to continually prove that he has learned his lesson."

Peter King does make a valid point here - namely, that this sets a precedent whereby no election result is ever certain in the public's mind, because there may have been some fudging of the truth in a candidate's campaign pronouncements:

So what disciplinary action could Santos face by the House or law enforcement, and what does one of Long Island's most powerful Republicans, former Rep. Peter King, have to say?

When asked if Santos should resign, King said by phone, "No, he was elected and, again, it's a bad precedent to set to resign. Then you'd have every election to be re-examined 'Was this accurate? Was that inaccurate?.'"

"Now, obviously, he went beyond almost anything anyone has done before, but it's not a crime. You should be sworn in, but after that there should be an immediate investigation," King added.

But the operative phrase there is "beyond almost anything anyone has done before." The horse is now out of the barn. If you can drag your election numbers over the finish line, it matters not how badly you insulted the voters' intelligence.

Bad behavior swept under the rug is not a new phenomenon in American politics. But indulge me in a theory I'm considering: We're moving out of a window during which a general consensus among the public about standards for such traits as truthfulness and servant leadership provided the goodwill that enabled such rascals as John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson to comport themselves with the bearing of perfectly respectable men. Before the window opened, politicians had the advantage of a by-modern-standards primitive news-dissemination technology. Then the technology came along, but those vying for or holding office had the good sense to act like responsible grownups when in the public eye. One could keep rumors of mistresses and mob ties at bay, simply by filling one's time with statesmanlike activities.

Then technology took another leap forward, to the extent that confusion reigns about what constitutes an accurate source of facts. That has made possible the rise of a wave of the most shallow political figures in our history. 

Our two major political parties have responded by adopting a whatever-it-takes-for-our-brand-to-prevail mentality. That's how we got, of course, Donald Trump, former bartender Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, antisemite nutritionist-with-a-shady-marital-and-parenting background Ilhan Omar, fluffbrain-riding-his-family's-political-coattails-even-as-sex-trafficking-charges-beathe-down-his-neck Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene, who boinked not one but two fitness trainers while married. 

It's how Kari Lake got her fifteen minutes in the national spotlight. No journalist seemed curious enough about her rather abrupt transition from being a left-leaning news anchor to rabid Trumpist to get to the bottom of it. That's quite a shift. Surely she had conversations with someone she was close to as the shift was underway.

It's why Barack Obama can bask in beloved-elder-statesman status. No one, in either the 2008 or 2016 campaigns, really went into his hardcore leftist background: his mentors, those who gave him a political leg up. Frank Marshall Davis. Rashid Khalidi, Jeremiah Wright. Bill Ayers, Heather Booth. Greg Galluzzo. 

We've jettisoned even the flimsiest gesture of fealty to the great human virtues. The parties actually don't mind a little controversy surrounding their candidates. It means they're getting noticed, which might translate to a legislative seat and the deciding vote on tough-to-arrive-at bills. 

In a society that has lost the ability to be embarrassed, shamed or remorseful, but has simultaneously become attracted to the most outrageous flouting of norms embraced by humankind for thousands of years, empty-suit celebrities will rise to the fore. 

Never mind what should be. We are only concerned with what is now.

That means that we're going to get more George Santoses. The guardrails are gone. We're rolling around in a bounce-house sea of shiny objects. And we're the less human for it.

 

 

 

Neo-Trumpism's disgusting take on the Zelensky visit

 First, I think it's time for this term to enter into common usage. The figure who spawned Trumpism may or may not continue to be a major player in American politics. He's up to his eyeballs in legal troubles, his picks in various kinds of races in the just-concluded midterms were duds, and various other Republicans of varying degrees of sanity are consuming some of the oxygen he used to have all to himself.

But even if he fades from here on out, he's created space not only for a new generation of deranged showboaters in public office, but has conferred legitimacy on some of the most shameful stances staked out by pundits in at least modern history.

