Stromata Blog

The Dystopia They Embrace

When progressive artistes conjure images of the future that ought not to be, they foresee a world where monopolistic corporations rule, a handful of plutocrats live in luxury, and the masses are ground beneath gold-slippered feet. If I were pitching a film along the lines of Soylent Green and Elysium, the plot might go something like this:

A man who manages ten trillion dollars of other people’s money decides that the government isn’t doing enough to implement his ideas on how the world should be run. Cutting democracy out of the picture, he demands that corporations carry out his preferred policies and announces that those that don’t will lose access to his trillions. Corporations fall into line, some out of fear, many because they agree with him that political processes too often yield the wrong results. In the final scenes, we see a world run by oligarchs who bask in self-congratulation and feed crumbs of welfare to the lower classes whose livelihoods have been suppressed for the sake of the greater good.

That pitch couldn’t be used, though, because it’s real life, not fiction. The CEO of ten trillion dollar investor BlackRock touts it in the form of “stakeholder capitalism”, which he has marketed with increasing success to the executives who run major corporations.

Why? They, and many of their colleagues in the C-suite, have realized that, in a regime where stakeholder, rather than shareholder, capitalism is the dominant ethos in the “private” sector, their rewards will be less dependent on delivering value to shareholders (who can be a demanding bunch) than in the past. Rather, they will be expected to pay increased attention to the somewhat nebulously defined aspirations of their almost as nebulously defined stakeholders. In practice, that means putting “their” companies’ capital, and the power that comes with it, behind a social, political, and economic agenda set by the state, various interest groups (unions, say, or NGOs, to take two examples), and, yes, business, a set-up that may not only offer them a pathway to (in many cases, even more) wealth but also to a degree of political power. And the latter comes with the advantage that it is largely free of conventional democratic control.

Whatever the merits of the causes that the stakeholder capitalists pursue, their method of pursuing them is a naked exercise in rule by the rich. Progressives would see that if BlackRock were withholding funds from corporations that pour money into “green energy” projects powered by Sun, wind and noble intentions or that indoctrinate employees with the fashionable variety of anti-white racism.

But one should not accuse our progressive friends of inconsistency. Left-wing politics has always followed one unwavering policy: Decisions must be made through whatever mechanism is most likely to ensure progressive outcomes. Democracy was fine when the “deplorables” could be counted on to vote for Democrats. Now that the American version of aristocracy is converting en masse to the Woke Religion, oligarchy is the only acceptable form of government. The world must be saved By Any Means Necessary, dystopia included.

Further reading: Andrew Stuttaford, “The Dangers of ‘Stakeholder Capitalism’”
Milton Friedman, “The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase its Profits”

Blaming The Donald for Biden’s Woes

President Biden has been blustering about how much Russia in general and Vladimir Putin in particular will regret a Russian invasion of Ukraine (leaving aside “minor incursions”), and it would be unfair to say that no action has accompanied his bluster. Some troops have been mobilized for possible deployment to NATO’s eastern border; some weapons are on their way to Kiev; some European allies have sent military aid from their own resources; some economic sanctions are threatened. The official consensus seems to be, though, that Russia can lop off as much of Ukraine as it feels able to digest without any risk of having to bear more pain than its rulers are willing to let the Russian people suffer. Hence, the United States has been proposing compromises in the hope that Moscow will settle for a few slices less than a full loaf. Perhaps it will. Tsar Vladimir’s demands, which amount to NATO’s permanent abandonment of Eastern Europe, are so extravagant that they may be intended only as a step toward securing concessions that, while major, will look reasonable by comparison.

For America and NATO to back down before an adversary with no significant allies and whose total economic output is not much more than one-third of U.S. tax revenue would be as embarrassing as it seems inevitable. It certainly will be no feather in Joe Biden’s cap. Hence, we may anticipate that his Varangian Guard will find ways to deflect responsibility. The New York Times’s morning newsletter is among the first to fiddle with the gaslight. Its author, David Leonhardt (kind of a leftish Jim Geraghty but without the latter’s sprighliness), has identified the blameworthy party. Not surprisingly, it is Donald Trump.

The argument is convincing so long as you don’t think about it:

Donald Trump has made a habit of deriding the U.S. alliance with Western Europe. He described NATO – the American-led alliance with Europe that dates to the 1940s – as “obsolete” and said that Americans were “schmucks” for financing it. He mused about withdrawing the U.S. from NATO and often spoke more positively about Russia than about longtime American allies like Germany and France.

These comments were a radical departure from the policies of every U.S. president, Republican and Democrat, for 75 years. Still, because Trump did not make good on his biggest threats, the tangible effects were not always clear.

Now they are becoming clearer.

As Mr. Leonhardt sees it, the reason why there is no NATO unity against Russian threats of aggression is that “one crucial country is missing from that united front: Germany”.

Germany’s government, under its new chancellor, Olaf Scholz, has ruled out any arms exports to Ukraine. It is also delaying a shipment of howitzers from Estonia to Ukraine. It may have kept British planes from using German airspace when sending military supplies to Ukraine last week.

Most significantly, the Scholz government has been vague about whether a Russian invasion would lead to the shutdown of an undersea gas pipeline between Germany and Russia. The pipeline, the Nord Stream 2, will become a major source of energy for Germany and a major source of revenue for Russia once it begins operating, likely in the next year.

These developments are, we are informed, “the long-term consequences of Trump’s hostility to Europe”. “Trump’s hostility to Western Europe” supposedly “encouraged Angela Merkel, Germany’s chancellor at the time, to ponder a future in which the U.S. might be pulling back from NATO. In that scenario, friendly relations with Russia (and China, too) would have advantages, especially because of its importance to European energy supplies.”

