…might be facing a third election.
Trump’s plan for 2020
Hmmm:
The story begins in New Mexico, which hasn’t been won by a Republican since George W. Bush in 2004 — and even that was a very near thing. Nevertheless, Bennett reports that Team Trump “is planning to announce a state director and additional ground staff there in the coming weeks.” The play is to “energize a slice of the state’s Hispanic voters” just big enough to turn it red. Jared Kushner told Time, “I can see us very aggressively playing in 18 swing states,” as opposed to just 11 last time around.
What would those states be? Kushner can’t be speaking of only states Clinton won in 2016, because she won only 19 states (plus D.C.). Clearly then Kushner is talking about battlegrounds both blue and red.
The author, Stephen Green, then tries to guess which states they might be; you’ll have to read the article for that. Then he concludes:
But the point is this: Trump wants to broaden the battlespace enough that a clean sweep would give him the biggest GOP win since George Bush ran for Reagan’s third term in 1988. (Bush declined to deliver Reagan’s third term; voters declined to reelect him.)
Now, that’s what you call optimism. But at this point I don’t discount any possibility.
I do think, though, that the outcome in 2020 will depend at least in part on who the Democratic nominee might be. Right now none of them seem any good to me. But there are also a lot of people who hate Trump enough to vote for anyone—literally anyone—who opposes him.
Meritocracy and equality
In the George Packer article I wrote about on Saturday, he sharply criticized “meritocracy.” We hear quite a bit of that sort of thing these days.
First, let’s define the word:
Meritocracy…is a political system in which economic goods and/or political power are vested in individual people on the basis of talent, effort, and achievement, rather than wealth or social class. Advancement in such a system is based on performance, as measured through examination or demonstrated achievement.
Note the phrase “rather than wealth or social class.” One of the criticisms of meritocracy that you hear these days is that meritocracy seems linked to wealth and/or class (or race or ethnic group or sex), and that it seems to perpetuate the links between these things rather than sever them. Another criticism is that it fosters a viciously competitive environment, but we’ll stick to that first criticism because it seems to be the major one.
In line with this, critics of meritocracy speak approvingly of equality. Long ago—when I was young—that meant equality of opportunity. But only conservatives speak of that these days. The left wants cosmic justice and cosmic (that is, impossible to achieve) equality. If you want to read what is meant by that, just pick up a copy of Thomas Sowell’s wonderful book The Quest for Cosmic Justice. Just one quote of many (more quotes can be found at the link):
A society that puts equality—in the sense of equality of outcome—ahead of freedom will end up with neither equality nor freedom. The use of force to achieve equality will destroy freedom, and the force, introduced for good purposes, will end up in the hands of people who use it to promote their own interests.
Humans are inherently unequal in drive, intelligence, talents, personality, life experience, and a host of other attributes or deficits. These traits are not necessarily distributed with perfect equality between groups. Whether that inequality is innate or cultural or stems from some combination of the two, in the real world we cannot possibly create perfect equality of outcome, and all attempts to procure it are doomed. All we can do, and what we should continue to strive for but have to a certain extent abandoned, is equality of opportunity and equality under the law.
But the left says that if the playing field of privilege as the left defines privilege really were equal, the races and the groups would all achieve equally (and perhaps, as in Lake Woebegone, everyone would be above average). But the left’s strained effects to achieve the impossible are hurting everyone, and that includes those they are supposedly trying to help.
Meritocracy means that merit—as in achievement, both academic and in the larger world—brings rewards. It’s hardly a perfect system, but there is no way to avoid that sort of arrangement without making a society less productive and less free, as in the old Soviet Union. Kill the kulaks and you’ve killed the most successful people in the rural areas. Stop serving the needs of the smartest kids—of all races, even if the proportions of each group among the smartest (as best we can measure such things) turn out to be somewhat different than each group’s proportion of the general population—and you create a society less able to invent things, run things, build things, and achieve brilliance.
I guess Elizabeth Warren was conceived through parthenogenisis
It would explain a lot.
