What most accounts of DeSantis's rejection of an AP pilot course aren't telling you

 If stories about this that are showing up in your social media feed, email or news digest of choice merely let you know that the Florida governor has put the nix on a pilot Advanced Placement African-American Studies course in his state's higher-learning insitutions, you're getting incomplete information.

Stanley Kurtz of the Ethics and Public Policy Center (whose book Radical in Chief opened my eyes to Barack Obama's background - not just Jeremiah Wright and Bill Ayers, but a host of people and organizations I'd not previously heard of, such as the Midwest Academy and the Annenberg Challenge, and Heather Booth, Robert Creamer and Greg Galluzzo) presents the complete picture of the situation at National Review:

The debate over APAAS has been complicated by the College Board’s secrecy. The College Board has steadfastly refused to release the APAAS curriculum framework or associated materials. Nonetheless, I obtained a copy of the APAAS curriculum and wrote about it in September, laying out its socialist agenda and its promotion of Critical Race Theory (CRT). Unfortunately, no one could judge the accuracy of my characterization because the curriculum remained secret. I confined myself at the time to a “fair use” discussion of the framework, declining to publish the full curriculum out of respect for the College Board’s insistence that it was a “trade secret.” In the wake of the controversy, however, the Florida Standard newspaper has obtained a copy of the pilot APAAS curriculumand made it public.

In another new development, I have now obtained a copy of a second document, the “APAAS Pilot Course Guide,” a manual designed for use by teachers. Taken together, the curriculum framework and the teacher’s guide expand our understanding of the course in a way that confirms the wisdom of DeSantis’s decision.

The most serious problems in APAAS are in the final quarter of the class (“Unit 4: Movements and Debates”). This is where the course grapples with contemporary political and cultural controversies. Overwhelmingly, APAAS’s approach is from the socialist Left, with very little in the way of even conventional liberal perspectives represented, not to mention conservative views. Most of the topics in the final quarter present controversial leftist authors as if their views were authoritative, with no critical or contrasting perspectives supplied. The scarcely disguised goal is to recruit students to various leftist political causes. Now let’s get down to cases.

The fourth quarter of the course features a topic on “The Movement for Black Lives.” The Movement for Black Lives (M4BL) was started by the Marxist organizers who founded Black Lives Matter. Yet M4BL extends far beyond BLM, encompassing “over 170 Black-led organizations.” M4BL is organized around an extensive policy platform, the “Vision for Black Lives.” That platform is radical, to say the least. As you might expect, it includes planks such as defunding the police. M4BL’s platform goes further, however, by calling for the abolition of all money bail, and even all pretrial detention. To this end, the “Vision for Black Lives” endorses federal legislation by “Squad” member, Representative Ayanna Pressley.

It would be a mistake, however, to think of M4BL’s extensive policy menu as a mere attempt to influence the platform of the Democratic Party. As explained by Marxist activist Robin D. G. Kelley (whose work is the subject of the very next APAAS topic), the real purpose of M4BL’s platform is to serve as a “blueprint for social transformation,” radically changing the structure of American society by shifting us away from market principles and toward “’collective ownership’ of certain economic institutions” and a universal basic income.

Kelley also highlights the expansive nature of what he calls M4BL’s most controversial demand: reparations. For M4BL, the concept of reparations goes far beyond massive monetary awards and includes even “mandated changes in the school curriculum that acknowledge the impact of slavery, colonialism, and Jim Crow in producing wealth and racial inequality.” According to Kelley, M4BL wants these changes so schools can undermine “the common narrative that American wealth is the product of individual hard work and initiative, while poverty results from misfortune, culture, bad behavior, or inadequate education.” In other words, M4BL (and Kelley) want schools to inculcate the basic premises of Critical Race Theory.

The APAAS teacher’s guide presents M4BL’s agenda in a way that is entirely free of criticism or alternative viewpoints. All the recommended topic readings support Black Lives Matter, and the “possible focus areas” provided for teachers uncritically summarize M4BL’s policy platform.

