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Contents J U LY 8 , 2 0 1 9 | VOLUME LXXI, NO. 12

The Socialist Party Reborn by Kevin D. Williamson

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JULY 8 ISSUE; PRINTED JUNE 20

Letters
EDITOR IN CHIEF
Richard Lowry
‘No’ to Socialized Medicine, Cont’d
A recent article by Avik Roy (“Socialized Medicine Is Bad for Your Health,”
Senior Editors

June 3) gives me pause in my waning support for repeal-and-replace and my grad-

Richard Brookhiser / Jonah Goldberg / Jay Nordlinger
Ramesh Ponnuru / David Pryce-Jones

ual conversion to support for single-payer health care. But I would like to draw
Managing Editor Jason Lee Steorts
Literary Editor Katherine Howell

his attention to two points not addressed in his article that seem to me to be fun-
Vice President, Editorial Operations Christopher McEvoy

damental to any health-care solution:

Roving Correspondent Kevin D. Williamson
Washington Correspondent John McCormack

First, Roy makes no mention of mandating health coverage for all Americans.
National Correspondent John J. Miller
Senior Political Correspondent Jim Geraghty

That so many people were uninsured is what led us to Medicaid and Obamacare.
Art Director Luba Kolomytseva

It seems this issue must be addressed: We need to mandate that all people in the
Deputy Managing Editors
Nicholas Frankovich / Fred Schwarz / Robert VerBruggen

U.S. purchase health insurance. It must be legal, constitutional, and enforce-

Production Editor Katie Hosmer
Assistant to the Editor Mary Spencer

able. This will not only vanquish the liberal arguments that the government
must step in and provide coverage (at taxpayer expense), but it will also drive
Contributing Editors
Shannen Coffin / Matthew Continetti / Ross Douthat

insurance rates down, as actuarial models will improve substantially with 100
Daniel Foster / Roman Genn / Arthur L. Herman

percent participation.
Mark R. Levin / Yuval Levin / Rob Long
Jim Manzi / Andrew C. McCarthy

Second, Roy does not address the fact that, while many plans provided by large
Andrew Stuttaford / Reihan Salam

employers do indeed limit choice, they are often self-insurance—companies pay

N AT I O N A L R E V I E W O N L I N E

employee claims out of their own pockets and hire an insurance company to han-
Editor Charles C. W. Cooke
Managing Editor Mark Antonio Wright (on leave)

dle all administrative matters. It is unclear to me how giving me choice will result
Senior Writers

in lower cost for the same benefit; it seems it might get more expensive.
Michael Brendan Dougherty / David French
Staff Writer Alexandra DeSanctis
Critic-at-Large Kyle Smith

David Beers
National-Affairs Columnist John Fund
Reporter Katherine Timpf

Via email
Associate Editors Molly Powell / Nick Tell / Sarah Schutte
Senior Content Manager Grant DeArmitt
Content Manager Daniel Rudolf
Content Manager Katie Yoder
Web Producer Scott McKim

AVIK ROY RESPONDS: We don’t need to force everyone to buy health insurance to
News Writers
Jack Crowe / Mairead McArdle

have a system in which every American can afford coverage. Indeed, doing so
would be counterproductive, as it would allow policymakers to further drive up
E D I T O R S - AT- L A RG E

costs, knowing that they could pass those costs on to consumers. In a market-based
Kathryn Jean Lopez / John O’Sullivan

system, insurers have an incentive to keep costs low, because they know you’ll
B U C K L E Y F E L L OW S I N P O L I T I C A L J O U R N A L I S M
Madeleine Kearns / Theodore Kupfer / John Hirschauer

choose to go without coverage if their products don’t provide enough value.

In another article, “To Stop Socialized Medicine, Expand Individual Choice”
Contributors

(NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE, May 27), I explain that the employer-based system
Hadley Arkes / James Bowman / Eliot A. Cohen
Dinesh D’Souza / Chester E. Finn Jr. / Neal B. Freeman

“is far removed from an actual market for health insurance, because few workers
James Gardner / David Gelernter / George Gilder

have the opportunity to choose their own coverage with their own money.”
Charles R. Kesler / David Klinghoffer
Alan Reynolds / Tracy Lee Simmons

Giving workers control over those dollars will in fact lower costs, because
Terry Teachout / Vin Weber

employers have shown little interest in bargaining with hospitals to achieve

Vice President Jack Fowler

lower prices. Indeed, insurers often prohibit employers from seeing the rates
Chief Financial Officer James X. Kilbridge
Accounting Manager Galina Veygman

insurers negotiate with hospitals and doctors. On the other hand, if insurers have
Accountant Lyudmila Bolotinskaya

to aggressively compete for individual consumers’ business by offering lower

Director, Product & Audience Development Jarreau Weber
Audience Growth Marketing Manager Emily Washler

premiums, they will have to bargain aggressively with hospitals to get the best
Audience Development Manager Philip H. DeVoe
Manager, Office & Development Russell Jenkins

possible deal. That will make insurance less expensive.

But insurance reform isn’t the only thing needed to make health care less
Director, Sales Jim Fowler
Senior Account Executive Kevin Longstreet

expensive. We also have to do much more to tackle the rising problem of crony
capitalism in the hospital and drug industries, by reforming federal and state
PUBLISHER CHAIRMAN
E. Garrett Bewkes IV Dale R. Brott

laws that restrict competition and entrench monopolies. I encourage those inter-
FOUNDER

ested in these topics to read my paper “Affordable Health Care for Every
William F. Buckley Jr.

N AT I O N A L R E V I E W I N C . B OA R D
Generation” at FREOPP.org (the website of the Foundation for Research on
Equal Opportunity).
Dale R. Brott
John Hillen
James X. Kilbridge
Allen J. Sidor
Rob Thomas

Letters may be submitted by email to letters@nationalreview.com.

2 | w w w. n a t i o n a l r e v i e w. c o m J U LY 8 , 2 0 1 9
base_new_milliken-mar 22.qxd 6/18/2019 6:37 PM Page 1

THE WAR ON
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 The Week Text

n By the time he’s done, Joe Biden will have disowned Amtrak.

n Iran blew up a couple of tankers in the Strait of Hormuz, one

of the most important commercial thoroughfares in the world.
There’s been skepticism on the left and in Europe over the intel-
ligence, but there’s little doubt—the Iranians have threatened to
carry out such attacks, and a video captured one of their boats
removing an unexploded mine, which would be crucial evidence,
from the hull of one of the ships. The operative question isn’t
“Whodunit?” but “What to do?” Such threats in the Strait should
be intolerable to us, given its strategic importance. If we don’t hit
Iran for this attack, we should make it clear that we will retaliate
if there is another one. We don’t want to get embroiled in a major
war with Iran, but Tehran has an incentive to avoid an out-of-
control escalation itself, since it has much more to lose. Iran
assumes that it can increase its leverage in the ongoing contention
over its nuclear program by carrying out deniable attacks with
impunity. We should make it clear that it’s wrong about that.

n In an interview with George Stephanopoulos, President Trump

said he’d accept information from a foreign government in the
2020 campaign. Naturally, all hell broke loose. Trump’s answer
was muddled—at one point, he said he’d both accept the informa-
tion and call the FBI, and he cited as a hypothetical Norway com-
ing forward, whereas Stephanopoulos cited Russia or China. The
right answer obviously is that you call the FBI if approached by a
foreign adversary because, even if you aren’t inclined to do so on
principle, you don’t know what the ulterior motive is or how you
might get played. We suspect Trump simply didn’t want to admit
by implication what is obviously true: that Don Jr. was wrong to
accept the infamous Trump Tower meeting. He certainly wasn’t
setting out a plausible standard operating procedure. After years
of investigation of that 2016 meeting, there’s no way anyone from
the reelection campaign is going to want to take the political and
legal risk of sitting down with shady representatives of a foreign
government promising oppo. Too bad that wasn’t the first instinct
of his 2016 team.
n President Trump bludgeoned Mexico into promising more
action to help with the migrant crisis. Trump’s threat of steadily
escalating tariffs against Mexico had huge downside risks. If
implemented, the tariffs would have been disruptive at a time
when U.S. growth is perhaps slowing, been a gut punch to an
allied country whose stability is important to us, and probably
precipitated a congressional revolt against the policy. In-
stead, Mexico is devoting 6,000 troops to attempting to better
police its own border with Guatemala, and, more important, has
approved an extension of the so-called remain-in-Mexico policy.
Under this arrangement, we can return asylum seekers to Mexico
while their claims—almost always ultimately rejected—are adju-
dicated. This avoids one of the biggest problems of our current
ROMAN GENN
removed, even if their claims are denied. Previously, Mexico lim-
ited the number of asylum seekers it accepted back to a trickle.
Now it is saying it will take them with no restrictions, potentially
a big advance. Given the blunderbuss weapon Trump was wield-
ing, the Mexico deal is welcome, and better than could reasonably
have been expected.
n The habit of abuse of presidential authority is now so
ingrained that it is considered hardly noteworthy when a major
presidential candidate promises unconstitutional executive
action as part of her campaign. Senator Kamala Harris (D.,
Calif.) has announced a new immigration plan that presumes
congressional deadlock and extends executive action beyond
even what Barack Obama did. The Harris plan would expand
his quasi-amnesties and take other executive actions that would
reinterpret federal statutes to provide some of the beneficiaries
with a path to permanent legal residence. It’s astonishingly
ambitious—especially considering that the Supreme Court
rejected one of Obama’s actions and has grown more originalist
since. But Harris’s plan represents the next step in the progress
toward an imperial presidency. Obama at least claimed that
Congress’s failure to enact his agenda “forced” him to act uni-
laterally. That was also Donald Trump’s argument for his emer-
gency declaration. Harris isn’t waiting for Congress to
disappoint her. She’s acting as if it didn’t exist.
n What Senator Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.) means when he calls

