Stromata Blog

Statues, Statues Everywhere!

Destroying monuments and erasing names from public buildings is a favorite activity of revolutionaries, as we have seen in the past year and a half. When you think about it, this iconoclastic impulse is odd. The dead don’t care whether their statues are displayed on street corners or their names are attached to schools, military bases or municipal landfills. Most of the public is indifferent, too. Does one American in ten know that Fort Bragg in North Carolina (scheduled for renaming as soon as a commission can find a sufficiently pure replacement) is named after a Confederate general (one who, incidentally, contributed more to the North’s victory than Union generals like John Pope and Ambrose Burnside)? Even fewer, I’m sure, know anything about Supreme Court Justice Joseph P. Bradley, whose name was erased a few days ago from a building at Rutgers.

To our contemporary iconoclasts, however, it is very important to scrutinize the careers of men like Bragg and Bradley, indict them for their faults, ignore the possibility that they possessed virtues, and seek to condemn to oblivion what little imprint their footsteps have left on the sands of time.

Braxton Bragg was an easy target, since he fought in support of a real insurrection (as opposed to the farcical one that is now decried by President Biden as “worse than the Civil War”).

The iconoclasts must look further for Justice Bradley’s offenses. Two of his Supreme Court opinions are held against him: United States v. Stanley, 109 U.S. 3 (1883), which held that the Fourteenth Amendment restricts only state action (a position unquestioned even by the Warren Court in its headiest days), and his concurrence in Bradwell v. State, 83 U.S. 130 (1873), which contains much lofty rhetoric on the centrality of motherhood to civilized life. That’s an unpopular viewpoint in many contemporary quarters, but did anyone ever embrace it because a building in New Jersey bore the name of someone who wrote in its defense?

What do the iconoclasts gain from their successes?

First, they can bask in the feeling that they, who have found these motes in our ancestors’ eyes, are morally superior to both those ancestors and the deplorable folk who overlooked their wrongthink. Their spirit is what Our Lord warned against when he said, “Judge not, that you be not judged.”

Second, they move the nation closer to “Year Zero”, to the time when America will have no history except the version woven by the revolutionaries. Demonizing little remembered figures strengthens the progressive tale that the United States has been a consistent force for evil in the world. The evisceration of the Braggs and Bradleys likewise makes it easier to attack better known figures and to envelop all dissent from progressive dogma in a blanket of prejudice.

Third, each cancellation adds weight to the notion that, as Hamlet reflected, a “dram of eale [evil]” casts doubt on “all the noble substance”; in other words, that merits can never outweigh faults, leaving aside the exception always made for those who profess the revolutionary catechism with unstinted and uninquisitive enthusiasm.

Iconoclasm fits well with a totalitarian mindset, for smashing the past is the necessary preliminary to building a future on a foundation of fantastical, unproven ideas, while sweeping away the remnants is an essential precaution against counterrevolution. How can it be countered? The iconoclasts, embalmed in their own self-righteousness, are not open to persuasion, and arguing in defense of each target is a tiring game that gives the impression that the iconoclasts have at least some valid points on their side.

My suggestion is that we throw more targets at them, until they collapse from exhaustion. It isn’t just that the time they spend constructing cases against figures whom they never heard of before will distract them from worse pastimes. One of their vulnerabilities is that substituting new historical figures for the canceled ones contradicts the image of America as an eternal cesspit of villainy. Hence, for example, Bradley Hall at Rutgers will from now on be known only by its street address.

How about a campaign to name every significant building that currently lacks one and to erect a new generation of statues of great men and women? Thousands of significant but little recognized figures have contributed to our Nation’s greatness. There is no shortage of candidates.

The iconoclasts, rather than the iconodules, would then be on the defensive. As they contrive objections to anyone and everyone who is put forward, their pettiness, dishonesty and hatred of the America that exists will come more clearly to the fore and, we may be confident, will become less and less palatable to those who don’t share their mania.

Capital Gains in Wonderland

Ron Wyden (D–Ore.), chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, has released the text of his proposed “Billionaires Income Tax Act”. It’s a mere 107 pages, a trifle over 20,000 words, and I’ve felt no impulse to do more than browse through it. The Wall Street Journal summarizes the high points, and I’ll summarize its summary, supplemented by dipping occasionally into the bill itself:

Senator Wyden aims to tax unrealized capital gains as they accrue, a huge change from present law, which taxes gains only when taxpayers realize them in sales, exchanges or other taxable transactions. Commentators have noted how tricky it is to tax gains that may prove transitory (asset values go down as well as up) and will often be hard to calculate (many assets don’t trade in liquid markets). Senator Wyden has made an effort to overcome these formidable difficulties, which is why his bill is novella length.

The tax would be imposed on anyone who, for three consecutive years, had net worth of over one billion dollars or adjusted gross income of over $100 million. Once a taxpayer fell into this disfavored class, he would remain in it until his net worth fell to $500 million or less and his AGI to $50 million or less and remained below those levels for three consecutive years. These thresholds are not indexed. We can thus anticipate, especially as Bidenflation takes hold, that the 700 “billionaires” reportedly subject to the new tax will eventually have lots of company, albeit probably not (we hope!) as much as the 155 individual taxpayers who initially had to pay the alternative minimum tax; their number grew to 5.1 million.

There would be two distinct regimes, one for assets that are traded on established markets, such as shares of public companies, and one for nontraded assets.

The net increase in fair market value of traded assets would be taxed annually at the maximum long-term capital gain rate (20% plus a 3.8% Medicare tax). In the first year in which an individual became subject to the tax (2022 for a Bezos, Musk or Zuckerberg), he would be allowed to spread payment over five years.

A net decrease in the value of traded assets could be carried back for up to three years to offset past gains and obtain a refund of capital gain taxes previously paid. The loss could also be carried forward indefinitely to offset future realized or unrealized capital gains and $3,000 a year of ordinary income. (When the limit on the ordinary income offset was increased from $1,000 to $3,000 in 1970, it wasn’t quite so nugatory: the equivalent of about $22,000 today.)

Gains on nontraded assets would be taxed only when realized, as under current law, but the definition of “realization” would be expanded to include gifts, bequests, transfers to irrevocable grantor trusts and various other transactions that ordinarily aren’t taxable (with an exception for transfers to spouses). Also, the tax rate would increase above 23.8% as the asset’s holding period increased, up to a maximum of 49%.

Those are the basics. The rest of the 107 pages are devoted to closing every loophole and work-around that Senator Wyden’s staff could imagine. You may be sure that by next Monday Mark Zuckerberg’s tax lawyers will have devised half a dozen schemes that are beyond the imaginative capacity of Congressional staffers, spurring yet more pages of statute in the future.

A couple of economic effects of this tax structure are predictable and will have an impact well beyond the small circle of ultra-wealthy targets.

First, the taxes assessed in 2022 will be gargantuan, which is why payment will be allowed over five years. After 2022, if the economy doesn’t fall into permanent stagnation (a scenario that shouldn’t be ruled out; President Biden’s policies could usher in a period that will make Japan’s lost decade look like exuberance), entrepreneurs will continue to found companies that grow from almost nothing to multi-billion dollar valuations in a short space of time. Even with five years to pay the tax, the 2022 and later billionaire cadres will face urgent needs for cash. They may avoid the tax for the moment by refraining from taking their companies public, a strategy that will make it harder to raise capital for further expansion and will also increase their eventual tax rate. Alternatively, they may go public and begin selling their personal stock holdings to raise money to cover tax liabilities. The latter course will exert a steady downward pressure on the stock price, to the detriment of other stockholders and the company’s future prospects.

Second, government revenue from the tax will fluctuate convulsively. The three-year loss carryback means that a broad stock market decline, like the one in 2008, could lead to multi-billion dollar tax refunds to men like Jeff Bezos at the very time when the federal fisc was most severely strained. Conversely, stock market booms will produce high but short-lived revenue streams, which, unless legislative habits alter radically, will be drawn on to establish programs whose expenditures will continue and swell after the boom has faded. California, which relies heavily on capital gains taxes to fund its government, illustrates how hard it can be to budget rationally when income is unforeseeable.

From a lawyer’s point of view, the most interesting question about taxing unrealized gains is whether it is permitted by the Sixteenth Amendment. If not, that is, if unrealized gains are not income within the amendment’s meaning, any tax levied on them is subject to the Constitution’s requirement that direct taxes be apportioned among the states by population (Art. I, sec. 9, cl. 4). The question is interesting enough that I’m going to ponder it longer before offering a definitive opinion. Here are a couple of preliminary observations:

The starting point should be Merchants’ Loan & Trust Co. v. Smietanka, 255 U.S. 509 (1921), in which the Supreme Court held that realized capital gains are “income”. The decision’s originalist analysis strongly implies that income arises only as the result of some act or transaction. Id. at 520. A later case, Helvering v. Bruun, 309 U.S. 461 (1940), refined that concept by holding that it was constitutional to tax the gain a landlord realized when he recovered real estate whose value had been increased by the tenant’s improvements. This case has been cited for the proposition that realization isn’t a necessary component of “income”, but that hardly seems consistent with what the Court itself said:

Here, as a result of a business transaction, the respondent received back his land with a new building on it, which added an ascertainable amount to its value. It is not necessary to recognition of taxable gain that he should be able to sever the improvement begetting the gain from his original capital. If that were necessary, no income could arise from the exchange of property; whereas such gain has always been recognized as realized taxable gain. [Id. at 469 (emphasis added)]

As an interesting sidelight, the legislature of my home state of Washington recently enacted a tax on realized capital gains. The state’s Supreme Court held long ago that income taxes violate the state constitution, unless the rate of tax is completely uniform. Culliton v. Chase, 174 Wash. 363 (1933). A lawsuit challenging the new tax is moving forward. The state doesn’t deny that the tax isn’t uniform. (It exempts gains on various classes of asset, such as personal residences, whose taxation would have led to legislators' donning coats of tar and feathers.) The argument in defense of the statute is that taxes on realized gains aren’t taxes on income. Meanwhile, Senator Wyden argues that unrealized gains are income. One must twist one’s mind into knots to be a true progressive these days.