So President Trump’s denigration of NATO, which, as Mr. Leonhardt says, never led to any significant action, impelled Chancellor Merkel and her successor from the opposing political party to increase Germany’s dependence on Russian natural gas supplies? Left unmentioned is Merkel’s decision to shutter Germany’s nuclear reactors, thus creating a huge shortfall of domestic energy production that her preferred “green” alternatives cannot begin to fill. Also pertinent, perhaps, is the fact that Chancellor Scholz’s Social Democratic Party has a history of Russophilia. The last SDP chancellor before Herr Scholz was Gerhard Schröder (1998-2005) who went onto the Russian payroll almost immediately after leaving office. He is now, among other posts, a director of Rosneft, the Russian state oil producer (reportedly with a salary of $350,000 a year for part-time work). He celebrated his 70th birthday in St. Petersburg at a bash hosted by Tsar Vladimir himself.

Further evidence that Germany’s unreliability as an ally can’t reasonably be traced to a snit over Donald Trump’s catcalls is the fact that, in Mr. Leonhardt’s own words, the “united front” lacks “one crucial country”, not several. Britain and even France have been supporting such efforts as the Biden Administration has made to contain Russia. Didn’t they read The Donald’s mean tweets?

Donald Trump can be blamed for many things, such as the loss of the Republican majority in the Senate and consequent empowerment of the Democratic Party’s socialist wing. His Euroskeptic rhetoric, on the other hand, annoying as it was to those of us who support a robust pro-liberty policy, was no more than wind that swayed the grasses back and forth but left them standing after it blew itself out. For the looming failure in Ukraine, Joe Biden bears full responsibility.

The Biden Problem

If you’re looking for another depreciation of Joe Biden’s capacity to fill the duties of his office or prediction that shadowy Democratic power elites will find a way to ease him out, somehow circumventing his dubiously capable next-in-line, this isn’t it. I’m thinking instead of the “Biden Problem” in a generic sense, viz., when a political faction finds itself bound to a leader who harms its cause more than he helps it and can’t easily be superseded.

Joe Biden became the Democratic Presidential nominee, because all of the other aspirants were inexperienced, unlikable, extremist, unknown or all four. Biden appeared to have none of those defects. He had served 36 years in the Senate and eight as Vice President. He was known for his bonhomie. He had a reputation as a moderate, a former quasi-Dixiecrat who had mellowed as the Jim Crow era receded into the past. He was well known to the electorate, at least in the sense that everyone had heard his name, even if very few had much sense of who he was.

The country learned little more about him during the campaign, which he spent largely out of sight. He then defeated, by a narrow margin and with immense help from media and billionaires, an incumbent President who had worked tirelessly to alienate large swathes of voters who agreed for the most part with the policies he espoused but not with his espousing them.

Thus we reached the present predicament, which, let’s remember, is a predicament for Americans of any and all political persuasions, not just for Democrats. Moreover, it’s a predicament that no plausible action within the framework of the Constitution can resolve. (Action outside the Constitution would bring on worse problems.) The President won’t be impeached. So long as he retains a reasonable proportion of his present faculties, the Twenty-Fifth Amendment is an unworkable removal mechanism (more difficult than impeachment, unless the incumbent is literally incapable of speaking up for himself). He shows no signs of wanting to lay aside the burdens of office voluntarily.

Moreover, should the forces of nature remove him, matters wouldn’t be improved much, if at all. His designated successors are Kamala Harris and, after her, Nancy Pelosi, figures who inspire confidence in their own households and very few other places.

Such is the current instantiation of the “Biden Problem”. Let’s note its elements, abstracted from particularities. First is the election of a President for reasons that have little to do with his fitness for the office. Joe Biden was lucky in his opposition; his own qualities didn’t really matter. Second is manifest incapacity for the office. That doesn’t mean that a President who is non compos mentis, just one who isn’t up to the demands of the world’s most demanding position. Third is the absence of visible exit from the situation created by the first two elements.

For most of our history, Biden Problems stemming from age weren’t a great danger. Only five of the 45 Presidents were as old as 65 when they took office (two of them at a time when Presidents had far less to do than today); 32 were under age 60. Joe Biden is a full eight years older than the next oldest, his immediate predecessor Donald Trump.

Only two men entered the Presidency with potentially serious physical impairments: Franklin D. Roosevelt, a polio victim, and John F. Kennedy, dependent on prescription drugs to alleviate a painful chronic disease. In each case, the country avoided a Biden Problem. While FDR and JFK died in office, death was from other causes. So far as one can tell, their debilities had little effect on how they carried out their duties.

Now let’s look ahead. I apologize if that view is discomforting.

According to polls (with all due allowance for their unreliability at this distance from Election Day), Donald Trump is the favorite to win the Republican nomination, assuming that he seeks it, in 2024. A brand new McLaughlin & Associates poll says that 70 percent of Republican voters want him to run, and 81 percent would support him if he did (62 percent “strongly”). Pitted against a laundry list of conceivable GOP opponents, running from Ron DeSantis to Candace Owens and Liz Cheney(!), The Donald is the choice of 53 percent; DeSantis is second at 13.

The same poll puts Trump solidly ahead of Biden in a hypothetical general election, 51 to 40 percent. (He would beat Hillary Clinton by the same margin.)

There is, then, more than a remote prospect that Donald Trump will become the second President to serve nonconsecutive terms. If he does, the possibility (not certainty, to be sure) of a Biden Problem looms.

• Should Trump be elected, two factors are likely to be keys to his success: (i) support from Republicans because of the enemies he has made and (ii) continued Biden bumbling that taints him and, more generally, the Democratic Party. Just as with Biden in 2020, Trump in 2024 will be the beneficiary of his opponent’s negatives rather than his own positives.
• Upon taking the oath for a second term, Donald Trump will be 78 years old. Does that ring a bell? After four years of aggravated ineptitude, he will face daunting challenges at home and abroad, for worse than Joe Biden had to cope with. That doesn’t mean that the office will overwhelm him as it has poor Mr. Biden, but the risk is undeniable. Gambling the nation on the health and acuity of an elderly man of volatile temperament isn’t much different from putting your life savings on red or black at the roulette wheel and letting it spin.
• If the gamble doesn’t pay off, it’s hard to see how America can recover. It won’t be a matter of easing a capable Vice President into office. By then, given the prospects of rampant inflation, unchecked crime and international turmoil, the transition may well be too late.