policy, which allows asylum seekers into the country, never to be himself a “democratic socialist” has been the subject of some
4 | w w w. n a t i o n a l r e v i e w. c o m J U LY 8 , 2 0 1 9
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week - FINAL_QXP-1127940387.qxp 6/19/2019 2:11 PM Page 6
THE WEEK
debate. Does he merely mean that he wants the U.S. to be more
like Scandinavia, albeit with higher corporate-tax rates? Or does
his past praise for the Soviet Union, Cuba, and Venezuela give
us a better picture of his goals? Sanders gave a big speech on the
subject. He said that he is a democratic socialist in the tradition
of FDR and Harry Truman: two people who never called them-
selves “socialists,” one of whom began our side of the Cold War.
Their enemies called them “socialists” too, Sanders said. But
wait: If he’s a proud socialist and he’s just like them, weren’t
those enemies right to use that label? If on the other hand those
mid-century Democrats were victims of hyperbole, then isn’t
Sanders, by claiming them for his own socialist project, just
repeating the insult? And while hugging the New Deal, Sanders
couldn’t bring himself to say a discouraging word about Stalin
or Castro or Maduro. His policy is to have no enemies on the
left, and no clarity either.
n Senator Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) has put out what she
calls “a plan for economic patriotism.” There are two germs
of good ideas in it. Apprenticeships probably should be a big-
ger part of American career development, although what that
has to do with patriotism is anyone’s guess. Consolidating
the federal government’s many job-training programs may
also be worthwhile, although it would be better to scrap the
ones that don’t work first. The other ideas are counterproduc-
tive. Adding regulations to corporate research in an attempt
to ensure that more of it goes toward producing high-paying
jobs for Americans seems likely to backfire. Making gov-
ernments buy American-made products would make a dif-
ference only to the extent that
American taxpayers accept even
lower value for the dollar than
they already get. Managing the
dollar to promote exports
would in practice mean higher
inflation in the long run in return
for a short-term boost for
manufacturers. A more
regulated, centralized,
highly taxed country,
and probably a poorer
one too, should not
be any patriot’s goal.
n The Office of Special Counsel, run by an appointee of
President Trump, has urged the firing of Kellyanne Conway for
MICHAEL BROCHSTEIN/SOPA IMAGES/LIGHTROCKET VIA GETTY IMAGES
repeated violations of the Hatch Act. That’s the law that prohibits
federal employees from engaging in partisan politics on the tax-
payer’s dime. The trouble is that the line between normal govern-
ment activity and partisan politics is fuzzy, especially at the
highest levels of government. When Kathleen Sebelius was sec-
retary of health and human services, she got dinged for violating
the act by advocating President Obama’s reelection at a meeting
of a liberal organization. Perhaps the guardrail against overt par-
tisanship is valuable; but presumably that meeting would have
been a partisan one even if Sebelius had not explicitly mentioned
the election. Trump says he will not fire Conway. Ultimately the
6 | w w w. n a t i o n a l r e v i e w. c o m
question of whether government officials are acting in unaccept-
ably partisan ways is one that voters, not lawyers, must decide.
n For decades, Joe Biden supported the Hyde amendment,
which bars federal Medicaid funds from paying for abortions
except in the cases of rape, incest, and threats to a mother’s life.
In May, he was asked where he stood on the issue and said he
opposed the amendment. A few weeks later, his campaign said
he had misheard the question and still supported it. Coming
under fire—everyone else in the Democratic presidential race
opposes Hyde—Biden then either reversed himself or reversed
himself again. He too now wants taxpayer-funded abortion.
Most Americans, according to every poll that hasn’t been care-
fully worded by advocates of tax funding, are on the other side.
But none of the Democratic candidates are hearing them well at
the moment.
n New York senator Kirsten Gillibrand has suggested that
opposition to abortion is akin to racism. Gillibrand, who lingers
near the bottom of the pack of Democrats jockeying for the 2020
presidential nomination, has said she’ll require any potential
judicial nominee of hers to back Roe v. Wade, declaring that
nominating a judge who did not would be like appointing “a
judge who’s racist or anti-Semitic or homophobic.” There you
have it, ladies and gentlemen: Belief in the actual Constitution
is now a hate crime.
n Pro-life Democrats are an endangered species in Congress,
and pro-abortion groups are hard at work to bring about their
extinction. Illinois congressman Dan Lipinski, one of only three
pro-life Democrats left in the House, survived a 2018 primary
challenge from left-wing activist Marie Newman by only two
percentage points. Newman is running again to finish off
Lipinski in 2020. If Democrats purge Lipinski, they won’t have
to worry about losing the heavily Democratic district in the
general election, but they will have to worry about the broader
message they are sending to the country: that pro-lifers and even
those with moderate views on abortion will not be tolerated
within their party. Lipinski is a liberal on many issues, from
guns to taxes to health care, but he deserves the full support of
all pro-life Americans for standing athwart the culture of death
within his own party.
n In Maine, Democratic governor Janet Mills has signed a bill
allowing non-doctors—including nurse practitioners, physician
assistants, and midwives—to perform abortions. Activist groups
such as Planned Parenthood have called the legislation a boon for
women’s health, claiming that restrictions on who can perform
abortions are “needless.” But even for those who wrongly call
abortion “health care,” Maine’s provision should not be a cause
for celebration. Despite the assertions of abortion-rights advo-
cates, abortion procedures are not as simple as having a tooth
pulled, especially later in pregnancy, and requirements that
abortions be performed by doctors are in fact intended to protect
women from harmful complications. If abortion advocates
sincerely wished to prioritize “women’s health,” they wouldn’t
champion legislation that increases the risks of abortion.
n California has approved a new budget that expands Medi-Cal
coverage to illegal immigrants up to the age of 26. (Previously,
J U LY 8 , 2 0 1 9
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the cap was 18.) The absolute lowest estimates place the cost for
this expansion around $100 million. Even the higher estimates
(somewhere around $260 million), however, don’t account for
the incentive the program will create for illegal immigrants to
move to California. As the magnet of free health care draws
more and more people to the state, there’s no telling how high the
price tag for this project might rise. So how will California pay
for health care for tens of thousands more people? It’s bringing
back the individual mandate. Governor Gavin Newsom expects
the mandate to generate $1 billion over three years, a significant
portion of which will fund the Medi-Cal expansion. So,
California residents who do not buy health insurance—either
because they don’t want it or, in many cases, can’t afford it—will
have their money taken by the government. In this case, it won’t
even be redistributed to their fellow citizens.
n The New York State legislature passed a bill aimed at making
New York City, and potentially the rest of the state, more
affordable. The bill includes an expansion of rent-regulation
programs and intensifies the already dense thicket of rules on
New York City landlords. It will almost certainly fail to achieve
its aims. Efforts to control or regulate rent have been shown to
decrease housing stock and raise rents. They favor the wealthy by
incentivizing the construction of luxury units to the detriment of
cheaper ones. New rules also make it harder for landlords to raise
rent to pay for basic improvements, endangering the quality of
lower-priced units. Hardly a victory for the average city-dweller.
n Texas prides itself on being hospitable to business, and now
that welcoming spirit will extend even to the littlest
entrepreneurs. The Lone Star State’s legislature has passed, and
Governor Greg Abbott has signed, a bill that would eliminate the
need for permits or licenses for “the occasional sale of lemonade
or other nonalcoholic beverages . . . by an individual younger
than 18 years of age.” In recent years the red tape on lemonade
stands has come not so much from state tax authorities as from
local governments and homeowner associations, but under the
new law (which doesn’t take effect until September 1, but Texas
summers are long), no such requirement can be imposed. Now
kids from Amarillo to McAllen will be able to learn through
experience about responsibility, salesmanship, accounting—
and the importance of free markets unencumbered by govern-
ment regulation.
n The 18th century had Thomas Paine. The 19th century had
Henry David Thoreau. And the great American dissident of the
early 21st century is . . . an outlaw baker named Jack Phillips.
The baker took his case to the U.S. Supreme Court and won after
Colorado attempted to sanction him for declining on religious
grounds to bake a cake in celebration of a homosexual marriage.
Though the Court ruled in his favor, the decision was narrow
and wanted finality. Phillips was then sued by Autumn Scardina,
a transgender activist who demanded a cake celebrating a
gender transition. Phillips declined and countersued, and the
case was dropped. Now Scardina has come back for a third
round, this time demanding of Phillips a birthday cake, also for
the purpose of celebrating a gender transition. Phillips has once
again declined. This is pure harassment and should be treated as
such. It is petty, it is vindictive, and it is without merit. But there
is a larger question. The “public accommodations” aspect of
8 | w w w. n a t i o n a l r e v i e w. c o m
American civil-rights law was a response to Jim Crow conditions
that made it practically impossible for African Americans to
travel freely and otherwise engage in fair commerce. The
burden involved in finding a gay-friendly caterer or wedding
planner is, to say the least, lighter. Members of sexual minorities
should be treated with decency and dignity, but we need not
pretend that their situation is comparable to that of the
descendants of slaves.
n In June, the supreme court of Washington State ruled
unanimously against Arlene’s Flowers. Its owner, Barronelle
Stutzman, had been sued twice for declining to provide floral
arrangements for same-sex weddings. Her lawyers defended
her decision on grounds of “freedom of conscience in all
matters of religious sentiment.” She filed a countersuit,
claiming that the legal actions against her had inflicted
financial hardship, and lost at the state supreme court in 2017.
She appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. It sent her case back
to the state, directing it to reconsider the matter in light of the
Masterpiece Cakeshop decision, which hinged on the finding
that the Colorado state agency that fined a Christian baker,
Jack Phillips, for discriminating against a same-sex couple
was motivated in part by religious animus. In affirming its
original decision, the state supreme court in Washington
argued that Stutzman encountered no religious animus, unlike
Phillips. The anti-discrimination laws in question rest on an
analogy between race and sexual identity. May a state decide
that its interest in enforcing such laws compels it to deny
religious exemptions? The Supreme Court has yet to say.
Meanwhile, proponents of religious freedom had better hone
their arguments.
n An Ohio jury has reached a verdict that should send a shock
wave through college administrations across the land. It has
ordered Oberlin College to pay $11 million in compensatory
damages and $33 million in punitive damages for its employ-
ees’ role in accusing a local, family-owned grocery store and
bakery of racism and racial profiling. The facts of the case are
egregious but not surprising, given modern campus culture.
After police arrested three Oberlin students for shoplifting
alcohol and assaulting a store employee who had tried to stop
the theft, student activists launched protests against the bakery,
claiming the store’s shoplifting accusation was racially moti-
vated. Administrators provided direct support to student pro-
testers and even participated in the protests by distributing a
defamatory flyer to the media, among other ways. The college
also engaged in economic reprisals against the bakery by can-
celing a longstanding food-service relationship. In other words,
without waiting for the facts, administrators participated in a
campaign of defamation, wrongly harming the family’s busi-
ness and damaging their reputation. But the First Amendment
does not give anyone license to lie, especially if the target of
the lie isn’t a public official. Oberlin may be full of students
and administrators who consider themselves woke, but it was
the jury that spoke truth to power.
n British prime minister Theresa May officially stepped down as
leader of the Tory party, triggering a leadership contest. Her
successor will have to take Brexit over the line and restore party
unity, all while Parliament faces a Brexit-shaped constitutional
J U LY 8 , 2 0 1 9
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THE WEEK
crisis. In Tory leadership contests, candidates are knocked out in
rounds. After Boris Johnson came in first in round one, with 114
of 303 votes (more than the second-, third-, and fourth-place
finishers combined), he was guaranteed to be one of the final two
candidates. Even though Johnson is a divisive figure among Tory
MPs, political pragmatism is prevailing in a desperate hour. The
Tories realize that they need to pick someone who can win a
general election and rescue their brand from Nigel Farage’s Brexit
party. Johnson is miles ahead in the polls among the Tory
grassroots. At this writing, it seems very likely that he will be the
next prime minister. Britain is now scheduled to leave the EU on
October 31. While Johnson has said he would like an improved
deal, something that the EU continually refused Theresa May, he
has promised no further delays to Brexit and is prepared to leave
without a deal. Should Parliament, or the speaker of the house,
find a way to block no-deal—or should no-deal prove as
disastrous as many fear—trust in both Johnson and the Tory party
could be damaged for years to come.
n Kim Jong-nam was the eldest son of Kim Jong-il, the second
North Korean dictator. Jong-nam was assassinated in February
2017 at the Kuala Lumpur airport. This was a hit ordered by the
current dictator, Kim Jong-un, half-brother of the deceased. It
transpires that Jong-nam was an informant for the CIA. We need
all the information we can get on North Korea, the “Hermit
Kingdom,” the most closed and isolated country in the world—
and one with nuclear weapons. Asked about Jong-nam and the
CIA, President Trump said, “I just received a beautiful letter from
Kim Jong-un,” and “I would tell him that would not happen under
my auspices, that’s for sure. I wouldn’t let that happen under my
auspices.” If the president is not telling the truth, on this occasion
we wouldn’t mind.
n Xinjiang Province in China—or East Turkestan, as the Uyghurs
call it—is among the most miserable places on earth. Chinese
authorities have rounded up more than a million Uyghurs, throw-
ing them into a network of concentration camps or reeducation
camps: a gulag. The object is to bring the Uyghurs to heel. To
wipe out their culture and make good Chinese out of them (or kill
them in the process). The Gauleiter of Xinjiang is the same man
who did such an effective job in Tibet, subduing that proud and
rebellious country. (His name is Chen Quanguo.) Xinjiang
Province is also a perfect surveillance state, reaching Orwellian
levels. Technology has virtually abolished privacy. Every day,
men and women are dying in the camps. The United States and
other free countries should make an issue of the Uyghurs. To take
something relatively small: The next Winter Olympics are
scheduled to be held in China. Why should they be?
n Every sport has its norms for sportsmanship in one-sided
games. In baseball, you don’t steal or swing at 3–0 pitches; in
basketball, you slow down the pace; in football, you run the ball
up the middle. In soccer it’s harder to keep the score under control
in case of a mismatch, but at least the Times Square–on–V-J Day
celebrations that follow every goal can be toned down once your
lead stretches to half a dozen. So the U.S. women’s World Cup
team came in for some criticism when they continued with their
wild, sometimes choreographed celebrations as the score climbed
into double figures in a 13–0 rout of overmatched Thailand. Like
all public controversies these days, this one quickly descended
10 | w w w. n a t i o n a l r e v i e w. c o m
into each side criticizing a caricature of the other side’s view. We
agree that the players should have taken it down a notch or two
toward the end, but the whole thing isn’t worth getting worked up
about. After all, it’s soccer.
n Many that are first shall be last, and the last shall be first—but,
as Cleveland Indians fans will tell you, sometimes you have to
wait a while for it to happen. They’re still waiting in Cleveland,
but this spring supporters of two other longtime unsuccessful
sports teams finally saw their faith rewarded, as Toronto won the
NBA championship and St. Louis won the Stanley Cup, for the
first time in each one’s history. We suspect most Canadians would
have preferred it the other way around, since according to a
recent survey, basketball is their eighth most popular sport (just
ahead of curling, and hot on the heels of rugby), whereas in
hockey, the national pastime, America has been eating Canada’s
poutine continuously since 1994 (before Raptors roamed the
earth; the team was a 1995 expansion entry). At least James
Naismith, the inventor of basketball and a Canadian, has finally
gotten his revenge.
n “Contain the spread of misinformation,” an apparatchik
demands of a roomful of baffled Soviet bureaucrats in a chilling
scene in Chernobyl, this summer’s exemplary and important
HBO drama. Chernobyl, which stars Jared Harris and Stellan
Skarsgaard as a scientist and a functionary charged with dealing
with the aftermath of the horrific April 1986 explosion at a
nuclear plant in Ukraine, then part of the USSR, took certain
liberties with the truth for the sake of streamlining events (the
character portrayed by Emily Watson, as a physicist who rushes
to the scene unasked to provide advice, did not exist). Yet the
five-hour miniseries, written by Craig Mazin and directed tautly
by Johan Renck, was a television masterpiece as it turned reams
of technical information into the stuff of riveting political
thrillers. Despite dealing with matters few of us are conversant
with, its dialogue was particularly tart and memorable: The
phrase “it’s only 3.6 Roentgens,” variants of which are said
many times by hacks seeking to convince themselves and others
that the radioactivity is less than catastrophic, ought to enter the
language as shorthand for inept damage control. While Mazin
led the chorus who suggested the series had something to tell us
about a certain radioactive occupant of the White House, what it
actually provided was a stark lesson about a political idea that
will apparently be glowing menacingly for thousands of years.
The series depicts how socialism, with its collectivist view of the
polity, shuts out dissent, oversight, and competing political
actors when these are most vital. Whenever anyone tells you
American politics is too fractured and quarrelsome to “get things
done,” suggest he give Chernobyl a watch.
n A critic for The Atlantic, reviewing the new Broadway revival
of Oklahoma!, mentions seeing numerous empty seats after the
first intermission. Then, he continues, “as the second act wore on,
still other theatergoers walked out, evidently repelled by the
director Daniel Fish’s dark and daring reinterpretation of this
enduring classic”—thereby missing the “quivering, feel-bad
ending.” These remarks wouldn’t work as excerpts for newspaper
ads, but they were actually part of a rave review. The New York
Times agreed, calling Oklahoma! “the coolest new show on
Broadway . . . wide-awake . . . altogether wonderful,” as well as
J U LY 8 , 2 0 1 9
week - FINAL_QXP-1127940387.qxp 6/19/2019 2:11 PM Page 11
“jolting,” “disturbing,” and “guaranteed to haunt your night-
mares” (these are all meant as compliments). Oh, and some of the
actors carry guns, but don’t freak: “Oklahoma! is the first ‘gun
neutral’ production in Broadway’s history. For every visible prop
gun onstage, a donation is made to organizations ‘committed to
helping solve the gun violence crisis by destroying firearms that
should be out of circulation.’” As the moderator of a panel
discussing “the use of guns in media” explains: “That’s why we
make art—to talk about things as this way of communicating. And
to evoke change.” If you feel like paying $150 a pop to get
depressed and then be lectured on gun control, go right ahead.
n Franco Zeffirelli was one of the outstanding directors of our
time, and indeed one of the outstanding artists. He directed opera,
film, and television alike. His Romeo and Juliet movie (1968) was
embraced by the world. His TV miniseries Jesus of Nazareth
(1977) still leaves a deep impression on many. He was more
popular with the public than he was with the critics. The main
charge was excess, or extravagance. Indeed, the obit in the New
York Times was headed “Franco Zeffirelli, Italian Director With
Taste for Excess, Dies at 96.” One Times critic once lamented that
Zeffirelli’s production of Turandot, the Puccini opera, was critic-
proof: The critics could not kill it, because the public loved it so
much. The public was right. Bravo, maestro, and R.I.P.
n Martin Feldstein was a realist. As chairman of the Council of
Economic Advisers in the Reagan administration, he advocated
the cause of old-fashioned balanced budgets over the excessive
optimism of the more excitable supply-siders. He warned
against the creation of the euro on the grounds that powerhouses
such as Germany had economic interests different from those of
countries such as Greece. The world did not heed his advice, but
it would have been better off if it had. Feldstein took a doctorate
from Oxford in 1967 and won the John Bates Clark Medal. He
ran the National Bureau of Economic Research and taught
freshman economics at Harvard for 20 years. His students
included a young Larry Summers, who wrote that for Feldstein
economics was “a calling, . . . never an intellectual game or
political tool.” He was a thoroughgoing conservative, but
unconstrained by partisanship: He gave Ronald Reagan good
advice, and Barack Obama, too, serving on the latter’s
Economic Recovery Advisory Board. He was an advocate of
dispassionate, empirical research in a field whose scholars are
from time to time overwhelmed by bias. Dead at 79. R.I.P.
n Those who knew David Boyd Kennedy describe him as
“humble” and “discreet.” From 1985 to 2003, he served as the
president of the Earhart Foundation, whose low profile belied
its record of accomplishment. Nine of its grantees, including
Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, went on to win the
Nobel Prize in economics. The foundation closed in 2015 after
its trustees decided to spend down to zero, to prevent
institutional drift and eventual betrayal of the intent of the
founder, Harry Earhart. An Ann Arbor boy, Kennedy studied at
Michigan, Indiana, McGill, and Yale and did a stint in Germany,
at the Goethe-Institut. He served in the U.S. Army in the 1950s
and picked up his Russian studies, which he had begun in
college. Next stop, Wyoming, where he was elected to the
legislature before being appointed state attorney general. He
was active in the Republican party and held positions on the
11
week - FINAL_QXP-1127940387.qxp 6/19/2019 2:11 PM Page 12
THE WEEK
national as well as state committees. Born into the Silent
Generation, Kennedy lived his life as a model of quiet purpose.
He died in March, at 85, and was laid to rest in June. R.I.P.
FOREIGN AFFAIRS
The Example of Hong Kong
F you need an example of man’s desire to be free, and his will-
ingness to resist tyranny, look to the streets of Hong Kong.
I Some 2 million residents of the city gathered there, in protest.
The population of the city is only 7.3 million. It was a stirring
sight—one of the most stirring the world has seen in recent years.
The protests in Tiananmen Square were stirring, too. That
was exactly 30 years ago. It ended in a massacre of protesters
by the Communist authorities. Every Hong Konger in the
streets this year knew that.
The immediate object of their protest was an extradition bill,
which would have sent Hong Kongers accused of a crime to the
mainland, for trial. On the mainland, there is nothing like justice.
Instead, there is torture, a sham trial, and a gulag (called laogai).
Yet the protest in Hong Kong had a more general object.
Citizens are intent on keeping their freedoms, or not letting them
go without a fight.
When the British turned over the city to the Chinese Commu-
nist Party in 1997, the promise was “one country, two systems,”
for 50 years. This was always chimerical. Year by year, month
by month, the CCP has been chipping away at Hong Kong’s
autonomy. The Party will not tolerate Hong Kong’s brash, uppity
independence until 2047.
Five years ago, democratic protests broke out. These were
dubbed the “umbrella movement,” because people used umbrel-
las to shield themselves from pepper spray. Earlier this year, eight
leaders of the movement were sentenced. One of them, Chan Kin-
man, a retired sociology professor, said, “In the verdict, the judge
commented that we are naïve” (naïve to believe that a protest
movement can attain, or retain, democracy). “But what is more
naïve than believing in one country, two systems?”
In Taiwan, there were street protests in behalf of the
umbrella-movement leaders sentenced. Why? Because
ANTHONY KWAN/GETTY IMAGES
Protesters march on a street in Hong Kong, June 16, 2019.
12 | w w w. n a t i o n a l r e v i e w. c o m
Taiwanese know that their fate, and their democracy, is linked
to Hong Kong.
In the wake of the extradition bill, the umbrellas came out
again, as people tried to shield themselves from pepper spray,
tear gas, and rubber bullets. Faced with this massive demonstra-
tion, which caught the attention of the world, Hong Kong offi-
cials backed down. The chief executive, Carrie Lam, announced
the suspension of the extradition bill, and even offered an apolo-
gy for its introduction.
Some protest leaders demanded her resignation. Others pointed
out that whoever followed her would be in the same position—a
servant of Xi Jinping, the PRC’s supreme leader (for life).
“Hong Kong’s bravery has bought it some time.” So said
Edward Lucas, the British foreign-affairs analyst, and he
put it well. We think back to “Finlandization,” which is
often misunderstood.
Finlandization was the process by which Finland was ren-
dered essentially neutral in the Cold War. The Finns did not set
out to be Finlandized; they wished to be with the Free West.
They fought like hell to avoid Sovietization, which resulted in
their (mere) Finlandization.
In a similar vein, Hong Kongers are fighting like hell to keep
the noose relatively loose around their necks. They are fighting
to retain a little breathing space.
The ruling Communists in Beijing hate the example of Hong
Kong, as they hate the example of (even worse) Taiwan. They
don’t want other Chinese—more than a billion of them—to get
ideas: ideas that Chinese people, in some places, can live freely
and democratically. News of the drama in Hong Kong was
blocked on the mainland.
Asked to comment on this drama, President Trump said, “I
hope it all works out for China and for Hong Kong. I under-
stand the reason for the demonstration, but I’m sure they will be
able to work it out.” The United States can do better than this.
People look to us for leadership, for moral support, and we
should provide it whenever possible.
Maybe Hong Kongers are doing nothing more than delaying
the inevitable—their eventual subjugation by the PRC. If so, they
are still doing something inspiring, right, and brave.
J U LY 8 , 2 0 1 9
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Text
The Socialist Party Reborn
An irritable red ant suspended in amber
Until recently, Democrats fled the label, but now they embrace it
BY KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON
HE unfinished business of the
Democratic party is socialism.
T Don’t take my word for it—
consult Bernie Sanders.
Senator Sanders gave a madcap
speech in which he ridiculed past con-
servative critics, beginning with Herbert
Hoover and Ronald Reagan, for charac-
terizing the expansive welfare-state
ambitions of the New Deal and the Great
Society as movements toward social-
ism. And then he . . . characterized the
expansive welfare-state ambitions of the
New Deal and the Great Society as
movements toward socialism.
“This is the unfinished business of the
Democratic party and the vision we
must accomplish,” he said. “These are
my values, and that is why I call myself
a democratic socialist.”
President Hoover, the prescient man,
is owed an apology.
As my colleagues and I recently docu-
mented over the course of two special
issues of NATIONAL REVIEW, socialism—
not exactly progressivism, certainly not
liberalism—is ascendant among Demo-
crats, including Democratic elected offi-
ROMAN GENN
cials, and on the American left more
14 | w w w. n a t i o n a l r e v i e w. c o m
generally. Senator Sanders is a declared
and avowed socialist, one who is
attempting to posthumously recruit the
Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. to his
cause. (King took a hard economic turn
toward the left in his later years and
spoke of socialism on a few occasions,
but to deputize him on behalf of the
gentleman from the whitest state in the
Union is a bit much, and more than a
bit unseemly.)
Senator Sanders is not alone in this.
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-
Cortez, the callow young Democrat
from New York, is a member of the
Democratic Socialists of America
(DSA), as is Representative Rashida
Tlaib, the Jew-baiting strange-o from
Michigan, along with about 40 other
candidates who were elected as Demo-
crats in 2018. “We are building a
pipeline from local positions all the way to
national politics,” the Socialists said in a
statement after the 2018 elections. Former
Colorado governor John Hickenlooper
was hooted and jeered at when he
affirmed on the stage of the California
Democratic convention that “socialism
is not the answer.”
And yet . . .
Ronald Reagan, an FDR man, spent
his entire career insisting that he was a
New Deal Democrat estranged from his
party: “I didn’t leave the Democratic
party—the party left me!” Many con-
servatives see in the tax-cutting, Cold
War–fighting John Kennedy a kindred
spirit. Much of the Republican criticism
directed at the hilariously misnamed
Affordable Care Act asserted that it
would undermine Medicare, the jewel of
Lyndon Johnson’s so-called Great
Society program—and some of those
Republicans even meant it.
Richard Nixon insisted that by the
1970s we were all Keynesians. Are we
all socialists now?
There are two important factors at
play here: The first is ignorance of the
past, and the second is ignorance of
the present.
Socialism is an idea with a history.
(And a body count of some 100 million
human beings in the 20th century, but
leave that aside for the moment.) The
most ordinary and traditional kind of
government spending is on public
goods, which are defined in economics
as non-rivalrous and non-excludable in
consumption. Think of a missile-
defense system: Missile defense is a
non-excludable good in that a system
that protects the civic-minded taxpaying
citizens at No. 7 Main Street also pro-
tects the freeloading deadbeats at No. 9
Main Street, whereas a guy selling
apples can exclude those who do not
pay; it is non-rivalrous in that Smith’s
enjoyment of protection from Nork
nukes does not diminish Jones’s possi-
ble enjoyment of the same, whereas
every apple Smith eats leaves one less
apple available for Jones.
In theory, spending on such public
goods as defense and law enforcement is
most of what liberal governments are
supposed to do, with some political dis-
agreement over what counts as a public
good. (Roads? There are both public and
toll models.) In reality, most of what
modern liberal governments spend their
money on is social welfare, the public
provision of non-public goods such as
food and education, both of which can
be (and historically have been) provided
on an ordinary market basis. These are
not public goods rigorously defined, but
they are publicly provided in practically
all modern democracies on the theory
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that a society as a whole is better off if
there is guaranteed universal access to a
minimum of them.
The public provision of non-public
goods is sometimes described as social-
ism, but it is distinct in that socialism
requires an additional factor: central
planning, often but not necessarily in
concert with state ownership of the
means of production. Food stamps are
social welfare, but government-run
farms and groceries are socialism;
housing-support vouchers are welfare,
but government-owned housing projects
are socialism. American conservatives
spend a fair amount of effort trying to
convert or partially convert such gen-
uinely socialistic projects as the monop-
oly K–12 education system (in which the
means of production are state-owned and
the workers are state employees) into
more conventional social-welfare pro-
grams by replacing or augmenting direct-
provision models with vouchers or other
market-enabling alternatives. There is a
significant difference between gov -
ernment funding of services and govern-
ment provision of services, which is
why, for examples, most Republicans
have made their peace with Medicare but
resist a British-style socialist-monopoly
model of health care.
But, then, most European countries
resist that model, too, which is why
there is no NHS-style national single-
payer system in France, Germany,
Sweden, etc., and no state-provided
health care at all in happy, well-
governed Switzerland. And this is where
the ignorance of socialism as an idea
with a history meets the ignorance of
actual political and economic practice
in the European states, particularly the
Scandinavian ones, that America’s self-
proclaimed democratic socialists claim
to admire. Senator Sanders et al. point to
countries such as Sweden and Denmark
and conclude that the lesson to be
learned from them is that the United
States should do . . . exactly what
Senator Sanders et al. always have
desired and always will desire to do:
enact punitive redistributive taxes
notionally targeting the wealthy and
corporations (as though middle-class
workers, particularly in the public sec-
tor, were not major corporate sharehold-
ers through their retirement funds)
while building new entrenched and cen-
tralized bureaucracies to be staffed by
16 | w w w. n a t i o n a l r e v i e w. c o m
comfortable, highly compensated Demo-
cratic constituents.
This response to the example of
Sweden—which is in many ways a well-
governed and prosperous nation—
makes sense only if you do not know
very much about Sweden. Senator
Sanders, for example, desires to radical-
ly increase the tax on inheritances for
moralistic reasons. Sweden’s inheri-
tance tax is 0.00 percent. Senator
Sanders wants to centralize the provi-
sion of health care in a federally funded
and federally administered cluster of
bureaucracies; health care in Sweden is
radically decentralized, funded and
administered mostly at the local level.
Left-leaning Democrats such as Senator
Kamala Harris of California have criti-
cized Republicans for not doing enough
to cut middle-class taxes (Senator
Harris, who does not seem to know how
tax refunds work, blasted the 2017 bill
as “a middle-class-tax hike”), but what
in fact distinguishes the Scandinavian
model (and most Western European
countries) from the United States is not
how they tax the rich but how they tax
the middle class—which is to say: They
do it. While about half of U.S. house-
holds pay no federal income tax, and
middle-class households pay relatively
little, middle-class earners in Denmark
pay about 50 percent in taxes. Taxes in
the United States are disproportionate-
ly paid by those with high incomes—
disproportionately even when you take
the income difference into considera-
tion: The top 1 percent takes home less
than 20 percent of total income and pays
almost 40 percent of federal income
taxes. Taxes in the Scandinavian coun-
tries fall heavily on the middle classes,
which also are the main beneficiaries of
the programs those taxes fund.
Senator Sanders is an ideologically
blinkered man, and he is not an intel-
lectually curious one. His views have
been set since he was honeymooning
in the Soviet Union as a young man,
and his speeches and writing testify
that he simply lacks the intellectual
capacity for growth and change.
Sweden has changed radically since
the 1970s, but Bernie Sanders has
stood still in time, an irritable red ant
suspended in amber.
But the so-called intellectuals of the
Democrats’ new socialist vanguard
have no such excuse. Some of them are
simply dim and poorly educated (poorly
but expensively, in the case of Repre-
sentative Ocasio-Cortez), but many of
them are intellectually dishonest. A par-
ticularly dishonest young socialist
writer with something of a following
recently published an income-disparity
ranking of countries that was supposed
to show how the Scandinavians had
cracked the inequality problem. And
Northern Europe was well represented
on the list, which also included France,
Switzerland, New Zealand, and Estonia,
among other nations, in the top ten.
Which is to say, the top ten countries
represented radically different modes of
government, radically different health-
care systems, different labor markets,
and different tax systems (Switzerland,
for example, does not tax capital gains,
something our progressive Europhiles
rarely mention), to say nothing of radi-
cally different cultures. (And many
scholars of governance agree that culture
is a key ingredient in the Scandinavian
secret sauce.) But even among the
Nordic countries, there are very large
differences: Iceland, for example, has
one of the world’s highest work-force-
participation rates; Finland’s is down
about where ours is, and ours is higher
than the overall EU rate. There isn’t a sin-
gle, unified policy story to be derived
from all that diversity.
But that is beside the point, for the
Democrats. What Senator Sanders
stands for is the continuation of a very
old and very dumb kind of politics: ado-
lescent anti-Americanism. It does not
matter that Germany, Sweden, and
Switzerland have fundamentally differ-
ent political and economic models:
These countries are only rhetorical
cat’s-paws deployed in the fundamental
progressive project: establishing that the
United States and its institutions are
hopelessly corrupt, and that they may
therefore be cleared away to make room
for something new. In this regard, the
energetically nationalistic Franklin D.
Roosevelt is a poor model for them—
their actual lineage traces to Woodrow
Wilson, whose racism and warmonger-
ing make him an unattractive totem but
whose frank rejection of the Consti-
tution and the founding principles of the
nation presages their own. In this way,
the socialist renaissance may be under-
stood as distinct from the broader pro-
gressive project but also subsumed
J U LY 8 , 2 0 1 9
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within it. The overall economic model is
essentially the Democrats’ health-care
model writ large: Destroy and discredit
what’s there, and then . . . improvise.
Senator Sanders, in his speech, gives
some thought to the Constitution—and
finds it wanting. What good is the Bill
of Rights, he asks, when one must
struggle so hard for mere material exis-
tence? “Are you truly free if you are
forced to work 60 or 80 hours a week?”
The median American work week is, as
of this writing, less than 35 hours a
week, significantly lower than it was in
1980. What in fact distinguishes low-
income households is not on average
that they have too many hours of work
to do but that they have too few: Only 40
percent of the working-age poor (those
below the federal poverty line) in 2014
worked at all. Among those who do
work, many are involuntarily relegated
to part-time or seasonal work. High-
income households average more work
hours, not fewer, than low-income
households. The unemployment rate for
those without a bachelor’s degree is
twice that of those with one. The prob-
lem the poor face is not long hours at the
salt mine but unemployment.
But what are a few inconvenient facts
when there’s a utopia to be built?
And that is the proper context in
which to understand what it is that
Senator Sanders et al. stand for. They
may, like Senator Elizabeth Warren, roll
out 55 five-point policy proposals per
hour, offering them with varying degrees
of seriousness, but theirs is fundamen-
tally a negative platform. What they
hate and wish to liquidate is the system
of markets, trade, law, regulation, and
taxes that we call, for lack of a better
term, “capitalism,” and their reasons are
as much tribal (they resent the social
status conferred by wealth as least as
much as the political power attending
it), moral, and aesthetic as they are eco-
nomic. But their policy proposals are
almost always the same: “Pillage the
rich and create a lot of new public-sector
jobs for me and my friends.” And that
much has remained constant whether
they call themselves liberals, progres-
sives, or socialists.
Socialists used to care a great deal
about history—“historical materialism,”
they called their big metaphysical idea.
Something for Senator Sanders to con-
template in his waterfront dacha.
18 | w w w. n a t i o n a l r e v i e w. c o m
The Post-
Text
Liberals’
Incoherence
They say they have a real solution;
we’d all love to see the plan
B Y C H A R L E S C . W. C O O K E
N some quarters of the American
Right, it has become fashionable of
I late to blame our classically liberal
order for the ills that afflict American
conservatism, and then to hint vaguely that
an alternative system of government might
deliver more-salutary results for religious
and social conservatives. This argument—
insofar as one can call it that—is a poor
one, and perhaps even a dangerous one. It
should be resisted.
The critique offered by the “post-
liberal” or illiberal-curious crowd contains
a number of fatal flaws. It relentlessly con-
fuses the bones of our political system with
the meat that free people put upon them, and
thereby becomes both incomprehensibly
vague and nigh on impossible to interrogate
and find any meaning in. It badly misiden-
tifies its enemy, which leads its progenitors
to turn, mistakenly, upon their allies. It is
wantonly self-destructive, in that, if fol-
lowed to its natural conclusion, it would
limit, rather than increase, the power of
those who advance it. And, because it is not
tethered to any specifics, it inevitably in-
vites respondents to inquire, “So let’s
assume you’re right about classical liberal-
ism—so what do you want to do about
that?” Taken together, these defects reduce
it to little more than a whine—a lament
that can be summed up in terms familiar to
the three-year-old: “That’s not fair.” And
whines do not great political systems make.
Defenders of our classically liberal order
such as I contend that its purpose is not to
deliver endless victories to one group or
another within society, but to create a
framework within which people who hold
markedly different conceptions of what
constitutes the Highest Good can coexist
without going to war. In America, this end is
achieved in part by our constitutional struc-
ture, which is designed to protect the indi-
vidual and to foster the pluralism that is
necessary for peace, and it is achieved in
part by the inclusion of democratic ele-
ments that ensure that the losing side in any
dispute has a chance to win in the future.
Ultimately, the classically liberal order
places only one condition on participants,
and that is they agree not to try to abolish it
or to permanently take it over. Beyond that,
it doesn’t much care how it is used. The
result is a country in which the Amish and
Silicon Valley can coexist, and in which
the Mississippi Baptist and the Brooklyn
hipster can thrill to the same flag. It is a
country in which Texas can thrive, and so
can Massachusetts. It is a country that can
host both Franklin Graham and Marilyn
Manson (but not Charles Manson).
Critics of the liberal order reject this
characterization, charging that the system
is unjust because it merely pretends at neu-
trality and toleration while in fact smug-
gling in its own values and imposing them
on the public square. This critique is similar
in kind to the progressive claim that, say,
neutral and expansive free-speech protec-
tions are not, in practice, neutral and ex-
pansive but rather serve to reinforce a
particular view of the good life—say, white
supremacy or patriarchy or Christianity or
capitalism. If this critique were correct, it
would be damning. Fatal, even. But it is
not. And, in fact, it is entirely backwards.
To grasp why, one needs only to look at
the examples of failure and hypocrisy that
are offered up against the classical-liberal
order. The Obama administration forced
religious business owners to pay for con-
traception. Aha! Jack Phillips can’t run his
bakery in Colorado without his con-
science rights being assaulted. Aha!
College campuses are shutting down
speakers! Aha! And so on. Now, it is true
that these things have all happened. But it
is also true that they are not reflective of
the classically liberal order but of an illib-
eralism that seeks to amend or undermine
it. Or, to put it another way, these infrac-
tions are the products not of our system
working correctly, but of its being reject-
ed by a progressivism that is openly hos-
tile to its presumptions.
Moreover, these departures are being
fought—and remedied—on the back of lib-
eral provisions such as the First Amendment
and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.
That the owners of Hobby Lobby had to
sue for their rights is an indictment of the
Obama administration, certainly. And yet
they won—and at a Supreme Court that was
less likely to protect religious liberty than
is today’s. Jack Phillips may have been tar-
geted and abused in a way that no man in a
J U LY 8 , 2 0 1 9
base_new_milliken-mar 22.qxd 6/18/2019 2:23 PM Page 1