A Not-So-Secret Ballot

Yesterday I filled out and mailed my ballot in some upcoming local elections. Washington State, where I live, doesn’t allow in-person voting, so I had no choice.

As I’ve said before, mail-in voting is a bad idea, because it effectively abolishes the secret ballot. Anybody who bribes or intimidates voters can check ballots before they’re dispatched, thus verifying that orders were obeyed.

Here in Washington, the attack on the secret ballot goes further. The envelope shows the voter’s name and address, and there isn’t a second, anonymous envelope into which the ballot is inserted. Instead, it can be put into a “sleeve”, which isn’t sealed and can’t be. The instructions emphasize, too, that hiding the ballot inside it is optional.

Hence, whoever opens voters’ envelopes can easily remove ballots, read them and put them back without any possibility of detection. The only preventive is the presence of watchers from the other party – not very effective in areas like Seattle, where there aren’t a lot of Republicans (or, for that matter, in the solidly GOP parts of the state where Democrats are thin on the ground).

Even for a well-crafted mail-in ballot, secrecy is optional, but at least the option is the voter’s. Whether ballots are secret in Washington depends on the honesty and good will of the political operatives who count the votes.

N.B.: The secretary of state who is responsible for this ballot design (a Republican, I regret to say) just resigned her office “to take a key election-security position in President Joe Biden’s administration”.

“Security” – You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

Way to Go, Brandon!

The Democratic Party grifters who send me half a dozen or so e-mails a day declaring that if I will just send them money, Donald Trump will go to prison and Anthony Fauci will be canonized yesterday sent one with the subject header, “Biggest Social Security increase in DECADES!”

President Biden has long called Social Security benefits “the bedrock of American retirement,” and now, recipients are poised to get the biggest cost-of-living increase in DECADES!

True enough, and Joe Biden deserves 100 percent of the “credit”. The 5.9 percent increase for 2022 is the largest since 1982, and the high rate of inflation that generated it is one of the earliest of what will be many economic disasters of the Biden Administration.

Inflation is, of course, a particularly severe detriment to the elderly, a great many of whom derive most of their retirement income from sources that don’t enjoy cost-of-living adjustments. That Democratic propagandists are celebrating inflation’s resurgence gives one an idea of how much they really care about Social Security recipients.

Today’s Acronyms: ESG and ERISA

The statute to which I’ve devoted almost all of my legal career – the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 (“ERISA”) – gets only intermittent (and usually only modestly accurate) attention from the media. A new burst occurred on October 14th, when the Department of Labor published a proposed regulation designed to prod investment managers of employer-sponsored retirement plans to give greater consideration to “the economic effects of climate change and other environmental, social, or governance factors on the particular investment or investment course of action”.

The proposed regulation is the latest volley in a back-and-forth that began in 1994, when the Clinton Administration published an “interpretive bulletin” (a document included in the Code of Federal Regulations but of considerably lower status than a real regulation) designed to dispel “a perception [that] exists within the investment community that investments in ETIs are incompatible with ERISA’s fiduciary obligations”. “ETI” was the acronym for “economically targeted investment”, which the bulletin described as “an investment that is selected for the economic benefit it creates, in addition to the investment return to the employee benefit plan investor”. This was the predecessor to the wider-ranging acronym that enjoys favor today: “ESG” for “environmental, social and governance” factors.

The (W.) Bush Administration revoked the Clinton interpretive bulletin, replacing it with one declaring that “ERISA’s plain text thus establishes a clear rule that in the course of discharging their duties, fiduciaries may never subordinate the economic interests of the plan to unrelated objectives, and may not select investments on the basis of any factor outside the economic interest of the plan except in very limited circumstances”. The Obama Administration revoked the revocation and reinstated the Clinton bulletin verbatim.

The Trump Administration sought to put its own reversal of its predecessor’s position on firmer ground by promulgating an actual regulation, whose philosophy is summarized by the statement, “A fiduciary may not subordinate the interests of the participants and beneficiaries in their retirement income or financial benefits under the plan to other objectives, and may not sacrifice investment return or take on additional investment risk to promote non-pecuniary benefits or goals.” 29 C.F.R. §2550.404a-1(c)(1).

The Biden Administration’s proposed amendment to the regulation doesn’t overturn that principle. Rather, it amounts to an op-ed in the guise of regulatory text. The current regulation states that investment managers must consider “The projected return of the portfolio relative to the funding objectives of the plan”. The proposed amendment adds, “which may often require an evaluation of the economic effects of climate change and other environmental, social, or governance factors on the particular investment or investment course of action”.

Similar editorializing shows up in a paragraph that begins innocuously: “A prudent fiduciary may consider any factor in the evaluation of an investment or investment course of action that, depending on the facts and circumstances, is material to the risk-return analysis, which might include, for example”, followed by a list heavily weighted toward “woke” favorites like “exposure to the physical and transitional risks of climate change”, “the positive or negative effect of Government regulations and policies to mitigate climate change”, “board composition”, and “progress on workforce diversity, inclusion, and other drivers of employee hiring, promotion, and retention”.

There isn’t a word in the proposed amendment that puts a fiduciary who wants to make climate stasis or racial discrimination (to call things by their correct names) a key investment criterion in any better position than under the current regulation. What’s more, notwithstanding a quarter century of abrupt volte-faces in official guidance, no reported decision in any case involving ERISA fiduciary duties has turned on, or so much as discussed, plan fiduciaries’ attention or inattention to “environmental, social and governance” factors.

Why, then, are the progressives who now control policymaking at the Department of Labor eager to insert ineffectual pro-ESG propaganda into the regulations? To grasp that, one must look at what the ESG movement is in practice.

ESG advocates don’t call for granular consideration of each of the variety of practices that fall under the headings “environmental”, “social” and “governance”. No one disputes that some of those are of vital importance to some companies. No rational being would evaluate investment in a coal company without taking into account government hostility to the industry (and without also taking into account, one might add, that coal is one of the world’s most efficient and abundant energy sources, a fact that can frustrate governments’ hostile plans). On the other hand, it is doubtful that a coal company with a minuscule proportion of female miners could become more profitable by hiring a sexually balanced work force.

What ESG analysis typically does is aggregate all kinds of disparate practices to produce ratings whose objective is to influence investment decisions. As the DOL noted in the preamble to the proposed version of the Trump regulation, there has been “a steady upward trend in use of the term ESG among institutional asset managers, an increase in the array of ESG-focused investment vehicles available, a proliferation of ESG metrics, services, and ratings offered by third-party service providers, and an increase in asset flows into ESG funds”. To the best of my knowledge, none of the “ESG metrics, services, and ratings” weights its factors by their importance to the individual companies under review. A high or low rating can flow from elements that are of no consequence for the bottom line.

As a further complication, “There is no consensus about what constitutes a genuine ESG investment, and ESG rating systems are often vague and inconsistent, despite featuring prominently in marketing efforts” – another point that the Trump DOL made in the preamble to its proposed regulation. In other words, there’s no way to be confident that an “ESG rating” genuinely rates ESG performance.

ESG evaluations are an expensive exercise. The evaluators must assemble data that don’t appear in financial statements and that can’t be easily acquired from other sources. Once acquired, the data must be updated regularly to watch for significant changes. Somebody must pay for those exertions, and that cost is inevitably passed on to the users of the evaluations. As the Wall Street Journal observes, “According to Morningstar, the asset-weighted average expense ratio of U.S. ‘sustainable’ funds was 0.61% in 2020 compared to 0.41% for all open-ended mutual and exchange-traded funds and 0.12% for passive funds.”

As already noted, ESG has been a non-factor in ERISA litigation to date, but that could change if it continues to make inroads among investment decision makers. Both the dubious linkage of ESG ratings to factors pertinent to particular companies’ performance and the high cost of producing those ratings raise ERISA red flags, and plaintiffs throw red flags with increasing frequency these days. Lawsuits alleging that plans acquiesce in excessive fees for inferior performance have become commonplace over the past several years. One of them, Hughes v. Northwestern University, is on next term’s Supreme Court docket. (It has no ESG angle; the Court will consider pleading standards for complaints that charge plan fiduciaries with allowing the payment of excessive investment fees.)

The Biden Administration wants to encourage greater use of ESG. ERISA-governed retirement plans are one of the world’s largest sources of investment capital. Unhappily for the ESG battalion, ERISA isn’t particularly favorable to the concept, nor does its categorical language leave room for an “ESG exception” to plan fiduciaries’ duties to participants.

For want of a better alternative, the Biden regulators have resorted to erecting a cardboard façade. Their proposed regulation implies that letting ESG factors influence investments is a great idea but doesn’t succeed in turning it into an idea that can be lawfully pursued. The reaction of the trade press, which has overwhelmingly reported the proposed regulation as a retraction of restrictions on ESG investing (restrictions attributed to the Trump Administration in 2020 rather than the Congress that enacted ERISA in 1974), suggests that the façade can withstand minimal poking by reporters who have trouble spelling “ERISA”.

Judges will be a bigger challenge. The proposed regulation doesn’t approve evaluating an investment on the basis of an aggregated rating that includes factors that both do and do not have a bearing on performance. Nor does it authorize paying fees for advice of dubious value. We’re probably a few years away, though, from the first ERISA ESG case. Until it arises, the purveyors of ESG ratings – I’ll take wild guesses that many of them make substantial campaign contributions and that little of that money goes to Republican candidates (well, maybe to Liz Cheney) – have received a boost to their industry.