.@SenWarren zings … men:
“We’re not here today because of famous arches or famous men. In fact, we’re not here because of men at all.” pic.twitter.com/CE2pjR1Xyk
— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) September 18, 2019
The future of climate change politics: Part I, the children
[NOTE: This is a big topic, and so my plan is to tackle it in segments.]
There’s a great deal of fear going around about what is now known as climate change and what is more accurately described as anthropogenic global warming (AGW): the idea that we are in the throes of a potentially catastrophic warming of Earth’s climate caused by human activity.
Right now I’m not going to debate the science. I’m going to talk about the political phenomenon. Those who believe this is a real and imminent crisis facing us are understandably filled with a great sense of urgency, and in that urgency they are proposing many supposed solutions. As part of that drive, there has been a push to educate the young in the extreme danger that will soon be facing them.
We have this sort of thing from an adult, author Jonathan Franzen writing in The New Yorker. It indicates the scope of the fear that is being projected by adults and that children are picking up on:
The goal has been clear for thirty years, and despite earnest efforts we’ve made essentially no progress toward reaching it. Today, the scientific evidence verges on irrefutable. If you’re younger than sixty, you have a good chance of witnessing the radical destabilization of life on earth—massive crop failures, apocalyptic fires, imploding economies, epic flooding, hundreds of millions of refugees fleeing regions made uninhabitable by extreme heat or permanent drought. If you’re under thirty, you’re all but guaranteed to witness it.
So that sets the tone: it’s is virtually certain to happen and to happen pretty soon, and to be awful. Franzen doesn’t bother to get into the science of it, which is wise because neither he nor I nor 99.99+% of his readers can understand the science, so it must be taken on faith or rejected on faith, plus whatever scientific knowledge and understanding each person may have. (More about that later, in another part of this series).
Franzen is hardly alone in his desperation and despair about this. He doesn’t really think a solution will be forthcoming at this point. That’s one of the thrusts of his article, in which he also writes what he thinks it would actually take to tackle the problem effectively:
The first condition is that every one of the world’s major polluting countries institute draconian conservation measures, shut down much of its energy and transportation infrastructure, and completely retool its economy. According to a recent paper in Nature, the carbon emissions from existing global infrastructure, if operated through its normal lifetime, will exceed our entire emissions “allowance”—the further gigatons of carbon that can be released without crossing the threshold of catastrophe. (This estimate does not include the thousands of new energy and transportation projects already planned or under construction.) To stay within that allowance, a top-down intervention needs to happen not only in every country but throughout every country. ..
Finally, overwhelming numbers of human beings, including millions of government-hating Americans, need to accept high taxes and severe curtailment of their familiar life styles without revolting. They must accept the reality of climate change and have faith in the extreme measures taken to combat it. They can’t dismiss news they dislike as fake. They have to set aside nationalism and class and racial resentments. They have to make sacrifices for distant threatened nations and distant future generations. They have to be permanently terrified by hotter summers and more frequent natural disasters, rather than just getting used to them. Every day, instead of thinking about breakfast, they have to think about death.
Franzen ends up concluding—and I concur—that this will never happen. And I add that this is correct whether the actual science, and Franzen’s fears, are valid or not. He also ends up recommending halfway measures such as forest conservation and replenishment, which are things that both left and right can get behind (we discussed it previously in this thread).
What effect does a message like this have on children? In a recent poll among teens, 88% believed in AGW and 52% were angry about it and 57% afraid. I’m surprised, given that 88% figure, that the other figures weren’t higher, but the poll also says that 88% of teens believe that there is still time to stop the worst effects. 64% of teens think climate change will hurt them personally, and 76% feel it will hurt people in the US.
So whatever the truth will turn out to be, the AGW advocates have done an excellent job in getting the word out. But not enough of a job to cause the sort of widespread panic that someone like Franzen feels would be required to actually change anything.
That’s where 16-year-old Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg comes in. As Richard Fernandez writes:
Even as the era of “small wars” is seemingly on the wane, environmental concerns, especially among the elite, are rising to panic bordering on despair. Sixteen-year-old climate activist Greta Thunberg, speaking at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting at Davos, said without batting an eye that “adults keep saying we owe it to the young people, to give them hope, but I don’t want your hope. I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day.”