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free society should be, but he also won 7–2
at the Supreme Court in a case whose hold-
ing is likely to be expanded in the future.
And the Foundation for Individual Rights in
Education reports that, while there are still
free-speech problems on campus, the num-
ber of institutions that earn its “red light”
warning has dropped from 74.2 percent to
28.5 percent over the last decade. There is
no easy way to prevent attempts to crush
the individual in any society, but there is
an easy way to repel them. The liberal
order is the dissenter’s best friend.
What of the culture? Doesn’t the liberal
order eventually corrupt that, even as it
insists that it is merely a framework within
which all people may thrive? Writing
at First Things, Sohrab Ahmari has argued
vaguely that it does, and he has pointed to
the existence of something called “drag-
queen story hour” at a library in Sacra-
mento, Calif., the existence of which
apparently demonstrates that we are sliding
to Gomorrah on John Locke’s back. Leaving
aside that there is nothing intrinsic to the
liberal order that prompted such an event—
America had the same political, judicial, and
constitutional system in 1930, and there is
no way that this would have happened
then; what has changed is the culture
on top of that system—it is hard to discern
in what alternative nonauthoritarian polit-
ical system such a practice could easily be
ended. Which is why, I imagine, Ahmari
has not presented a plan of any sort.
What could he offer? Does he want more
local control over libraries? If so, he’ll be
disappointed when he learns what the locals
in much of California choose to permit.
Does he want free-speech zones imposed, as
on college campuses, the better to limit the
taking of offense? If so, he must explain
how he differs in principle from his political
rivals, and why he uses the illiberalism of
progressive college campuses as an example
of the problem with the status quo. Or does
he just want to win—that is, to ban drag-
queen story hours nationwide by any means
necessary? If he does, he has only one option:
to stage a coup and to replace the American
system with a new order headed by those
who think like him. Given that he doesn’t
mention such a plan, I shall assume he does
not want to do this. That being so, there are
only two other ways that Ahmari can win this
fight. The first is to move somewhere else—
someplace where this sort of thing does not
happen anywhere within the polity. (It is
worth noting, incidentally, that Ahmari does
not actually live in Sacramento.) The second
20 | w w w. n a t i o n a l r e v i e w. c o m
is to win the argument culturally so that
such behavior is marginalized and dis-
dained, even if it is not illegal.
Despite having no other solution,
Ahmari disdains this final option, which he
disparagingly calls “David Frenchism.”
He is wrong to do so even on his own
terms. Why? Well, because absent the
establishment of a dictatorship, any non-
cultural solution to what ails America will
itself be reliant on the culture. Ultimately, in
America, everything falls under democratic
control—yes, even the Bill of Rights, which
can be amended by a supermajority and
which relies for its execution on judges who
are chosen by the executive and legislative
branches. And that democratic control is
the product of our culture; if the culture is
fallen, the democracy will be, too. Ahmari
seems to imply that there is some way of
taking over the government in order to fix
the culture while that culture is the “enemy.”
But what, exactly, would that look like?
I do not for a moment believe that Ahmari
seeks a sinister alteration to our order. I do
think, however, that he has a duty to
explain himself in detail.
I think, too, that he ought to be extremely
careful what he wishes for. The irony here is
that if the post-liberals were somehow able to
establish a set of institutions that could direct
the culture as they wished, they would likely
be setting themselves up for persecution. It
should be obvious that any organization
imbued with sufficient power to win cul-
tural battles without democratic backing
would also be imbued with sufficient
power to crush social and religious conser-
vatives without democratic backing. And
then what would the persecuted do, having
agreed to dispense with the guardrails?
The great thing about the American
order is that you have just as much right to
say “But the First Amendment!” as the
people who hate you and believe you want
to turn society away from the Highest
Good—and vice versa. To undermine that
principle on the grounds that you really do
know what’s best is folly. The best way to
fight illiberalism in 2019 America is the
same as it was in 1919 and 1819: not to
abandon the system wholesale and seek
some elusive permanent victory, but to
insist on its being upheld. It is to speak,
to argue, to persuade, to engage, and, in
such cases as the law is being ignored, to
take the buggers to court and remind
them that the Constitution is supreme in
this country—and should be. No victories
are won in self-imposed exile.
The
Text
Incredible
Guts of Thae
Yong-ho
An emissary from North Korea
B Y J AY N O R D L I N G E R
Oslo
EOPLE who manage to leave
North Korea are often known as
P “defectors”—even when they
are ordinary citizens, rather
than government officials or military
personnel. That’s because, when you
are born in North Korea, you are
deemed to belong to the state. If you
leave, you have defected, and you are
a traitor.
Thae Yong-ho is a defector in a more
widely understood sense. He was North
Korea’s deputy ambassador to the United
Kingdom when he went over to the
South Koreans in 2016. He is one of the
highest-ranking North Korean officials
ever to defect. He is something rare in the
world: a messenger from a closed and
isolated society, a “hermit kingdom,” as
North Korea is called.
I have met him at the Oslo Freedom
Forum, the annual human-rights gather-
ing in the Norwegian capital. Thae
speaks good English with a slight British
accent. He is elegant, knowledgeable,
and self-assured—a man you can imag-
ine in diplomatic work.
He was born in 1962, and he grew up
a true believer. There is little choice in
North Korea. You are commanded to
worship the Kims as gods. You know
hardly anything about the outside world
(although this is less true now than it was
when Thae was growing up). He read
books about Communist liberators who
sacrificed their lives for the equality of
man. Thae wanted to dedicate his life to
that end too.
He went to the Pyongyang University
of Foreign Studies. He joined the WPK,
the Workers’ Party of Korea, i.e., the rul-
ing party. He entered the foreign min-
istry in 1988. And, in 1996, he had his
first foreign posting—to Denmark.
J U LY 8 , 2 0 1 9
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That was a revelation. He expected

beggars in the street and the ruthless
exploitation of workers. Instead, he found
a happy, peaceful, healthy society, with
ample social welfare. This pricked at the
young diplomat’s brain.
He also started to see North Korea, and
its ruling Kims, as outsiders saw them. In
the mid 1990s, there was a terrible famine
in North Korea. Thae understood that this
was the result of natural disasters, and that
the leader, Kim Jong-il, was doing every-
thing possible to relieve the problem.
All North Korean diplomats, wherever
they were posted, were instructed to get
food aid from their host governments.
Thae went to the Danish foreign ministry.
They were happy to oblige. But they had
questions: Why was Kim Jong-il invest-
ing millions in nuclear weapons when
people were starving? Why was he
spending millions on a mausoleum for
Kim Il-sung (his father and predecessor)
when people were starving? These were
hard questions to answer.
Thae came face to face with the
hypocrisy of the regime he was serving,
and had been taught to revere. North
Korean delegates arrived in Denmark to
buy cows, for the special use of the Kim
family. This would keep the Kims in
dairy products and beef. Other delegates
arrived to buy beer for the North Korean
elites. These things were a far cry from Thae Yong-ho at the Oslo Freedom Forum, May 2019
the equality of man.
Thae began to experience “double- Britain. What was it like? It was not really Jong-chul is a big fan of Eric Clapton, the
think,” in Orwell’s immortal and useful safe for the boys to say, “Great!” They British rocker. In 2015, Thae accompa-
coinage. Part of him held on to the true asked their father how they should nied Kim Jong-chul to hear Clapton in the
faith, the North Korean Communist faith; respond. He suggested that they reread Royal Albert Hall.
another part of him had plain doubts. Oliver Twist, and give them some stories Slowly, inevitably, defection crept into
He was later posted to Britain. One of out of that book. Thae’s mind. He would not consider it
his duties was to speak to Communist and You can read Dickens in North Korea, while his family was separated. Diplo-
socialist groups, to whom he sang the for his depiction of urchins and such. In mats could not have all of their children
praises of North Korea, knowing, already, April, I talked with Vladimir Bukovsky, with them abroad—someone had to be
it was a false song. These British leftists the Russian dissident. He spent twelve left hostage, back in North Korea. So,
were true believers, as he had once been. years in the Soviet Gulag. He told me that, Thae and his wife would have one son or
He felt sorry for them. in prison libraries, you could read the other with them in Britain. But in
Then there was the matter of his Dickens (and Dreiser). 2014, Kim Jong-un changed the policy.
boys: his two sons. In an atmosphere of Thae Yong-ho pondered his fate, and Now they had both of their sons with
freedom—namely, Britain’s—they too his family’s, and North Korea’s. Maybe them—which changed the equation.
were experiencing doublethink. They he could wait the Kim regime out. But what about other relatives back
had some hard questions for their father Maybe it would collapse before too home? The Kim regime is a firm believer
at the dinner table: “Why is there no long—certainly in his lifetime. Then, in in guilt by association. If one person steps
Internet in North Korea? YouTube helps 2009, Kim Jong-il announced that his out of line, his family and even his friends
you do your homework. Isn’t our govern- youngest son, Kim Jong-un, would suc- and colleagues pay for it. This keeps
ment supposed to care about education?” ceed him. This dispirited Thae. The end of North Koreans in line.
What was their father supposed to say? the regime was not in sight. There came a time when Thae Yong-ho
Periodically, the family would go home Incidentally, Thae would have an was recalled from London to Pyongyang.
JAY NORDLINGER

to North Korea. Naturally, the boys’ encounter with Kim Jong-un’s older Why was a mystery. Maybe they were
friends there were curious about life in brother, Kim Jong-chul, in London. Kim going to punish him, for some infraction
21