“First, do no harm.” In this age of euthanasia, physicians may have forgotten that maxim, but it remains wise.

Friday Through Tuesday: Free E-Books

[If you’re reading this post after midnight, January 25th, Pacific Standard Time (3:00 a.m., January 26th, Eastern Standard Time; 8:00 a.m., January 26th, Greenwich Mean Time), you are, alas, too late to take advantage of the free book offer. You may, however, purchase any of the works listed below for 99 cents, which is practically free.]

From Friday, January 21st, through Tuesday, January 25th (all dates reckoned by the Pacific Time Zone), four of my short stories and novelettes will be available free from Amazon’s Kindle Store:

• “The Monkey and the Amazon: A Tale of Illusions” – intrigue and disguise in Hellenistic Babylon
• “Shadowloves: A Tale of Desire” – where romantic dreams come all too true
• “Daimon Born: The First Adventure of Theagonistes” – of a being who dwells between the Moon and the Empyrean and makes a (literal) impact on the Earth
• “Igor’s Campaign: A Tale of Ambition” – a World Science Fiction Convention in Yeltsin-era Russia

After the giveaway expires, the prices will revert to 99 cents each, the lowest that Amazon lets authors charge, or free on Kindle Unlimited.

Still available for a trifling $1.99 is Clicks & Colluders, recounting what happened in the weeks after Hillary won the 2016 election.

Reminder: If you love or hate (or feel moderate emotions toward) any of these works, you can praise or deride the author with a review on Amazon.

No, You Don’t Have a “Gender” (Unless You’re a Part of Speech)

The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (1971), whose two Brobdingnagian volumes and accompanying magnifying glass grace the bookshelves of many homes, states that “gender” as a synonym for “sex” is “now only jocular”. It identifies “gender” as a grammatical term, a classification employed in inflected languages to determine what forms of adjectives go with which nouns.

According to Aristotle (Rhetoric III:5:5), the pre-Socratic philosopher Protagoras was the first to classify nouns as “masculine”, “feminine” or “inanimate”. The terms were inspired by the fact that nouns that refer to males or to females tend to fall into the same classes. The Greek words for “father”, “son” and “brother” are in one class (“masculine”), for “mother”, “daughter” and “sister” in another (“feminine”).

When one gets beyond the obvious cases, however, any correspondence between sex and grammatical gender quickly breaks down. The ancient grammarian and hyper-skeptic Sextus Empiricus pointed out that the same objects may change genders not only between languages but even between different dialects of the same language. It is easy to find examples of linguistic “gender confusion”. In Latin, for instance, an army may be an exercitus (masculine), an acies (feminine) or an agmen (neuter). What’s more, the principal subdivision of the Roman army, the cohors, is feminine, even though no women served in their ranks.

Sometimes a noun’s gender depends on whether its referent is masculine or feminine. A Roman would call his male dog “bonus canis” and his bitch “bona canis”. But that wasn’t the rule. A good horse, whether stallion or mare, was “bonus equus”. It’s possible, too, for a change in gender to result in a complete change of meaning. In French, “un livre” (masculine) is a book; “une livre” is a unit of weight (a “pound”).

In short, the relationship between sex and “gender”, as that word was used until the day before yesterday, is a paronomasia, a play on words, a mostly arbitrary and capricious product of the tangled, arational history of real-world tongues. As the OED said not so long ago, assigning gender to human beings was “jocular”. Or, as a friend of mine once put it, “Nouns have gender. Fruit flies have gender. Men and women have sex.”

Why, then, has the grammatical term recently been imported into human affairs and, indeed, edged out “sex”? The reason, I believe, is that sex is rooted in biological fact, while “gender” can be anything one wants it to be. Replacing “sex” with “gender” is thus a way to justify ignoring the constraints imposed by our physical natures in favor of self-absorbed fantasies. It is the childish idea that one has the right to have all desires fulfilled.

I would like to be a lead tenor at the Seattle Opera and the starting center fielder for the Mariners. The Woke Religion hasn’t yet furnished the means for my attaining those goals, but why shouldn’t it? They seem less formidable than making men pregnant.

A side benefit for the Woke who assume genders or invent strange new ones is the right, which the Woke Religion grants them, to demand that their self-characterizations be universally affirmed and that dissidents be punished for uttering the “wrong” pronouns or otherwise failing to go along with the game. That sense of power is a consolation for the fact that the fantasies aren’t reality. A man who wins a women’s swim meet is not a great female swimmer. A woman who declares herself to be male will never be a father.

There is nothing inherently wrong with fantasizing. There is something very wrong when the fantasizers try to coerce others into pretending that their unfulfillable wishes are reality.

Non omnia possumus omnes (“We can’t do everything”), the greatest of Latin poets averred. The contemporary world would be a happier place if it heeded him.

The Future of King Day

My crystal ball glowed this morning, signaling a revelation from future times. Do you wonder what Times to Come hold for Martin Luther King, Jr. Day? Read this book review from the Washington Post, dated January 19, 2037, and you will find out.

Virtue Signaling: 99.4% Pure

“Virtue signaling” is becoming a cliché, applied to any and all outpourings of the Woke Religion, yet the narrower and more useful sense of the term hasn’t wholly disappeared: A “virtue signal” is an act whose primary purpose and effect is to demonstrate that the actor supports what others regard as a noble cause or abhors what they regard as an evil one. Whether the signal will accomplish anything or is pertinent in the context in which it is performed, or whether the signal is sincere – those are secondary matters at most.