An Apology to Pronouns Everywhere

Through inattention to truly important matters, I overlooked International Pronouns Day, which was celebrated on October 20th. Happily, the State Department was on the case. I’ll be more alert for the forthcoming days celebrating other parts of speech. Gerunds, I believe, haven’t received the respect that they deserve, and adverbs are often mistreated.

Yesterday was also the fifty-first day of the ordeal of Americans and Afghan allies trapped in the Taliban dystopia, including families of U.S. soldiers. CNN posted (but, so far as I can see, didn’t put on the front page of its web site) a report on privately organized and funded efforts to rescue de facto hostages. After recounting the successful escape of an Afghan interpreter and his family, the report continues –

Two months after the final US military plane left Kabul, some of those same people are still working tirelessly to extract family members of US service personnel stuck in Afghanistan – all with what sources say is little or no official help from the US government.

Interviews with active-duty service members, former military officers and current lawmakers working on this issue reveal a deep level of frustration over the lack of formal government assistance. Lawmakers say they are in the dark about the best official avenue to help constituents who call asking for help. And military personnel with family stuck in Afghanistan say they've been left to figure things out for themselves.

With no embassy on the ground in Afghanistan, the Taliban in control, and a sclerotic immigration process widely seen as dysfunctional and far too slow, US service members are left to work the same ad hoc, do-it-yourself networks used by Masoud to rescue their families still there. . . .

“The military says, ‘family first, no one will be left behind,’” said one active-duty service member who told CNN he had received no help from the US government in evacuating his family members. But “nobody cares about my family,” he said. “And nobody cares about people that were left behind.”

But, hey, the pronouns are alright!

Distributed Totalitarianism

In Knowledge and Decisions, one of those works that everyone ought to read, Thomas Sowell identifies seven features of totalitarian ideology:

● “the localization of evil in Jews, capitalists, or some other group – so that comprehensive political solutions to age-old human problems seem feasible within a reasonable time horizon by surgically removing the offending group, leaving a healthy body politic intact”
● “the localization of wisdom, to explain why this miraculous cure has escaped so many minds for so many centuries, as well as explaining the necessity for superseding democratic institutions and beliefs”
● “a single scale of values by which priorities may arranged in every field of human endeavor, to be achieved ‘at all cost’”
● “the presupposition of sufficient knowledge to achieve whatever goal may be projected”
● “the urgency of the ‘problem’ to be ‘solved’ so that ruthlessness is the lesser of two evils”
● “a psychic identification with millions, whose opinions may nevertheless be disregarded and whose lives may be sacrificed in the cause, without feelings of guilt”
● the creation of “a self-enclosed system, to exclude alternative views and visions” and “convert questions of fact into questions of motive”

That list has a familiar ring, for it describes, with near perfection, the leading features of the version of “progressive” ideology to which the term “woke” is nowadays applied. Evil is the monopoly of “white supremacists” (including, needless to say, Jews). All past thought is tainted by racism and therefore unable to address the endemic evils created by whiteness. Political values are the standard for evaluating everything from music to Halloween costumes to statues of historical figures. “Identity” explains everything, so that no other knowledge is necessary or desirable. Because the white supremacists hold sway over all institutions, “lawful” resistance simply plays into their hands. The “woke” are acting in behalf of the BIPoC and LGBTQI (which I endorse as an acrostic: “Let’s Get Biden to Quit Immediately”) masses, who don’t understand their own interests. Finally, all who reject the ideology are motivated by “white fragility”, the refusal to encounter their own ingrained racism, so that argument is superfluous and coercion justified.

If the advocates of this ideology copied the tactics of the totalitarians of the past, they would be instantly recognizable. Woke militias would take to the streets like the brown shirts, black shirts and Red Guards of old. To a very limited extent, they do, but Antifa is a shadow of the SA. The militia of wokery consists of the tens of thousands of adherents who enforce its doctrines within the small circles over which they wield power. University administrators intimidate teachers and students. “Enlightened” CEO’s compel underlings to attend “diversity training” where they can be imbued with feelings of shame or hubris based on their membership in oppressor or victim groups. Vocal twits form online mobs to demand that breaches of woke etiquette be punished by expulsion from society. And so on.

No Mussolini or Hitler or Stalin or Mao directs these operations. They bubble up spontaneously: distributed rather than centralized totalitarianism. Being a decentralized phenomenon, the woke ideology is prone to mutation. Contemporary communism is very much like what Marx and Engels expounded, but what wokery today differs vastly from what it was just a few years ago. It transfigures itself almost before our eyes, as illustrated by the sudden emergence of the denial of biological sex as a central tenet or the way that “LBGT” has lengthened to “2SLGBTQQIA+” and will no doubt grow further by this time next week.

Distributed totalitarianism is something new under the Sun. Before the Internet, it was inconceivable. Now it threatens to overwhelm the institutions and values on which society rests. On the other hand, its protean character renders it, if I may borrow a favorite woke term, fragile. The day may come, in no distant future, when civil wars arise within the woke domain. That has already occurred on a small scale in the polemics between radical feminists and transgender sex-deniers. It would be no surprise if that teapot-sized tempest were to be the portent of raging storms. Lenin could impose discipline on the Bolsheviks. Can Ibram X. Kendi control his “allies”?

Where Was Mayor Pete? A Washington Mystery

Let me begin by reminding everyone (self included) that mundane explanations for mysterious events, however far they strain credulity, are often correct. Only in fiction does life have to be probable. It’s not impossible that a Cabinet secretary’s two-month disappearance really was the product of his intense desire to spend quality time with two infants and a housemate. It’s not as if he claimed to have been abducted by Vegans. (Vegans from a planet circling Vega, I mean; abduction by terrestrial vegans – villainous for their cruelty to animals – is perfectly plausible.)

Having cleared my throat sufficiently, I now want to state the obvious. If a corporate executive drops out of public view, without warning and without a stated reason, at a time when his particular area of responsibility is in the midst of a crisis, then returns just as abruptly mouthing a “time with my family” cover story, no one believes that he just took an extended vacation. There are whispers of health issues, family problems, legal entanglements, burnout, hidden scandals.

Paternity leave has become fashionable – but two months of leave, when it would be easy to make occasional speeches, hold a press conference every couple of weeks, publish op-eds on “How President Biden Will Untangle the Supply Chains” (which staffers would write, needless to say), and otherwise maintain a presence in the world. Not only would it be easy, but, for a man with high political ambitions, a necessity. What could be more damaging to a technocratically competent façade than being absent (with secret leave) at the very time when one’s ordinarily obscure bureaucratic fiefdom has a moment to shine?

All things considered, I think that it’s fair to call this incident a mystery, perhaps bordering on an enigma. That no sleuths are seeking the solution isn’t, however, a mystery at all. Who really expected Pete Buttigieg to be anything more than a polished piece of statuary adorning a Potemkin administration?

Too Good to Check!

An image of a letter on Canadian government stationery (you can view it here) has been floating around the dexterosphere today. It purports to be a ukase prohibiting Canadian civil servants from including the phrase “Let’s Go, Brandon” in any official communication.

There’s not much that I’d put past our northern neighbor’s pre-adolescent prime minister and his woker-than-thou administration, but this goes past that line. It’s obvious satire, making the point that progressives suffer humor deprivation, and worthy of the Babylon Bee. Happily, it isn’t literally true – at least not yet.

Update (October 20, 2021): Others have now discovered that the “Let’s Go, Brandon” ban was a joke.

Is the Trump Train Headed Off the Rails?

Donald J. Trump is a study in multiple political personality disorder. One DJT is a slightly unconventional conservative Republican with a degree of charisma that far exceeds what his mostly humdrum agenda could be expected to generate. His orthodox conservative side – deregulation, tax cuts, originalist Supreme Court Justices, scorn for “wokeness” – and his deviations – skepticism about free trade, a pacifist foreign policy, strict immigration enforcement, indifference to excessive federal spending – all fall within the “Overton window” of American politics. The enthusiasm of his most ardent fans (an appropriate term for them) seems almost independent of his policy prescriptions. So far as I can see, it carries over from his pre-political career, when he was a full-time celebrity who ran some businesses on the side.

DJT-1 became visible only after he became President. Many conservatives who vehemently opposed his nomination in 2016 advocated his re-election four years later. While the inveterate core of Never Trumpers call them opportunists and sellouts, most have, I think, merely come to see a different Trump personality.

DJT-2 is a braggart and bully who has no real interest in public policy, knows little about it, doesn’t care to learn more, places his highest priority on personal victories, and quickly sours on advisors who pester him with substantive advice.

When Trump emerged as a plausible Presidential candidate in early 2016, National Review took aim at DJT-2. Its February 15, 2016, issue blared “Against Trump” on the cover. Inside was a symposium of 22 conservatives representing a wide range of right-of-center opinion. The editors added their own appraisal. The bottom line:

Trump is a philosophically unmoored political opportunist who would trash the broad conservative ideological consensus within the GOP in favor of a free-floating populism with strong-man overtones.

Most Never Trumpers still see only DJT-2. Nothing that Trump did in office altered their perception, except that some came to hold their negative opinion yet more firmly, a few – Bill Kristol, Max Boot and Jen Rubin, to take conspicuous instances – to the point of abandoning conservatism altogether.

DJT-1 and DJT-2 are Trump personalities whose existence seems to me clearly supportable by objective evidence. The other two are more subjective. In fact, I’d call them delusions, but those who see them believe them.

DJT-3 is a “fighter” against the “elites” who, whether ostensibly Republican or Democrat, are joined in a united enterprise of running the country for their own benefit. The elite hostility that he attracts is taken as proof that they fear him, which is all the more reason to give him unconditional support.

I know people for whom DJT-3 is the “real Donald Trump”. I confess to not being able to see what they see. The widespread assumption, particularly among those for whom DJT-2 is the real thing, is that this group comprises the majority of the people who voted for Donald Trump last November. It certainly includes a lot of them.

