Stromata Blog

Dobbs: The Left’s Share of the Credit

Donald Trump has demanded credit for the Supreme Court’s overthrow of the infanticidal regime of Roe v. Wade, and various dexterosphere mememasters have had fun at the expense of conservative commentators who praise Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization without mentioning the man who appointed three of the five Justices who rendered it.

Feeling that it is bad form to lambaste someone for doing what you want, I’m willing to commend Mr. Trump, but it is only fair to offer a modicum of thanks to the people who impelled the former President’s appointments, namely, the Hysteriac Left.

At a moment of crisis during the 1848 revolution in France, a leading politician is said to have exclaimed, “There go the people. I must follow them, for I am their leader.” Donald Trump’s service to the pro-life movement was in much the same spirit:

Donald Trump was, until he decided he wanted the Republican presidential nomination, an across-the-board social progressive: not only pro-abortion but “very pro-choice” in his own words, a supporter of gay marriage, a supporter of left-wing gun-control proposals, etc. . . . When Trump was asked what kind of justice he’d nominate for the Supreme Court, he suggested his sister – who is not exactly Clarence Thomas.

When friends asked me in 2016 why I wasn’t going to vote for The Donald (or, needless to say, for his crooked opponent), I answered that Trump had no credibility as a conservative and prided himself on having mastered “the art of the deal”. Once in office, he would inevitably follow the easy and attractive course of negotiating with Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi to produce about the same results as the election of Hillary Clinton would have yielded. The deals would, of course, include “compromise” judicial nominees who wouldn’t disturb the “living Constitution” status quo.

And why didn’t that happen? Why did a man who had spent his business career treating promises like pie crusts suddenly stop breaking them? Could it have had something to do with the fact that leftists rioted and denounced him as a contemporary Adolf Hitler even before he took the oath of office? The most artistic deal maker has trouble working with materials like that.

So the newly installed President turned to the “establishment Republicans” whom he had mocked mercilessly during the primaries. “Conservatism, Inc.” was willing to overlook his faults in return for inter alia follow-through on judicial nominations. The upshot was the addition of Justices Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Comey to the Court and the demise of Roe. None of which would have happened if the Left had been willing and able to subordinate its hatreds to its interests. Let me extend a hearty “thank you”.

“The End, Perhaps, of the Beginning”

After hearing news of the victory at El Alamein, Winston Churchill responded, “Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.” That is my sense of the significance of the Supreme Court’s overruling of Roe v. Wade, the 20th Century’s counterpart to Dred Scott v. Sandford. Just as Justice Taney opined that black men had no rights that a white man was bound to respect, Justice Blackmun dismissed the humanity of very young human beings, whether they were black or white or any other hue.

The Court has now corrected the notion that the Constitution stands for that proposition, but it refrained from trying to do more than is possible for a court. It did not declare that the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments protect the lives of the unborn. That would have been as impracticable as it would have been for Justices McLean and Curtis, the dissenters in Dred Scott, had they been the majority, to hold that the Constitution forbade slavery.

The killing of the unborn is, sad to say, commonplace in modern society, as common and unthinkingly accepted as infanticide was among the ancient Greeks and Romans. Looking at it as is it and seeing what it involves requires new and better moral eyes, a vision that perceives what many people would prefer to ignore. Only when we recognize human beings as our brothers and sisters, without regard to their age, will abortion become unthinkable.

A Wokish Comedy

Writing in The Spectator, Grayson Quay describes a series of events that is too improbable for the most wildly satiric fiction. The setting is the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (to which, in the interests of full disclosure, I acknowledge that many of my best relatives adhere; one is a member of the ELCA clergy). As summarized by a non-ELCA Lutheran pastor –

Neurodivergent nonbinary trans pastor is made bishop. This individual then disciplines abusive latinxpastor. But this is unknowingly done on a Hispanic holiday and is thus racist. Woman archbishop rebukes bishop but isn’t harsh enough so is then also racist.

The sequence of events was thus:

1. A Lutheran bishop who claims to be neither male nor female, but who used to have male anatomy and now goes by a traditionally feminine name, dismissed a pastor whom she/he/it had determined was verbally abusive.
2. The fired pastor is a “cisgender male” (meaning that he was born male, doesn’t pretend to be of any other sex and isn’t homosexual). He is also of Afro-Caribbean descent. He objected to being sacked.
3. “Who has the higher intersectionality score?” was the key question. The answer hung in the balance, until the pastor “pulled an Uno Reverse. It turns out that Rohrer [the bishop] had announced his firing on the day of the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe.” (As Mr. Quay points out, “Lutherans don’t celebrate the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe. That’s a Catholic thing. The Marian apparitions the feast commemorates happened eleven years after the pope excommunicated Martin Luther.”)
4. The Asociación de Ministerios Latinos de la ELCA promptly came to the pastor’s defense, declaring that dismissing him on the feast day of the patron saint of Mexico was racist.
5. The bishop, seeing that she had come out behind in the intersectional game, abjectly apologized. “Rohrer said they was very sorry as well as ‘grateful to all who have educated me about the needs of the Latino/x/é [author’s [Quay’s] note: WHAT?!] community and remain committed to doing the work needed to repair relationships.’”
6. Then came the denouement, as related by Mr. Quay:

In response to the Asociación’s complaints, Presiding Bishop Elizabeth Eaton, the first woman to lead the ELCA, said Rohrer’s actions were “unwise” but were not deserving of official church discipline. Well, that was racist too. The Asociación called Eaton’s failure to have the denomination’s first trans non-binary bishop hanged, drawn, and quartered a “culturally insensitive dereliction of duty.” Eaton, a white, straight, cis-gender woman, was intersectionally outgunned. She quickly reversed course and asked Rohrer to resign, which they did.

Keeping to the order of precedence at the Court of Versailles was never so challenging.

So Much for John Adams

Following the now almost forgotten event that was known as “9/11”, the U.S. government took action against a variety of individuals and groups who seemed highly sympathetic to the idea of overthrowing the current Constitutional order and replacing it with something else. One might almost label them “insurrectionists”. They were unpopular among large segments of the American public but had the good fortune to receive first rate legal counsel. Major law firms defended accused Islamofascists pro bono and responded to criticism by pointing to the example of John Adams, who appeared in court in behalf of the British soldiers charged with carrying out the “Boston Massacre” and secured acquittals of most of them. Adams was at that time engaged in polemics against the British Crown, yet he believed that the Crown’s agents were entitled to the services of lawyers.

Times have changed. It’s now an article of faith among the “wokened” segment of the legal profession that representing certain defendants is a blot on a lawyer’s character, if not grounds for disbarment. Today we saw a striking instance of that view. In the morning, the Supreme Court held “that the Second and Fourteenth Amendments protect an individual’s right to carry a handgun for self-defense outside the home”. On that basis, it struck down New York’s requirement that citizens must demonstrate “a special need for self-defense” in order to obtain licenses to carry firearms anywhere but in their own residences.

Arguing the case for the plaintiff gun owners was Paul Clement, one of the most eminent of Supreme Court advocates. When the Court announced its decision, he was a partner in Kirkland & Ellis LLP, one of the world’s largest law firms. The firm’s reaction to his victory in this high profile case wasn’t to congratulate him. Instead, it announced that it will “no longer represent clients with respect to matters involving the interpretation of the Second Amendment” and will withdraw from pending cases, leaving its clients to find new lawyers.

“We [Mr. Clement and another partner, Erin Murphy] were given a stark choice: either withdraw from ongoing representations or withdraw from the firm,” Clement said in a statement. "Anyone who knows us and our views regarding professional responsibility and client loyalty knows there was only one course open to us: We could not abandon ongoing representations just because a client's position is unpopular in some circles.”

The two ousted lawyers announced that they will form a new law firm and will take over the representations that Kirkland & Ellis, evidently without a thought for the interests of the clients, is abandoning. How its action can be reconciled with the rules of legal ethics is a mystery to me, but we can be sure that the firm won’t have to endure the slightest rebuke from the legal Brahmins who rushed twenty years ago to defend inmates at Guantanamo.

A Pandemic of Sanity

I’m now abroad (and anyone who even thinks of the obvious punch line risks expulsion from the Internet or at least from the Washington Post) and therefore may be less timely in posting until I return. But I did want to note a hopeful sign of the waning of the panicdemic.

Italy hasn’t yet revoked its mask mandate for airline passengers arriving in or departing from the country despite a European Union determination that it no longer serves any purpose (assuming arguendo that it ever did). Given that the raison d’être of the Draghi government is keeping Italy in line with EU dictates, it’s ironic that it stands up to Brussels on a rare occasion when Brussels is right.

My airline states that, while it no longer demands masks on domestic flights, it complies with the laws of foreign countries. Annoyed but not annoyed enough to cancel the trip, I took care to add a mask to my carry-on.

And what happened? The airline personnel at the departure gate said nary a word about masks. Hardly any passengers wore them, nor did most of the flight crew. At the airport in Rome, masks were no more common.

This bit of Roman silliness is scheduled to expire officially on June 15th. It appears to have wasted away already.

The Roots of Woke Success

Rich Lowry observes the easily overlooked obvious. After noting recent pushback against “Critical Race Theory”, he continues:

And we shouldn’t exaggerate what has been accomplished here. The fact that we are now in a position of fighting a battle over whether or not racialism will be taught in the public schools isn’t a sign of tremendous strength. In fact, it’s more a sign of how much the culture has continued to slip away from us.