Discourse might be more rational if we built a wall of separation between acts or arguments and the character of those who act or argue. Bad men can propound good ideas, and vice versa. We live in an era, though, in which a President of United States can declare that allowing state legislatures to establish election procedures is wrong, because Jefferson Davis also supported state authority, and lots of people nod in agreement, while others feel impelled to preface their support for ballot security with a disavowal of secession and slavery. A touch of defensive virtue signaling is almost essential to slipping past the cancellation authorities.

Still, there are virtue signals whose purity deserves recognition. Last Monday, 86 “business entities”, ranging from American Express and Apple to Tiffany & Co., Uber and the United States Soccer Federation (you won’t be surprised to see Google and Microsoft on the list of filers, but it isn’t entirely predictable; Amazon and Meta (né Facebook) left themselves off), filed an amicus brief in a lawsuit that, if you’re a normal person, has escaped your notice.

In Virginia v. Ferriero, the Commonwealth of Virginia and the States of Illinois and Nevada seek a writ of mandamus to compel the Archivist of the United States to certify that the Equal Rights Amendment has been adopted as part of the Constitution of the United States, notwithstanding that, as of the Congressionally fixed deadline for ratification, June 30, 1982, only 30 of the necessary 38 states had ratified it. (Thirty-five ratified it at one point or another, but five later rescinded their ratifications.)

Last March, a D.C. district judge (an Obama appointee, incidentally) dismissed the action. The plaintiffs have appealed. The business entities’ amicus brief urges the District of Columbia Court of Appeals to reverse the district court. To appreciate how undiluted this virtue signal is, one must take note of why the lower court decided the case as it did.

First, Judge Contreras held that certification by the Archivist has no legal effect. Mr. Ferriero has many important duties, but one of them is not making binding decisions about what is and isn’t in the text of the Constitution. Therefore, the plaintiffs have not been injured by his failure to accept their opinion about what that document says. Not having been injured, they have no standing to sue him to redress the nonexistent harm.

Second, the judge continued, even if standing weren’t a bar, the plaintiffs didn’t satisfy the conditions for the issuance of a writ of mandamus, which is a court order compelling a public official to perform a legal duty. The judge quoted another court on the circumstances in which the writ can be issued: “A court may grant mandamus relief only if: (1) the plaintiff has a clear right to relief; (2) the defendant has a clear duty to act; and (3) there is no other adequate remedy available to plaintiff.” The plaintiffs didn’t meet those conditions. The Archivist has no duty, certainly not a “clear duty”, to certify an amendment as part of the Constitution when fewer than three-quarters of the states have ratified it, and the ERA was either three or five states short on June 30, 1982. (The judge rejected the plaintiffs’ contention that Congress hadn’t really set a deadline.)

The amicus brief has nothing to say about either of the grounds for the judge’s ruling. Its argument is divided into two sections, headed “As Corporate Citizens, Amici Are Strongly Committed to the ERA as a Means to Advance the Goal of Gender Equality” and “The ERA Would Enable Women’s Full Participation in the Labor Force and Provide Consistency in the Enforcement of Laws Affecting Women”. The words “standing” and “mandamus” do not even appear in the document.

What is the purpose of this effusion, prepared by a well known law firm for, one has no doubt, a very substantial fee (unless, that is, the firm of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison is signaling its own virtue by charging a reduced rate)? It is devoid of legal argument and doesn’t even advance its ostensible cause. Any appellate judge who may sympathize with the plaintiffs and be in search of a rationale for reversing the district court will find no help here.

No, all we have here is 86 businesses frantically signaling that they aren’t sinners against wokeness. It is a pathetic exercise and another sign of the degeneracy of America’s business leadership. Happily, it is form without a shred of substance.

Conspiracy or Farce?

For their actions on January 6, 2021, eleven members of the “Oath Keepers” have been indicted for Seditious Conspiracy (18 U.S.C. §2384), which is defined thus:

If two or more persons in any State or Territory, or in any place subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, conspire to overthrow, put down, or to destroy by force the Government of the United States, or to levy war against them, or to oppose by force the authority thereof, or by force to prevent, hinder, or delay the execution of any law of the United States, or by force to seize, take, or possess any property of the United States contrary to the authority thereof, they shall each be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than twenty years, or both.

Byron York describes the actions that led to the indictment as “The LARP rebellion”. He likens the “conspiracy” to a role playing game. It sounds to me more like a scenario for a Mel Brooks farce.

What to make of it all? First, the Oath Keepers really were a gang of idiots. What were they thinking? In what fantasy world did they, unarmed and careening in golf carts, plan to install the next President of the United States? Reading the indictment, it's hard to avoid the conclusion that it all was an elaborate bit of LARPing – that is, live-action role-playing. The indictment is filled with page after page of fantasy talk.

But of course, the group did discuss interfering with the transfer of power. They talked about civil war. They brought guns to the Washington area, although, careful to observe local gun laws, they did not use them or even bring them into the District of Columbia. They were part of the mob that entered the Capitol, although it does not appear that any of them engaged in any violence. And now, for it all, they have been charged with seditious conspiracy.

The indictment raises questions about whether it is correct to refer to the Capitol riot as an “insurrection” or “sedition”. Obviously, the investigation has given rise to an indictment for seditious conspiracy. But can the actions of a group of 11 LARPers accurately describe the motives and actions of the hundreds of people at the Capitol, and thousands more in the area, who had no connection with the Oath Keepers? A recent poll showed that many Americans view the Capitol riot seriously, but as a protest that got out of hand. The new indictment will probably not change their minds.

If the facts stated in the indictment are true – they certainly sound plausible – the actions of the accused undoubtedly fall within the literal terms of the statute. On the other hand, the “force” with which they planned “to prevent, hinder, or delay the execution of any law of the United States” was so patently inadequate as to raise questions about whether the conspirators had any real objective in mind. Do conspiracies to make futile and stupid gestures rise to the level of sedition?