Finally, DJT-4 aims at becoming a dictator and inspired an insurrection last January 6th with that end in mind. Those who see this Trump see another Mussolini and the January riot as the equivalent of the March on Rome. That strikes me as fantastical, but we can leave that argument for another day.

Whether Donald Trump will be the Republican nominee in 2024 depends on which of the competing DJT’s looks most real to the most voters. Last Wednesday, Trump himself gave the country something new to look at. He released this brief statement:

If we don’t solve the Presidential Election Fraud of 2020 (which we have thoroughly and conclusively documented), Republicans will not be voting in ’22 and ’24. It is the single most important thing for Republicans to do.

Parsed sympathetically with one’s eyes closed, that could just be a prediction, uttered with no intent to persuade anybody to stay home on election day. Even on that view, it’s startling. A massive boycott of the polls by Republican voters would guarantee a progressive Congressional majority able to enact whatever program appeals to “woke” fanatics in 2023. Just finishing whatever parts of this year’s Biden agenda fall by the wayside would be bad enough. DJT-1 would surely have made a very different statement, one urging his supporters to leave 2020 to the historians and work to Make America Great Again in 2022.

Coming from DJT-3, the statement is only slightly less inconceivable. Declining to vote isn’t a very effective way to “fight”. It amounts to surrender to the “elites”. It certainly isn’t a threat that will terrify the people who, in DJT-3’s view, control the United States.

Maybe it’s evidence for the reality of DJT-4, a sign that Trump has given up on democratic politics and will next urge a MAGA putsch. That’s quite a leap of logic. Whether it’s accurate doesn’t matter a great deal. January 6th showed that Trump “insurrectionists” are few in number and irresolute of purpose.

That brings us to DJT-2. The not-too-covert threat to sink the GOP unless his personal desire for vindication is satisfied is exactly what that Trump would do. It’s also consistent with his conduct during the Georgia Senatorial elections, where his denunciations of the state Republican Party are universally cited as a major cause of the loss of two Senate seats, handing control, tenuous though it is, to the Democrats.

Does DJT-2 have any base anywhere? Voters who admire DJT-3 may not have drawn a sharp distinction in the past between him and DJT-2, because much of the former’s “fighting” consists of the insult-laden, juvenile rhetoric of the latter. Now he is asking them, for practical purposes, to subordinate the overthrow of “elite” dominance to his personal King Charles’s Head. Will a great many of them fall in line with doing nothing in response to Joe Biden’s record, already disastrous and on a downward trajectory? Is that how fighters behave? So far, the ground isn’t swelling with positive vibrations.

John Hinderaker, who thinks that “Donald Trump was a very good president, our best since Ronald Reagan in my opinion” (yeah, not the highest of bars), titled his post on the Trump statement “Bad Donald” and summarized thus:

So Trump’s solution is to say that “Republicans will not be voting in ’22 or ’24.” This is a profoundly stupid threat. In fact, the Democrats’ response would be, as we used to say on the playground, Is that a threat or a promise? From the Democrats’ perspective, the answer is obvious.

Trump’s worst fault is his tendency to put his own interests – or worse, his own ego – over the interests of his party and his country. I don’t know how many Republicans he could induce to stay home next year, or in 2024, if he isn’t satisfied with progress on election integrity. But the dumbest possible response to the existence of voter fraud – something that has been with us since the beginning of our democracy – is to refrain from voting yourself. If Trump were to persuade even a small number of Republicans to abstain from voting next year, or in 2024, it could well swing close elections to the Democrats. Trump should be enough of a patriot to consider that the worst of all possible outcomes.

Sure, he should be, but don’t bet on it.

More About Meritocracy

Having recently penned a three-part post on the progressive attack on “meritocracy” (Part I, Part II, Part III), I was interested to see Peter Berkowitz’s lengthy review of pop-professor Michael J. Sandel’s The Tyranny of Merit: Can We Find the Common Good?. Part I of my series took note of Charles Murray’s review of the same book. The Berkowitz and Murray reviews concentrate on different themes: Murray on the how “Today’s elites have a remarkable obliviousness about the lives and contributions of ordinary people that bespeaks an unseemly indifference – not to mention disdain – for those people”, a point on which he and Professor Sandel agree; Berkowitz on the book’s thesis, which he summarizes as “the greatest threat to equality, community, the common good, and justice in America is freedom in America”.

[T]he distinguished Harvard professor argues that the antagonism in America between equality, community, the common good, and justice, on the one side, and freedom on the other has reached catastrophic proportions. Amid the bitter divide in the United States between progressive elites and conservative-leaning middle-class and working-class voters, Sandel elaborates the sensational claim that it is meritocracy – the view, central to the modern tradition of freedom, that a “just society” provides all individuals “an equal chance to rise as far as their talent and hard work will take them” – that is tearing the United States apart. It turns out, however, that Sandel is not opposed to the rule of every form of merit. The thrust of his argument indicates that he wishes to replace the allegedly despotic rule of technocrats, economists, and financiers with the ostensibly refined and compassionate rule of experts in moral reasoning capable of leading national conversations about a common good in America that, in his telling, has been and remains elusive.

That is a good summary of a central political issue of our contentious era. Progressives see individuals’ “equal chance to rise as far as their talent and hard work will take them” as a threat to “equality, community, the common good, and justice”, as defined by progressives like Professor Sandel, of course. Their solution is to impose inequalities. One is reminded of an anecdote recounted by Herodotus, describing what happened when Periander, the tyrant of Corinth –

sent a herald to Thrasybulus [an older, more experienced tyrant] and inquired in what way he would best and most safely govern his city. Thrasybulus led the man who had come from Periander outside the town, and entered into a sown field. As he walked through the corn, continually asking why the messenger had come to him from Corinth, he kept cutting off all the tallest ears of wheat which he could see, and throwing them away, until he had destroyed the best and richest part of the crop. Then, after passing through the place and speaking no word of counsel, he sent the herald away. When the herald returned to Corinth, Periander desired to hear what counsel he brought, but the man said that Thrasybulus had given him none. The herald added that it was a strange man to whom he had been sent, a madman and a destroyer of his own possessions, telling Periander what he had seen Thrasybulus do.

But Periander understood his fellow tyrant’s advice. Progressives do, too, and seek to make their hegemony secure in the same way.

Quote of the Day

Andrew Roberts, “In defense of King George III”:

I grew a beard during lockdown, which I’m now going to keep because my wife Susan has called it ‘piratical’. There was a time when I was as pogonophobic as the next man, but no longer. ‘I hate your beard,’ David Starkey told me at a drinks party recently. ‘I didn’t bring her,’ I replied. ‘I’m only here for you.’

No, the quote has nothing to do with King George. It’s from a miscellaneous set of musings that begins with a mention of the author’s current book tour promoting his forthcoming biography of George III, The Last King of America: The Misunderstood Reign of George III (not to be confused with Jeremy Black’s George III: America’s Last King (2006)). Those of us whose forebears were loyalists look forward eagerly to its publication.

Quote of the Day

Daniel J. Mahoney, “The Ideologues of March 1917”:

The American reader probably cannot imagine Red October, or its equivalent, in our immediate future. But essential aspects of the February Revolution – contempt for all authority and hierarchy, disdain for the past and a desire to repudiate it or negate it altogether, demands to abolish the police, intolerance of anything that smacks of conservatism or tradition – are all around us and are the hallmark of what it means to be “progressive” today.

A Cold, Expensive Winter Is Coming

The U.S. Energy Information Administration (which only reports information; we aren’t yet at the point where information is administered) released its updated Winter Fuels Outlook today. Here is the summary:

• We expect that the nearly half of U.S. households that heat primarily with natural gas will spend 30% more than they spent last winter on average – 50% more if the winter is 10% colder-than-average and 22% more if the winter is 10% warmer-than-average.
• We expect the 41% of U.S. households that heat primarily with electricity will spend 6% more – 15% more in a colder winter and 4% more in a warmer winter.
• The 5% of U.S. households that heat primarily with propane will spend 54% more – 94% more in a colder winter and 29% more in a warmer winter.
• The 4% of U.S. households that heat primarily with heating oil will spend 43% more – 59% more in a colder winter and 30% more in a warmer winter.

The White House reportedly reacted as one would expect, that is, with a display of economic illiteracy:

The White House has been speaking with U.S. oil and gas producers in recent days about helping to bring down rising fuel costs, according to two sources familiar with the matter. . . .

“We are closely monitoring the cost of oil and the cost of gas Americans are paying at the pump. And we are using every tool at our disposal to address anti-competitive practices in U.S. and global energy markets to ensure reliable and stable energy markets,” a White House official said.

Higher energy prices shouldn’t be a surprise, given the Biden Administration’s efforts to cut domestic oil and natural gas production, but those steps won’t be reversed. It’s pretty obvious that the White House would like to see “voluntary” price controls. Maybe it’s starting to lay the groundwork for controls that are not even nominally voluntary.

One of the clearest lessons of economic history is that lowering prices by fiat creates shortages as demand outstrips supply. Some of us remember Jimmy Carter’s gasoline price controls and the endless lines at such stations as had gasoline to sell. Then Ronald Reagan was elected. To the horror of liberals, he abolished the controls. A couple of mornings later, the lines were gone.

The predictable result of artificially suppressing energy prices is that many consumers won’t pay higher heating bills. Instead, they won’t be able to buy heat at all. The White House will then blame “anti-competitive practices” or, if Joe Biden continues his steep slide to the left, “saboteurs and wreckers”.

Button up your overcoat, and get out the long underwear.

Putting Our Ancestors on Trial

Yesterday I wished readers a Happy Human Sacrifice Abolition Day. Today let me expatiate on the increasingly common practice of treating history as a court room and our ancestors as either the accused in the dock or their innocent, wholly meritorious victims.