One of two recommended books for this topic is From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor. Taylor is a socialist, and in no way shy about it. Her book argues that BLM is a step toward what ought to be a revolutionary socialist transformation of the United States. While Taylor rejects Stalin’s authoritarianism, she remains quite fond of Marx and Lenin. Taylor sees capitalism as synonymous with racism, and she argues that any successful struggle against racism must ultimately replace capitalism as well. Taylor also dismisses “colorblindness” as a ploy to disguise the racism inherent in the capitalist system. (This view of colorblindness is excluded from Florida’s curriculum by law.)

Far from BLM fulfilling American ideals, as Taylor sees it, “when the Black movement goes into motion, it destabilizes all political life in the United States,” exposing “the foundational lie of the United States as a free and democratic society.” Taylor ends her book with a quote from the Marxist intellectual and “revolutionary,” C. L. R. James: “The hatred of bourgeois society and the readiness to destroy it when the opportunity should present itself, rests among [Blacks] to a degree greater than in any other section of the population in the United States.”

Virtually all APAAS authors in the final quarter of the course are part of the same tight group of far-left activists. Taylor’s book carries an enthusiastic blurb from Barbara Ransby, the author of the other book assigned for this topic; another blurb from Robin D. G. Kelley, the Marxist radical whose work is the subject of the very next APAAS topic; and a blurb from Michelle Alexander, whose work is the subject of a previous APAAS topic. In general, readings by authors assigned in the final quarter of APAAS endorse, are endorsed by, and overlap with, other APAAS readings. When it comes to APAAS’s treatment of contemporary policy debates, conventional American liberals and conservatives need not apply.

The APAAS topic immediately prior to the topic on “The Movement for Black Lives” covers “The Reparations Movement.” We’ve just seen that the most controversial demand of M4BL is reparations, expansively defined to include even mandated school curricula. So why does APAAS include yet another topic on reparations? It may not add up as an educational strategy, but it is an effective political recruiting tool.

The three suggested items for study in the reparations topic are Ta-Nehisi Coates’s article “The Case for Reparations,” a button that the teacher’s guide says serves to “promote” reparations for the Tulsa race massacre, and the copy of H.R. 40, a federal bill that sets up a commission to develop proposals for reparations. It’s clear from these assignments that APAAS itself is promoting reparations. No article criticizing this highly controversial policy is assigned. In effect, APAAS is pushing students to lobby for legislation. And by the way, M4BL also endorses H.R. 40, so students will find the same de facto call to legislative lobbying waiting for them in two successive topics.

The teacher’s guide purports to outline “debates” over reparations, yet the so-called debates don’t actually involve arguments against reparations. By “debates,” the guide simply means practical disagreements about who exactly should pay for reparations, who exactly should benefit, and the precise mixture of monetary compensation and public apology to be demanded. There is no disagreement about reparations as such. This is political advocacy, pure and simple.

The topics on reparations and M4BL are part of a special section of the course. That section presents four different topics touching on “Contemporary Issues and Debates.” This special set of four optional topics allows teachers to instruct students to focus in-depth on only one of the topics in question. The selection of a single topic out of the four options can be done by a whole class, by small groups of students, or by each individual student. In addition to reparations and M4BL, students can focus either on “Incarceration, Abolition, and the New Jim Crow,” or on injustices and activism regarding “Medicine, Technology, and the Environment.” Because students choose only one of the four topics to explore in-depth, all four topics are omitted from the final AP Exam. Students, the guide says, cannot be held responsible on the test for the topics they didn’t choose to focus on.

Sorry about excerpting at such length, but this is important stuff. 

This is not some kind of overall endorsement of DeSantis in whatever his political career plans may be. The guy can be a performative jackass. He bases too many of his actions on tactical political calculations (like campaigning for Kari Lake). But he's spot on here.

While the substantiation that Kurtz provides is indispensable, I'd offer a bit of shorthand advice to any high school or college student, parent, school board member or college trustee: run, don't walk, in the opposite direction from any "academic discipline" with the word "studies" in the name. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The current debt-ceiling standoff and the two irreconcilable views of government's proper scope

 We're back at a juncture we've found ourselves at several times. It works a little differently from the way such a juncture does in a household. (And here, we're assuming a responsible couple heading that household, a couple with a common goal of ensuring financial soundness in the present and for the future.) In a household, the people involved come to an agreement along the lines of, "Okay, given our present income, present savings plan, and reasonable confidence that both can be maintained, if we ever have to go in yet, here's how much we can handle, but we must never that."