How, indeed, does one distinguish this particular “sedition” from numerous other protests against other government actions? When opponents of confirming Brett Kavanaugh’s appointment to the Supreme Court massed in D.C., their goal was certainly to overawe the Senate into rejecting Judge Kavanaugh. If some of them had used rhetoric like that of the Oath Keepers (and some probably did), would that have been “seditious conspiracy”, too? Overheated partisans often jabber about “forcing” Congress or the President or the courts to do this or that? More “sedition”? Are we all seditionists now?

Aggravated Absurdity

As you may have heard, a bill (H.B. 1692) has been introduced in the Legislature of my home state of Washington to reduce the maximum penalty for drive-by shootings. It has been referred to the ominously named Committee on Public Safety. One may hope that it will be guillotined there. One sees, though, that its co-sponsors include three committee chairmen and a Public Safety committee member. This isn’t some lark and detour that nobody takes seriously.

An article posted yesterday by The Spectator furnishes background on the bill’s author, Rep. Tarra Simmons, a lily-white former drug dealer who enjoys the distinction of being the first convicted felon to have won election to the State House of Representatives.

What her bill specifically would do is amend the definition of “aggravated first degree murder”, which carries a mandatory sentence of life imprisonment without parole (25 years to life for juveniles under age 16). (The death penalty used to be an option, but the state’s very woke Supreme Court abolished capital punishment in 2018.) At present, one of the aggravating circumstances is –

The murder was committed during the course of or as a result of a shooting where the discharge of the firearm, as defined in RCW 9.41.010, is either from a motor vehicle or from the immediate area of a motor vehicle that was used to transport the shooter or the firearm, or both, to the scene of the discharge.

H.B. 1692 would strike that paragraph and require that all murderers currently serving time for aggravated murder be resentenced. For those who were under age 21 at the time of the killing, there is additional leniency, a waiver of the mandatory minimum sentence for ordinary, non-aggravated first degree murder. Rep. Simmons –

is at least upfront about her intentions. She claims the new law would “promote racial equity in the criminal legal system.” That’s because the vast majority of drive-by violence, in both Washington State and elsewhere, is perpetrated by young black males. Oddly enough, most of their victims are also black. So in the looking-glass world of Washington’s public officials, it’s apparently fine to shoot an African American while you’re out cruising in your customized Dodge Viper on a Saturday night provided you’re the same skin color.

“Murder is murder,” Representative Simmons sagely reminds us. “But locking children up and throwing away the key is not the answer,” she adds, noting that “everyone deserves a second chance in life.” (Other than those mown down from a passing car, presumably.)

(You may read the representative’s maudlin argument for leniency here.)

One killer to whom Rep. Simmons specifically wants to give a second chance is Kimonti Carter, who in 1997 “unloaded at least 19 bullets into what he believed to be a car full of rival gang members”. It wasn’t. The victims were teenagers with no gang connections. One, Corey Pittman, was a 19-year-old black man, home from college on summer vacation. He was studying political science and aspired to become a lawyer. Thanks to Kimonti Carter, he never got a first chance, much less a second.

This case illustrates why drive-by murders have been classified as an aggravated offense. The likelihood that bystanders will be killed is high, and the murderer is already in the getaway car, ready to speed off and evade arrest. As an empirical fact, most victims of gun violence, including drive-bys, are black. If the law that Rep. Simmons wants to repeal is an instance of racism, it is racism of a peculiar sort. Indeed, if one is going to toss around accusations of racism, which is more racist: to punish severely people who kill blacks or to reduce their sentences on account of their race?

Joe Biden: America Is a Dark, Unjust Autocracy

According to news reports, President Biden will declare today that the country he leads is not currently a democracy:

“The next few days, when these bills come to a vote, will mark a turning point in this nation,” Biden will say according to prepared remarks shared by the White House. “Will we choose democracy over autocracy, light over shadow, justice over injustice? I know where I stand.”

If Mr. Biden were speaking from exile after a foreign power had occupied the United States, his belief that autocracy, shadow and injustice hold sway over our land would not be surprising. If he were himself a ruthless dictator, his characterization of his own rule would surprise but would have the merit of truth. Yet the United States of America is fully independent, and Joe Biden, whatever his faults, is no Xi Jinping or Vladimir Putin.

Politicians who are out of power not infrequently complain that the Will of the People is being thwarted. (Vide D. J. Trump.) One doesn’t expect that lament from incumbents, save for those who contemplate following in the footsteps of Louis-Napoléon.

The Mystery of a Vanished Liberalism

Two items caught my eye today, reminders that American liberalism used to be far different from its current progressive incarnation. That it vanished so completely after the 1970’s, having dominated the country’s politics for about forty years, is an odd, under-analyzed historical phenomenon.

The first item came from John Hinderaker, one of the PowerLine blogging quartet. It was inspired by a conservative twitterist’s cheeky remark: “I think we made out pretty well in the Taibbi/Greenwald for Kristol/Wilson trade.” Mr. Hinderaker added:

Like other conservatives, I am grateful for the support we get from these liberals on issues like free speech, government overreach and the corruption of the liberal media. But this prompts a melancholy reflection: remember the good old days when the battle between liberals and conservatives was fought, more than anything else, over marginal income tax rates? Just 40 years ago, most Democrats believed in free speech and supported the Constitution.

Now, in contrast, we are fighting for our lives. Despite the clownishness of the Biden administration and the modern Left, the goalposts have moved a long way in their direction. Conservatives are being silenced on the most important information platforms, our Constitution is under overt attack, and the Democrats are a whisker away from making election integrity illegal.

For now, we obviously need to fight these life or death battles. But how long will it be before we return to the days when tax cuts and Social Security reform are the issues that divide the parties?