Columbus Day is the starkest instance of this phenomenon, though I expect it to spread in time to Independence Day and Washington’s Birthday. After that, it may reach the holiday named after Martin Luther King, Jr., the racist agitator who wanted to judge people by “the content of their character” without regard to intersectional identities of victimhood. President Biden’s Columbus Day proclamation had two themes. One was the “lasting contributions to our Nation” made by Italian-Americans. The other, longer and clearly more heartfelt, questioned whether that Nation was worth contributing to:

Today, we also acknowledge the painful history of wrongs and atrocities that many European explorers inflicted on Tribal Nations and Indigenous communities. It is a measure of our greatness as a Nation that we do not seek to bury these shameful episodes of our past – that we face them honestly, we bring them to the light, and we do all we can to address them. For Native Americans, western exploration ushered in a wave of devastation: violence perpetrated against Native communities, displacement and theft of Tribal homelands, the introduction and spread of disease, and more. On this day, we recognize this painful past and recommit ourselves to investing in Native communities, upholding our solemn and sacred commitments to Tribal sovereignty, and pursuing a brighter future centered on dignity, respect, justice, and opportunity for all people.

The President also issued “A Proclamation on Indigenous Peoples’ Day, 2021” that elaborates on the “vibrant and diverse cultures” of “American Indians, Alaska Natives, and Native Hawaiians” in contrast with “the centuries-long campaign of violence, displacement, assimilation, and terror wrought upon Native communities and Tribal Nations throughout our country”. His occasional Veep came out of the Clueless Protection Program to deliver a speech lamenting how European “explorers ushered in a wave of devastation for Tribal nations – perpetrating violence, stealing land, and spreading disease”.

It is certainly true that European immigrants to what is now the United States – no doubt the Vice President wishes there had been a big, beautiful border wall back then – fought wars with the Indians, occupied and farmed land over which (by European notions) native tribes held sovereignty, and carried with them diseases that had never before been present in the New World (and which Europe would have been happy not to suffer). But it is also true that millions of people who had lived in poverty or under tyrannical rule in the Old World found in America better lives for themselves and their descendants and that the nation that eventually emerged from European colonization was the first to be founded on an unprecedented conception of “government of the people, by the people and for the people”. It is conceivable that, had America remained the dominion of the Indians, our modern ideas of liberty and democracy would have taken root and flourished somewhere else, some other time. It is less conceivable that the time would have arrived already.

Our backward facing “progressives” don’t want to talk about any of that. They are most interested in passing moral judgment on the settlers. For present purposes, I’ll set aside arguments about the accuracy of their accusations and instead question the purpose of the inquisition. Two points are striking:

First, the inquisitors are, by and large, people who deny the existence of universally binding moral code. They insist that individuals create their own values and are not beholden to archaic moral precepts (or even, to an increasing extent, to the facts of biology). Yet that relativistic perspective is exchanged for the spirit of Torquemada when the past comes under scrutiny. It’s a fact of our era that those who have no church are the most zealous to burn heretics.

Second, the judging is far from even-handed. Did Europeans, in the Old World or the New, engage in wars whose objective was to capture enemies who would then be ritually sacrificed to appease literally blood-thirsty gods? Were any of them cannibals? Was slavery absent among the Indians? Did tribes never seize others’ territories, exterminate their menfolk and force their women into sexual servitude? For those crimes the progressive prosecutors never render indictments.

Why the discrepancy? Is it because the prosecutors see nothing wrong with human sacrifice or cannibalism and are unaware of Indians’ enslavement of other Indians (and of whites and blacks, too, after those races arrived in the hemisphere)? That sounds implausible. The self-evident explanation is that the aim of the historical inquest isn’t to discover malefactors but to instill feelings of shame and guilt in their descendants. It is a political tactic designed to silence opponents without the bother of grappling with their arguments.

The same tactic is available to the Right, of course, though conservatives who deploy it get much less media amplification. For roughly a hundred years after the Civil War, the Democratic Party was the party of Jim Crow, and resistance to integration was led almost exclusively by Democrats. Democratic Presidential candidates, including those like Adlai Stevenson who ostensibly supported civil rights legislation, balanced their tickets with Southern segregationist running mates. If all historical records between 1954 and 2020 were lost, a future historian might credibly hypothesize that the Democrats’ embrace of critical race theory descended in a direct line from “massive resistance”.

How America evolved from minuscule colonial outposts into a great and free nation is a fascinating story. If we are going to pass judgment on the dramatis personae, we should do so with awareness of the virtues of what they brought forth rather a prurient emphasis than on what we now perceive as their vices. Contrary to Mark Antony, it often happens that the good that men do lives after them, while the evil is interred with their bones. And if we do feel called upon to be judges, our verdicts shouldn’t be dictated by how aptly they will serve contemporary polemical purposes.

Another Country for “Brandon” to Scuttle

If you’ve thought about Yemen lately, you’re one in a thousand, or maybe a million, but it’s a place worth thinking about. Occupying the eastern shore of the strait between the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden, it is an excellent position from which to interdict shipping between Europe and the Indo-Pacific region. It is also mired in a long-running civil war pitting proxies for Saudi Arabia (the post-Arab Spring government that was forced to flee the capital in 2015) against proxies for Iran (the Islamofascist Ansar Allah, commonly called the “Houthis”). This combination of geopolitical position and international conflict makes the country strategically important.

Yemen is located adjacent to the Strait of Hormuz, the world’s most important energy choke-point, and to the Bab-el-Mandab Strait, which controls access to the Suez Canal.

Disruptions of these seaborne supply routes to Asia and Europe, to which there few alternatives, would result in increased volatility in the oil price. If these transport routes are temporarily blocked, for instance by mines dropped in the narrow shipping lanes, the current global supply overhang could quickly diminish.

Furthermore, Yemen’s inherent instability and its porous borders pose a direct threat to its neighbors Saudi Arabia and Oman. In a worst case scenario, Yemen’s situation could lead to disruptive spill over-effects in the whole Gulf region.

That was written in 2015, when a “global supply overhang” existed. The energy situation is far more tenuous today.

Since the Obama Administration, the United States has been providing support to the Saudi-backed forces: intelligence sharing, arms sales and, reportedly, a handful of military advisors. Last February, President Biden cut off most of that support. As summarized by a State Department spokesman in reply to a reporter’s question –

we are ending all American support for offensive operations in Yemen, including relevant arms sales. Importantly, this does not apply to offensive operations against either ISIS or AQAP, but it does include both materiel and restricting, as you alluded to, our intelligence sharing arrangement with Saudi Arabia and the Saudi-led coalition in accordance with the President’s guidance. All arms sales to Saudi Arabia will return to standard procedures and orders, including with appropriate legal reviews at the State Department. We’ve re-established an interagency process for working through the details of these individual cases. It will be led by the White House and with all relevant agencies at the table bringing expertise, discipline, and inclusivity back to our policymaking on these issues.

The Biden Administration hasn’t yet carried that policy to its logical conclusion. In a new essay in The National Interest, my friend Bill Hawkins discusses left-wing pressures to give Yemen the Afghanistan treatment, to which the Administration hasn’t yet yielded completely.

The State Department knows “The Houthis benefit from generous military support from the Iranian government to wage attacks against civilian population centers and commercial shipping.” In May, sanctions were imposed “against two senior leaders of Houthi forces in Yemen who are involved in military offensives that exacerbate the humanitarian crisis, pose a dire threat to civilians, and destabilize Yemen.” Secretary of State Antony Blinken has called on Tehran to pressure the Houthis to negotiate, but the situation has continued to escalate since Iran apparently has no fear of America taking effective action to back its diplomacy.

And why should it? Does any enemy any longer fear effective action by Joe Biden?

Happy Human Sacrifice Abolition Day!

In 1492, slavery, extraordinary forms of torture, cannibalism and human sacrifice were common practices in the Americas. The two most powerful states, those of the Aztecs and the Incas, were tyrannical autocracies. Hernán Cortés overthrew the Aztec empire in part because his handful of soldiers possessed superior weaponry and in larger part because Montezuma’s oppressed subjects joined forces with the foreigners.

The soi disant “progressives” who topple statues of Christopher Columbus and decry the European arrival in this hemisphere as a great historical malady will never be reasoned out of their antipathy. They were, so far as I can tell, never reasoned into it. They are moved by a deep, emotional loathing for the America that now exists, an America where chattel slavery has been abolished, the law forbids cruel and unusual punishments, cannibalism exists only as a movie plot device, and human sacrifice is inconceivable. They’re welcome to their preference for 1491, but I, for one, do not understand it.

President Biden issued proclamations for both “Indigenous Peoples’ Day” and “Columbus Day”. He wasn’t, however, triangulating. Both documents make it clear that he regards the country of which he is the highest elected magistrate as a tree growing from poisonous roots. No wonder that he wants to eradicate its past and build a utopian fantasy in its stead.

Further Reading: Dan McLaughlin, “Why We Celebrate Columbus Day”
John Hinderaker, “Happy Indigenous Peoples’ Day?”
Jeff Flynn-Paul, “The myth of the ‘stolen country’”
Armando Simón, “The Historical Falsification of Columbus’ ‘Crimes’”
Gene Vallorani, “An Italian-American Defends Columbus Day”
Thom Nickels, “Philly’s Battle of Columbus”
Glenn Reynolds’s annual Columbus Day post

Thank God for 1776!

My direct paternal ancestor at the time of the American rebellion against Britain was a Virginia gentleman named George Veal. Unusually for his class, he was a loyalist. His neighbors seized his property, placed him under arrest and confined him to a jail, where he died. If he had foreseen the state of affairs recounted by Lionel Shriver in “The Most Frightened Nation”, he would, I am confident, have changed his mind about independence.