With such a frightened younger generation, it can only benefit the left, because government is seen as the solution.
Using censure to slap someone down for being too moderate
Usually when Democrats run as moderates they end up voting like good little leftists, except for votes that don’t matter.
Democrat Senator Krysten Sinema of Arizona, who won a close election in 2016, ran as a moderate. I haven’t followed all the ins and outs (or, to be honest, any of the ins and outs) of her actual voting record, but it appears that every now and then she really has voted as a moderate.
Which has earned her this:
Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D., Ariz.) is facing a censure vote from the Progressive Caucus of the Arizona Democratic Party, due to her support for some of President Donald Trump’s nominees…
The resolution, which will be considered by the Democratic state committeemen during the Arizona Democratic Party’s quarterly meeting Saturday, cites a pair of Sinema’s confirmation votes. They did not support her confirmation votes for William Barr as U.S. attorney general and for David Bernhardt as secretary of the interior. They were also annoyed by her resistance to join Democrats in trying to reinstate “net neutrality” rules.
I don’t believe this will pass the full Arizona Democratic Party; the group pushing this is the Progressive Caucus. In other words, the leftist branch. But the leftist branch is now wagging the dog on the national level of the Democratic Party, so perhaps that’s true in Arizona, as well, and perhaps it will pass. “Progressives” don’t believe in or tolerate disagreement or compromise of any sort, however small. It’s groupthink and goodthink all the way.
What’s ahead for Israel?
I don’t know and nobody else knows either, because the results of yesterday’s election were a dead heat and no one has a clear majority to form a new government. So there will be a lot of wrangling ahead.
Here’s the story as it now stands:
With 95 percent of the votes counted, Kahol Lavan has won 33 out of 120 Knesset seats, with Likud behind with 32 seats. Netanyahu’s bloc, comprised of right-wing and ultra-Orthodox parties, currently stands at 56 seats. The center-left bloc has 56 seats.
Avigdor Lieberman, whose Yisrael Beiteinu party is projected to have eight seats, is expected to be the election’s kingmaker. On Wednesday morning, he reiterated his support for a “broad liberal unity government,” which would include Yisrael Beiteinu, Likud and Kahol Lavan.
As far as I can tell, that’s not much of a change from before this election.
More:
In a brief statement to the press, Netanyahu says the choice is now between a government led by him or a “dangerous government” relying on “anti-Zionist Arab parties.” Likud and the right-wing Hayamin Hehadash and Habayit Hayehudi parties have agreed to begin negotiations to form a Netanyahu-led coalition, he adds.
I’ve said many times that I don’t like parliamentary systems. This election hasn’t disabused me of that notion.
Israeli election today
I plan to update later as actual results come in.
So far it’s only exit polls – which I don’t credit much. They say that it’s close, which I do believe will be the case. It may be that no clear winner emerges.
The left is determined to oust Susan Collins
It’s no secret that the left wants to hold the House and take the Senate, so that even if Trump wins again they can thwart his every move in terms of legislation. And the Senate is particularly important, of course, for approving judicial nominees.
Therefore the left is determined to defeat Susan Collins of Maine. It’s especially ironic, because in past years it’s been the right wing of the GOP that has tried to oust Collins as insufficiently conservative and way too RINOesque.
But Collins turned out to be the unexpected hero (to the right) of the Kavanaugh confirmation, standing up for the rule of law against the politics of unsupported character destruction pushed by the left against Kavanaugh. In this, the left sees an opportunity to defeat her in the purplish-blueish state of Maine, where she was already something of an anomaly, although a longstanding one.
This Vox piece from yesterday pushes the completely discredited recent NY Times allegations as something that will hurt Collins, and knowing how propaganda works (it’s often effective, in other words) Vox may even be correct about that.
However:
The nonpartisan Cook Political Report recently moved its appraisal of Collins’s race from “lean Republican” to a toss-up, citing a number of polls showing Collins losing ground and the emergence of a strong Democratic challenger.
To be sure, what few polls there are show Collins leading her closest challenger — Democrat and Maine House Speaker Sara Gideon — by double digits. Collins has a huge advantage with her name recognition. But a number Republicans are worried about is Collins’ approval rating, which Morning Consult shows is at 45 percent, compared to 48 percent unfavorable. Another poll, conducted by AARP in July, shows Collins at 49 percent favorability, and 41 percent unfavorability.