An analogy might be if ten years from now conservatives organized to defeat an initiative to mandate that every public-school student in America be referred to by the pronoun “ze.”

One reaction might be, “Wow! We’re finally winning! Our forebears never thought to fight the battle against mandatory gender-neutral pronouns.” A more appropriate reaction from the perspective of 2022 would be, “Dear God. How is it possible that things got so bad that the conservatives of the future considered that a resounding victory?”

Or, as Swedish writer Malcom Kyeyune says in a City Journal essay –

Ten years ago, critical race theory was something you’d encounter only online or in academic settings, Democratic politicians were still talking about civil unions for homosexual couples, and the media and federal government were busy pointing out how far America had come in repairing the broken race relations of the past. Today, little remains of that old order.

To what does the Woke Religion owe its astonishing success? Writing in The Spectator, Daniel McCarthy posits that “Woke martyrs” have been the key.

The left wins the culture war through the blood of sacrifice. The racial turmoil that has plagued our country for the past decade has its origins in a series of well-publicized martyrdoms, from Trayvon Martin to George Floyd. Each victim gives urgency and power to street protests, demands for policy change – from defunding the police to de facto decriminalization of shoplifting, fare evasion and more serious offenses – and an overall narrative of white evil and black oppression: systemic racism.

Martyrdom drives the sexual revolution as well, at least beyond its initial hedonistic impulse. With the AIDS crisis, homosexuals became victims who gave their lives for love, a testimony too powerful for popular prejudice or biblical morality to gainsay. Was the murder of Matthew Shepard a hate crime or a result of drug-related robbery? Whatever the facts, the significance of his death lay in the way the media and gay-rights advocates presented it.

The trans cause has its martyrdom stories and statistics as well, some involving murder, others suicide – for which blame is laid not upon mental illness but on transphobic society.

An interesting idea, but Mr. McCarthy doesn’t seem to recognize how different these “martyrs” are from the early Christians. He himself explains why Christian martyrdom was so effective:

The Roman Empire lost its culture war against Christianity because the Christians welcomed martyrdom. Offered the chance to escape with their lives for only the slightest concession to the emperor’s divinity – a pinch of incense at his altar – Christians instead asked for death. This behavior was so extreme, so unreasonable, how could anyone not talk about it? And the more people talked, the more they heard Christ’s name, learned of his sacrifice, and converted – leaving the Romans to make more martyrs and so more Christians.

Any parallel between George Floyd and St. Ignatius of Antioch strikes me as strained past credibility. George Floyd was a drug addict who, if he died for anything, died for his right to pass counterfeit bills and consume life-threatening doses of fentanyl. It’s highly doubtful that he held any opinions about CRT, intersectionality or LGBTQ+ rights. If he did, they may well have been those that are prevalent among African-Americans, whose actual views are whistled away by the Woke.

St. Ignatius was sentenced to death, by the Emperor Trajan personally, for refusing to sacrifice to pagan deities. He thereby affirmed that worship is due only to the One God, Who sent His Son to redeem us from our sins.

One these things is not like the other. What we were instructed to learn from George Floyd’s death was that American law enforcement is irredeemably racist and brutal. What impressed Romans about Ignatius’s martyrdom was his steadfast refusal to compromise his faith, which led some to think that there might be more to it than a foolish delusion. George Floyd was a pretext for a Woke assault on American society; St. Ignatius was a beacon of righteousness.

Malcom Kyeyune offers a more plausible explanation of Woke progress: The Woke Religion serves the interests of the “managerial class”, those men who neither furnish the capital for enterprises nor produce the goods and services that those enterprises sell but, rather, act as intermediaries, keeping the gears turning (in a metaphorical sense).

That the managers would seek to become masters rather than servants was foreseen over 80 years ago by James Burnham. By adopting and enforcing the Woke Religion, they can move effectively toward that goal. Wokeness, being a species of “distributed totalitarianism”, demands constant oversight and control. Its doctrines are ever changing, because it denies that any objective principles exist. What is demanded today (“sports equity” for women) may be superseded tomorrow by its contrary (opening women’s athletic events to male competitors). No one can internalize this ever-changing catechism. Guardians are needed to recognize the latest Commandments and police obedience to them. That is a perfect role for the managerial class, empowering it to dictate to both capitalists and workers.

Mr. Kyeyune suggests that his native Sweden has avoided the worst of this development by creating harmless featherbedding jobs for the kind of people who become managers, thus diverting them from positions where they could do real harm. He doesn’t think that would work in the United States. I doubt that it really works in Sweden. The managerial class there hasn’t moved on to transgenderism, because it’s still fixated on eradicating Islamophobia. Give it time.