According to an Ipsos MORI poll conducted in July, an impressive 27 percent of Britons want to impose a government-mandated nationwide curfew of 10 PM – not then in force – “until the pandemic was under control worldwide,” which might be years from now. A not-inconsiderable 19 percent would impose such a curfew “permanently, regardless of the risk from Covid-19.” Presumably, these are people who don’t get out much. While 64 percent want Britain’s mask mandate in shops and on public transport to remain a legal requirement for the duration of the global pandemic, an astounding 51 percent want to be masked by law, forever.

There’s more: some 35 percent want to confine any Briton who returns from a foreign country, vaccinated or not, to a ten-day home quarantine – permanently, Covid or no Covid. A full 46 percent would require a vaccine passport in order to travel abroad – permanently, Covid or no Covid. So young people today would still be flashing that QR code on whatever passes for smartphones in 2095, though they might have trouble displaying the device to a flight attendant while bracing on their walkers. Likewise, the 36 percent who want to be required to check in at pubs and restaurants with a National Health Service contact-tracing app forever. A goodly 34 percent want social distancing in “theatres, pubs and sports grounds,” regardless of any risk of Covid, forever. A truly astonishing 26 percent of Britons would summarily close all casinos and nightclubs forever. Are these just a bunch of fogies who don’t go clubbing anyway? No. In the 16-to-24 age bracket, the proportion of Brits who want to convert Ronnie Scott’s jazz club in London’s Soho into a community lending library, even after Covid is a distant memory, soars to a staggering 40 percent.

Far from yearning for their historic liberties as “free-born Englishmen,” eight out of ten of the British, according to a Southbank/Kingston University survey, were “anxious” about lifting any of their benevolent government’s copious pandemic restrictions. I’m not sure that you can call it Stockholm syndrome when captives don’t fall in love with their captors but with the state of captivity itself.

Miss Shriver has much more. To be fair, restrictions in Australia are more authoritarian than in Britain, but a not insubstantial number of Aussies at least protest, even if they haven’t yet stormed Canberra with stakes and torches in hand.

Meritocracy and Its Cultured Despisers (Part III)

Part I of this series looked at the original, pejorative meaning of the term “meritocracy” and the criticism directed at it by the term’s coiner, the English Baron Young of Dartington. What he meant by “meritocracy” might have been better labeled “sapientocracy”, rule by individuals of high natural intelligence. Part II examined the more recent, broader attack on a somewhat different notion of “meritocracy”. Progressive anti-meritocrats reject merit itself. It is unfair, they contend, to reward people for being “better on the merits” than others, because those merits ultimately derive from external circumstances, most notably the genes, upbringing and education passed on by successful fathers and mothers to their offspring. Worse yet, when preference is given to merit, competition ensues, blighting the lives of the competitors.

In this part, I wish to examine more closely one aspect of the progressive complaint. Once again, the anti-meritocratic spokesman is Daniel Markovits of Yale Law School, who has summarized his case in an interview with the keen teens of the web site Vox. As noted in the previous installment, Professor Markovits believes that parents who “spend enormous sums of money . . . on educating their children, on getting their children into prestigious kindergartens and high schools, on coaches and tutors and music teachers”, with the result that their kids “do better on the merits”, are morally indistinguishable from participants in the Varsity Blues scandal, where actors and hedge fund managers circumvented merit through outright bribery.

Professor Markovits doesn’t deny that the beneficiaries of a top-flight education possess the qualities that top-tier colleges are looking for. Why, then, is admitting them over applicants with fewer of those qualities unfair? Usually, we think that unfairness means evaluating people on the basis of irrelevant criteria. It is unfair for a teacher to give A’s to student brown nosers who don’t understand the material. It is unfair for an executive to promote his incompetent nephew. It is unfair for a movie producer to give leading roles to women who sleep with him.

Meritocracy, in the sense that progressives denounce, is the practice of refusing to take irrelevant factors into account. (That leaves much room to argue about what is, in fact, irrelevant and who should answer that question, but those are matters for another time.) From a utilitarian point of view, it’s hard to argue with giving preference to merit. As we saw in Part II, however, critics like Professor Markovits reject the utilitarian argument. They believe that society would be better off without the inordinate level of competition that meritocracy engenders. If one accepts that premise, one is left simply with the moral question: If it is not useful to prefer merit, is it nonetheless the morally superior option?

The instinctive response is that rewarding merit is right, indeed a tautology. The progressive counterargument can be found in Professor Markovits’s equation of education with bribery. The student whose superlative preparation for college has been arranged and paid for by his parents has, from the progressive point of view, done no more than the one whose father paid off the college admissions department. The “merit” belongs in each case not to the student but to his forebears, and their “merit” isn’t relevant to determining whether their children should be admitted to college.

That argument crucially assumes that the qualities instilled by the first student’s preparation don’t truly belong to him. It isn’t surprising that progressives would make that assumption. It underlies the common progressive idea that criminals aren’t responsible for their actions, because social conditions beyond their control formed their characters.

Ultimately, that line of argument denies that human beings exist as moral actors. We are the puppets of heredity and environment, who ridiculously believe that we (and others) are responsible for our own actions. The upshot is what C. S. Lewis described as “the abolition of man”.

Whether human do or do not have moral autonomy is not a question that is amenable to rational dispute, because it is an axiom rather than an inference. If we are puppets whose moral ideas are pulled by strings, our philosophical ideas are pulled in the same way. Presenting a finely crafted argument that those ideas are wrong is as futile as debating with an automobile that won’t start. Debate and persuasion are possible only among those who believe that other people are not puppets.

In arguments about “meritocracy”, as well as in many other spheres, the crucial cleavage today is between those who would and those who would not abolish man. We might want to think for a moment about what an abolitionist victory would mean. If reason is an illusion, the monsters that arise while it sleeps will be real – and vicious.

Defeat’s Darkening Shadow

For years, advocates of ending American support for the government of Afghanistan pontificated that withdrawal would have no adverse consequences: That fractious country had no geopolitical significance. If the Taliban took it over, that would mean not much more than a jihadi conquest of Pluto.

In one sense, they were right. It has been a mere 40 days since Joe Biden ordered our soldiers to scuttle away like frightened rabbits, leaving billions of dollars of weaponry behind. Thousands of U.S. citizens and permanent residents, along with tens of thousands of Afghans who aided our armed forces, are trapped inside the Taliban’s domain. And already attention has drifted elsewhere. As I type this post, the “Latest Headlines” page on the Wall Street Journal’s web site lists 50 stories. Not one is about Afghanistan.

Yet that “backwater” is stirring with an incipient tornado. The Long War Journal reports that the Movement of the Taliban in Pakistan (known by its Urdu initials, “TPP”), “which sent thousands of fighters into Afghanistan to help the Afghan Taliban conquer the country over the summer”, has turned to “consolidating its power in Pakistan’s volatile tribal areas”. Insurgent groups that broke away from the TPP in a succession crisis after the death of its second “emir” in 2013 are pledging allegiance to the current leader, Mufti Wali Noor Mehsud (alias Abu Mansoor Asim). The TPP has added nine new partners since July of last year. Wali is –

a veteran jihadist who fought alongside the Afghan Taliban against the Northern Alliance and against the U.S. and its allies after the Oct. 2001 invasion. Wali has served as a military commander and has led the TTP in the Pakistani city of Karachi. More importantly, Wali is a religious scholar who rose to the rank of judge within the TTP. His credentials gave him the needed clout to reorganize the TTP.

Having “played a key role in helping conquer Afghanistan”, the TPP can look for a safe haven with, and support from, the victors. Perhaps that support will include access to the trove of military gear that President Biden generously provided.

The Pakistani government naturally will oppose its own displacement, and Isalmabad will be a harder nut to crack than Kabul. Nonetheless, there are grounds for concern:

The Pakistani military, its Inter-Service Intelligence Directorate and powerful elements of the state handcuff themselves by continuing to play both sides of the jihadist coin. The Pakistani state also played a key role in supporting the Afghan Taliban by providing safe haven support, weapons, cash, and other forms of support. The Afghan Taliban and other groups such as Lashkar-e-Taiba are considered “good Taliban” by the state, as they help promote the foreign policy goals of Pakistan – primarily strategic depth against India and jihad in the Indian territory of Kashmir and Jammu.

However, the so-called “good Taliban” are allied with groups like the TTP and Al Qaeda, the so-called “bad Taliban” which actively seek to overthrow the Pakistani state. The good Taliban provide shelter, support, manpower, and such to the bad Taliban, which attacks the state. This is the “Wheel of Jihad.”

To put it another way, Pakistan has pulled the Jihad Horse inside its gates and believes that only its “good Taliban” friends are inside.

Even without seizing power in Islamabad, TPP can create havoc by furnishing well-armed reinforcements to rebels in Kashmir/Jammu, activity that will increase the danger of war, which could turn into nuclear war, between the two nations of the Indian subcontinent.

Some backwater!

Fires at Home

Under the inscrutable name “Project Home Fire”, the University of Virginia Center for Politics (Larry Sabato’s outfit) has joined with “the co-founders of Predictive Branding Partners (www.predictivebrandingpartners.com), the only brand strategy practice that is predictive of customer behavior” to inter alia –

Provide a deeper understanding of the dangerous divide that threatens America’s pursuit of universally representative democracy.

The project’s first work product is a poll that purports to demonstrate (i) that Trump voters and Biden voters fear and distrust each other, (ii) that each group’s “commitment to democracy” is “wavering” and (iii) that, despite those ominous signs, both largely agree on “various issues being debated as part of bipartisan infrastructure and reconciliation bill negotiations”. From this starting point, the project hopes to –

Reveal the specific pathways to persuade Americans on both sides of the divide to open their minds to mutually beneficial compromise that accrues to [sic] the bigger goal of preserving, protecting, and expanding America’s universally representative democracy.