unknown to him. This happens to North
Koreans routinely. They don’t know they
have done something wrong until they are
being imprisoned, tortured, or killed.
Thae thought about his sons. What
kind of future would they have in North
Korea? Could he really consign them to
that kind of life, when they had already
enjoyed a free life? And what about their
children, and their children? Thae decid-
ed he would “cut off slavery at my gen-
eration,” as he puts it. This far and no
farther. No matter what, his sons and
grandchildren and so on would not be
slaves. He made a break for it.
The North Korean government called
him “human scum” and, for good mea-
sure, accused him of child rape. (This
accusation is a specialty of Communist
governments, and of some post-
Communist ones too, such as Putin’s.)
A delicate, awful question: What hap-
pened to Thae Yong-ho’s brothers, sisters,
and other relatives in North Korea?
Sitting here in Oslo, I don’t ask him. But
Thae’s goal, or dream, is nothing less
than the end of the regime.
previous interviewers have. He assumes
his relatives are in camps. It weighs very,
very heavily on him. Unspeakably so.
Knowing this already, I don’t need to ask.
I do ask him about his personal security.
Does he have worries? “I have a lot of
worries,” he says, “but I am heavily pro-
tected when I am in South Korea. The
South Korean government knows that I
am No. 1 on the assassination list.” And
“I know this will go on till the last day of
the Kim regime.”
Let me pause, now, to relate something
that happened in the days after Thae
Yong-ho and I talked. Do you know
about the recent fad of “milkshaking”?
Protesters throw milkshakes on public
figures they dislike. This happened to
Thae as he was entering the Grand Hotel
here in Oslo. The attacker, or “milkshak-
er,” was a Norwegian leftist, apparently.
In the Free World, hard as it may be to
believe, some people despise North
Korean defectors as traitors, liars, and
defamers. They take essentially the same
view as the Kim regime itself.
When Thae was “milkshaked,” his
guards quickly subdued the attacker, and
22 | w w w. n a t i o n a l r e v i e w. c o m
the man was soon arrested. Online, his
comrades celebrated him. One of them
said, “He got arrested for ruining a rich
defector’s coat and deserves a lot of sup-
port and love right now.”
It was just a milkshake, true—nothing
serious. But Thae didn’t know that at first.
He thought of Kim Jong-nam, the dicta-
tor’s half-brother, who was killed when
two women smeared him with a foreign
substance in the Kuala Lumpur airport.
Back, now, to our conversation, and
another question: How do South Koreans,
his brother Koreans, treat Thae? It de-
pends, he says. South Korea is polarized
on the issue of North Korea. People on
the left treat him with scorn. I remark
that they might try living in North
Korea, if they think it’s so great—which
makes Thae smile.
I further ask him what he thinks of the
unusual relationship between President
Trump and Kim Jong-un. He says that he
understands the need to discuss nuclear
issues—but does not understand why
Trump depicts Kim as a “nice guy” or
even a “normal person.” “Kim Jong-un is
a tyrant, a dictator, and a criminal.”
Thae’s goal, or dream, is nothing less
than the end of the regime. He would like
to see the Korean Peninsula reunited on
democratic terms. He opens his mouth,
whatever the risks, every chance he gets.
He wants to tell the outside world about
the realities of North Korea. And he
wants to encourage North Korean elites,
first and foremost, to recognize what
they surely know or suspect already, in
their doublethinking: The Kim regime is
corrupt, nasty, and lying. He does not
think this regime will fall tomorrow. But
he thinks it will fall, as North Koreans
learn more about themselves and others,
and, in disgust at having been misled and
oppressed, rise up.
Before Thae and I part, I ask, “Do
your former colleagues and other North
Korean elites admire you, secretly?”
“Yes,” Thae says. “Do you know this
for sure?” I ask. “Of course,” he
answers. They know, better than anyone
else, the sheer guts of what Thae Yong-
ho has done.
Women
Text
Writing
Notes on great American works that
should be in the canon
BY DAVID MAMET
ONDOLEEZZA R ICE was
approached by a professor
C of English and asked to rec-
ommend a book by a black
woman, to round out the racially and
sexually sensitive curriculum. Rice
said, “How about my The Soviet
Union and the Czechoslovak Army,
1948–1983?”
The other woman was, of course, non-
plussed, for (if an explanation is
required) she did not want a book by a
black woman, but a book by same about
being a black woman: that Rice had
other interests and excellences was
moot; she was to be admired not as a
writer, but as a prop.
We have long suffered through the
mantra that “we need to have a dialogue
about race,” in literature. Such (or a dia-
logue about “gender,” whatever that
may be) must necessarily be written by
a member of one and only one of the two
groups in question.
Should that debar the writer from hav-
ing opinions?
Are the opinions of one of the mo-
mentarily petted groups to be accepted
only on the subject of their (supposed,
arguable, or actual) oppression? Are
women, for example, to be ignored (no
matter how great their talent) for writ-
ing about something other than their
“plight”? Does possession of a “plight”
exempt authors from the traditional
requirements of skill, clarity, novelty,
or insight?
We have, if not a tradition, then cer-
tainly a history of excluding women
writers from our literary pantheon. It’s
all very well and charming to rant
about “dead white males,” and it is
environmentally praiseworthy, as their
books are not, as of this writing, actu-
ally burned.
Literature is an approach, via fiction,
to truth. Truth is useful not because it is
Mr. Mamet is a writer.
J U LY 8 , 2 0 1 9
3col - NEW p23_QXP-1127940387.qxp 6/19/2019 12:40 AM Page 23
beautiful or will prevail (it will not) but
because it is true. It is both wicked and
absurd to praise, as to dispraise, writ-
ing based upon genetics; this is, of
course, barbarism.
A more moral and less savage
approach would be to discover and
enjoy the productions of great American
writers, per se and irrespective of their
subject or gender.
Fashions in literature, of course,
change. When I was young, Willa Cather
was out of print, and generations of
schoolchildren have had their interest in
reading destroyed by The Great Gatsby
and The Catcher in the Rye.
But here is a list of women authors
not “out of favor,” but, today, forgotten
and unread. Their works should be cher-
ished. Among the earliest American
novels is Charlotte Temple, by Susanna
Rowson (1762–1824), a romance of the
early colonial period. See also The
Linwoods (1835), by Catharine Maria
Sedgwick. Miss Sedgwick wrote here of
the Revolutionary War and the battle
between the colonials, based in Boston,
and the royalists in New York. For any-
one interested in Washington and that
war, this is as close as you’re going to
get and a smashing yarn.
She wrote at the same remove (50 to
60 years) as did Tolstoy from the
Napoleonic wars, Margaret Mitchell
from the Civil War, and, for that matter
Mario Puzo from the Mafia turf wars.
That is, they, and Sedgwick, wrote of
the Grandparent Stories, which they had
heard at the kitchen table and which had
become part of family lore.
Imagine, in The Linwoods, one reads
the impressions of people who actually
knew Washington.
The great novel of the antebellum
South is Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Mrs. Stowe
wrote the hell out of it. It is an indict-
ment of slavery, which, as Lincoln said,
“started the Civil War”; it has been over-
looked and, indeed, excoriated (by
those who cannot have read it), as the
phrase “Uncle Tom” has come to mean
an appeaser. But his character is nothing
of the kind; he is a Christian trying to
live a godly life in the midst of human
horror. (See also Viktor Frankl’s Man’s
Search for Meaning.)
Per contra, there is Margaret Mitchell’s
Gone with the Wind, published in 1936, a
compilation and reimagining of the
Grandfather Tales. I find it unreadable,
but there is certainly nothing in American
law or culture to debar women, like men,
from writing badly.
On the subject of race I will mention
Laura Ingalls Wilder, and her beautiful
Little House on the Prairie books,
which, I understand, have recently been
denounced by the American Library
Association, or some other ship of fools,
on the basis of racism; Miss Wilder, it
seems, having used some of the lan-
guage of the pioneer days in referring to
Native Americans.
That association and its like will not,
yet, have gotten around to banning the
two authors below, their reserve, I am
sure, borne not of sloth but of ignorance.
And it may be that I, in these notes, am
exposing these two superb authors to a
notice that can only end in (may it be but
momentary) anathema.
Perhaps when the transfer of human
knowledge from print to electronics is
complete, and when the Internet in-
evitably crashes and is commandeered
by some central authority, perhaps, some
cached remnant will remain, to be dis-
covered by a future generation, which
will find itself charmed by historic evi-
dence of free expression.
These two women were pioneers,
crossing the plains in covered wagons
and living well into the 20th century.
Mari Sandoz (1896–1966) grew up in a
log cabin in Nebraska. See her reminis-
cences in Old Jules and her beautiful
novels. I mention in particular Miss
Morissa, Doctor of the Gold Trail.
Miss Sandoz was the state historian
of Nebraska. Her pioneer sister, in New
Mexico, was Agnes Morley Cleaveland.
Her No Life for a Lady is a thrilling
report of a cow-woman, rancher, genteel
gun-toting rustler, and if that don’t get
you running to Amazon I don’t know
what all.
Further, on the subject of race, I
recommend Anzia Yezierska’s Bread
Givers (1925), a harrowing tale of
Jewish immigrant women in New
York’s Lower East Side ghettos. And
recently reprinted by Penguin are two
classics on race worthy to sit beside
Native Son: See Passing (1929) and
Quicksand (1928), by Chicago’s
Nella Larsen.
The greatest war correspondent of the
20th century was Martha Gellhorn.
Collier’s sent her, just out of Vassar,
to Spain, after which she covered the
fall of Czechoslovakia, all of World War
II, and Vietnam. She is the only woman
to have landed on D-Day. She dressed
as a man, bribed her way onto a hospital
ship, and landed among the first waves,
working as a stretcher-bearer. She was
at the liberation of Dachau.
No one wrote better than
Martha Gellhorn.
Here is a list of her books that would
take you through a winter you’d hold in
memory. War correspondence: The
Face of War; short stories: The Trouble
I’ve Seen, The Heart of Another, The
Honeyed Peace; novels: A Stricken
Field, The Wine of Astonishment. This
brings us well into the 20th century,
which gave us the (currently) acknowl-
edged masterpieces of Edith Wharton
and Willa Cather, and the southern fic-
tion not only of Kate Chopin and Ellen
Glasgow but of Carson McCullers,
Harper Lee, and Flannery O’Connor.
I also mention Mary McCarthy
(1912–1989), next to whose work
Salinger’s stuff reads like a greeting
card; the heart-wrenching tragicomic
novels of Dawn Powell (1896–1965)
and of Renata Adler (b. 1937), and, of
course, the superb novels of Joyce
Carol Oates, Because It Is Bitter, and
Because It Is My Heart, etc. See also
Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold and
Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues,
both stunning reports from lesbian life,
and the wicked wisdom of Fran
Lebowitz. Here are three outliers: the
hit Broadway plays The Drag, Pleasure
Man, Diamond Lil, and Sex, by Mae
West; the whodunit by her literary sis-
ter Gypsy Rose Lee, The G-String
Murders; and the magnificent mono-
logues of Ruth Draper (1884–1956),
among the best dramatic writing of the
American Century.
I had the privilege of growing up in
the open stacks of fiction, in the
Chicago Public Library. I was free to
browse, to take down now this and now
that, to read a bit, and, if the novel did
not please, to replace it and try
again. The books there were classified
not by characteristics of the author, but
by subject.
This is the enchanting freedom of
the used-book store, where one can
browse unhampered by the idiot
hucksterism of publishers, politicals,
or academics.
Please God, may it continue.
23
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Logistics with Chinese
Characteristics
Beijing has weaponized the global supply chain
BY CHRISTOPHER R. O’DEA
EFORE 9/11, no one thought of commercial airliners as
weapons. But the attack on the Twin Towers transformed
B the air-travel system into a battlespace.
And although no one thinks of container ships as
weapons today, China is weaponizing the global supply chain. The
vessels of China’s state-owned shipping companies no longer
merely carry merchandise. Sailing to a global network of ports
under Chinese control, they’re carrying Chinese power.
China’s dominance of global manufacturing rests on a triad of
commercial capabilities that emerged as byproducts of the coun-
try’s industrialization. China developed expertise in port construc-
tion and operation, container shipping and logistics, and electronic
networks. In combination, these enabled the country to offer for-
eign companies the convenience of one-stop shopping—low-cost
production and reliable global distribution from China’s coastal
manufacturing sites. China’s port and logistics network also
enables its cyber-surveillance efforts, increases Chinese financial
This article is based on “Asia Rising: Ships of State,” Mr. O’Dea’s study of the
ir_^ jvqp
role of infrastructure investment in national power published by the Naval War
College Review.
OS ö = = w w w. n a t i o n a l r e v i e w. c o m
Text
leverage over Western countries, and provides China with a round-
the-clock presence in the global maritime domain that threatens to
limit U.S. naval access to the growing roster of commercial ports
under Chinese control.
Lucky timing helped China put this all in place. The country’s
entry into the World Trade Organization in 2001 sparked rapid
growth in manufacturing. And even as China set about exploiting
Western companies—by requiring “technology transfer” as a
condition of doing business in China, and even through outright
intellectual-property theft—Western intelligence establishments
overlooked the security implications of the nascent commercial
triad, instead focusing almost entirely on preventing further ter-
T
rorist attacks.
HE first vector of weaponization is a physical network of
ports under Chinese control in locations that provide China
with various forms of economic leverage: access to miner-
als, energy, or food; ability to deploy cyber-surveillance; and poten-
tial to deny access to U.S. naval vessels. Having built the ports that
enabled China to become the world’s manufacturing platform, and
g r iv U I O M N V
2col_QXP-1127940309.qxp 6/19/2019 1:08 AM Page 27
having completed the artificial islands China needed to secure
its claims over the South China Sea, Chinese state-owned port-
construction companies are projecting Chinese maritime power
with projects in the European Union, Latin America, East and West
Africa, the Indian Ocean, and Southeast Asia. Much attention is
focused on large greenfield projects in developing nations, but
China has built its network largely by acquiring control of up-and-
running assets that play an essential role in developed economies.
The second component is the introduction of Chinese cyber-
capabilities, including the installation of digital networks at
Chinese-controlled sites, typically by Huawei, and a subsea cable
network being built by Huawei’s marine unit that will nearly
encircle the globe by the end of this year. Chinese state-owned
companies are leading a rapid, digitally enabled consolidation of
the logistics sector—bringing together supply-chain functions
that had previously been performed by separate companies,
adopting centralized IT systems to control distribution from the
doors of factories in China to the doors of consumers in America,
and developing a wide array of technologies that can be used for
both commercial and military purposes.
The most threatening aspect of China’s commercial triad is that
the physical network of ports, ships, and terminals serves as a
force multiplier for China’s cyber-aggression. From drones that
monitor operations to facial-recognition technologies that control
access to container yards, port facilities provide nearly perfect
cover for cyber-espionage. There’s a lot going on in a seaport, and
all of it is controlled and monitored by technology that feeds
information over digital networks to buyers, sellers, regulators,
financial institutions, and transportation companies. In short,
ports are power. Power over imports and exports, power over
economic-development policies, construction, shipbuilding, land
transport, and electricity grids—and power over the digital infor-
mation needed to move goods through global supply chains that
originate in China and Southeast Asia. These critical supply lines
have increasingly come under the influence or control of a hand-
ful of Chinese state-owned companies.
This situation—call it “logistics with Chinese characteristics”—
poses a new threat to U.S. economic and national security.
China’s commercial triad creates leverage with which it can exert
sustained pressure on U.S. allies and U.S. companies to adopt or
at least acquiesce to Chinese policies. Already some allies are qui-
etly investing in Chinese expansion projects, even if they publicly
question Chinese motives and commercial practices. China’s
global logistics network will also complicate efforts to relocate
supply chains—moving a plant from China to Vietnam, for exam-
ple, might reduce exposure to Chinese IP theft but still leave a
company dependent on Chinese state-owned entities to ship its
goods to world markets.
The ongoing tariff spat should be seen as a reconnaissance mis-
sion, each side testing the other’s will and assessing the scope of
international support for their respective positions in a sustained
contest. But despite a sudden rise in anti-Chinese sentiment in
Washington, a policy that recognizes the need to confront China’s
W
commercial triad has yet to emerge.
HILE several Chinese state-owned companies are
involved in the effort, the principal architect of the
weaponization of the supply chain is China COSCO
Shipping Corporation Limited. With shipping, port-management,
and logistics divisions, COSCO has spearheaded China’s expan-
sion into the EU and Latin America, acquiring the rights to oper-
ate and develop ports and terminals for terms as long as 40 years,
typically bringing in Huawei to install new IT systems. Naval
experts in the U.S. and other countries view COSCO as the prin-
cipal logistical-support organization for the Chinese navy, and
Chinese military strategists have suggested that the growing net-
work of commercial ports will someday serve as bases for
Chinese naval vessels.
Today COSCO controls China’s main Western commercial
logistics base, in the port of Piraeus in Greece. COSCO began
investing there in 2008 and in 2016 gained control of the publicly
listed Greek company that manages the port and its development.
Demonstrating that it is serious about asserting control over its
logistics assets, COSCO wasted no time in changing the Greek
company’s bylaws to allow board meetings to be held in China, and
appointed Huawei Technologies to replace the port’s network
infrastructure with Huawei Internet routers, firewalls, and switch-
es for the port’s data center. Since 2012, the U.S. has said Huawei
equipment could be used to conduct cyber-surveillance on behalf
of the Chinese government, and it recently warned Germany and
other allies that U.S. intelligence agencies might limit intelligence-
sharing with countries that use Huawei gear in their national
telecommunications networks. It’s not clear how far the U.S. con-
cerns go, but even if Huawei gear is kept out of national phone sys-
tems, Chinese-controlled ports could serve as a back door into the
critical networks of the countries that host them.
Moving quickly to establish economic influence, COSCO
bought controlling or significant stakes in ports in Valencia,
Spain, and Vado, Italy, rapidly upgraded those facilities, and used
its shipping line to boost container volume. In 2018, ports under
Chinese control in Spain, Italy, and Greece that had previously
been faltering reported volume increases of 16 to 22 percent.
Higher container volume increases revenue to host nations,
which typically retain a share in the port’s financial performance.
It’s the definition of leverage.
COSCO’s leverage is multiplied through the Ocean Alliance,
one of three space-sharing arrangements that container lines
formed in 2016 to help one another avoid sailing partially filled
vessels. COSCO typically attributes some of the growth at its ports
in Spain, Italy, and other countries to volume from its alliance part-
ners. COSCO’s major ally in the Ocean Alliance is CMA CGM, a
privately held company based in Marseille, France, formed when
France privatized its state-owned shipping line. Chinese regulators
played a major role in pushing CMA CGM into the alliance with
COSCO. Chinese regulators scuttled a plan to form a space-sharing
alliance that CMA CGM and two other major lines proposed during
the shipping recession of 2014. China said the group would have
too much market share on the ocean routes between Asia and the
EU. In 2015, a Chinese state bank injected more than $1 billion into
CMA CGM, in a deal that included an undisclosed strategic invest-
ment in the company and required CMA CGM to buy ships and
containers from Chinese suppliers. In 2016, CMA CGM nailed its
flag to the mast of Chinese maritime expansion, signing on with the
Ocean Alliance. Despite the Ocean Alliance’s dominance of the
Asia-to-EU routes, Chinese regulators approved the arrangement.
Under the original plan, members of the Ocean Alliance were
to decide in 2022 whether to renew the deal for another five years.
But the alliance is working so well that its members couldn’t wait
that long—they met quietly in Hainan in January and agreed to
27
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extend the arrangement through 2027. The power of the alliance
hinges on one feature its competitors can’t match—Chinese state
support. Its principal members are China’s main shipping enter-
prise and a de facto French vassal company financed by China’s
state-owned lenders. If trade conflicts heat up in the future, Ocean
Alliance ships are likely to enjoy continued access to Chinese
ports that serve as the critical link between manufacturers in
China and markets around the world.
Non-Chinese shipping lines and alliances haven’t fared as well.
Japanese lines formed the ONE Alliance in 2016, and Maersk and
MSC formed the 2M Alliance. ONE had a rough start when prob-
lems adopting a new IT system caused some customers to switch
carriers; one line had to cut its fleet after announcing it would lose
almost $1 billion this year. In a sign that the Ocean Alliance’s mar-
ket position is attractive to shipping lines that are members of
other alliances, Switzerland-based MSC has made vessel-sharing
arrangements with COSCO or CMA CGM in the past several
months that will help MSC improve its services on routes from the
East Mediterranean to India, and from Northern Europe to
Australia. Perhaps that is what Xi Jinping has in mind when he says
Chinese maritime expansion is about win-win cooperation.
In the digital domain, CMA CGM’s home port of Marseille will
soon become the French connection for the globe-circling undersea
cable network being built by Huawei Marine Networks Co. Ltd. The
Chinese company that runs Hong Kong’s phone network plans to
work with Orange S.A., the former France Télécom S.A., to bring
Huawei’s undersea cable onshore in Marseille by 2020. Already
home to two data centers, the Marseille port authority plans to use
the new connection to create a major maritime data hub.
Huawei Marine’s undersea cable powers China’s physical
port network. Ahead of a meeting of leaders in late March,
Brazilian officials reportedly rebuffed warnings from their
American counterparts that Huawei equipment could be used
for cyber-espionage. After all, Brazil has become a key depot on
China’s weaponized supply chain. Last fall, Huawei completed
the undersea link from the northeast coast of Brazil to Kribi in
Cameroon; there, CMA CGM is part of a Chinese group that
began work in 2011 on a new deep-water port to handle bauxite,
iron ore, and other mineral exports. In Brazil, the Huawei cable
will support Chinese state-owned enterprises; one is building a
port for soybean exports in the northern city of São Luís, and
another has acquired the rights to operate Brazil’s most profitable
container terminal, in the southern port of Paranaguá. To aid adop-
tion of Chinese digital standards, Huawei early this year donated
5G equipment to the technical training institute in the Brazilian
state of Paraná, where the terminal is located.
The Ocean Alliance has also reached U.S. shores. In March,
CMA CGM acquired nearly 90 percent of the voting shares of
CEVA Logistics AG, a Swiss freight company that runs the
largest freight network in the U.S. It’s not clear whether the U.S.
has any recourse to review the purchase. But it’s worth a look.
The purchase gives control of a major U.S. logistics network to a
company that’s financed by Chinese state banks and whose prin-
cipal ally is the logistics arm of the Chinese navy.
Not quite 20 years after China joined the WTO, the U.S. has
wound up in a situation where American consumers’ package-
delivery fees will be subsidizing the Chinese navy’s support ships.
Meanwhile, the U.S. Navy told Congress last year that the U.S.
sealift fleet will face a modernization crisis starting after 2020 if a
replacement program can’t be started soon.
28 | w w w. n a t i o n a l r e v i e w. c o m
T HERE are signs that the U.S. recognizes the national-
security threat that Chinese logistics power poses. As a
condition of U.S. approval of COSCO’s takeover of
Orient Overseas International Limited (OOIL), the U.S.’s
Committee on Foreign Investment required COSCO to sell a
highly automated terminal that OOIL owns in the Port of Long
Beach. But more needs to be done. While the terminal was sold to
an Australian investor, COSCO pocketed a gain of more than $1
billion on the sale—a windfall the company said it will use to fur-
ther expand its logistics network. At the highest level, the U.S.
should be assessing the security of U.S. access to bases and facil-
ities in Italy, as well as to ports that have fallen under the control
of Chinese state-owned companies and their allies.
Under its authority to monitor vessel-sharing agreements, the
Federal Maritime Commission should review the extension of
the Ocean Alliance in light of consolidation in the logistics indus-
try, the weak condition of competing shipping lines, and the man-
ifest national-security aspects of the alliance’s role in China’s
maritime-power expansion. It’s also time for the U.S. to engage
allied governments and the private sector in a maritime-security
dialogue aimed at restoring U.S. and Western capabilities in the
commercial dimension of sea power. The initial aim should be to
ensure the viability of at least one of the alliances that compete
with COSCO and the Ocean Alliance. Longer-term objectives
could include slowing the pace of technological development at
Chinese shipbuilders, bolstering Western merchant-marine
training, working with allied governments and private investors
to reestablish a Western shipyard presence in the Pacific or
Southeast Asia, and devising a plan to move key supply chains
beyond the influence of China’s logistics network.
On the digital frontier, the administration needs to heed the semi-
conductor industry’s warning against agreeing to large Chinese
purchases of U.S. chips as part of a trade deal. Such purchases
would force U.S. chipmakers to revamp their supply chains so that
operations now done in other countries would be moved to China.
It’s no surprise that the idea for large Chinese chip purchases came
from China’s National Development and Reform Commission, the
architect of China’s maritime commercial triad. China has used its
regulatory powers to change the structure of the global logistics
industry and is taking a similar approach in semiconductors, with
the NDRC warning Western chipmakers not to go too far in their
efforts to comply with the latest U.S. restrictions on doing business
with Huawei. There’s no reason the U.S. should help China in-
crease its control over the global supply chain, particularly in tech-
nologies that are essential to the Huawei equipment and undersea
cables that help convert China’s network of commercial ports into
instruments of Chinese national power.
In our image-driven world, a visual aid might spark efforts to
understand the scope and impact of China’s logistics power: Media
outlets often use generic photos of container ships and ports to illus-
trate stories about trade. But China’s takeover of global supply
chains means container ships are no longer generic. The ships of
COSCO, CMA CGM, Orient Overseas, and other Ocean Alliance
members are China’s ships of state—adversarial vessels carrying
Chinese power deep into Western territory. It’s time to stop using
images of those ships without identifying their allegiance to Beijing.
Thinking of something as seemingly routine as a container
ship or cargo dock as a weapon might seem far-fetched. After all,
ports are just dots on a map. But how did we miss 9/11? No one
connected the dots.
J U LY 8 , 2 0 1 9

Josh Hawley’s
Virtue Politics
The GOP’s youngest senator has
taken aim at Big Tech and Pelagius,
among other targets
Text
BY JOHN MCCORMACK
T age 39, Josh Hawley is the youngest person seated in
the United States Senate and also the upper chamber’s
A most interesting—even puzzling—new member. A
constitutional lawyer and conservative intellectual, as
well as a populist with a paternalist streak, the Missouri GOP
freshman wears many hats. On any given day, you might see
him grilling a Trump judicial nominee about religious liberty at
a Senate committee hearing, decrying the monopolistic power
of Big Tech on Fox News, or condemning Pelagius, a fourth-
century Christian heretic who denied original sin and preached
that humans could attain salvation through their own merit, not
God’s grace.
What, exactly, you might ask, does Pelagius have to do with
American politics? At a recent commencement address at the
King’s College, a small Christian school in Manhattan,
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Hawley identified the British monk as an early proponent of a
“particular philosophy of freedom” that has come to dominate
American culture and politics for decades: “It is a philosophy of
liberation from family and tradition, of escape from God and
community, a philosophy of self-creation and unrestricted,
unfettered free choice.”
The Pelagian vision “preaches merit” but “produces elitism,”
Hawley said. “Though it proclaims liberty, it destroys the life
that makes liberty possible. Replacing it and repairing the
profound harm it has caused is one of the great challenges of our
day.” This liberationist view is the philosophy of the wealthy and
the elite, he told the students: “The people with the most choices
are the most free. And that means the rich.”
Such a concept of liberty is “disconsonant” with the ideals of
the Founders, Hawley tells me during an interview in his
Senate office. For them, genuine liberty could exist and be
understood only among independent citizens who were
fulfilling their obligations to their community. “I worry about a
country in which only a small little band of people has any real
effective control over their lives,” says Hawley, “and every-
body else lives at the mercy of others.” Hawley has an elite
background (Stanford undergraduate, Yale Law, and former
clerk to Chief Justice Roberts) but says he aims to revive the
“great American middle.”
Many Republican politicians have awkwardly attempted
to reinvent or rebrand themselves as populists in the age of
Trump. What makes Hawley unusual is that his populism—
whatever you might think about its merits—predates the
president’s election and appears authentic. In 2008, around
the time Donald Trump was donating to Hillary Clinton’s
presidential campaign, Hawley published a biography titled
Ne
Sum w Ed
me ition
r 20
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OV
2col - NEW p30_QXP-1127940309.qxp 6/19/2019 1:14 PM Page 30
“Theodore Roosevelt: Preacher of Righteousness.” In
2010, when the Tea Party and libertarianism were ascen-
dant in the GOP, Hawley was writing favorably, in an essay
for National Affairs, about the big-government “virtue pol-
itics” of Roosevelt and condemning what he described as
the “epicurean liberalism” embraced by everyone from
President Woodrow Wilson to Justice Anthony Kennedy to
NATIONAL REVIEW’s Frank Meyer, who sought to unite lib-
ertarianism and traditionalism in the 1960s under the ban-
ner of “fusionism.”
“Instead of asking how to ensure equality (as the left usually
does) or how to maximize growth (as the right usually does),
the ethic of self-determination presses us to work for an econ-
omy through which the ideal of independence can be realized:
that is, an economy that allows every worker to support him-
self by his own labor and, in so doing, improve his station in
life,” Hawley wrote in 2010. “This ambition would require a
new emphasis on opening the labor market to low-skilled
workers, as well as new efforts to boost wages and improve
H
social mobility.”
AWLEY’S populism is less of a reaction to Trump than it
is “a reaction to the forces that brought us Trump or the
forces that Trump made evident,” says conservative
scholar Yuval Levin, the editor of National Affairs. Hawley is try-
ing to “think about where a more populist conservatism could
point that is substantive, that’s policy-minded.”
Senator Hawley says that the current era is ‘characterized
by increasing concentrations of power in the American
economy, but particularly the rise of Big Tech.’
The populist Progressive era at the turn of the last century
“is very similar to ours, in terms of the sheer amount of change
and upheaval—social, economic, global,” says Hawley.
Teddy Roosevelt was asking questions about “how the people
retain control of their government.” “He was asking: What does
republican government need to survive and thrive in the 20th
century? He got progressively worse. He fell progressively
more in love with government regulation and control and
became more corporatist over time.”
The Missouri senator says that the current era is “character-
ized by increasing concentrations of power in the American
economy, but particularly the rise of Big Tech.” Asked whether
he agrees with Elizabeth Warren’s plan to break up large tech
companies, he replies: “I think there should be antitrust
scrutiny, absolutely. How should that come out? I don’t know.”
In less than six months in office, Hawley has already introduced
several bills to regulate tech companies.
One bill would establish a strict “Do Not Track” list that
would let users opt out of almost all online data tracking.
Another would allow parents to delete data profiles of their
children that companies had created. A third would ban so-called
loot boxes—which allow users to pay to win—in video games
that are marketed to minors. “This is gambling. These are casinos
essentially getting inserted into kids’ games,” Hawley says. “And
30 | w w w. n a t i o n a l r e v i e w. c o m
this speaks to a larger issue we ought to be talking about, which
is the addiction economy.”
If Hawley is introducing legislation to protect minors from
video games, doesn’t it logically follow that lawmakers should
do something to protect minors from accessing hard-core
pornography online? “It’s a good question. The thing that
makes it particularly thorny is that the Supreme Court has
weighed in on that repeatedly,” Hawley says. “There are
significant First Amendment doctrinal issues there, . . .
significant legal hurdles.” Would something like the law
recently enacted in the United Kingdom requiring adults to
prove their age in order to access hard-core pornography be
constitutional in the United States? “It might be, it might be,”
Hawley answers. “The Supreme Court hasn’t weighed in on
that particular question, to my knowledge. . . . For better or for
worse, that area of law is very fraught.”
Hawley’s most controversial contribution so far to the debate
over Big Tech is his support for changing American law in a
way that could effectively put social-media companies out of
business if they discriminate on the basis of users’ political
viewpoints. Hawley notes that Congress passed a law in 1996
(Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act) that
grants platforms immunity from liability for content posted by
users. If social-media companies are banning users in a
politically biased manner, he contends, they are making
editorial decisions and should not be granted this immunity.
“Why shouldn’t they be treated like any publisher in America if
they’re going to act like publishers?”
On the other hand, why shouldn’t some entrepreneur truly
dedicated to free speech create a new social-media platform
rather than wait for the government to tell private companies
what to do? “Good luck with that,” Hawley replies. “How would
you do that in the present environment? . . . People have tried
that. Facebook either stifles them, buys them, shuts them down,
blackballs them. Same with Google. I mean, good luck.”
Hawley isn’t content simply to complain about the political
bias of social-media companies; he wants to have a deeper
discussion about their value: “Are these platforms—the social-
media platforms in particular—are those really good for the
economy, for society, for the country? Are they really adding
anything at all?”
It’s a question Hawley has been asking in an increasingly
pointed manner during his brief tenure in the Senate. In a speech
on May 2 at the Hoover Institution, in the shadow of Silicon
Valley, Hawley portrayed social media as an addictive drug that
“only works as a business model if it consumes users’ time and
attention day after day after day.”
“Our attention spans have dulled. Our tempers have
quickened. We reduce our friends to their public presentation in
short posts. We substitute comments and ‘likes’ for phone calls
and direct human interaction. And those are the benign effects,”
he said, before noting that a rise in teenage suicide rates and
J U LY 8 , 2 0 1 9
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Senator Josh Hawley
depression rates seems correlated with the proliferation of smart-
phones. In a USA Today op-ed, Hawley called social-media
companies “parasites” and mused that we might be better off if
they simply “disappeared.”
Hawley’s diagnosis of social-media social malady seems
accurate (though I am perhaps biased, working as I do in the
field of journalism, which is populated by the worst kinds of
Twitter addict). Less persuasive is Hawley’s argument that
social-media companies are at fault for exacerbating deeply
rooted social problems. A populist politician might not wish to
say it, but it is largely human nature (the pride, envy, wrath,
and plain old stupidity of users), not the greed of the tech
titans, that makes instantaneous self-publishing technology
H
inherently toxic.
AWLEY ’ S broader economic agenda is still taking
shape, but it is a clear break from the more business-
friendly and fiscally conservative Republican party
of a decade ago. He has introduced legislation with Florida
senator Rick Scott that would prohibit drug companies from
charging higher prices in America than they do in Canada and
some European countries. Hawley dismisses the argument
that this could stifle innovation: “Pharma is turning a nice
healthy profit in Europe as well,” he says. He has also signed
on to Arkansas senator Tom Cotton’s RAISE Act, which
would cut legal-immigration numbers in half, in order to
boost the wages of the working class. In his 2010 National
Affairs essay, Hawley argued that the early-20th-century
“immigrant boom placed acute downward pressure on wages
ALEX WONG/STAFF/GETTY IMAGES
and strained cities’ social infrastructures.” He hasn’t de-
veloped a specific tax-reform agenda but cites reinvestment
and education as his top priorities in that arena. A critic of
outsourcing, he wouldn’t rule out punishing companies that
send jobs overseas.
From 2011 to 2015, congressional Republicans almost
unanimously backed Paul Ryan’s plan to reform Medicare for
Americans under the age of 55 (while keeping the program as
it is for older Americans). Hawley wouldn’t say whether he
supports it: “I’d have to go back and look at it.” Is entitlement
reform an essential part of reining in national debt? “Where I
would start with reining in the national debt is: We need to do
something about Obamacare,” Hawley replies.
Asked about Hawley’s putting entitlement reform on the
back burner, Yuval Levin points to the populism. One of its
risks is “avoiding enormous problems because they aren’t what
voters want to talk about,” he says. “Some of politics is helping
voters get what they want. And some is leading voters to see
problems they’re inclined to want to ignore.”
Hawley represents one possible path forward for
Republicans—one vision of what a future Trumpism without
Trump might look like. It’s entirely possible that the GOP after
Trump, whether in two years or six, could turn toward a strain
of populism that is less socially conservative than what the
brightest rising star in the new class of GOP senators has to offer.
It could even turn away from populism and return to Reaganism,
as the House GOP’s brightest rising star, 35-year-old Texas
congressman Dan Crenshaw, would like it to do.
But Hawley, as a source of intellectual and policy ferment on
the right, demands attention. “It’s an exciting time in history—in
American history and also in the history of the conservative
movement,” he says. “The post-war period that really defined
modern conservatism and the modern conservative movement,
that period is over. . . . If the 2016 election makes anything clear,
it’s that that world is over.” The interesting question, Hawley
says, “is what comes next.”
Hawley will be free to think through that question for the next
few years without any immediate electoral considerations. He
won’t face his next election until 2024. The only question is
which office he will be seeking.
31