Government has options for skirting the firmness of such an agreement. It can tax citizens more, issue bonds and print money. Congress never worries about whether those measures will actually be taken when spending bumps up against the agreed-upon limit. Treasury bond holders still seem to have enough confidence in the full-faith-and-credit premise of the arrangement to keep things shored up, at least on a band-aid basis.

How did all this get started, anyway?

It’s a legal limit dating back to 1917 that caps the level of debt that the federal government can assume. Once the U.S. hits the limit and exhausts ways to pay its bills, Congress must lift the ceiling in order for the government to continue to borrow to meet its obligations. If it doesn’t, the country could be forced to default, which experts warn would be economically catastrophic.

Republicans have waged heated battles over the debt ceiling, most notably in 2011, but they have always been resolved in time.

Now, it's true that the rush to resolve a debt-ceiling crisis is not about new spending. Government is on the hook for the debt in question. But the fact that government keeps coming to a moment like this means that no one ever thinks of operating government at a debt level far enough below the ceiling to avoid trouble.

In light of that, is it grandstanding for McCarthy to insist on spending cuts in his negotiations with Biden? That case could be made; McCarthy has something of a track record as a grandstander. But his stance is predicated on a question worth asking: At what point do we have the difficult discussions about the reason we're always up to our eyeballs in debt?

And what might that reason be? Well, that's why the discussions would be difficult:

Politicians promised you benefits, but never funded them.

That’s according to truthinaccounting.org, which noted that there’s $96.3 trillion owed in promised but unfunded Medicare and Social Security benefits — $55.1 trillion for Medicare and $41.2 trillion for Social Security.

While Uncle Sam has $5.9 trillion in assets, the $129 trillion owed in bills — including military and civilian retirement benefits — means the U.S. is in the hole for $123 trillion. Just the unfunded liabilities in Medicare and Social Security add up to $96 trillion.

It is a stunning amount coming due over the next 75 years. The Treasury Department sticks its proverbial head in the sand and does not even list the liabilities on the balance sheet of the federal government.

But not to worry, taxpayers will not actually be paying for this. How could they?

Instead, older people who have been promised these benefits likely will not be paid in full.

If by some magic we do manage to pay for these promised benefits, it is young people who would be saddled with trillions in extra taxes with nothing in return.

Unelected policy makers in the twentieth century decided for the nation that government should address two major givens of human life - old age and sickness - that had, to that point, been outside its purview. Frances Perkins, the fourth labor secretary of labor, was the architect of social security in the 1930s (as she was of the minimum wage and unemployment insurance, two more unprecedented intrusions into the life of the citizenry).  Medicare was the brainchild of a Democratic congressional majority in the 1960s who found it unacceptable that only 60 percent of older Americans had health insurance.

These programs and the thinking behind them didn't appear spontaneously. They have their roots in the progressive movement of the early twentieth century. Thinkers such as John Dewey, Thorstein Veblen, Richard T. Ely, Herbert Croly and Woodrow Wilson looked at the rapid industrialization and urbanization of the country and concluded that the Madisonian framework for American government was no longer sufficient to address the issues of the day. Furthermore, legislators elected from the populace around the country lacked the knowledge to deal with those issues by crafting bills to target each one. In their view, what government needed to do was hire a cadre of experts in areas such as transportation, infrastructure, labor, health care, education and agriculture that would flesh out with details broad mandates enacted by Congress.

This fundamentally changed the average citizen's view of his or her relationship to government.  Government, with its monopoly on the legitimate use of force, was now assuming a seemingly benevolent role as well, and private citizens would be henceforth dependent on it for basic necessities. No longer was the state just tasked with keeping bad guys foreign and domestic from knocking us over the head. Now it would assume responsibility for the planning of an individual's life course. 

Over the course of the last 90 years, people have come comfortable with the trading off of having choices as to how to plan for their basic well-being - liberty, if you will - for being unburdened with having to think about such daunting matters.

There are think tanks and lobbying organizations dedicated to the quixotic task of rolling this all back, but without an understanding on the part of the country's inhabitants of the preciousness of their freedom to steer their own destinies. That, in turn, requires an understanding that individual sovereignty is the image and likeness of the Creator's sovereignty. 

But it's pretty late in the day for a conversation like that, isn't it?

 

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.