These well-intentioned folk seem to have started with the solution and let that define the problem. It’s very easy for observers who are (or pretend to be) indifferent between both sides of a conflict to imagine that “mutually beneficial compromise” is a real option. Reading the history of Europe’s religious wars, don’t we all think that the conflict must have been sparked by irrational hatreds? To an outsider, the differences among Catholic, Calvinist, Lutheran and Erastian doctrines were hair-splitting trivialities that shouldn’t have stood in the way of peaceful accommodation.

Similarly, if one believes that the current political turmoil in the United States is a problem that can be solved by “the art of the deal”, an essential premise is that the contending sides don’t have fundamental differences. One can make that premise sound plausible by polling, as isolated items, issues that aren’t especially controversial, which is what Project Home Fire has done. We aren’t told how many issues its poll covered, but here are the ones about which a majority of both “Biden voters” and “Trump voters” “at least somewhat agree”:

■ Improvement to the electric grid and other parts of the power sector
■ Modernizing drinking water, wastewater, and storm water systems
■ Investing in the construction of roads, bridges, rail lines, ports and other types of “hard infrastructure”
■ Raising income taxes on American households with incomes above $400,000
■ Investing in universal pre-Kindergarten for all American children
■ Increasing funding for rural broadband internet access
■ Creating a national paid family leave program

It’s no surprise that, stripped of context, those wishes can command majorities across the political divide (albeit lukewarm majorities; “strong agreement” drops off sharply among Trump voters). Spending money on good-sounding things is always popular until one has to think about how they will be paid for, who will run them and what they will actually do, and lots of people are enthusiastic about raising taxes on somebody else. As the saying goes, “Don’t tax you. Don’t tax me. Tax that fella behind the tree.” But what if the poll had asked whether the questionees agreed with positions like –

■ Teaching children that America was founded on and is defined by racism
■ Defunding the police, minimizing the punishment of repeat offenders and refusing to prosecute serious crimes, up to and including murder
■ Letting boys who call themselves “girls” use girls’ restrooms and compete in all-girls athletics
■ Decriminalizing illegal immigration
■ Allowing abortion up to the moment of birth and perhaps a little while beyond

Consensus would, I imagine, be harder to find. The “mutually beneficial compromise” between “Judge people by the content of their character” and “Anti-racism means judging people by their race” may be elusive.

Project Home Fire’s findings regarding mutual “fear and distrust among Biden and Trump voters” and less than whole-hearted “commitment to democracy” are less shaky. Majorities of both voting blocks “agree strongly” that “elected officials from the [other] party present[] a clear and present danger to American democracy”. That sounds pretty dire. Yet there have been times when and places where that sentiment would be fully rational. Recep Erdoğan is an elected official who has undermined democracy. So were Salvador Allende and Hugo Chavez. So will be the elected Democratic judges of the North Carolina Supreme Court if they follow through with their threat to bar two of their Republican colleagues from taking part in a case where the plaintiffs are trying to undo state constitutional amendments enacted by a large majority of voters.

Political stasis (the term that Thucydides applied to the conditions that lead to civil war) can spring from ethnic and cultural differences or from hatred stirred up by demagogues. That is a recurring phenomenon. The antagonism between the Hutus and the Tutsi in Rwanda had little to do with differing opinions about the role of government. Contrasting with that is stasis founded on ideological conflict. When each of two halves of a country believes that the other is “a clear and present danger to the American way of life” (43 percent of Biden voters “agree strongly”, 47 percent of Trump voters), the reason may be that they disagree sharply about what “the American way of life” is.

That disagreement isn’t amenable to high-minded “solutions”. At least, it hasn’t been in the past. Historically, ideas win or lose, though often after the passage of much time and many reversals of fortune. And even then victory and defeat may prove impermanent. As T. S. Eliot observed,

If we take the widest and wisest view of a Cause, there is no such thing as a Lost Cause because there is no such thing as a Gained Cause. We fight for lost causes because we know that our defeat and dismay may be the preface to our successors’ victory, though that victory itself will be temporary; we fight rather to keep something alive than in the expectation that anything will triumph.

One of Project Home Fire’s most noticed poll results suggests that many Americans want to “keep something alive” more than they want to trample their enemies underfoot. A majority of Trump voters and forty percent of Biden voters agree (about half of them “strongly” in each case) that the “blue” and the “red” states ought to go their separate ways. Although that strategy is wildly impracticable, the impulse behind it is eirenic: laissez passer; “live and let live”. That is likewise the impulse behind proposals to bolster federalism by limiting the power of the central government to bludgeon the states into accepting its edicts.

Unhappily, not everyone is searching for a way to “disagree without being disagreeable”. The State of California now bans official travel to 18 states, home to a third of the country’s population, because their laws don’t line up with California’s views on such matters as abortion and denial of biological sex. The latest addition to the list is Ohio, for the offense of allowing doctors to refuse to perform gender-“reassignment” surgery. Actions like that smack of the expectation that California’s ideology “will triumph” if the state exerts sufficient coercive power against the backward precincts. California’s ruling class, in short, doesn’t shy away from a civil war; it expects to win. Is it so surprising that less “woke” Americans feel threatened?

But, so as not to end of too somber a note, let me puzzle over the origin of the name attached to the project: “Home Fire”. What leaps to mind is a song from the Great War:

Keep the Home Fires Burning,
While your hearts are yearning.
Though your lads are far away
They dream of home.
There's a silver lining
Through the dark clouds shining,
Turn the dark cloud inside out
Till the boys come home.

That may not be the inspiration. The “lads far away dreaming of home” hadn’t crossed the Channel to fashion a “mutually beneficial compromise” with the Kaiser.

Desperate? Incompetent? Grifting? Dick Tuck Redux?

During last year’s election campaign, I began receiving a trickle of e-mails from (purported) Democratic organizations, all filled with hyperbolic rhetoric obviously aimed at separating partisans from their money. Since I’ve never given a nickel (so far as I can recall) to any Democrat anytime anywhere, that was curious. I paid attention to the messages only long enough to delete them.

Post-November, the trickle dwindled to barely a drip, drip, drip. Then, a couple of months ago, the flood gates swung open. Here are the subject headings of those that landed in my inbox today (some more than once):

TRUMP OFF THE HOOK??
Joe Biden just HUMILIATED Mitch McConnell...
Sonia Sotoymayor’s EMPHATIC dissent
we’re about the throw in the towel
Trump’s Jan 6 phone records
Biden’s agenda RUINED!?
Your rating for Dr. Fauci

The content is just as unlikely to persuade the unconverted as that of the election year emails. Here is my transcription (missing the grade school graphics and the links to pleas for cash of “Trump’s Jan 6 phone records”:

BREAKING NEWS: EXPERTS PREDICT DONALD TRUMP’S JAN 6TH PHONE RECORDS COULD SEAL HIS FATE & SEND HIM TO PRISON
YES! YES! YES!
Trump’s phone records are the critical evidence we need to PROVE he incited the horrific Jan 6. Insurrection.
And Merrick Garland is our BEST HOPE for releasing them. But it’ll take a WAVE of pressure to get him to act.
PLEASE, Edward: We need 50,000 signatures by 10 AM TOMORROW. So add your name to demand Garland release Trump’s January 6th phone records! >>
CLICK HERE TO SIGN THE PETITION >>
Edward -- We all know that Trump is LYING about what really happened on Jan 6.
We still have NO hard evidence.
But if Merrick Garland’s Department of Justice releases his phone records, we’d have STONE-COLD proof of his awful crimes. He’d HAVE to pay for EVERYTHING he’s done.
So we’re circulating a nationwide petition to convince Merrick Garland to do the right thing and RELEASE TRUMP’S JAN 6. PHONE RECORD.
But Edward, we’re sending our petition at 10 AM tomorrow. If you care about bringing Trump to justice, SIGN NOW! >>
DEMAND GARLAND RELEASE TRUMP’S JAN. 6TH PHONE RECORDS >>
Stand up for what is right,
National Democratic Training Committee

Whoever composed this faith-based screed apparently expects his target audience to believe that the U.S. government has recordings of private phone conversations – and not to be appalled.

This is one of a cascade of bizarre appeals. The Greg Abbott emails inform the recipient that “You can TANK Greg Abbott’s approval rating by responding to this poll immediately.” “TRUMP OFF THE HOOK??” moans that “Pressure Mounts for Attorney General Merrick Garland to Stop Investigating Trump”, to that “we need 5,000 responses from local Democrats to convince Merrick Garland to do the right thing”. What humiliated Mitch McConnell? “Edward: We’re JUMPING with JOY!!! Joe Biden is ALL IN to pass H.R. 1!!” The Biden agenda will be RUINED! without “[14] more local donations” to abolish the Senate filibuster. And “Dr. Anthony Fauci has been helping us through the worst pandemic in a hundred years and never ONCE minced words with us.” (What, never? Well, hardly ever.)

I’d like to assume that these messages signify Democratic desperation or incompetence or that they are just a less adept than usual political grift. I get plenty of appeals for money from ostensibly conservative organizations that are pretty obviously just seeking lucre, but they are mostly less strident and less wildly implausible.

My current working theory is that some prankster has gotten hold of a right-of-center mailing list and is deluging it with this offal in the hope of making the Democratic Party look even more unbalanced and hysterical than one would infer from straight news reports. If so, his heart is in the right (in one sense of the word) place, but I really wish he would cease and desist. The universe’s supply of pixels isn’t inexhaustible. They should be saved for better and higher uses.

One last fact that may be indicative of something: GMail’s spam filter catches almost none of these messages. The only one that I found there today was a second sending of “TRUMP OFF THE HOOK??”. The proportion of partisan conservative email that goes straight to spam is far higher. If I didn’t know that Google maintains strict standards of impartiality, I would wonder why.