Anyway, I’m not convinced that the Kyeyune hypothesis is correct. Wokeness is a religion whose spread seems inexplicable, less like a belief system than the hysterical episodes in the Middle Ages that arose from eating tainted bread. Maybe we face less an ideological than a medical phenomenon.

Demasking the Gray Lady

Yesterday the New York Times posted a non-paywalled column admitting that “mask mandates have not done much to reduce Covid caseloads over the past two years” and conceding, albeit reluctantly, that there are far more effective ways to reduce the residual risks posed by the disease.

The writer finds it paradoxical that “masks work and mask mandates do not work”. By “masks work”, he means –

Masks reduce the spread of the Covid virus by preventing virus particles from traveling from one person’s nose or mouth into the air and infecting another person. Laboratory studies have repeatedly demonstrated the effect.

In fact, as others have pointed out, real-world studies, including many that were available when Covid broke out, have demonstrated that the sort of masks that people actually wear are marginally effective at best.

Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) on mask use, generally more reliable than observational studies, though not infallible, typically show that cloth and surgical masks offer little protection. A few RCTs suggest that perfect adherence to an exacting mask protocol may guard against influenza, but meta-analyses find little on the whole to suggest that masks offer meaningful protection. WHO guidelines from 2019 on influenza say that despite “mechanistic plausibility for the potential effectiveness” of masks, studies showed a benefit too small to be established with any certainty. Another literature review by researchers from the University of Hong Kong agrees. Its best estimate for the protective effect of surgical masks against influenza, based on ten RCTs published through 2018, was just 22 percent, and it could not rule out zero effect.

For a more comprehensive summary of the evidence, see Jeffrey H. Anderson, “Do Masks Work?: A Review of the Evidence”.

In the early days of the epidemic, medical authorities like Anthony Fauxi discouraged the public from buying and wearing protective masks. Dr. Fauxi now insists that he was lying. It seems to me more plausible that he was “following the science” back then, only to dismiss it later, when mask wearing became an emblem of good citizenship. Mask mandates weren’t based on any scientific consensus but on the old, familiar syllogism:

Something must be done!
This is something.
Therefore. . . .

Fighting an epidemic with masks is like fighting flood waters with a levee that has gaps. The masking gaps are glaringly obvious:

Airplane passengers remove their masks to have a drink. Restaurant patrons go maskless as soon as they walk in the door. Schoolchildren let their masks slide down their faces. So do adults: Research by the University of Minnesota suggests that between 25 percent and 30 percent of Americans consistently wear their masks below their nose.

And the outcome is just what one would predict – and that many troglodytes did predict:

In U.S. cities where mask use has been more common, Covid has spread at a similar rate as in mask-resistant cities. Mask mandates in schools also seem to have done little to reduce the spread. Hong Kong, despite almost universal mask-wearing, recently endured one of the world’s worst Covid outbreaks.

Advocates of mandates sometimes argue that they do have a big effect even if it is not evident in population-wide data, because of how many other factors are at play. But this argument seems unpersuasive.

After all, the effect of vaccines on severe illness is blazingly obvious in the geographic data: Places with higher vaccination rates have suffered many fewer Covid deaths. The patterns are clear even though the world is a messy place, with many factors other than vaccines influencing Covid death rates.

Yet when you look at the data on mask-wearing – both before vaccines were available and after, as well as both in the U.S. and abroad – you struggle to see any patterns.

And so the writer gives in.

If the mandate has even a modest benefit, it can be worth it.

But this approach is not sustainable for years on end. Masks hinder communication, fog glasses and can be uncomfortable. There is a reason that children and airline passengers have broken out in applause when told they can take off their masks.

In the current stage of the pandemic, there are less divisive measures that are more effective than mask mandates. Booster shots are widely available. A drug that can further protect the immunocompromised, known as Evusheld, is increasingly available. So are post-infection treatments, like Paxlovid, that make Covid less severe.

Will any of this commentary persuade hard core, progressive Times readers? Not immediately, I’m sure, but perhaps, as evidence and experience peck away at their preconceptions, Mad Mask Mountain will be worn down.

Further reading: Not long after I posted this entry, I saw the Foundation for Economic Education’s reaction to the same Times column: “The New York Times Explains Why Mask Mandates Don’t Work”.

Also worth your notice is a paper published in The Lancet under the formidable title, “Revisiting Pediatric COVID-19 Cases in Counties With and Without School Mask Requirements – United States, July 1-October 20 2021” (caveat: not yet peer-reviewed). It revisits and enlarges a study of school mask mandates that the Centers for Disease Control has cited in support of swaddling schoolchildren. The new study reaches the opposite conclusion. Those who don’t want to read the whole thing will find a summary here.