By serendipitous coincidence, the center-right Tablet last week posted a piece by Michael Lind, a liberal who, like Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald, often finds himself opposing left-wing ideological trends. In “America’s Asymmetric Civil War”, Mr. Lind analyzes the clash as one within, rather than between, states, pitting two elites against each other:

The social base of the Democrats is neither a few liberal billionaires nor the more numerous cohorts of high-school educated minority voters; it is the disproportionately white college-educated professionals and managers. These affluent but not rich overclass households dominate the Democratic Party and largely determine its messaging, not by virtue of campaign contributions or voting numbers, but because they very nearly monopolize the staffing of the institutions that support the party – K-12 schools and universities, city and state and federal bureaucracies, public sector unions, foundations, foundation-funded nonprofit organizations, and the mass media. By osmosis, professional and managerial values and material interests and fads and fashions permeate the Democratic Party and shape its agenda.

While the liberal Big Rich cluster in silver apartments and offices in trophy skyscrapers in the inner core of blue cities, the elites of the outer suburbs and exurbs tend to be made up of the Lesser Rich – millionaire car dealership owners, real estate agents, oil and gas drilling equipment company owners, and hair salon chain owners. This group of proprietors – the petty bourgeoisie, to use Marxist terminology, compared to the Democratic haute bourgeoisie and its professional allies – forms the social base of the Republican Party, despite efforts by Sens. Josh Hawley of Missouri, Marco Rubio of Florida, and others to rebrand the GOP as a working-class party.

Mr. Lind doesn’t like either elite. His description of the “Lesser Rich” has touches of sympathy:

Unlike the flagship tech oligopolies like Facebook, Google, and Amazon, whose executives and employees fund and sometimes staff the Democratic Party’s political operations, many small business owners struggle to keep up with the jargon and paperwork required to deal with elaborate environmental regulations or proliferating race and gender quotas in federal record-keeping and subsidies. In addition to helping their urban core constituents, Democratic policies, to the extent that they harm Republican businesses and industries, increase the Democratic share of national wealth, which can then be deployed further against the party’s Republican rivals.

That sympathy is nonetheless constrained. “But the fact that the local business owner can discuss hunting and fishing with his employees or may attend the same church does not moderate the ferocious hostility of most of the red-county gentry to anything that would raise the cost of labor for their businesses – a higher minimum wage, unionization, paid vacations, paid parental leave.” He asks, in a tone of lament:

If hourglass Democrats are dominated by urban managers and professionals linked to the national and global economies, and the diamond Republicans by moderately rich local business elites, then who speaks for the two-thirds of Americans who are working class, who lack college diplomas and must work for wages? The answer is: nobody. At 6% and falling, private sector trade union membership in the United States is lower than it was under Herbert Hoover.

The only time that the working-class majority had any real influence in American politics, as well as in their workplaces, was between the 1940s and the 1980s, when private sector unions were a force that both parties had to reckon with. Private sector unions have been annihilated in the last half-century in the United States because hatred of organized labor is one of only two areas of agreement between socially liberal Democratic Silicon Valley tech entrepreneurs, CEOs who donate millions to Black Lives Matter, and small-town Republican sweatshop owners and overseers who think Social Security and Medicare constitute “socialism.”

If my purpose were to argue with Mr. Lind, I would point out that the hostile force that has deunionized the private sector has been workers who overwhelmingly have no desire to be “represented” by labor unions that are themselves run by members of the elite that runs the Democratic Party. But that’s a discussion for another day. Mr. Lind is certainly right when he says that the kind of liberalism that existed from the late Forties, after it was freed from the dead weight of FDR and his cronies, until some time in the Seventies or Eighties – a liberalism that didn’t aspire to transform the country but simply to give the working class a larger share of the pie – today has all the political pertinence of the Divine Right of Kings.

The conclusive proof of the extinction of that liberalism is that no one has any notion of what it would espouse if it did exist. With all due respect to Senators Hawley and Rubio, their “working class party” ideas amount to welfare for people who aren’t quite poor enough to receive it now. On the other side are arrayed zealots for socialism, the most effective formula for impoverishing workers that has ever been devised by the malignant ingenuity of man.

If the profession of history emerges from the present era with a few uncorrupted practitioners, some of they may have the interest, insight and diligence to address this mystery. I cannot begin to unravel it.

A Natural and Foreseeable Consequence of January 6th Hysteria

An old legal maxim holds that one is presumed to intend the natural and foreseeable consequences of his acts. The presumption isn’t always accurate; some people are short on foresight. Still, it is a good starting point for looking behind the hysteria that is being whipped up over the riot in the Capitol Building a year ago, an incident being compared, with every sign of seriousness, to Pearl Harbor, 9/11 or even the Civil War.

Some consequences that the hysteriacs may hope for impress me as outside the “natural and foreseeable” range. Every day I get half a dozen or so e-mails from Democrat-connected organizations calling for Donald Trump to be banned from running for office again and for Congressmen who allegedly “plotted” the “insurrection” to be expelled from the Legislature. The dean of the Democrats’ election lawyers has suggested lawsuits to that end. Unless the universe takes a most improbable turn, none of that will happen.

Nor is it very likely that the great mass of voters will become convinced that January 6th really was like 9/11 and that they therefore should forget about inflation, crime, foreign policy debacles, inept and authoritarian Covid policies, shortages in stores and the sad fact that President Biden patently lacks physical and mental faculties on the level needed to carry out the duties of the world’s most demanding office.

On the other hand, the President and his Congressional supporters have set in motion a train of events whose end point is plain to see. Their rhetoric about January 6th is inextricably linked to demands that Congress enact legislation “protecting” voting rights by outlawing mandatory photo ID for voters, expanding mail-in balloting, legalizing ballot harvesting and otherwise opening the door wider to intimidation and fraud.

These proposals have virtually no prospect of becoming law. Passage will be possible only if the Senate creates a new exception to the 60-vote threshold for advancing legislation, and all indications are that a majority of the Senate opposes that step. There are also grave questions concerning the Constitutionality of federal intrusion into the manner of conducting Presidential elections. Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution provides that each state’s Presidential electors shall be appointed “in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct”. Congress’s only power is to “determine the Time of chusing the Electors, and the Day on which they shall give their Votes”.