Meritocracy and Its Cultured Despisers (Part II)

“Meritocracy” was coined as a pejorative, has enjoyed a few decades as an aspiration, and is now returning to its original status, as progressives denounce the notion that attention to “merit” is anything more than camouflage for racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism and what new isms and phobias have been discovered since three o’clock yesterday. Part I of this series examined the “soft” anti-meritocratic argument, the one advanced by the term’s originator, Baron Michael Young, and carried on today by Charles Murray, ideologically a very different figure.

The “soft” objections to meritocracy specifically address the tendency to equate “merit” with natural intelligence. Baron Young would have forestalled a great deal of confusion if he had labeled the idea that he was satirizing “sapientocracy”. Progressives attack a broader concept of “merit”. The ultimate foundation of their argument is that no one “merits” anything, because our merits don’t originate within ourselves. Rather they are bestowed by others: ancestors, parents, people with whom we associate, society as a whole.

An example of this thinking can be found in an interview that Vox, a web site popular with TikTok influencers and other pre-adolescents, conducted with Daniel Markovits, a Yale Law School professor who has written The Meritocracy Trap: How America’s Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite. I will here borrow from the Vox interview to explicate the logic of the “hard” case against meritocracy, which is much like a case against merit itself

Asked to define “meritocracy”, Professor Markovits replies, “Meritocracy is the idea that people get ahead based on their own accomplishments rather than, for example, on their parents’ social class. And the moral intuition behind meritocracy is that it creates an elite that is capable and effective and that it gives everybody a fair chance at success.”

He concedes that contemporary America is “something like a meritocracy”, because “the bulk of the reason why certain people have gotten ahead is that they have genuinely accomplished things” but objects that “the moral intuition behind meritocracy is not at all realized. This system does not give everybody a fair chance at success and it hasn’t been particularly good for society as a whole.”

Although Professor Markovits undoubtedly regards inequality as undesirable, he is not devoted to leveling all the hills and filling up all the valleys. If he advocated “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need”, he would hardly be interested in whether meritocracy gave “everybody a fair chance at success”. A fair game that produced unequal results would be just as objectionable as one that was rigged.

He summarizes meritocracy’s unfairness thus: “[B]ecause the rich can afford to educate their children in a way nobody else can, when it comes time to evaluate people on the merits, rich kids just do better.” The proof of that proposition is that students at top-tier colleges predominantly have parents who are well above average in income and education.

The premise is that the key to admission to a top-tier college is the preparation furnished by affluent, well educated parents and that the recipients of that preparation have an unfair advantage. Those advantages are of many kinds, including (i) native intelligence (assuming that intelligence is linked to either heredity or family environment), (ii) attendance at good schools, (iii) parental encouragement to do well academically and in extracurricular activities, (iv) lower incidence of family breakup, crime, drug abuse and other detriments to achievement, (v) association with other children of the same “cognitive elite” class, (vi) superior access to cultural and intellectual resources and (vii) in a pinch, the availability of special tutoring and similar support. There are doubtless more that haven’t crossed my mind.

Those advantages foster the qualities that selective colleges look for in students, but to Professor Markovits they are no better than the bribes paid by the celebrity parents involved in the “Varsity Blues” scandal.

In that scandal, some rich and famous people paid bribes to get their kids into college.

Now, I’m not saying the scandal wasn’t wrong – it absolutely was scandalous. But the bulk of the reason why our colleges, particularly our elite colleges, are filled with kids of rich parents isn’t that. Instead, it’s that rich parents spend enormous sums of money not on bribing anybody but on educating their children, on getting their children into prestigious kindergartens and high schools, on coaches and tutors and music teachers, and this means the children of rich people simply do better on the merits.

And so the big problem that we face isn’t merely that the rich cheat, it’s that the meritocracy favors the rich even when everybody plays by the rules.

In this discussion, Professor Markovits takes us only as far as the gates of the campus, which isn’t where many men and women other than star athletes accrue wealth and fame. I’ll assume arguendo that matriculation brings with it yet more advantages – acquisition of monetizable knowledge, friendship with fellow students who are on their way to success and will be helpful in later life, credentials that will impress future employers, etc. – that lead to “the children of rich people” doing yet “better on the merits”. If that isn’t the case, Professor Markovits’s argument peters out, for all that an elite college education then does is make rich people a little less rich as they pay monstrous sums for their children’s four-year vacations.

At this point one may ask why, even if it is in some sense “unfair” for those who are “better on the merits” to earn the greatest rewards, society doesn’t benefit from the arrangement. Leaving aside “rent seeking” activities (for which Yale or Harvard may or may not be a good preparation), getting rich generally is the result of providing goods or services that other people want. Professor Markovits himself says, as already noted, that “the bulk of the reason why certain people have gotten ahead is that they have genuinely accomplished things”. Jeff Bezos isn’t a multi-billionaire simply because he graduated from Princeton, nor Bill Gates because he attended (but dropped out of) Harvard.

“Genuinely accomplishing things” isn’t a prime, or even especially desirable, goal for Professor Markovits. Accomplishment has become enmeshed in the greater evil of competitiveness. He shares Baron Young’s nostalgia for pre-meritocratic privilege:

Look, one way to think about this is that if you take a longer historical view, meritocracy in its deeper origins came to the English-speaking world around 1833 [sic; sc. 1854], which is the date in which the administrative division of the British East India Company entrance and promotion based on social class was replaced with entrance and promotion based on competitive examinations.

The eventual upshot was –

It takes enormous effort to win and keep winning in this competition, so elite schooling has become enormously more intensive than it was 20 or 50 years ago. And elite jobs have become enormously more intensive. The toll that this takes is quite heavy and I think it’s destructive of human well-being.

Meritocrats are constantly struggling and being evaluated and tested, and they constantly have to shape and manipulate themselves in order to pass the test. And in a way, it’s like they’re portfolio managers whose assets include just themselves, and they have kind of an instrumental and alienated attitude toward their own lives because they have to treat their life that way.

The interviewer asks, “Is there any way to organize a competitive society that doesn’t inevitably tend toward these sorts of excesses?” Professor Markovits has something of a solution at hand:

I think it’s possible, yes. So one distinction I draw is between excellent education and superior education. Excellent education is education that makes a person good at something that’s worth doing, and superior education is education that makes somebody better than other people at something, regardless of whether it’s worth doing or not.

You can imagine a society which has widespread, excellent education and invests in training people to be good at all the tasks that the society needs and fills up its jobs with people who are excellent at them. And that would be a kind of a meritocratic society that structures its education and work so that once you’re excellent, being a little bit better doesn’t make that much of a difference.

Damping down education from “superior” to “excellent” sounds like an excellent way to stifle innovation, while suppressing “education that makes somebody better than other people at something” is an obvious formula for producing cookbook followers who unimaginatively do what their predecessors did. Stagnation almost sounds like the objective behind Professor Markovits’s denunciation of “superior education”:

It gives huge advantages to people who are better than somebody else or than everybody else in all sorts of things that probably aren’t worth doing, like being great at high-tech finance, which most economists think has almost no social value.

But if you’re really good at it you can make millions and millions of dollars a year, and to get really good at it you have to master all sorts of difficult skills and you have to get degrees at the top of your class in the very best universities in the country. And that’s the kind of system that we have now.

This is such a strange view of the economy that I suspect the professor of amusing himself at the expense of his teenage-level interviewer. He was perhaps waiting to be asked how those “who are better than somebody else or than everybody else in all sorts of things that probably aren’t worth doing” get paid “millions and millions of dollars a year”. Alas, the question didn’t come, so we didn’t get to hear his answer. I’m going to go out on a limb and bet that it wouldn’t have been convincing.

Whether meritocracy is useful is, however, only part of the story. As should be clear by now, Professor Markovits has moral, as well as utilitarian, criticisms. To those I’ll turn when I get around to the next installment in this series.

“The Red Has Returned”

Last month, as reported by the China Media Project (tip of the beret to Instapundit), a more or less random Red Chinese peon blogged his reaction to “recent moves by the Chinese authorities to bring the entertainment industry in check and curb the influence of celebrities, coming on top of the suspension last year of the blockbuster IPO of China’s Ant Group, the fining of Alibaba, and the crackdown on ‘fandom culture’”.

“This change will wash away all the dust, and the capital market will no longer be a paradise for capitalists to grow rich overnight,” he writes. “The cultural market will no longer be a paradise for effeminate stars, and the press will no longer be a place for the worship of Western culture.” The author’s next line reeks of Maoist nostalgia: “The red has returned, the heroes have returned, and the grit and valor have returned.”

These events, he avers, show “that China is undergoing a major change. From the economic sphere to the financial sphere, from the cultural sphere to the political sphere, a profound transformation is underway – or, one might say, a profound revolution.”

In itself, the effusions of an obscure Maoist diehard mean nothing. We have those in the U.S., too. What does mean something is how the Xi regime reacted:

Such language, appearing on the odd social media account, might ordinarily be dismissed as the ravings of a Maoist outlier. But this post, though attributed to Li’s own public account, “Li Guangman Freezing Point Commentary”, was shared on the websites of eight major Party-state media on August 29, and on scores of commercial sites, all with the same headline: “Everyone Can Sense That a Profound Change is Underway!”

The re-publishing by Party-state media of an article from so-called “self-media” or “We media”, a term referring to digital social media platforms such as WeChat that integrate self-publishing with chat and other services, is a very rare occurrence. The assumption many observers have naturally made, therefore, is that the joint posting of this WeChat article across Party-state media websites must have been coordinated by the Central Propaganda Department and other relevant offices.

In the social media comment sections this week, the concern has been palpable. “A movement has begun,” one user commented underneath a Weibo post on the Li Guangman article. “They’re blowing a wind to see what fish they can stir up,” said another. A third comment was more portentous: “History is being repeated,” it said.

No one need ask what history we are talking about here.

And in other news –

California officials and representatives of local organizations delivered warm congratulatory messages to an online celebration held by the Chinese Consulate General in Los Angeles on Wednesday for the 72nd anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China.