Lessons from
The Iraq War
Its defenders were wrong–and so
were its critics
Text
BY HAL BRANDS &
PETER D. FEAVER
Iraq War is the war that never ended. That’s true
HE
literally, in that U.S. troops are still in Iraq some 16
T years after the American invasion, and figuratively,
in that recriminations over Iraq—why the United
States invaded, what went wrong, whether different outcomes
were possible—continue to influence U.S. foreign policy and
domestic politics to this day. The Iraq War has been a signifi-
cant issue in every presidential election since it began in 2003.
It has cast a shadow over every subsequent discussion of
whether, where, and how the United States should use force. It
has inflamed debates over whether America should recommit
itself to an ambitious internationalism or pull back from the
Middle East and perhaps the broader world. It has haunted
American statecraft.
But it is not clear what America has actually learned from
Iraq. Former Iraq War supporters—mostly but not exclusive-
ly Republicans—have hesitated to admit some hard truths:
that the war was a strategic mistake, that it was flawed not
just in initial execution but in conception, that it inflicted an
enormous human and financial toll (far beyond what its sup-
porters predicted), and that it set off a cascade of damaging
consequences that plagued U.S. policy in the Middle East and
far beyond.
Yet critics of the war—mostly but not exclusively
Democrats—have also failed to face some inconvenient facts:
that the war was not based on lies or malevolent motives, but
rather on a good-faith effort to confront a significant if over-
estimated threat; that the surge of 2007–08 succeeded in
bringing the strategic goal of the war—a stable, friendly,
democratic Iraq—within reach; and that the precipitate with-
drawal from Iraq in 2011 was an avoidable strategic blunder
that undercut American policy in the Middle East and far
beyond. A more honest reckoning with the Iraq War begins
with the long-overdue recognition that neither the war’s sup-
porters nor its critics have had a monopoly on either wisdom
or folly.
Mr. Brands is the Henry A. Kissinger Distinguished Professor of Global Affairs at
the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and a scholar at the
American Enterprise Institute. From 2015 to 2016, he served as a special assistant
to the secretary of defense for strategic planning. Mr. Feaver is a professor of political
science and public policy and the director of the Program in American Grand Strategy
at Duke University. From 2005 to 2007, he was a special adviser for strategic
planning and institutional reform at the National Security Council.
PO ö = = w w w. n a t i o n a l r e v i e w. c o m
Such a reckoning is critical to getting U.S. foreign policy right
today. Understanding the limits of U.S. power and the dangers
inherent in major military interventions—something that sup-
porters of the war failed to do—is a prerequisite to keeping
America engaged and effective in a world where new dangers
abound. Yet understanding that squandering the hard-won gains
in Iraq was also a blunder—and that the dangers of overlearning
the lessons of that conflict are as grave as the dangers of under-
learning them—is equally fundamental. For years after 2003,
some of America’s biggest foreign-policy headaches could be
traced to the decision to topple Saddam Hussein regardless of
the consequences. For years after that, however, the desire to
avoid another Iraq, regardless of the consequences, produced
major headaches of its own. The costs of both mistakes have
been far too great.
There are no two ways about it: The Iraq War was a tragic mis-
What Republicans Need to Admit about Iraq
take. The war was waged on premises that proved to be faulty
or false: that the threat posed by Saddam Hussein’s weapons
programs was growing and urgent, that the post-war stabiliza-
tion and democratization of Iraq could be accomplished quick-
ly and on the cheap, and that taking down Saddam’s regime
could cause a democratic chain reaction throughout the Middle
East. It was also informed by a hubris that resulted from the
unexpectedly quick and seemingly decisive victory over al-
Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan, which led the Bush
administration to dismiss many warnings from outside
observers about the impending showdown with Iraq. As these
premises and illusions collapsed following the invasion, the
United States found that it had stumbled into a conflict in
which the benefits were lower than expected and the costs
were far higher. Those costs, in lives and treasure alike, made
punch lines of the Bush administration’s pre-war optimism.
Matters only got worse for years after March 2003, as the
administration’s failure to adequately prepare for or rapidly
adapt to the challenges of stabilizing Iraq left American forces
stuck in an intensifying maelstrom.
In fairness, not every post-invasion decision was wrongheaded
or disastrous. Against formidable odds, U.S. officials managed to
keep the prominent Shia ayatollah Ali al-Sistani from urging his
followers to violently oppose the American occupation, which
would have made matters in Iraq vastly worse. And some of the
decisions that backfired most severely by alienating the Sunnis—
such as disbanding the Iraqi military and pursuing aggressive
de-Baathification—were rooted in an understandable need to
appease Iraq’s majority Shia population. But the mistakes were
numerous, and debilitating in their cumulative effect.
As the United States became bogged down in Iraq, a range of
other foreign-policy problems worsened. U.S. officials had
hoped that invading Iraq would further defang the terrorist threat
and deter would-be sponsors of terrorism. Instead, the Iraq War
served as a rallying point for al-Qaeda and its partners, reviving
a jihadist movement that had been pummeled in Afghanistan.
Meanwhile, Iran achieved unprecedented influence within Iraq
and throughout much of the Middle East, filling the vacuum the
war had created. After briefly pausing when the Iraq War looked
like it might be a rapid success and Iran might be the next target,
Tehran also accelerated its nuclear program, taking advantage of
American distraction. The regional Sunni–Shia split became
g r iv U I O M N V
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fiercer and more violent, exacerbating a conflict that continues to
threaten regional stability. And as the military situation deterio-
rated in Afghanistan, the United States—increasingly consumed
by the turmoil in Iraq—could not spare the resources or attention
to stabilize that country, either.
The spillover effects of the Iraq War reached far beyond the
greater Middle East. North Korea drew the lesson that Saddam’s
mistake had been in moving too slowly to develop nuclear
weapons. The Kim dynasty ramped up its nuclear program, con-
fident that a distracted United States could not make it stop.
Because of the U.S. commitment in Iraq, President Bush found
his options limited in dealing with several other major crises that
erupted on his watch, from mass atrocities in Sudan to Russia’s
invasion of Georgia. The fact that the Iraq War had caused bitter
disputes within NATO, and dramatically depleted American
prestige and soft power, made these and other problems still more
difficult to manage. Not least, Iraq diverted resources—including
the most precious resource of a senior leader: focus—from the
Bush administration’s effort to hedge against the rise of an
assertive, autocratic China.
Fortunately, the Iraq quagmire and associated distractions did
not bring America fully or permanently to its knees. The Bush
administration eventually restored functioning relations with
key European allies, made important strategic moves, such as
building a friendship with India, and laid some of the ground-
work for policies that the Obama administration later rebranded
as the “Asia pivot.” Greatly revitalized aid and development
programs, especially the unprecedented U.S. efforts to fight
malaria and AIDS, offset some of the soft-power setbacks
caused by Iraq. And by the end of his tenure, Bush had signifi-
cantly weakened al-Qaeda in Iraq—all while avoiding another
mass-casualty attack on the U.S. homeland. Nevertheless, for
years after the invasion in March 2003, the Iraq War was the
geopolitical wound that kept on bleeding, weakening American
foreign policy across issues large and small.
Yet perhaps the greatest damage was done not abroad but at
home. Over time, the struggle in Iraq contributed to a growing
doubt about America’s capacity for competent leadership and
effective action, pessimism about the vitality of American val-
ues and ideals, a weakening of foreign-policy bipartisanship in
Congress and among the public, and a powerful feeling of
exhaustion and even decline within the country as a whole—a
sense, as Condoleezza Rice later acknowledged, that America
was simply “out of steam.” All this was before the Great
Recession added its own body blow to the confidence of
Americans and further weakened domestic enthusiasm for a
globally engaged foreign policy. The Iraq War was not—as one
critic has alleged—as disastrous a blunder as the Nazi invasion of
the Soviet Union in 1941. But it certainly qualifies as one of the
costliest U.S. foreign-policy decisions of the post–Cold War era.
For many Americans, of course, these critiques of the Iraq War
are not controversial. After all, the two presidents who have fol-
lowed George W. Bush—one Democratic, one Republican—
both ran on foreign-policy platforms that treated the war as
strategic folly. Some prominent individuals who initially backed
the war—from both inside and outside government—have sub-
sequently acknowledged that they erred in doing so. And a major-
ity of the American public long ago concluded that the Iraq War
was a mistake. Even so, a number of Republicans—both Bush-
administration veterans and others who supported the war—have
hesitated to face up to its legacy. This failure has been apparent
in the positions taken by National Security Adviser John
Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Both officials
continue to argue, explicitly or implicitly, for regime change in
Iran—perhaps even forcible regime change—despite the danger
that such an endeavor could prove even more costly than the
American misadventure in Iraq. And the Trump administration
spent much of 2018 and 2019 dramatically ramping up tensions
with Tehran, despite the danger that doing so could provoke
another damaging conflict America cannot afford.
The fact that the Iraq War was wrong, however, does not mean
What Democrats Need to Admit about Iraq
that all critiques of it are right. For starters, many members of the
anti-war camp are wedded to a false narrative about the origins of
the war—a simplistic “Bush lied, people died” myth that is high-
ly misleading about the threat Iraq posed, the inherent limits of
pre-war intelligence, and the Bush administration’s motives in
launching the war. They say it was done to distract the American
public from domestic failures, or as a payoff to the oil industry.
They use evidence developed after the invasion, when the
United States had unimpeded access to Iraqi territory and regime
insiders, to pretend that it should have been obvious that pre-war
intelligence estimates were overstating the Iraqi threat.
Barack Obama captured this distorted view well in the oft-
invoked 2002 speech that launched him to national prominence:
What I am opposed to is the attempt by political hacks like Karl
Rove to distract us from a rise in the uninsured, a rise in the poverty
rate, a drop in the median income—to distract us from corporate
scandals and a stock market that has just gone through the worst
month since the Great Depression. That’s what I’m opposed to. A
dumb war. A rash war. A war based not on reason but on passion,
not on principle but on politics.
Not all of the war’s initial critics alleged bad faith and outright
deception by the administration, of course. Some were simply
unpersuaded that the use of force was the best available option for
combating the Iraqi threat. Nonetheless, the more extreme ver-
sion of the anti-war critique was prominent at the time—and
remains prominent more than 15 years after the fact.
It is a gross misrepresentation to claim that the Bush admin-
istration did not sincerely believe that Iraq posed a serious
threat to U.S. interests, or that the Iraq War was a cynical
attempt to deflect attention from Enron or weak stock-market
numbers. On the contrary, the Bush administration believed the
consensus view of our intelligence community (and those of
key allies) that Iraq still possessed significant stockpiles of
weapons of mass destruction and retained ambitions to recon-
stitute lost WMD capabilities, and that the problem was get-
ting worse the longer Saddam was not subject to U.N.
inspections. The evidence uncovered by the invasion and the
subsequent interrogation of Iraqi officials showed that the
administration was wrong to believe the more pessimistic esti-
mates about the nature of that arsenal. But the evidence also
showed that the administration was right to believe that
Saddam was gaming the system, that he was planning a WMD
build-up once he got out from under the sanctions (which were
rapidly eroding), and that Iraq had explored ways of cooperat-
ing with al-Qaeda (and vice versa)—and had indeed cooperated
with myriad other terrorist organizations—in the years prior.
33
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In 1998, these assessments had led the House of Repre-
sentatives to vote 360–38, the Senate to pass by unanimous con-
sent, and President Clinton to sign into law the Iraqi Liberation
Act, which stated that “it should be the policy of the United States
to support efforts to remove the regime headed by Saddam
Hussein from power in Iraq and to promote the emergence of a
democratic government to replace that regime.” This was not an
authorization for war; the assumption was that regime change
would be pursued mostly through covert operations and diplo-
matic pressure. But it was an unambiguous statement that
Saddam was a threat and that regime change was America’s goal.
In the post-9/11 environment, of course, concerns about
Saddam’s intentions and capabilities were understandably even
greater. In hindsight, we now know that the Iraqi threat was not
as urgent as the Bush administration claimed in 2002. Yet we
also know that it was a threat that would have gotten worse as
the inspections-and-sanctions regime collapsed—and that
before the Bush administration decided to confront Saddam
directly in mid 2002, non-military means of solving or even
containing that problem, such as tightening sanctions or seek-
ing to overthrow Saddam by means short of war, were becom-
ing ever less promising.
To be sure, critics inside and outside the administration who
warned that the war might go poorly turned out to be prescient
in many respects. Some of the many crippling problems—the
creation of a security vacuum after the collapse of the Iraqi
state, the failure of occupying forces to rapidly provide key ser-
vices to the Iraqi people, and others—might have been avoided
with better pre-war planning and wiser decision-making fol-
lowing the invasion. The searing official history produced by
the U.S. Army points to many tantalizing what-ifs that might
have produced better outcomes. But it seems likely, as scholars
such as Daniel Byman have argued, and as anti-war critics
warned at the time, that the invasion itself was such a high-risk
endeavor that it was almost certain to encounter serious diffi-
culties of one sort or another.
Later decisions by President Bush, however, most promi-
nently the decision to undertake the so-called surge, which
adopted a population-centric counterinsurgency strategy sup-
ported by 30,000 additional troops, put the Iraq War on a much
more promising trajectory. The most systematic study of this
turnaround, conducted by the political scientists Stephen
Biddle, Jacob Shapiro, and Jeffrey Friedman, is unambiguous.
It shows that the surge was critical to exploiting other positive
developments—namely, overreach by al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI)
and the resulting “awakening” of Sunni tribes. The outcome was
to break the cycle of sectarian violence, deal severe blows to
AQI and the broader insurgency, and create space for the nascent
political reconciliation and progress that had begun to occur by
2007–08. The Iraq War may have been a strategic mistake, but it
was a mistake that the United States had gone some distance
toward correcting by the close of Bush’s presidency.
Here is where the anti-war side of the debate has yet to fully
reckon with the facts. Bush’s surge decision was a gamble, but it
was a gamble that paid off much better than the critics claimed.
Moreover, it was a gamble that was opposed by virtually every-
one who had opposed the Iraq War initially—people who argued
strenuously that holding that position gave them special wisdom
on all matters relating to the war. Some opponents, in Congress
and the anti-war movement, did not just warn that the surge
34 | w w w. n a t i o n a l r e v i e w. c o m
might not pan out; they also mobilized all the weapons in their
political arsenal in an attempt to thwart the surge in 2007 before
it could even be tried.
Much of this opposition to the surge was based on sincere
beliefs and reasonable (or seemingly reasonable) premises: that
the war had been a mistake from the outset, that the Bush admin-
istration had so badly mismanaged the conflict before late 2006
that it had lost credibility on the subject, that the infusion of
another 30,000 troops was unlikely to dramatically alter the
course of events, that no amount of military success could make
a meaningful difference given the broken, sectarian politics of
Iraq, and therefore that the best course was simply to end the war
as quickly as possible. Politics were also involved: As two promi-
nent critics of the surge, Senators Barack Obama and Hillary
Clinton, later acknowledged in a private conservation described
in Secretary of Defense Robert Gates’s memoirs, they opposed
the surge with an eye to the 2008 presidential election.
Yet motives aside, war critics were wrong to so quickly oppose
the surge—and were especially wrong to advocate a U.S. with-
drawal that almost certainly would have led to intensifying sec-
tarian violence and a dramatic setback for American interests in
the Middle East. The country and, ironically, Bush’s successor,
Barack Obama, were fortunate that the anti-surge effort failed
and Bush’s gamble was given a chance to succeed.
Because of that success, Obama inherited a situation in which
Iraq was stabilizing and habits of political tolerance and compro-
mise were slowly but clearly emerging. The government of Nouri
al-Maliki, while far from perfect, was exercising power in a
much more constructive and non-sectarian way than it would
later, once American influence had dissipated and the U.S. secu-
rity blanket had been pulled away. The trends were indisputably
positive, and it was becoming possible to achieve the goal of an
Iraq that could “govern itself, sustain itself, and defend itself”—
the objective, repeated in multiple speeches, that Bush set for his
second term. The success of the surge also allowed Obama to
relax his campaign promise to get out of Iraq as fast as possible.
Instead, he adopted—at least initially—a slower drawdown plan
quite similar to the one Bush had developed in 2008.
Unfortunately, the gains in Iraq, while real, proved to be
reversible. Subsequent mistakes by the Obama administration
eroded the achievements of the surge and contributed to an
unraveling that brought Iraq, in 2014, to the brink of a collapse
even more catastrophic than what had been conceivable in 2006.
The problem arose because Obama ultimately abandoned the
policy trajectory he had inherited—a gradual drawdown to be
followed by a sustainable, long-term presence of U.S. military
forces to advise and assist their Iraqi partners—and instead
implemented a complete withdrawal of all U.S. military forces
from Iraq at the end of 2011.
At the time, Obama boasted that with this complete with-
drawal, he was “leaving behind a sovereign, stable, and self-
reliant Iraq.” When the withdrawal backfired and Iraq slipped
back into chaos, with invading columns of the Islamic State (for-
merly AQI) knocking at Baghdad’s door, Obama-administration
officials claimed they had had no choice but to go down to zero
because U.S. government lawyers had insisted on guarantees that
U.S. forces would not be subject to prosecution in Iraqi courts—
assurances that the Iraqi parliament did not provide. (The assur-
ances were, instead, guaranteed only by the Iraqi prime minister,
a level of protection that U.S. lawyers believed was deficient.)
J U LY 8 , 2 0 1 9
2col_QXP-1127940309.qxp 6/19/2019 1:08 AM Page 35
U.S. Marines on patrol in Fallujah, Iraq, 2006
Defenders of the administration also claimed that Obama was
merely fulfilling the terms of the 2008 Status of Forces Agree-
ment (SOFA), which supposedly bound the United States to
withdraw its troops at the end of 2011.
The latter justification is unpersuasive, given that Obama him-
self initially sought to negotiate an extension of the SOFA, the
same course of action the Bush administration had always envi-
sioned. The former justification lost some of its persuasiveness
when Obama ordered U.S. troops back into Iraq in 2014 under
essentially the terms that had been on offer in 2011. What seems
obvious in retrospect, however, is that the president’s longstand-
ing opposition to the Iraq War drove his desire to be done with
that conflict in 2011—and that the understandable and sincere
desire to avoid the mistake of “doing another Iraq War” con-
tributed to his reluctance to counter the resurgence of the Islamic
State prior to its devastating romp across western and northern
Iraq in 2013–14. Having regenerated and grown rapidly as a
result of the Syrian civil war, AQI rebranded itself and surged
back into Iraq. Without U.S. backing, the Iraqi security forces
collapsed in Mosul. By the time the United States reengaged in
Iraq in the summer of 2014, only the significant use of American
combat power (as well as the more problematic contributions of
Iranian-backed militias) could forestall defeat.
By the time the U.S. intervened, however, the damage was
done. ISIS had reinvigorated the global terrorist movement.
The goal of countering Iranian influence in the region had suf-
fered a major setback: Iranian sway in Iraq and beyond had
become even more pervasive, reversing the gains Washington
had made as a result of the surge. American partners in the
ALVARO YBARRA ZAVALA/GETTY IMAGES
region had grown skeptical that the United States was still com-
mitted to playing a decisive role there. Nor did the problems in
the Middle East stay in the Middle East. ISIS conducted or
inspired a new wave of terrorist attacks in Europe and, to a less-
er extent, the United States; those attacks, combined with the
flood of refugees created by the Syrian civil war, triggered a
populist backlash that continues to roil European politics. And
for all the talk of a pivot to Asia, U.S. policy was once again
mired in an effort to play catch-up in the Middle East, sucking
up time, attention, and resources that were needed elsewhere.
The subsequent campaign against ISIS repaired some of this
damage, but only belatedly and at significant cost.
If war supporters should admit their errors in breaking Iraq,
war opponents should admit that once the war started and
Iraq was broken, it was critical not to lose or walk away prema-
turely. For although the decision to topple Saddam had negative
consequences that flowed far and wide, so did a U.S. withdrawal
that was rooted at least partly in an abiding opposition to the
decision to go to war.
Getting the Iraq story right is not simply a matter of historical
Why Iraq Is Still Important
accuracy; it is a matter of national security today and in the
future. Bad arguments about the Iraq War contaminate the mar-
ketplace of ideas at just the moment when America needs a
robust, healthy debate about how best to meet foreign-policy
challenges, from surging great-power revisionism to the
decline of democracy and the ascendance of authoritarianism.
Lingering rancor and polemical arguments over the Vietnam
War continued to undercut American statecraft for years after
that conflict ended. Until the United States arrives at a more
balanced—and honest—assessment of the Iraq War, it will be
hobbled and divided as it faces an increasingly dangerous,
fracturing world.
Skeptics of American foreign policy within the academy
continually refer to the Iraq War as an example of hubris and
hegemonic tendencies that can be controlled only by pulling
back significantly not just from the Middle East but from
the wider world. Within the political sphere, figures as
diverse as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Donald Trump have
used the domestic anger and disillusion sown by the war as an
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opportunity to impugn the broader, more constructive tradition
of American internationalism. These critics have discovered
that reductio ad iraqum is an effective debating ploy: Claim,
regardless of the merit, that a proposed policy is “another Iraq”
or is “supported by those who supported the Iraq War,” and no
reasoned argument is needed.
Yet having a healthy debate on U.S. foreign policy will also
require politicians and public intellectuals to stop perpetuating
the myth that the Iraq War was not simply a mistake but a con-
flict that was launched on the basis of lies and deplorable
motives. This sort of historical revisionism bears obvious simi-
larities to the “merchants of death” thesis about World War I—
the idea, which took hold in the 1930s, that the United States
went to war to serve the interests of arms manufacturers and
lending houses. That school of thought contributed to American
isolationism and inaction as dangers gathered in Europe and
Asia. The “Bush lied, people died” thesis similarly undermines
support for the engaged foreign policy America needs in deal-
ing with looming threats today.
Finally, getting U.S. foreign policy right requires acknowl-
edging that the “no more Iraqs” impulse, understandable as it is,
can itself be harmful to American interests. That type of think-
ing ran through much of Obama’s foreign policy, not just his
decision to withdraw from Iraq. It influenced his decision to
couple the surge of U.S. troops in Afghanistan in 2009 with a
simultaneous announcement that those troops would begin
withdrawing 18 months later; his determination to avoid U.S.
military commitments for the stabilization of Libya in 2011
after overthrowing Qaddafi’s regime; his resistance to interven-
ing more forcefully in Syria; and his general sense that America
needed a more restrained foreign policy to ensure that it did not
once again do “stupid” things.
The merits of these various policies can be debated. Reason-