Nevertheless, proposals don’t have to become law in order to have effects. Progressive jeremiads insist that state legislation to reform slovenly election procedures is a continuation of the “insurrection”. According to the New York Times editorial board, “The Capitol riot continues in statehouses across the country, in a bloodless, legalized form that no police officer can arrest and that no prosecutor can try in court.” Vice President Harris has gone a bit further, declaring that, without the Democrat-sponsored “reforms”, the United States will cease to be a “role model” for opponents of autocracy.

It is natural and foreseeable that a very large segment of the Democratic Party rank-and-file will believe the Vice President and the other party spokesmen who intone the same line, just as a large segment of Republican voters believe that the 2020 Presidential election was stolen thanks to insecure voting procedures that were in many instances altered without legislative approval in ways that made them even less reliable.

What reaction, then, is natural and foreseeable if, as a great many observers anticipate, the 2022 elections go very badly for the Democrats? Not so long ago, the nation saw the ferocity of riots – far more violent than the January 6th outburst – to which many Democratic leaders reacted with indifference, if not approval. It is almost as if the party’s leaders are priming their followers for – might one call it an “insurrection”?

Further Reading: John Lott, Jr., “Is ensuring election integrity anti-democratic? Facts say no”. In 2005, a bipartisan commission co-chaired by Jimmy Carter and former Secretary of State James Baker recommended a series of election reforms along the lines that Republican-controlled state legislatures are mulling, including universal photo ID requirements, severe restrictions on mail-in voting and ensuring the accuracy of voter registration rolls. If those recommendations had been adopted, Donald Trump would have found it far harder to raise questions about the accuracy of the election returns.

N.B. Not all liberals buy the equation of an aimless riot with genuine insurrection: Glenn Greenwald, “The Histrionics and Melodrama Around 1/6 Are Laughable, but They Serve Several Key Purposes”; Matt Taibbi, “A Tale of Two Authoritarians”; Jonathan Turley, “‘Preserve the Narrative’: The Public Rejects the ‘Insurrection’ Claim in New Polling”.

The Moral Equivalent of Pearl Harbor?

The riot on January 6, 2021, is to insurrection as sticking pins into a voodoo doll is to murder. The deed and the intended result are connected only by a magical cause-and-effect. Imagine that the rioters had taken over the Capitol and driven Congress away. Imagine that they had stayed for longer than a few hours, like the more numerous protesters who occupied the Wisconsin state capitol for a month in February and March 2011. If you seriously believe that their action would or could have kept Donald Trump in office after January 20th, your grip on reality is on the level of Alex Jones or Joy Reid. The riot was an explosion of irrational anger, much like, though far less deadly and destructive than, the rioting that swept major cities during the summer of 2020.

This week, Democrats in Congress and progressive commentators in the media are calling on us to remember January 6th as a day that will live in infamy. On New Year’s Day, the New York Times published an editorial that deserves comparison with the John Birch Society’s declaration that the United States under President Eisenhower was “60 percent communist controlled”. According to the Times editorial board, the insurrection that began last January 6th is ongoing. “In short, the Republic faces an existential threat from a movement that is openly contemptuous of democracy and has shown that it is willing to use violence to achieve its ends.” Tora! Tora! Tora!

That isn’t to say that the riot lacked consequences. It has become the bludgeon that the self-proclaimed “defenders of our democracy” wield to smash free speech, fair elections and the rule of law. As Roger Kimball suggests, the Times men were “writing with a mirror in front of them”.

The foremost grievance that motivated the January 6th rioters was their conviction that the 2020 election was marred by massive ballot fraud. What gave that grievance wings was the extraordinarily slovenly way in which the election was conducted. Unprecedented mail-in voting and lax attention to the accuracy of voting rolls offered unprecedented opportunities for fraud. We will never know, because comprehensive investigation after the fact is impossible, how many votes were cast by ineligible or fictional persons.

What I think is the right response to our invincible ignorance is acceptance of the results that were certified. Even if they are wrong, there is no prospect of finding evidence strong enough to prove that the real outcome was different, and in the absence of that evidence, reversing Joe Biden’s victory would have dire consequences. In 1960, when fraud in Illinois and Texas was barely hidden, Richard Nixon chose to step aside for an unqualified poseur rather than risk a Constitutional crisis. President Trump should have followed that precedent.

He didn’t. Instead, he pursued efforts to overturn the election through legal means. The theories that he and his lawyers put forward were, in my judgment, hopelessly weak. They went nowhere in either the courts or Congress. Making weak arguments is not, however, “insurrection”. If it were, very few politicians would be out of jail.

The riot didn’t threaten the American political order. The partisan reaction, of the sort that one expects in banana republics, is more ominous.

The Democratic majority in the House of Representatives has set up a committee to “investigate January 6th”, to which it has appointed nine Democrats and two Republicans who have already announced their verdicts. Although Speaker Pelosi likens it to the commission established to investigate the intelligence failures that led to 9/11, its mission isn’t to determine how it was possible for a mob to invade the Capitol and what measures can reasonably be taken to guard against repetition. Instead, its members have stated in advance that all blame lies with Donald Trump and his allies; the committee’s only task is to find evidence to support that conclusion.

Committee vice chairman Rep. Liz Cheney (?-Wyo.) has said of the riot, “I think what Donald Trump did is the most dangerous thing, the most egregious violation of an oath of office of any president in our history.” In the same interview, she asserted that Republicans in the House who voted against the second Trump impeachment were motivated by “their personal security or their family security, their concerns about that affected the way that they felt they could vote”. How can you doubt that Rep. Cheney has an open mind and judicious temperament?