It may be mere wishful thinking on the part of the left that Collins could lose her seat. But if she doesn’t lose it, it won’t be for lack of trying on the part of the left to defeat her.
The fact that all the Kavanaugh charges are bogus and have been proven so, and that the latest charges are especially weak, doesn’t matter. Think they don’t work as propaganda? Think again:
“There was a lot of grassroots energy that came out of [the Kavanaugh vote],” Stack [Maine Democratic Party spokesperson] told Vox this summer. “People keep wanting to step up for us. That energy has not dissipated, it’s only grown.”
Big lies get stronger the more they are repeated. You can fool some of the people some of the time. The real question is: how many? and for how long?
Out with the old anti-Semites, in with the new
In their defense, I guess it must be hard to find a leftist who isn’t an anti-Semite.
The war against Kavanaugh: remember Clarence Thomas?
The Times hit piece on Kavanaugh that I discussed yesterday is still in the news, partly because the Times issued an addendum/correction to say that oh yeah, we forgot to mention it, but the supposed victim is reported to have said she has no recollection of the alleged event.
There’s much more along those lines, all of it to the disgrace of the Times. But this story wasn’t worthy of any newspaper except a gossip column scandal sheet even if the supposed victim had made the accusation herself. It’s about an irrelevant, ancient, unprovable, easily falsifiable charge. And even in the highly unlikely event that it was true exactly as written, it’s hard to know who the perp would be. Kavanaugh, or his penile-handling buddies?
I’ll leave that to everyone else to sort out. What interests me far more is the left’s goal in all this, discussed at some length here. And you can see that goal in action if you read this opinion piece by Jamelle Bouie in today’s NY Times (moving right along, the Times is) urging court-packing to offset the appointment of conservative justices and adding:
And of course Justice Brett Kavanaugh was confirmed last September under clouds of suspicion that stemmed from accusations of sexual assault and sexual misconduct to a bevy of ethics complaints.
See how it goes? Make a bunch of bogus accusations, and then that person is forever “under a cloud” and “suspicious” and discredited.
But this is nothing new. The only thing new is the enthusiastic and unapologetic boosting of court-packing—and even that’s not new; it was advocated (with the screen excuse that it was to correct for justices being too long in the tooth) by none other than FDR. It’s also of interest that Bouie – or his editors, or whoever at the Times came up with the headline for his piece – appeals openly and nakedly to emotion rather than logic in the headline: “Mad About Kavanaugh and Gorsuch? The Best Way to Get Even Is to Pack the Court.”
Don’t get mad; get even.
Clarence Thomas was nominated for the Court nearly thirty years ago by George H. W. Bush, after the vicious Bork hearings. Thomas’s hearings were just as vicious as Bork’s on the part of the left, although they took a different (and now very familiar) form: accusations of sexual wrongdoing of an unprovable and salacious sort, although at least the Thomas accusations were made by someone willing to make them publicly, and they involved conduct alleged to have occurred when Thomas was fully adult rather than a college or high school student.
Why was Thomas’ appointment (or Bork’s) so offensive to the left, so unacceptable and unendurable? The Court had been moving to the left for many years, and the nomination of either man threatened that movement. Bork was nominated as a replacement for swing vote Powell (just as Kavanaugh replaced Kennedy, another swing vote) and Thomas was nominated as a replacement for the liberal Thurgood Marshall. The Thomas nomination was especially galling because he was black and therefore his conservative beliefs were a particular affront to a left that fully expected and demanded that all black people toe the leftist line.
But any conservative taking the seat of a liberal or even a swing vote was an abomination to the Democrats, and worthy of character assassination or any other weapon in their rhetorical arsenal. And ever since the Thomas hearings, has he not been (as Bouie says of Kavanaugh) “under clouds of suspicion that stemmed from accusations of sexual misconduct”? That was the plan.
As many others have pointed out, the courts are one of the main organs of the left these days, and the left relies heavily on them to advance the leftist agenda even when the public isn’t fully on board. That is why this is a matter of extreme importance to the left, and why they will not let up on this front or relinquish these tactics.