able and well-informed people disagree, for instance, on
whether earlier and more robust intervention in the current
Syria conflict would have led to a better outcome or just failure
at a higher price. What can be said, however, is that the policies
Obama pursued in the shadow of the Iraq War had real costs in
their own right: undermining the efficacy of the U.S. surge and
the prospects for successful negotiations in Afghanistan;
decapitating the Qaddafi regime without taking prudent mea-
sures to put Libya back together; losing the ability to meaning-
fully mitigate the geopolitical and humanitarian catastrophe in
Syria or prevent Iran and Russia from gaining the advantage
there; and putting the United States in a comparatively passive
posture as the international environment deteriorated from
Europe to the Asia-Pacific.
Today, the Trump administration’s policies in the Middle
East are so chaotic that America may be in danger of ignoring
all the key lessons of the Iraq War. The administration’s hawk-
ish posturing toward Iran has raised concerns that Washington
may launch (or stumble into) another major war in the Middle
East. And yet the president’s own behavior toward the region
suggests that he is simultaneously courting the opposite error:
failing to pursue the reasonable, prudent policies that might
protect U.S. interests in an age of enduring terror. Trump has
openly talked about walking away from Afghanistan, under-
mining his own negotiating team as it seeks a diplomatic bar-
gain that would allow disengagement on tolerable terms.
Likewise, he announced on Twitter his desire to conduct an
36 | w w w. n a t i o n a l r e v i e w. c o m
unplanned, uncoordinated, and unconditional withdrawal from
Syria, thus handing Iran and Russia a major geostrategic advan-
tage and dissipating any U.S. diplomatic leverage.
Of course, there are credible arguments to be made in favor of
winding down U.S. military operations in the greater Middle
East at a time of surging great-power rivalry; there are also sure
to be damaging consequences, from a probable ISIS resurgence
to declining American influence in a region of continuing strate-
gic importance. Yet in defending these moves, Trump talks
breezily about not fighting “endless wars” and repeatedly
invokes the reductio ad iraqum of mentioning the invasion of
Iraq, blithely ignoring how the reckless attempt to “end” the Iraq
War without leaving behind a stable Iraq produced many of the
very strategic threats that bedevil the region today. His adminis-
tration calls this “principled realism,” but it is really just debating
tricks. It is understandable to wish that the United States had
never invaded Iraq; it is foolish to allow an exaggerated Iraq syn-
W
drome to prevent us from dealing with the world as it really is.
E still have much to learn about the Iraq War. As his-
torians write and rewrite the history of that conflict in
the coming years, some issues that looked black-and-
white at the time will come to appear in shades of gray. We do not
pretend to have a monopoly on wisdom about the Iraq War our-
selves. But we are certain that the prevailing debate distorts the
historical record and harms American foreign policy.
When President Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq in 2003, he
outlined as America’s goal an Iraq that was at peace with its
neighbors, an ally against terrorism, and reasonably stable and
democratic. One of the most remarkable—yet unremarked—
aspects of the Iraq debate is that for all the errors that plagued
U.S. policy in 2003 and after, this goal may actually still be
reachable. Iraq in 2019 is for the most part at peace with its
neighbors and an ally against terrorism. It is reasonably demo-
cratic, although illiberal and sectarian tendencies remain promi-
nent and stability remains precarious. Iraq is certainly not a U.S.
ally against Iran, as some Bush-administration officials hoped it
would be, but neither is it a lost cause in the struggle to contain
Iranian influence.
Admittedly, what progress has been made in these areas has
been modest, tenuous, and vastly more expensive than President
Bush promised. And none of this necessarily justifies the original
decision to go to war. But Iraq in 2019 is far closer to the objec-
tive America initially sought than was the case in, say, Vietnam
in 1979. What all this means is that America may still have the
chance to turn Iraq into a muddled and partial success that cost
far too much, rather than—like Vietnam—a decisive and even
more costly defeat.
Vietnam haunted U.S. foreign policy for decades and argu-
ably still casts its shadow to this day. The stakes are too high to
let polemical, politicized, or problematic arguments about the
Iraq War similarly contaminate the public debate. Simply put, if
it was a tragic error to invade Iraq, it would be equally tragic to
allow overheated critiques of the war to distort U.S. foreign pol-
icy at a time when dangers are gathering and the pax Americana
is experiencing severe pressures both at home and abroad. With
a little more candor on both sides, America might still avoid this
fate in time to meet the real threats and opportunities we face,
not just in Iraq but around the world.
J U LY 8 , 2 0 1 9
 Athwart
Plowing the Web
RUMP gives a speech in Iowa, says some-
thing, Fox drops the feed. Vox writer Aaron
T Rupar tweets: “Beyond parody—Fox Busi-
ness cuts away from Trump’s speech right
after he laments, bizarrely, that tractors can’t hook up to
the internet.”
It’s as if he thought they hit the kill switch because Fox
has a standing rule about cutting away from the president
when he enters Spontaneous Rumination Mode. What?
Tractors connecting to the Internet? Did that go out? Tell
me that didn’t go out!
“That might have made it out,” the producer says with
a tremulous voice, “but the part where he said the
threshing machines were like Pac-Man, going down
rows and eating things, and asked the farmers whether
they were pursued by small colored ghosts, I think we
shut off by then.”
“Sir!” the social-media intern says. “A Vox reporter
heard him say the part about the tractors.”
“Vox?” The Fox producer goes pale. “Of all the people
to hear that, why did it have to be Vox? How are we ever
going to come back from this?”
The Vox reporter was speaking for the rest of the
chattering types who live in the urban bubble. And by
“bubble,” we mean a steel bathysphere that can descend
to the bottom of the Mariana Trench without admitting
a molecule of the surrounding water into the pressur-
ized interior.
Apparently the Vox idea of a farmer comes directly
from Green Acres, where tractors belch smoke and go
rapita-rapita-rapita, and the farmer dude sits bouncing on
a metal butt-bucket, gripping a steering wheel the diame-
ter of tympani, chewing on a stalk of wheat while he
plows the earth with his, er, plow? Is that what it’s called?
Man, those farmers have a real complex language, don’t
they. I will plow with the plow and then I will get in my
truck and truck to town.
Idiots, the Voxy writer thinks. Trump voters, all of
them. Good thing they’re getting screwed by tariffs, and
ha ha they’re all welfare queens now getting subsidies
from that dad-blang’d gummint they hate so much. Welp,
better get started on that piece about how the Democrats
can find a message to win over the rural areas.
The reporter was quickly corrected in Twitter replies by
people who pointed out the necessity of Internet connec-
tions for modern agriculture. No, they do not say, “Alexa,
how high is the corn?” and Alexa, using the Internet, does
not reply, “The corn is as high as an elephant’s eye.”
Not that farmers need the Internet the way modern
urbanites do. Your average Vox writer’s Internet search
history probably has things like “Do I need the socket’s
consent when screwing in a light bulb?” Self-reliance,
Mr. Lileks blogs at Lileks.com.
BY JAMES LILEKS Text
for this cohort, is when you walk to the take-out place
instead of having DoorDash deliver to your apartment.
If you look at a farmer’s search history, it does not have
things like “How to remove arm caught in auger,”
because they know from the start that that is a thing to
be avoided.
Of course, if the farmers were smart, they would be in
big cities writing pieces for websites like BuzzFeed,
home of such deathless journalism as “eat five of these
sixteen Madagascar beetle species and we’ll tell you
which Disney Prince you’ll marry.” (There are similar
quizzes for women.) In fact, BuzzFeed recently cast an
approving eye towards the mysterious interior of the
country and celebrated a Good Ol’ Country Boy who dec-
orated his pickup for Pride Month, the seemingly 52-
week-long festival of rainbow branding.
“On June 6,” the story said, “he decorated his truck with
rainbow duct tape and mailbox letters that spell out ‘NOT
ALL COUNTRY BOYS ARE BIGOTS. HAPPY PRIDE MONTH.’”
Since we’re about a year or two away from a truck-
maker running Pride ads that say “We don’t care whether
you like a stick or prefer an automatic or whether you’re
more comfortable with a hybrid, if you know what we
mean. Just be yourself. Ford. Celebrating whatever road
you take” or something, Truck Guy isn’t exactly that
brave, but you’d think he was like a Democrat in 1944
adding school desegregation to the national platform.
From their giving him an attaboy for saying, in
essence, that most country boys are bigots, you might
infer they think most of your Bubba demographic sits
around listening to Hank Williams—Junior, that is, not
his Commie papa—peeling off beer-bottle labels with
their thumbnails, waitin’ for their pack leader to stand,
adjust his belt buckle, and say, “Well, boys, I say we can
sit here all night and drink, or we can subsume our latent
homosexual urges by projecting our fears onto a vulner-
able member of the community. Who’s up for lettin’ the
air out of the tires of that fella what teaches thee-ater o’er
at the schoolhouse?”
“I don’t know, Billy. What if he makes an advance?
What if’n he comes out dressed like a girl? I seen them
cartoons where Bugs Bunny dresses like a girl and they
always made me feel kinda funny, and not in a bad way.”
“Don’t worry, buddy, I got your back.”
“Yeah, well, what if he says that, too?”
Recently AgSec Sonny Perdue spoke to a meeting of
employees of two Agriculture Department research
agencies, and they turned their back on him. Why?
Because he’d proposed moving the offices from D.C. to
(gasp) Kansas City, where they’ll be closer to, you know,
agriculture. It’s like the czar sending you to Siberia. You
know who’s probably hardest hit?
The people whose job it was to get broadband to rural
areas. Job security, as long as it never got there.
37
Text The Long View
Deleted Material,
December 7, 1941:
“Totally lousy day. Just . . . just
like the totally worst day. And in the
future, people will be, like, That
must have been a crappy day for
those people and—”
Sound: coughing
“Are you kidding? Can you
please—who was that? Was that
Stimson? Stimson? Can you just—
can somebody get Stimson a Sucret
or something? No, no, we need to do
this again, okay? I’ll tighten it up,
too. Just feels, just not like, like, stir-
ring enough, you know? It’s just
flabby and I just want it more like,
like crackly radio noises and then I
say something like, ‘Yesterday,
December 7, 1941—a date which
will live in infamy—the United
States of America was suddenly and
deliberately attacked by naval and
air forces of the Empire of Japan.’
Oooh. That’s good. Give me a sec to
write that down. And then we’ll do
another take. Okay?”
Unusable Material,
March 15, 44 B.C.:
“Can I have everybody’s attention,
please? Just for a moment? And then
I promise I will let you guys go back
to your whatevers and . . . Hello?
Can I just . . . Hello? I just have a few
short prepared remarks—”
Sound: hand under armpit, laugh-
ter
“Okay, who was that? That’s just
rude. If you don’t want to be here,
there’s the door, okay? No one is
forcing anyone to—hello? Can I just
. . . Come on, guys! Seriously?
38 | w w w. n a t i o n a l r e v i e w. c o m
Friends, Romans, countrymen! Lend
me your—”
Unused Audio, Thursday,
November 19, 1863:
“. . . let me see, maybe 80-plus
years? I want to say, 80 and some
change years ago? Don’t quote me
on the exact dates—dates aren’t my
thing, but I know we can say it was a
long time ago, okay? When the
country was made by the guys back
then and the Constitution and the
whole bit, that shebang, with the Bill
of Rights, which was a very good
document, really a superb . . . I mean,
just as a piece of writing, am I right?
And then they were, it was liberty,
that’s what it was all about—”
Sound: Horse whinny
“—can you please, what? Can you
just . . . What’s the horse doing here?
Steve? Can someone tell me what the
horse is, why there’s a horse right
here making all the noise and . . .
Keep going? Keep going? Doug, I
don’t know where I was, okay? The
horse and the . . . Okay, let’s start
again, can we do that? Let’s just start
again. Okay, cleansing breath.
Cleansing breath. Coming down in
three, two, one. Four score and seven
years ago, our fathers brought forth . . .”
Removed from Official
Account, Year 26, day and
date unknown:
“You know who’s great? The
poor! So great. So, so, so great.
Totally going to be in heaven with
the angels and the whole thing. Not
just the poor, it’s not a money thing,
but also the poor in spirit, and I
know you know who you are, plus
which the meek, they’re also total-
ly going to make out in the whole
deal and—”
Sound: olive branch waving in
wind
BY ROB LONG
“Excuse me, you with the olive
branch? I am not trying to single you
out, but it’s very distracting, you
waving that. Can you just . . . thanks.
No, no need to apologize, I totally
get it, it’s hot out here and the sun
can be a killer, it’s just that there are
people around you and . . . no prob-
lem. Thanks so much. Okay, where
was I? Did I do the poor? No? No,
I did? Let’s just start again. Okay.
So. Now. Blessed are the poor in
spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of
heaven . . .”
Outtake, Reel #2,
June 12, 1987:
“. . . and people are always saying
to me, since he took, you know, that
job over there—and it’s been confus-
ing, let me tell you, what with all of
the various leaders there and so
forth, the, the, the Chernenko and the
Andropov and what have you, it’s
been a real challenge just to keep up
with all of that, and people say to me
that this new person, his name is just
right there on the tip of my tongue,
the new one, what’s his name? No,
don’t tell me. It’ll come. Anyway, so
the wall behind me, if someone like
the new person over there really
means what he says then maybe he
should just, you know . . .”
Sound: Imperceptible chewing
noise
“I’m sorry. I just . . . is that gum?
Is someone chewing gum? It’s very
rude. The smack-smack and the lip
noise and it’s very distracting. I
don’t even know . . . Gorbachev! I
got it! Mikhail Gorbachev! Right.
Can’t believe it slipped my mind, but
I got it now. Can we restart from
one? Tell me when you’re ready?
Where’s the light? Yes? Okay, you
got the part before and then I looked
over here and you can match cut
right into this and . . . Mr.
Gorbachev! Tear down this wall!
Wait. Let me do it again, it didn’t
have the intensity.”
J U LY 8 , 2 0 1 9
 Books, Arts & Manners
George
Will’s
Declaration
M AT T H E W C O N T I N E T T I
Text
I
The Conservative Sensibility, by George F. Will
(Hachette Books, 640 pp., $35)
N 1975, shortly after she was
elected leader of the Tories,
Margaret Thatcher found herself
in a debate over the party plat-
form. As one speaker called for modera-
tion and accommodation with Labour,
Thatcher reached into her briefcase,
pulled out a heavy book, and said, “This
is what we believe.” Then she slammed
the book on a table. It was Hayek’s
Constitution of Liberty.
George Will may have had this anec-
dote in mind when he began work on
The Conservative Sensibility. The syn-
dicated columnist’s 15th book is
weighty, learned, comprehensive, philo-
sophical, and perfect for thumping on
furniture. “What I have written,” Will
says, “is the distilled wisdom, as I
understand this, that I have acquired
from half a century in Washington, my
home, which I love.” Admirers of
Will—I plead guilty—now have what
amounts to a definitive statement, a
summation of his remarkable career in
journalism and politics.
Like many careers, Will’s began by
chance. He was a 28-year-old professor
at the University of Toronto when
Everett Dirksen, leader of the Senate
S P O N S O R E D B Y National Review Institute
Republicans, died in 1969. Soon there-
after, Senator Gordon Allott of
Colorado was elevated to chairman of
the Republican Policy Committee.
Allott wanted a conservative academic
as his writer. One thing led to another,
and Will, who recently had made his
first contribution to NATIONAL REVIEW,
got the job. He moved to D.C. in
January 1970.
Allott was defeated two years later.
Looking for work, Will called William F.
Buckley Jr. and said this publication
needed a Washington editor. Buckley
agreed. He also made Will the book edi-
tor, replacing Elsie Meyer, who had been
filling the role of her husband Frank
since his death the previous April. Will’s
first “Capitol Issues” column appeared
in the February 2, 1973, issue. “It is pos-
sible,” he wrote, “that this president,
beginning his second term in an unusual-
ly sullen Washington, will re-invigorate
the Congress.” More than possible, as it
turned out.
What reinvigorated Congress was the
news that President Nixon had attempt-
ed to conceal his administration’s
involvement in the Watergate break-in.
Will was a tough critic of Nixon’s,
putting him at odds with both NR’s
readers and NR’s publisher, Bill Rusher.
“As an occasional writer of article-
length pieces on the Washington scene,
George Will would have a great deal to
recommend him,” Rusher wrote to the
editors in 1973. “As the Washington edi-
tor of NATIONAL REVIEW, he is little short
of a disaster.” Buckley and senior editor
James Burnham disagreed. They stood
by Will, who began his twice-weekly
Washington Post column in 1974, the
year of Nixon’s resignation.
In 1976 Will contributed his first
semimonthly essay for Newsweek. He
won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary
the following year. The year after that,
he published The Pursuit of Happiness
and Other Sobering Thoughts, the first
of eight collections of columns, essays,
reviews, and speeches. In November
1981, he joined This Week with David
Brinkley and quickly became a televi-
sion celebrity. Men at Work, one of
three volumes on baseball, was pub-
lished in 1990 and, Will likes to joke,
has almost outsold all the other books
put together.
This list of accomplishments and
accolades, as well as his genteel per-
sona, should not mask Will’s talent for
controversy. Bill Rusher was neither the
first nor the last conservative to disagree
with Will, who is equally capable of
annoying the Left. He has found himself
at odds with every president, and every
political party, since he started writing
for a living.
According to Will, Carter was an
incompetent moralist, and Reagan a
friend who won the Cold War but was
nevertheless incapable of restraining the
appetites of voters for big government.
George H. W. Bush was a “lapdog,” and
Bill Clinton a narcissistic technocrat.
George W. Bush began as a capable
leader but ended up making the worst
foreign-policy decision “in American
history.” Obama, the paradigmatic
Wilsonian, was a relentless agent of the
administrative state. Trump is “an almost
inexpressibly sad specimen.”
The rise of Trump caused Will to
change his Maryland voter registration
from Republican to unaffiliated in June
2016. Will, whose first article in these
pages (“What Happened to the Demo-
cratic Coalition?” April 8, 1969) de-
scribed and critiqued George Wallace’s
Jacksonian populism, could not and does
MY POSSESSIONS
Like sterile seeds
Cast among weeds:
Cheese boards and socks,
Earrings and clocks—
Already gone,
A sinking dawn,
Text
Earth inside out.
Christ, bring me doubt
Of grasping fear,
My prison here,
And let me sleep
For you to keep.
—SARAH RUDEN
39
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BOOKS, ARTS & MANNERS
not support the latest of Jackson’s heirs.
It may surprise Will’s comrades in the
Resistance that the book under review
does not so much as mention the name of
the 45th president. What it offers instead
is a deep and sustained reflection on
American conservatism.
Or, more accurately, one man’s con-
servative sensibility: The landscape of
the Right is vast, and filled with tradi-
tionalists, neos, paleos, hawks, doves,
counterrevolutionaries, communitarians,
classical liberals, post-liberals, libertari-
ans, and reactionaries. With The Conser-
vative Sensibility, George Will takes a
stand amid the rabble.
There is nothing worse than a pre-
dictable columnist, and Will is anything
but predictable. One reads him not only
for his prose but also for the chance to
observe a great and restless intellect.
The careful reader of his work over the
years will have noticed that Will has
moved away from Burke, Disraeli, and
Newman and toward Madison, Hayek,
and Darwin. His jurisprudence these
days is more Jaffa and Barnett than
Scalia and Bork, his foreign policy
more Rand Paul than Marco Rubio.
This onetime friendly critic of Man-
chester liberalism is now at home with
the Cato Institute.
“Invariably,” Will wrote in 1981, “it is
this for which I write: the joy, than which
there is nothing purer, of an argument
firmly made, like a nail straightly dri-
ven, its head flush to the plank.” The
argument he makes in The Conservative
Sensibility is characteristically epigram-
matic, heavy with quotation and anec-
dote, and steeped in history and
literature. It not only informs the reader
of George Will’s sensibility but also
helps you see more clearly the fissures
within the American Right.
And what fissures. The conservative
intellectual movement is engaged in a
debate over nothing less than the founda-
tion of our regime, the nature of liberal-
ism, the virtues of the market, the role of
the state, and the value of freedom.
Some conservatives, especially young
ones, have turned their attention away
from the free choices of individuals to
the institutions—family, community, reli-
gion, and nation—that provide authorita-
tive guidance for those choices and shape
personal characters. Will, who dedicates
this book to Barry Goldwater, reminds
us of what the conservative mainstream
40 | w w w. n a t i o n a l r e v i e w. c o m
looked like for much of the 20th century,
and what it might look like again.
“The proper question for conservatives
is, What do you seek to conserve?” Will
asks. “The proper answer is concise but
deceptively simple: We seek to conserve
the American Founding.” Whereas Burke
and European conservatives defended
throne and altar, American conservatism
ought to protect the Declaration of
Independence and the Constitution and
the principles that inform them.
“The price of accuracy might be con-
fusion,” Will says, “but this point must
be made: American conservatives are
the custodians of the classical liberal tra-
dition.” In place of a king and estab-
lished church, Americans have equal
natural rights, federalism, separation of
powers, checks and balances, and a writ-
ten charter of government that—thank
goodness—is difficult to amend.
Part of the American inheritance is
judicial review. It is on this issue that
Will finds himself opposed to many fel-
low conservatives. Since the beginnings
of originalism in the 1970s, most con-
servatives have advocated an ethic of
judicial restraint. Absent egregious vio-
lations of the Framers’ original intention,
conservatives say, judges should defer to
legislatures. Where the Constitution is
silent, majorities rule.
Not for Will. Rather than judicial
restraint, he advocates “judicial supervi-
sion” or what others call “judicial en-
gagement.” When judges decide cases,
Will says, they should have in mind not
only the Constitution but also the
Declaration of Independence. “And a
properly engaged judiciary is duty-
bound to declare majority acts invalid
when they abridge natural rights,” in-
cluding rights not mentioned explicitly
in the Constitution. That is because the
Founders “thought that individuals have
property in—ownership of—themselves
which is necessary for the pursuit of hap-
piness. And they understood that owner-
ship of property provides the individual
with a zone of sovereignty in which the
individual is at liberty to use his re-
sources for the pursuit of happiness.”
But what, exactly, are the dimensions
of this zone of sovereignty? There must
be limits. And who defines these
boundaries—the legislature or the judi-
ciary? Such questions are the axis around
which American political history has
turned. And one of the lessons of history
is this: While elected majorities infringe
upon liberty, so too do unelected judges.
It is easy for bureaucracies and judges
to thwart majorities. It is far harder for
majorities to restrain judges. Their con-
straints must be self-imposed. As Robert
Bork told the 1985 convention of the
American Bar Association: “Any defen-
sible theory of constitutional interpreta-
tion must demonstrate that it has the
capacity to control judges. An observ-
er must be able to say whether or not
the judge’s result follows fairly from
the premises and is not merely a ques-
tion of taste or opinion.” The credibility
of the judiciary, as well as the stability of
our constitutional order, suffers if the
observer cannot say this.
Will’s support for judicial engage-
ment is all the more notable because
restraint and humility are great themes
of his work. Human beings are imper-
fect creatures. Our limitations require us
to be skeptical of hubristic undertakings
in economics, social policy, foreign
intervention, and moral and religious
uplift. “Conservatism’s task today,”
Will writes, “is to demonstrate that the
dignity of constitutional government
depends on restraints of a sort that do
not come easily to conservatives or any
other Americans.” He continues:
And these restraints will not come
automatically or spontaneously from
institutional arrangements—from fed-
eralism or the separation of powers or
juridical review. The restraints requi-
site for limited government, and hence
requisite for the virtues that republican
government presupposes, will come
only from thoughtful reverence for the
nation’s founding, a reverence that not
only honors the memory of the
Founders but is conscientious in under-
standing their principles.
Here, then, is George Will’s task: to
remind Americans of our unique heritage
by connecting present debates and public
figures to our nation’s fundamental
ideas, disagreements, problems, and
statesmen. “The more educated a person
is about fine things and noble behavior,”
he writes, “the more a person is equipped
for the pleasures of intelligent praising,
the more he or she is equipped for intel-
ligent pessimism, a prerequisite for the
defense of liberty.” Such is the education
that awaits the reader of this beautiful,
graceful, profound book.
J U LY 8 , 2 0 1 9