President Zelensky's visit to Washington was pitch-perfect. He met with everyone he needed to meet with and delivered a ringing defense of human freedom to a joint session of Congress. It went far to strengthen the notion that Ukraine, being tempered by fire as it is, is demonstrating that it is indeed a Western nation.

So a hearty LITD hurrah for the delivery of the Patriot anti-missile system. I just wish M-1 Abrams tanks didn't require so much training to operate and maintain.

But those who are going to continue to carry the banner of incoherent nationalism regardless of whether their cult leader maintains his prominence displayed the most vomit-inducing lack of basic humanity imaginable in response to Zelensky's courageous decision to come here. Donald Trump, Jr. called Zelensky an "entitled welfare queen." Commentator Benny Johnson called him an "ungrateful piece of s---." Tucker Carlson used the monologue of his television show to remark that Zelensky's choice of attire for his visit made him look like a strip club manager.  He called the visit "the most humiliating scenario . . imaginable."

These are views emanating from an entirely different moral universe than most of us inhabit.

And let me repeat a point I make with some frequency, because it's that important: the Neo-Trumpist infection has made it increasingly difficult for actual conservatism to engage the present scene. There are a number of matters that ought to be addressed by responsible conservatives: climate alarmism, identity politics militancy and wealth redistribution, and the avenues by which progressivism is imposing them, such as DEI, ESG and larded-up spending bills. 

But if unhinged yay-hoos are taking the lead in talking about them, the public at large will have no idea that there is no other basis for objecting to the leftist agenda than the kind of foul grandstanding that leads to the reaction we've seen to this visit by one of the giant of our age.

I suppose, like all else, Western civilization has to have a shelf life

 You've surely noticed that I don't use LITD to weigh in on every last instance of gender insanity severing the last strand of the gossamer and hopelessly frayed thread by which civilization hangs. Not only are instances that get news coverage daily occurrences now, it's in our faces in our daily lives. I've had students in my community college courses for several semesters now who put pronouns in their profiles. Got a business email a few weeks ago, and the person with whom I was corresponding did the pronoun thing. 

But occasionally, a development must be remarked on. The Cambridge Dictionary's "update" of the definition of a woman qualifies:

Cambridge Dictionary has updated its definition of “woman” to include anyone who “identifies as female” regardless of their sex at birth. 

The online dictionary recently added a supplementary definition of a “woman” which includes transgender people. 

It now states that as well as definitions including an “adult female human being”, a woman can also be “an adult who lives and identifies as female though they may have been said to have a different sex at birth”. 

It gives the examples: “She was the first trans woman elected to a national office” and “Mary is a woman who was assigned male at birth”.

The Dictionary’s editors made the changes after studying patterns of how the word “woman” was being used across society, and concluded that the new definition is one that English learners “should be aware of”.

This pretty much makes it official that use of the term "woman" in this second portion of the definition is commonly accepted usage of this formerly commonly agreed-upon English-language word.

This is utter madness. 

Twenty damn years ago, the notion that we'd be here was laughable.  

We have taken two of the most basic elements of what it means to be human - sexuality and language - and completely obliterated them.

Just as the momentum of our material advancement as a species has accelerated over the past three centuries, so has that of our spiritual sickness. The amount of time it took for the West to go from Rousseau to the Romantics to Marx has been shrunk to the blink of an eye in which we've gone from Obergefell v Hodges to this move. 

I don't know what to say beyond what I've said here. I'm not here to exhort you to join some activist group that thinks it has the magic formula for reversing this. If any one of them was effective, we wouldn't be at this grim juncture. 

Pray, I guess.

That's always a good idea. 

And don't acquiesce. There will come a day, if it hasn't arrived, when you will have to decide whether to use the term "they" in reference to an individual person in some situation in which you're leaving a permanent record. What will you do?

What's happening is as historically profound as anything I've experienced in my life, and I was there for the rash of assassinations in the 1960s and the moon landing. We're shredding our birthright by the minute.

You stiff-necked people, uncircumcised in heart and ears, you always resist the Holy Spirit. As your fathers did, so do you.

- Acts 7:51