It is also one of their many beefs against Trump – why, that awful man got to appoint judges! Disgusting! And the judges he appointed trend not just Republican but conservative. There oughtta be a law against it!
[NOTE: A lot of people are saying this is all about Roe. It certainly is about Roe and the left’s fear of the Court upending it, but it’s about any and all of the left’s agenda and the Court’s role in advancing it.
By the way, just to refresh your memory, here is just a small excerpt from Ted Kennedy’s speech about Bork:
Robert Bork’s America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens’ doors in midnight raids, and schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists could be censored at the whim of the Government, and the doors of the Federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens.
Absurd, but apparently effective.]
[ADDENDUM: Also see this.]
How the great truth dawned: the Gulag as change agent
Gary Saul Morson has written an extraordinary aticle for New Criterion. It’s hard to capture its flavor. I suggest you read the whole thing, if you haven’t already.
I could excerpt almost any part of it, but I’ll choose this:
Solzhenitsyn often cites the memoirs of the revolutionary R. V. Ivanov-Razumnk, who compared his imprisonment under tsars and Soviets. Under the tsars, interrogation never involved torture, while under the Soviets it was routine. The tsars never thought of arresting relatives of criminals: Lenin remained free and was accepted to higher education although his brother had been hanged for his role in a conspiracy to murder Tsar Alexander III. The Soviets built camps for “the wives of the accused,” and “member of the family of a traitor to the motherland” became a criminal category. In some periods, the children of these traitors were put in orphanages, where most died, while in others they were simply executed. The tsars never conducted arrests at random, but Stalin issued quotas for each district, and Lenin explicitly called for the arbitrary execution of innocent people, since killing the innocent, he explained, would create a terrorized, therefore submissive, population…
Compared to Soviet interrogators, Solzhenitsyn observes, the villains of Shakespeare, Schiller, and Dickens seem “somewhat farcical and clumsy to our contemporary perception.” The problem is, these villains recognize themselves as evil, and say to themselves, I cannot live unless I do evil. But that is not at all the way things are, Solzhenitsyn explains: “To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he’s doing is good, or else that it’s a well-considered act in conformity with natural law. . . . it is in the nature of a human being to seek a justification for his actions.”
Why is it, Solzhenitsyn asks, that Macbeth, Iago, and other Shakespearean evildoers stopped short at a dozen corpses, while Lenin and Stalin did in millions? The answer is that Macbeth and Iago “had no ideology.” Ideology makes the killer and torturer an agent of good, “so that he won’t hear reproaches and curses but will receive praise and honors.” Ideology never achieved such power and scale before the twentieth century.
I’m not sure about that last sentence, though. Yes, the evil perpetrated in the more distant past was often about plunder, the spoils of victory and power rather than ideology. But sometimes ideology entered into it. What about the religious wars of Europe and Asia, for example? (For the former see this and for the latter, the Muslim conquest of India comes to mind.)
What the 20th Century did to enlarge the “power and scale” of wars of ideology was to make killers more efficient and comprehensive by giving them modern tools for carnage. In addition, the ideologies of the 20th Century – which were not for the most part religious – were stand-ins and substitutes for the ideologies of religion minus the somewhat-restraining morality of those religions. Nazism and Communism were ideologies without any old-fashioned shackles related to good and evil, except that “it is good to kill your enemies as you define them.”
But I’ve wandered a bit far afield here. Morson’s essay is really about how the Gulag changed Solzhenitsyn utterly:
But wasn’t Solzhenitsyn himself once an atheist and a Communist? Indeed he was, and The Gulag Archipelago narrates how, bit by bit, he changed his view of life. The book is not only a history but also an autobiography, and because Solzhenitsyn’s experience was shared by so many others, Gulag offers itself as a collective autobiography. I was arrested this way; here are the ways others were arrested. I suffered this brutal interrogation; others underwent these other kinds of torture. As we examine the progress of souls in extreme conditions, a story—or rather a set of closely related stories—unfolds, and these suspenseful narratives command considerable dramatic interest.