Text
Our
Providential
Constitution
DANIEL J. MAHONEY
A
A Constitution in Full: Recovering the Unwritten
Foundation of American Liberty,
by Peter Augustine Lawler and Richard M.
Reinsch II (University Press of Kansas,
216 pp., $29.95)
and American con-
MERICA
servatism are at a crossroads.
Conservatives are naturally
the “patriotic party,” proud
of their country and committed to
defending it against its cultured despis-
ers. Most of us, most of the time, remain
confident that America is mankind’s “last
best hope.” Yet many of us cannot help
but acknowledge that our country is
becoming less morally estimable, as
human freedom is increasingly under-
stood as limitless relativism and accom-
panied by totalitarian moralism on much
of the left. Some conservatives, such as
Patrick J. Deneen in his widely discussed
book Why Liberalism Failed, are tempted
to blame this state of affairs on the princi-
ples of the American Founding. Deneen
and some other Catholic traditionalists
chalk up our discontent to liberalism
itself, which is said, in the long run, to
corrode personal responsibility, civic
spirit, and authentic culture. Deneen
argues that the American Founding is
Mr. Mahoney holds the Augustine Chair in
Distinguished Scholarship at Assumption College.
He is the author, most recently, of The Idol of
Our Age: How the Religion of Humanity
Subverts Christianity.
S P O N S O R E D B Y National Review Institute
complicit in the corruption of true
democracy because it is ultimately root-
ed in the not-so-concealed nihilism at
the heart of Enlightenment liberalism. In
this view, liberalism inexorably gives
rise to an unrelenting anti-culture,
which, because it recognizes no authori-
tative institutions, is destructive of civi-
lization as such.
In another sector of the American
Right, perhaps even more influential,
the threat to American liberty is identi-
fied as big-government progressivism.
It is progressivism that has increasingly
eroded the “natural rights” constitution-
alism bequeathed to us by John Locke
and the American Founders. This is the
basic story told by the students of
Harry V. Jaffa and, in a more libertari-
an form—one less friendly to religion
and natural law—by George F. Will in
his new book, The Conservative
Sensibility. In this view, the secular con-
test between natural-rights republican-
ism and egalitarian progressivism is the
great struggle of our time.
Without its conservative
foundations, liberty withers and
turns against itself.
As Richard Reinsch and the late Peter
Augustine Lawler, two remarkably tal-
ented students of American political
thought and Western political philoso-
phy, argue in their thoughtful and
provocative new book, our country’s
appeal to natural rights was indispensable
in the effort to “discredit the communist
or fascist reduction of the particular per-
son to nothing but an expendable cog in a
machine.” And rights are certainly not
arbitrary or groundless, given to us capri-
ciously by a state that can take them away
at will. They do indeed have real roots in
human nature and the order of things. The
problem, as Lawler and Reinsch see it, is
that these rights are increasingly discon-
nected from the traditions that gave rise
to them and from the ends and purposes
of human freedom. Many libertarians and
soi-disant classical liberals, and almost
all progressives, ignore or explain away
the essentially relational character of
human existence in the name of an ever
more unconstricted view of personal lib-
erty. This conception of liberty is severed
from the moral foundations of democra-
cy: loyalty to country; the love, support,
and discipline of the family; and the eter-
nal verities conveyed by traditional reli-
gion. These are among the precious
“moral contents of life,” as the French
political philosopher Pierre Manent calls
them, without which liberty degenerates
into a nihilistic form of self-assertion or,
at best, an indifference to human excel-
lence or to the primordial distinction
between good and evil. Without its con-
servative foundations, liberty withers and
turns against itself.
Lawler and Reinsch are fully commit-
ted to the dignity of the relational person
and to the defense of the American
republic. They believe that human
beings should never be “civic fodder,” as
was often the case in the classical
republics; species fodder, as with the
preferred understanding of our dogmatic
Darwinians who subordinate the person
to the “survival of the fittest”; or “History
fodder,” as happened in the totalitarian
democides of the 20th century. Following
Alexis de Tocqueville and the great 19th-
century American Catholic thinker
Orestes Brownson, Lawler and Reinsch
defend “liberty under God and the law”
(the admirable locution is Tocqueville’s).
For the authors, the Founders are best
understood as wise and gifted statesman
and not theorizing revolutionaries. They
were “conservative revolutionaries,”
men of principle and prudence, who
appreciated, or at least took for grant-
ed, the moral and cultural inheritance,
what the authors call the “providential
constitution,” that made possible a
humane and ordered liberty in the
United States.
Lawler and Reinsch establish that, in
the American tradition rightly under-
stood, the free person is necessarily a
relational person with obligations to oth-
ers and to a common good made possible
by the rule of law and the responsible
exercise of personal and political liberty.
Brownson is, in decisive respects, their
guide. For Brownson, the American
achievement in ordered liberty eschews
41
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BOOKS, ARTS & MANNERS
both radical individualism, which is little
more than moral anarchy, and an abstract
and indiscriminate humanitarianism that
forgets that true democracy is always
“territorial democracy,” rooted in the
mores, traditions, and inheritances of a
specific people in a specific place. There
can be no democracy without the frame-
work provided by the nation, the only
form of territorial democracy available in
the late modern world. The nation thus
provides a judicious mean between dera-
cinated cosmopolitanism and a tribalism
that succumbs to xenophobia.
There are other heroes in this book,
among them the Catholic theologian
John Courtney Murray and the conserv-
ative political theorist Willmoore
Kendall (two eminent 20th-century
thinkers well known to past readers of
NATIONAL REVIEW). All of Lawler and
Reinsch’s intellectual heroes were elo-
quent partisans of a virtuous and free
people. None of them confused the
exercise of natural rights with a solip-
sistic individualism that transforms free
men and citizens into possessors of an
unbounded “autonomy.” When liberty
becomes a groundless, open-ended
project, guided by nothing but self-
creation, it ceases to be a form of polit-
ical liberty in the service of the
common good. The crucial nexus
between liberty and law is severed.
Witness the Supreme Court’s decla-
ration (in the 1992 Casey decision) that
“the heart of liberty” is the right to
“define one’s concept of existence, of
meaning, of the universe, and of the
mystery of human life.” As Lawler and
Reinsch say, this nihilism masquerad-
ing as juvenile existentialism “warrants
the power of government to secure its
unbounded claims.” Liberalism then
becomes an authoritarian demand for
moral liberation and permissive egali-
tarianism, far from the dignified,
humane, and self-limiting conception
of human freedom held by the found-
ing generation.
Between those who denounce
America as ill-founded and those who
confuse it with a project for government-
sponsored liberation from natural moral
constraints, Lawler and Reinsch outline
a salutary via media. Instead of identify-
ing America with abstract freedom,
Tocqueville, Brownson, Kendall, and
Murray appreciate that the notion of
“consent,” qualified and within certain
42 | w w w. n a t i o n a l r e v i e w. c o m
bounds, lies at the political heart of
republican self-government. But it can-
not be the criterion governing every
aspect of life—in institutions such as the
family, churches, and universities—
without giving rise over time to an
aggressive “political atheism,” a view of
democracy that recognizes no law higher
than human will and that erodes the cru-
cial moral and cultural prerequisites of
a free society. The “sovereign self,” man
as god, replaces the moral superinten-
dence that makes ordered liberty possible.
Brownson and Murray interpreted
natural rights, and especially the pro-
found truths of the Declaration of
Independence, in the light of natural
law: We have no right to own or oppress
another human being, because owner-
ship is a deeply flawed way of thinking
about our relationship to ourselves and
others. Strictly speaking, we do not own
ourselves. As Lincoln reminded us in
his second inaugural, we are all under
the judgment of God, whose will is
always informed by His reason and
goodness. Brownson opposed the bar-
baric institution of slavery, on Christian
and American grounds, and supported
the preservation of the Union, but he did
not support the more radical leveling
goals of the abolitionists.
Willmoore Kendall argued persua-
sively that civil society, justice, and
rights always presuppose the previous
formation of government and society.
Without a “preexisting ‘We,’” as Roger
Scruton has called it, there can be no
social contract worthy of the name. But
law, and especially the sempiternal dis-
tinction between right and wrong, is
never predicated on contracts or con-
sent. Kendall put it succinctly and well:
We discover the authority of law, civic
and moral, through “reason or revela-
tion.” We cannot just make it up as we
go, or assert its existence: We are not
autonomous beings, demiurges that
create freedoms without boundaries.
America was not founded ex nihilo in
1776 or 1787. Our “providential consti-
tution,” rooted in territorial democracy,
and in the moral, spiritual, and intellec-
tual inheritance of Western civilization,
is an essential part of our larger “consti-
tution,” or politeia.
As in all great and suggestive books,
Lawler and Reinsch get a few things
wrong. They are too sanguine that reli-
gious liberty can be preserved in the
face of the Supreme Court’s Obergefell
decision mandating a right to same-sex
marriage nationwide. They believe the
case was wrongly decided but think it
would be “judicial activism” to overturn
it. But they understate the extent to
which Obergefell subverts the very
meaning of marriage. In the wake of that
ill-considered decision, marriage no
longer has any connection to the natural
complementarity of men and women
and to the education of future citizens.
The decision did not expand the benefi-
ciaries of an established institution; it
put an end to public recognition of nat-
ural marriage by abolishing its natural as
well as historical foundations. Marriage
in the United States is now rooted in per-
sonal “autonomy” that knows no intrin-
sic limits (marital monogamy is at best a
settled tradition—for now). Our authors
do not wish to exacerbate civic divisions
by overturning Obergefell, and so they
hope against hope for the best. But in the
name of prudence, they risk abandoning
a sacred, non-negotiable principle.
This reservation aside, Reinsch and
Lawler have written an extraordinary
defense of conservative constitutional-
ism, one that speaks powerfully to our
present discontent. In the manner of
Brownson’s The American Republic
(1865), an unjustly neglected political
classic, they rebuke both Lockean indi-
vidualists and humanitarian democrats
for forgetting the civic virtues and patri-
otic attachments that allow Americans
to display “love and loyalty to the social
and political order of their birth.” They
give a theoretical account of the practi-
cal achievements of the Founding and
thereby show that this country of ours
was in no way ill-founded. But they
also show that the genius of America
involves accepting our moral and polit-
ical heritage in a spirit of gratitude. This
gratitude is sorely lacking in those
today, on the left and the right, who con-
demn the Founding tout court.
Gratitude and loyalty are at the heart of
our “constitution in full,” and of authen-
tic conservatism.
One final word: This book is a lasting
tribute to Peter Lawler, a true patriot,
Christian, and conservative, and a polit-
ical theorist of the first rank, who died
unexpectedly in May 2017. Kudos to
Richard Reinsch, a serious thinker in
his own right, for bringing this joint
work to completion.
J U LY 8 , 2 0 1 9