The committee has not only prejudged the causes of the riot. It has also decided that giving or accepting mistaken legal advice is tantamount to insurrection. It has subpoenaed various Trump advisors not for anything they did in the Capitol or said to the rioters but for arguing that valid grounds existed to challenge some states’ certified electors and that the Electoral Count Act gives the Vice President the authority to rule on those challenges. Those opinions aren’t shared by many lawyers, but treating their espousal as a form of treason harks back to the Palmer Raids and Joe McCarthy.

Certain prominent Democrats have taken the next step, to open advocacy of deploying January 6th as a weapon to suppress political opposition. Marc Elias, the consigliere of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, recently tweeted a “prediction” that “we will have a serious discussion about whether individual Republican House Members are disqualified by Section 3 of the 14th Amendment from serving in Congress. We may even see litigation.”

Mr. Elias, the Democratic Party’s most active election lawyer, is in a position to make his prediction come true. In essence, he wants judges to expel from Congress members who engaged in conduct that falls within an extraordinarily strained definition of “insurrection”. The Constitutional provision that he cites was aimed at men who had disavowed allegiance to the United States and participated in a four year rebellion. Even with that provocation, the prohibition was laxly enforced. To apply it to Congressmen whose “treason” consists of disputing election results would combine tyranny with farce.

January 6, 2021, may live in infamy. If so, the reason will be not the violence of one afternoon but the ensuing quest to convert it into America’s counterpart to the Reichstag Fire.

Further Reading: Ann Althouse on “online sleuths who style themselves as ‘Sedition Hunters’”. Let me add that just as slovenly procedures undermine confidence in elections, so does official cooperation with “sedition hunters” undermine faith in the rule of law.

LeakyCon Channels Umbrage

As you may have heard, biology deniers are angry with J. K. Rowling, because she knows what X is and what Y is and what difference it makes. One may add to their ranks LeakyCon, one of the larger Potter-themed conventions, which is starting up again after a three-year panicdemic interruption. Today its organizers published a statement declaring that “the values this community holds close are staunchly opposed to the fear and hatred that J.K. Rowling has been spreading about members of the trans and non-binary communities in recent years”. For good measure, it added an “Event Mission” statement making it clear that, in the name of diversity and inclusion, it will purge all wrongthink from its ranks.

The Dementors smile.

Ivy League Panicdemic

A Yale undergraduate organization that, many years ago, I played a part in founding holds an annual banquet. Last year, it had to be canceled, because Yale was barely functioning and students’ lives were subject to severe restrictions. This year, preparations were under weigh for the event. This evening, however, I received an e-mail from the chairman announcing that it will have to be postponed.

[G]iven the the relative lack of restrictions last semester, I didn't foresee any changes in University policy preventing us from following through with the event.

Unfortunately, this afternoon, the University announced a new slate of COVID-19 restrictions effective until, at the earliest, February 7th. Among these restrictions are a prohibition on students visiting any off-campus establishment, which would prevent currently enrolled [students] from attending the Banquet. Between this, and the possibility of further restrictions being imposed, we've determined that we cannot feasibly hold the Banquet at this time.

My alma mater seems determined to seize whatever prize is offered for Overbearing Stupidity. The notion that men and women in their late teens and early twenties must be subjected to a version of in loco parentis that would have been considered excessive in a 19th Century convent can be entertained only by administrators who either lust after the exercise of arbitrary power or have been driven mad by an irrational fear of what is, for persons of undergraduate age, a disease that inflicts, at worst, the same symptoms as a moderately severe cold.

The next step, I foresee, will be the updating of Yale’s motto from Lux et Veritas to Nox et Ignorantia.

If I were still a student, I would obtain a bull horn, take a position in the vicinity of President Salovey’s manse, and recite in a stentorian voice a parable for our times, “How Hamilcar Wilts Prepared For Everything And Got It”.

Boola, boola.

A Better Idea for New Years

Every twelve months, for reasons once related to astronomical phenomena and agricultural needs but now to calendar sales, charitable fund raising and orderly accounting, we declare that a “new year” has begun, recap the preceding twelvemonth and make predictions about the one aborning, recalling at the same time that last year’s predictions mostly missed the mark by somewhere between a country and a continental mile.

All this strikes me as a great waste of time, energy and resources, the very opposite of the frugal practice of recycling advocated by right thinking folk from 17th Century New England Puritans through 21st Century Blue America Progressives. Isn’t it time to extend the wise insight that impels us to sort our weekly trash into the more consequential area of time keeping? Rather than build a New Year from scratch and later bemoan its shoddy construction, let us pick an old one and recycle it.

My prime candidate is 1815, a year that from quiet beginnings – Europe and America resting after the tumult of war, crowns resettling on heads that had been imperiled for the past quarter century, the Corsican Ogre locked away on the island of Elba – erupted into high drama – the Ogre’s return and “a damned nice thing, the nearest run thing you ever saw” – and ended by ushering in a century of general peace and prosperity that, sadly, came to an end in 1914 and has revived only partially and shakily since then. No good thing lasts forever. We wear out our most useful possessions, such as competent, unobtrusive government, and are left with knick-knacks like impressionist paintings, grandiose musical compositions and “true to life” literature.

Other years are appealing, too. The one during my lifetime that has a trajectory most similar to 1815 is 1980, which, after stagflation at home and humiliation abroad, eventuated in the improbable elevation to the Presidency of an actor and political autodidact who turned out to have a better grasp of how to preside over a country than did all the experts.

And then there was 1989, when the seemingly invincible Union of Soviet Socialist Republics collapsed like a burst balloon into Russia, a Russia that has since regressed to its historical mean of autocracy, poverty and paranoia. (We still await its Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Solzhenitsyn and Tchaikovsky. We already have its Nicholas I.)

I have a soft spot also for 1920, when Americans chose “normalcy” over permanent wartime economic controls, and even 2016, which wasn’t all that terrific in many ways but did hustle the Wicked Witch of Little Rock into long overdue retirement from public life.

Many years to choose from. Why must we endure a 2022?

Nonetheless, Happy New Year!