Inside an
Engima
C A R S O N H O L L O WAY
Text
A
The Chief: The Life and Turbulent Times of Chief
Justice John Roberts, by Joan Biskupic
(Basic Books, 432 pp., $32)
MERICA’S longstanding de-
bate about the politicization
of the judiciary is by now so
familiar that we have lost
sight of its enigmatic character.
Practically everybody, left and right,
agrees that courts should somehow be
above politics. At the same time, how-
ever, practically everybody can point to
numerous instances of what they sin-
cerely regard as egregious examples of
politicized judging—important cases that
courts have determined according not to
law but to the political preferences of the
judges. It is strange to find a phenomenon
that is apparently prevalent despite being
almost universally condemned.
This enigmatic problem is illustrated
by the public career of America’s most
famous—and perhaps most enigmatic—
judge: John Roberts. Roberts is famously
associated with the claim that judges
should not be political. During his confir-
mation process he insisted that judges
should be only “umpires” and not players
in the game of politics. At the same time,
Roberts has not been able to shake the
accuastion—made by his enemies, and
sometimes even by his friends—that he
himself is a political judge, that he has let
Mr. Holloway is a visiting scholar at the B. Kenneth
Simon Center for Principles and Politics at the
Heritage Foundation and the author of Hamilton
versus Jefferson in the Washington
Administration.
S P O N S O R E D B Y National Review Institute
considerations other than the Consti-
tution and the laws determine the out-
come of important cases.
This difficulty—Roberts’s desire to
avoid politics while perhaps being
unable to do so—is a key theme of Joan
Biskupic’s new biography. Biskupic cov-
ers Roberts’s whole life. The book
includes revealing accounts of his youth
and education, his work in the Reagan
administration, his distinguished career
as an appellate litigator, his brief ser-
vice on the United States Court of
Appeals for the District of Columbia
Circuit, and his early elevation to chief
justice of the Supreme Court. Biskupic’s
principal concern, however, is how
Roberts’s work as a judge is influenced
by his politics—both by his own politi-
cal conservatism and by his concern for
the Court’s public reputation.
As the author of previous biographies
of Justices Scalia, O’Connor, and
Sotomayor, Biskupic is an experienced
observer of the Supreme Court. As a
result, The Chief is unfailingly informa-
tive and engaging. Nevertheless, the
book’s account of the nexus between
law and politics is marred by two
defects. These defects might be consid-
ered fortuitous, however, insofar as they
help to illustrate the difficulties involved
in grappling with the problem of politi-
cized judging.
In the first place, Biskupic’s account is
somewhat biased. This is not to say that
the book is malicious. Biskupic seems to
respect and like the chief justice. But she
is part of the liberal legal establishment,
and it shows. The book seems to be orga-
nized more around her own preoccupa-
tions than around those of its subject.
Issues that involve race—such as voting-
rights cases and challenges to affirmative
action in higher education—receive
extensive treatment, while other, no less
interesting and important questions are
scanted or ignored.
The constitutionality of capital punish-
ment, for example, is both inherently
interesting and reliably controversial.
Biskupic treats it only cursorily. Even
more strange is the lack of any discussion
of Boumediene v. Bush (2008), in which
the Court, over the objections of Roberts
and three other conservative dissenters,
for the first time declared that enemy
combatants held outside the United
States have a right to habeas corpus. This
case was the capstone of a series of con-
troversies in which the Court had en-
gaged in a tug of war with the presiden-
cy and the Congress over the rights of
enemy combatants detained in the
American prison at Guantanamo Bay,
Cuba. One would certainly think that it
merits inclusion in any book that wants
to give a complete and impartial account
of Roberts’s time as chief justice.
It is therefore hard to suppress the sus-
picion that Biskupic has lavished atten-
tion on areas of the law where she thinks
she can plausibly suggest that Roberts
has allowed his legal thinking to be
shaped by politics, but she has studious-
ly avoided those areas where it would
look like the liberal justices were guilty
of the same thing. This is a common-
place fault of most arguments about
what is often called “judicial activism.”
Political judging is a real problem, but
the criticisms of it often turn out to be
“political” or partisan themselves. That
is, they turn out to be not principled calls
for courts to remain above politics but
argumentative weapons to be wielded
against judges who have disappointed
our political hopes.
This brings us to the book’s second
defect. To get a clear understanding of
how political considerations influence
the work of the courts, we would need
judges to speak candidly and publicly
about this question. This they are
famously reluctant to do, however, and
Biskupic has not succeeded in piercing
their reticence. To judge from her foot-
notes and acknowledgments, she exten-
sively interviewed a number of the
justices, including Roberts himself. But
none of them spoke with her on the
record about the deliberative process in
particular cases.
This drawback undermines what
many readers will find to be one of the
most interesting parts of the book: its
behind-the-scenes account of how the
Court reached its decision in the Obama-
care case, NFIB v. Sebelius (2012).
According to Biskupic, Roberts began
by thinking that the law’s “individual
mandate” was unconstitutional and that
its Medicaid expansion was constitution-
al. During the course of the Court’s pri-
vate deliberations, however, he began to
think that the mandate could be upheld
under Congress’s taxing power, but also
started to think that the Medicaid expan-
sion unconstitutionally coerced the
states into participation. On Biskupic’s
43
BOOKS, ARTS & MANNERS
telling, Justices Breyer and Kagan joined
in Roberts’s rejection of the Medicaid
expansion in order to shore up his sup-
port for the individual mandate. If true,
this amounted to something close to
political horse trading. But it is difficult
to know how much to credit the story
when none of the participants would
vouch for it on the record.
Here again, however, the defect itself
is instructive. If politics should not and
did not influence the courts, then judges
would be able to say so publicly and
convincingly, even about important and
controversial cases. Or, if it were unre-
markable and permissible for politics to
influence the courts, judges would be
able to say this publicly and explain how
the process works. That they do neither
suggests that something is wrong.
As The Chief reminds us, this sense
that something is wrong is underscored
by Roberts’s own recent behavior,
viewed in light of his earlier pronounce-
ments. Last fall, President Trump
ramped up his frequent complaints
about the liberal politicization of the
courts by lamenting that one of his
administration’s initiatives had been
blocked by an “Obama judge.” In
response, the chief justice stepped into
the limelight, apparently to rebuke the
president. “We do not have Obama
judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or
Clinton judges,” said Roberts, but “an
extraordinary group of dedicated judges
doing their level best to do equal right to
those appearing before them.”
The trouble is, there is ample evi-
dence that Roberts knows that this
pious assurance is not entirely true. As
Biskupic notes, when Roberts dissented
from the Court’s discovery of a right to
same-sex marriage in Obergefell v.
Hodges (2015), he openly told the
public that “the Constitution had noth-
ing to do with” the Court’s ruling. What
is that other than an admission that his
colleagues had behaved politically,
making up instead of interpreting the
nation’s fundamental law?
America is now in a position in
which its leading jurists really cannot
give a candid and credible account of
how the courts do their work. That
should be troubling to anyone of any
political persuasion. Biskupic’s Chief
offers a timely reminder of this prob-
lem, even if it cannot itself point the
way to a solution.
44 | w w w. n a t i o n a l r e v i e w. c o m
Text
Fields of
Beauty
RICHARD LOWRY
M
Ballpark: Baseball in the American City, by Paul
Goldberger (Knopf, 384 pp., $35)
EMORIAL STADIUM in Balti-
more wasn’t much of a
ballpark. I didn’t know that
when I went there for my
first major-league baseball game as a kid
in the late 1970s and while walking up to
our seats caught a glimpse through a tun-
nel of the field, the greenest, most perfect
grass I’d ever seen, a color I didn’t know
existed. (This was long before the advent
of high-def TV.)
The lush field at the center of an enclo-
sure of concrete and steel provides one of
the themes of Paul Goldberger’s new
book. For him, the ballpark is the garden
in the city, the rus in urbe, a sports combi-
nation of the Jeffersonian agrarian tradi-
tion and the Hamiltonian emphasis on
cities and industry.
A former architecture writer for the
New York Times and The New Yorker,
Goldberger calls the ballpark “one of
the greatest of all American building
types” and argues that, “as much as the
town square, the street, the park, and the
plaza, the baseball park is a key part of
American public space.”
Goldberger relates the history of base-
ball through its physical facilities and
the business, real-estate, and design
considerations that created them. You
couldn’t do this with any other major
sport. It’s rare that a football stadium or
basketball or hockey arena becomes
memorable in its own right. The experi-
ence of baseball, in contrast, is caught
up in its surroundings.
Even watching a game on TV played at
the Trop in Tampa Bay, the SkyDome in
Toronto, the Coliseum in Oakland, or
the New Comiskey (ridiculously called
“Guaranteed Rate Field”) is less appeal-
ing than at a place with some character.
Ballpark is a lovely book that is over-
sized but still manageable to hold and
read, and it has enough drawings and
photographs to illustrate Goldberger’s
points about each park. He catalogues
the journey from ballparks shoehorned
into city streets, to the wrong turn into
monochromatic dual-use forms, before
an unexpected, triumphant return to
the traditional.
Ballparks are one of the few public
aspects of American life—it’s hard to think
of other examples, frankly—that have
gotten more beautiful rather than less.
Goldberger argues, correctly, that
despite our association of baseball with
rural America, as captured in the classic
movie Field of Dreams, the game is more
connected to the city.
The first ballpark was built in Brooklyn
in 1862 and called “Union Grounds.”
(Amazingly enough, “The Star-Spangled
Banner,” not yet the national anthem, was
played before the first game.) New York
and Brooklyn, then separate cities, had
the greatest number of teams.
The second version of the South End
Grounds in Boston, built in 1888, was the
most ambitious of the 19th-century
parks, with conical towers and other
pinnacles atop a recognizably modern
double-deck grandstand. Like many of
the wooden ballparks of this era, it
burned down. The fire started in the right-
field bleachers during a game and ended
up destroying 200 buildings in Roxbury.
Baseball was split at the outset between
the impulses to appeal to the working man
and to the more respectable, middle-class
sort. In St. Louis, a tavern owner named
Chris von der Ahe realized that fans from
a nearby ballpark provided a flow of cus-
tomers and took it over, rebuilding it as
Sportsman’s Park. Not subtle, he placed a
beer garden within the field of play. (On
these grounds alone, I hazard to say my
longtime friend and NR colleague Kevin
Longstreet, a fellow Yankee die-hard,
would consider Sportsman’s one of the
great ballparks.)
On the other end of the spectrum,
Albert Spalding rebuilt Lakefront Park
in Chicago in 1883 with private boxes
furnished with upholstered chairs and
J U LY 8 , 2 0 1 9
books - NEW2_QXP-1127940387.qxp 6/18/2019 11:05 PM Page 45
Memorial Stadium during the World Series, featuring the Baltimore Orioles and the Pittsburgh Pirates, October 1979
tended by waiters, a forerunner of the
luxury box.
The 20th century brought the age of
steel, brick, and concrete, and what
Goldberger refers to as “the Golden
Age” in 1912–14. It gave us Crosley
Field, where the Reds played until 1970,
with an upward slope known as the
“terrace” in left field; Tiger Stadium,
quirky and cozy (a flagpole was in the
field of play in deep center); and espe-
cially the “jewel boxes” of Fenway,
Wrigley, and Ebbets.
They had in common idiosyncrasies
owing to where and how they were
built, and an extraordinary intimacy.
Some of their signature features didn’t
come until later. The famous Green
Monster and the “Dartmouth Green”
paint of the interior of Fenway arrived
with renovations. Wrigley didn’t get
its iconic ivy walls until the 1930s.
(An experiment in planting trees in the
bleachers failed.)
Subsequent decades brought a flight
from cities, and from eccentricity.
Cleveland previewed what was to come
in the 1930s with its publicly funded, gar-
gantuan, usually half-empty, symmetri-
cal, multi-sport Municipal Stadium. The
bleachers were so distant that no one ever
RICH PILLING/CONTRIBUTOR/GETTY IMAGES
hit a home run into them. So inhospitable
was the stadium to baseball that for more
than a decade the Indians split time
between their prior little bandbox of a
home, League Park, and the “Mistake by
the Lake.”
S P O N S O R E D B Y National Review Institute
The truly dreadful, indistinguishable
concrete donuts, like other lamentable
trends in American life, were a product of
the 1960s. If the stadiums looked like
cookie-cutter public-works projects, it’s
because they often were.
The turning point, of course, was
Camden Yards in Baltimore.
Originally conceived as another multi-
sport suburban facility, it instead decisive-
ly moved baseball beyond such hybrids.
A momentous decision at the outset was
to keep an old Baltimore & Ohio Railroad
warehouse intact at the site of the new
park. The nostalgic feel of the brick ware-
house usefully pointed backward.
Camden Yards has a red-brick exteri-
or and exposed steel supports inside,
eschewing the concrete of the donuts. It
limits foul territory to make ground-level
seats closer, and the stands are arranged
asymmetrically to avoid a deadening
sameness. Advertising on the outfield
walls—for the first time since Connie
Mack Stadium in Philadelphia closed in
1970—recalls classic parks. And the
stands frame a view of the Baltimore sky-
line, anchoring the park in the city.
It’s easy to forget what a revelation
Camden Yards was now that its retro style
has become a design cliché. Its influence
left a stamp on the best of the new parks:
PNC Park in Pittsburgh, which, outside of
Fenway and Wrigley, might be the most
charming place to watch a game in the
country; Oracle Park in San Francisco,
which is everything its execrable fore-
bear, Candlestick, wasn’t; T-Mobile Park
in Seattle, which is enchanting despite a
retractable roof.
I agree with almost all of Paul
Goldberger’s judgments, although I think
he neglects the importance of noise. Not
the blaring announcements and nonstop
blasting of music in contemporary stadi-
ums (get off my lawn!), but the roar of
the crowd. What the Metrodome and
Kingdome lacked in suitability for base-
ball, they could make up with crazed
crowd noise, an indispensable part of
sports excitement.
This is one of my beefs with the new
Yankee Stadium. I appreciate the ameni-
ties and the larger, more functional
spaces. The halls of the old Yankee
Stadium could feel like a crowded sub-
way platform. But the new stadium dis-
perses sound, so the manic energy of the
old place—you sometimes could feel the
upper deck rock—is a thing of memory.
While I’m at it, one more complaint. I
also remember from my inaugural visit
to Memorial Stadium a foul ball landing
very close to us in the upper deck. (I still
recall my stomach dropping as I watched
the laces of the ball spin toward us.)
Balls don’t reach upper decks anymore.
I’d readily trade some obstructed views
from pillars and posts to reduce the dis-
tance of the seats upstairs.
In that, I may be alone. But I’m one of
millions who appreciate, and have bene-
fited from, the return to beauty so ably
chronicled in this book.
45
 BOOKS, ARTS & MANNERS
Country Life
Weather
Trends
Text
T
RICHARD BROOKHISER
HE first meteorologists were
the cows. On some road trip of
my youth, passing a stony
upstate farm, one of my parents
explained that when the cows are standing
it will not rain, but when they are sitting it
will. As I grew older I devised a pseudo-
scientific explanation for their pre-
science—increasing air pressure pushes
them earthward—but never tried to con-
A 51 percent chance of rain at 3 P.M., dropping to 47 percent
at 4. What algorithm exactly allows them to slice it so fine?
firm it, simply accepting their predictive
powers as fact. I test them every weekend
when I take the mill road to my house in
the country. Across the road from the
waterfall that must have been the site of
the structure that gave the road its name is
a barn and a field where there are always
two, three, or four cows. Sometimes they
are all upright, if it is proper to say that of
four-footed creatures, sometimes they all
rest on the grass like so many bovine
Buddhas. Sometimes one stands while the
others sit, or vice versa; my wife and I will
say, mixed forecast. For years their record
was extremely good, though of late they
have often been off, so much so that we
have taken to asking (if they are seated),
Are they predicting, or just resting? To ask
the question is to introduce a greater bur-
den of observation and deduction than a
simple adage will bear, so now we simply
regard them as scenery.
Human meteorologists have changed
too. When I first read it, the Broadsheet of
46 | w w w. n a t i o n a l r e v i e w. c o m
the Resistance ran meager columns of data,
all print, accompanied by information on
the phases of the moon, in case you had
misplaced your Farmers’ Almanac. The
National Hotel Lobby Newspaper changed
all that. In came colors and maps; slanty
lines for storm fronts; yellow sun faces for
clear skies. It reported the weather nation-
wide too; newspapers with international
readerships added Dubai to Pittsburgh.
TV weather changed along with print. The
weather girl was an ongoing off-color
joke, and Bill Murray supplied the ulti-
mate satire of all-knowingness, but that is
what broadcast weather became: a dollop
of titillation, atop the omniscience of the
Wizard of Oz—as it rained in the begin-
ning, rains now, and ever shall rain (until
the forecast changes).
The forecast for information consump-
tion changed the most. Now the weather
comes to us online. The official site, main-
tained by an agency of the federal govern-
ment, will give the current weather for
whatever zip code you type in, and a fore-
cast for succeeding days and nights, up to a
week out: high and low temperatures, wind
speeds and directions, chances of precipita-
tion, rainfall amounts. All the future events
are extrapolations from current trends. In a
box midway down the main screen, off to
the side, is displayed the real information
from which the presumed trends are
derived: maps of clouds as observed by
satellites. By clicking on the proper arrow,
you can look farther afield in all the direc-
tions of the compass. All clear here, but see
that big blot of something over the neigh-
boring state; and there, over the middle of
its neighbor, another equally forbidding.
Keep your umbrella handy.
A private company parrots this data,
adding pseudo-precise scheduling to it: a
51 percent chance of rain at 3 P.M., drop-
ping to 47 percent at 4. What algorithm
exactly allows them to slice it so fine? I
would as soon trust two cows sitting, one
standing. But they must be right, the site
has accu for accurate in its title.
I notice that Wendell Berry, no doubt
reacting to such pretensions, is against
weather forecasting, as well as every other
aspect of modernity. His is a lonely posi-
tion. Men have been consulting weather
glasses and other barometers for a long
time. I am not a farmer with a backlist, but
a weekend refugee from the city. If I don’t
plant between Friday and Sunday, it does-
n’t get done. So when I am upstate I check
online several times a day.
The first weekend of June everything
went well. After an unusually wet May,
there were three clear days, with a chance
of rain Sunday night, so everything we
planted would get a good wet tuck-in.
Sunday evening is when we clean up,
load the car, and drive to the bus that takes
us home. Although we have done the drill
about 800 times, it is still a mad rush: paper
to the fireplace, scraps to the compost, bot-
tles and garbage to the bins for the transfer
station, clothes and food in the suitcase.
My wife and I argue over who has more to
do. Each of us is right (and wrong). As we
scurried, the leaves on the trees increased
their tempo too, fluttering in the way that
indicates new weather coming in. Good to
know that the forecasts were accurate.
Bull’s-eye accurate. The moment we
stepped out the front door, at the time
predicted for a “chance” of precipita-
tion, the heavens opened. There was still
sunlight in the west, but in the right here
it was pouring.
The drive to the bus station takes half an
hour. Ten or 15 minutes along the rain
stopped. We followed a rainbow, with a
dim second rainbow hovering at the
threshold of existence outside it. As we
waited for the bus not a drop fell.
The drops resumed as we took the
thruway south. The lower corner of the
state was raked by passing thunderstorms.
Windshield wipers swiped, rain rattled,
dusk was darkened by clouds. The final lap
is a sprint through the meadowlands, a
crawl to the tunnel, then rebirth into the
city, more people on every block, heck, in
every building, than in the village we left.
Ramadan was ending, the cabbies were
less rigid in their fasts, hailing one was
easy and rainless. But during the drive to
our building the heavens opened once
more. Pounding, pounding rain, hardest
when we drew to our door and muscled out
the luggage.
In 20 minutes I ran an errand;
dry again.
J U LY 8 , 2 0 1 9
 Text
Film
Dance with
I
Death
R O S S D O U T H AT
HAVE a confession: I did not love
the first John Wick movie. If you
don’t like action movies in which
loner heroes fight their way
through a succession of gangland ene-
mies to get revenge for some deep
wrong or betrayal, then you won’t find
this a surprising opinion. But I do like
such movies, and Wick was hailed by
connoisseurs of the genre as a highly
effective return to form, its success a
bright spot in a landscape where special
effects have overtaken the old choreog-
raphy of fisticuffs.
Which, in many ways, it was. But I
had a peculiar gripe about the titular
main character, a former hitman played
by Keanu Reeves in his finest stone-
faced style, who carves his way through
the Russian mob after a Mafioso idiot
scion beats him up and steals his car and
kills . . . his . . . dog. (The dog was a gift
from his late wife, so the movie isn’t just
a canine-lover’s manifesto.)
The heart of this particular genre’s
appeal is watching somebody do the
impossible—fight an entire world of ene-
mies singlehandedly, and win—but with-
out the superheroic gifts that dominate
the defining genre of our time. There are
two ways this can happen: He can be an
everyman, like Bruce Willis’s character
in Die Hard, who under extraordinary
circumstances uses his brains and guts
and luck and gumption to outwit as well
as outfight his enemies. Or he can be
someone with a very special set of
skills—the martial arts of Jackie Chan,
the assassin’s talents of Liam Neeson’s
Taken dad. In either case, he’ll still have
to take more punishment than any normal
human being could. But in both cases
you’re given some reason to suspend
your disbelief that he could pull it off.
And what has kept me from investing
fully in Mr. Wick, now back for his third
outing in John Wick: Parabellum, is that
SUMMIT ENTERTAINMENT
I don’t know how he does it. He is not a
beleaguered everyman in the John
McClane style, that’s for sure. Instead,
S P O N S O R E D B Y National Review Institute
Keanu Reeves in John Wick: Chapter 3—Parabellum
we are told again and again, usually in
hushed, Russian-accented tones, that
he’s a nearly supernatural force, a Baba
Yaga, a bogeyman. Well and good. But
then in the action scenes that follow, he
never seems that much more capable
than any of his enemies; he just fights
them one on one, or sometimes one on
two or three, and always comes out just
barely ahead.
This workmanlike quality lends the
fights a certain grit, a punishing realism,
that’s absent when a martial artist goes to
work, and Wick’s progress evokes at
times the doggedness of Tom Cruise’s
Ethan Hunt, another hardworking action
hero. But Hunt has his team and his
masks and his gadgets to help explain
why he always pulls things out. Whereas
Wick is a man (mostly) alone, and as the
fights accumulate and the body count
rises, the sense that the story wants to
impart, of John Wick, force of nature,
Death itself, gives way to the sense that
he’s surviving all these fights just because
the screenplay requires him to be a force
of nature—when in reality, in the world
we’re being shown, he’s just a solid, capa-
ble fighter who survives because all the
breaks go his way.
Is this a stupid complaint about a series
that makes no pretense of realism else-
where—that takes place in a world with a
secret government employing assassins
who seem to kill only one another and
whose battles are largely ignored by civil-
ians and passers-by? Maybe so. I’m a
great believer in the internal consistency
of fantasy worlds, the importance of
keeping things plausible not even but
especially when you’re positing a differ-
ent architecture for the universe. (This is a
test that Game of Thrones spent many
seasons passing and then abruptly failed.)
But it’s possible that what the Wick
movies are offering is a kind of magical-
realist version of the action genre, where
the luck of the protagonist is itself built
into their universe’s architecture.
And approaching them in that spirit I
have enjoyed the movies more in certain
ways with each installment, as the
baroque assassin’s world envelops the
narrative, the appearances by normal
people fall away, and we just move from
one ludicrously tricked-out lair to anoth-
er, with stops in between at the movies’
best invention, the Continental Hotels
(there’s one in every city), where assas-
sins are required to keep the peace.
In the latest entry we visit a Conti-
nental in Casablanca to meet a not partic-
ularly well-cast Halle Berry, plus a
Russian mob lair, with Anjelica Huston
presiding, that trains all its boys to be
killers and all its girls to be ballerinas,
plus a tent in the desert where the sheikh
who sits “above the High Table” weighs
and measures Wick. And then we return
to the original Continental, with Ian
McShane presiding devilishly as the
hotelier and Lance Reddick at his side,
for the final dance with death.
And through it all Reeves maintains
the weird handsome anti-charisma that’s
made him one of our strangest, most
arresting movie stars for a quarter of a
century. These are not really great
movies, but for him John Wick is a great
part: If I don’t quite believe in him as the
Grim Reaper personified, I believe in the
quality Reeves always imparts—that
amid whatever absurd action or science-
fiction situation he finds himself, from
the careening bus in Speed to the kung fu
fighting of The Matrix to now a gunfight
at the Continental Hotel, his character is
as serious as death.
47
Text Happy Warrior
TV Is Terrible
HENtelevision is bad, nothing is
worse,” famously declared Newton
‘W Minow, former Federal Communi-
cations Commission chairman, in a
speech to the National Association of Broadcasters in 1961.
“I invite you to sit down in front of your television set when
your station goes on the air . . . . Keep your eyes glued to that
set until the station signs off. I can assure you that you will
observe a vast wasteland.”
Today, of course, that wasteland is bigger, badder, and
more impressive than ever. Television, especially when it
comes to our growing bumper crop of streaming-on-demand
options, is an endlessly chatty slot machine that never signs
off, never breaks a sweat, and never shuts off the lights.
Despite its outward verve and vigor, however, have you
noticed that the bulk of today’s TV seems a bit, well . . . down
in the dumps? Dear television: We don’t see that much of
each other, but I’m kind of worried about you! Much of what
today’s critics hail as “great television,” in fact, is so dark that
it could send one right round the bend.
In case you’re rolling your eyes and silently debating
whether I’m a hopeless old fogey right now, here’s the inter-
esting twist: Generation Z, filled to the brim with teenagers,
seems to agree.
Take pop sensation Billie Eilish, 17. Eilish, whose shows
sell out across the country, talks openly about her struggles
with depression. As ’90s nostalgia flourishes, she almost
appears as if she just stumbled off of a bus from the heart of
the Seattle grunge era. Billie Eilish sings of quiet angst; her
fans, largely teenagers, go wild.
Eilish’s new hit album, When We All Fall Asleep, Where
Do We Go?, features tracks entitled “Bury a Friend” and
“All the Good Girls Go to Hell.” But one of her most
intriguing songs—and I’m not going to lie, I kind of like
one or two of them—is titled “My Strange Addiction.”
Lest you jump to any sordid conclusions, Eilish’s strange
addiction has nothing to do with chemicals. Instead, she’s
addicted to the very goofy and now-defunct NBC hit sit-
com The Office.
“When I wake up, I put on The Office. If I’m making a bur-
rito, I turn on The Office,” Eilish told Elle in March. “I need
the distraction so I don’t think. It’s like therapy for me.” The
singer says she has watched each episode of The Office
eleven times. This is impressive dedication: It adds up to
approximately 814 hours, or roughly one-tenth of a year.
Eilish is not alone. During its tenure on Netflix, The
Office has far and away served as one of the network’s most
popular features, followed by reruns of the very cheery
Friends and the ironically cheery Parks and Recreation. “It
has become perhaps the defining post-Millennial rite of
passage to binge the entirety of The Office on Netflix as
fast as humanly possible, then binge it all over and over
Heather Wilhelm is a NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE columnist.
48 | w w w. n a t i o n a l r e v i e w. c o m
BY HEATHER WILHELM
and over again, then quote and meme it as if to create an
alternate internet world where the show is still going,”
Vulture reported in April. To be addicted to The Office, the
piece adds, is “extremely Gen Z.”
This is particularly fascinating when you consider that
many of the show’s jokes—together with jokes from, say,
The Hangover, plus the jokes from about 5,000 other
movies made before approximately 2014—likely wouldn’t
fly in today’s ultra-woke, hypersensitive shame-o-sphere.
Meanwhile, this particular rerun-fest isn’t just for Gen Z:
When suffering from occasional brain burnout, my very
Gen X self recently started rewatching The Office, too.
This is because it is light, it is funny, and I know that it
will scorch neither my eyeballs nor my soul with painfully
detailed reenactments of regular maiming rituals per-
formed by evil, scheming, hygiene-challenged fairy-folk.
(Cough, ahem, Game of Thrones, cough.)
“Watch Ozark,” my friends said. (I was traumatized after
about four episodes.) “Watch Breaking Bad,” my friends
said. (I am still trying to purge the image of Walter White’s
underwear from my mind.) “Watch The Handmaid’s
Tale,” my friends said. (Ha, ha! No!) “Watch Black
Mirror,” my friends said. (Oh, dear: I am way too paranoid
for Black Mirror, which serves up a new technology-
related horror story with every episode. Black Mirror
makes me want to unplug all my WiFi in a panic and
move to an off-the-grid rustic-chic yurt in the middle of
the Texas desert. To be honest, I kind of want to do that
anyway, but that’s another column.)
“Okay, watch Game of Thrones,” my friends said.
“Everyone’s watching Game of Thrones!” (Please see my
note about painfully detailed reenactments of regular
maiming rituals performed by evil, scheming, hygiene-
challenged fairy-folk above; the show was described as a
“wonderfully bleak journey” by the review clearinghouse
Rotten Tomatoes. Help!)
Anyway, when my brain is too fried to read—I know, I
know, I should be reading instead of watching The Office,
so judge me as you will—there is at least one new televi-
sion series that I have settled into: HBO’s Chernobyl.
There is nothing remotely light or funny about Chernobyl,
of course. But it is powerful, sobering, and very, very well
done. It reminds viewers never to trust the Commies, which
stands as a solid added bonus in my book. It also gave my
husband the opportunity to inform me that it was “not
Chernobyl” when our air-conditioning broke down in spec-
tacular style on a sweltering afternoon last week.
That said, in its own odd way, the show does a marvelous
job of putting our nation’s current media angst-fest in clear
relief. America has problems, but it is still—just as we used
to say in the 1980s, as the Soviet disaster was unfolding—
a remarkably blessed and wonderfully free country. We can
always use a reminder of that fact, even if our TV situation
could use a little help.
J U LY 8 , 2 0 1 9
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