"And You Claim That I'm in Prison and You're Free?"
Five Things You Need to Read Today
1. The Republican Party's Death Spiral
I haven't bothered doing a roundup of the impeachment proceedings in the Senate, for two reasons. (Well, there is a third, which is that I've been doing a lot of administrative work for a new project. Stay tuned.)
One reason is that they did not reveal anything we didn't already know. Republican Representative Adam Kinzinger sums up the overall conclusion.
The immediate cause for Trump's impeachment was Jan. 6. But the president's rally and resulting riot on Capitol Hill didn't come out of nowhere. They were the result of four-plus years of anger, outrage, and outright lies. Perhaps the most dangerous lie—or at least the most recent—was that the election was stolen. Of course it wasn't, but a huge number of Republican leaders encouraged the belief that it was. Every time that lie was repeated, the riots of Jan. 6 became more likely.
Even now, many Republicans refuse to admit what happened. They continue to feed anger and resentment among the people. On Jan. 6, that fury led to the murder of a Capitol Police officer and the deaths of four other Americans. If that rage is still building, where does it go from here?...
Impeachment offers a chance to say enough is enough. It ought to force every American, regardless of party affiliation, to remember not only what happened on Jan. 6, but also the path that led there. After all, the situation could get much, much worse—with more violence and more division that cannot be overcome. The further down this road we go, the closer we come to the end of America as we know it.
Actually, there is one new fact that has come out, but not in the hearings: a more detailed report about Donald Trump's refusal to help congressmen under immediate threat from the Capitol rioters.
In an expletive-laced phone call with House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy while the Capitol was under attack, then-President Donald Trump said the rioters cared more about the election results than McCarthy did. "Well, Kevin, I guess these people are more upset about the election than you are," Trump said, according to lawmakers who were briefed on the call afterward by McCarthy.
McCarthy insisted that the rioters were Trump's supporters and begged Trump to call them off.
Trump's comment set off what Republican lawmakers familiar with the call described as a shouting match between the two men. A furious McCarthy told the then-President the rioters were breaking into his office through the windows, and asked Trump, "Who the f— do you think you are talking to?" according to a Republican lawmaker familiar with the call.
The newly revealed details of the call, described to CNN by multiple Republicans briefed on it, provide critical insight into the President's state of mind as rioters were overrunning the Capitol.... The Republican members of Congress said the exchange showed Trump had no intention of calling off the rioters even as lawmakers were pleading with him to intervene.
Keep this in mind when you consider the meaning of the House and Senate votes on Trump's impeachment. The Republicans in the House who voted not to impeach, and the senators who voted not to convict—43 of them—are voting to accept this as a normal part of their political lives. They have voted for tyranny—not over the country as a whole, but over themselves, personally. They have voted to live the rest of their lives in fear of Trump and his mobs—and of whoever manages to establish himself as Trump's successor.
This leads me to the other reason I haven't been writing breathlessly about the impeachment: We all knew the result ahead of time, no matter what evidence was offered.
In fact, impeachment may be masking the real issue. While the Republican Party's national leadership has merely been cowering in fear, the Trump fanatics are working to take over the party at the state organization level.
One of the first tests for this is going to be in Virginia, thanks to our policy of holding state-level elections in odd-numbered years, so that candidate selection for this November's vote is already well under way. Hence the prospect of the Virginia GOP being taken over by "Trump in heels."
A Virginia state senator and gubernatorial candidate who has described herself as "Trump in heels" is emerging as a problem for the state's Republican party as they seek to take the governor's mansion.
Amanda Chase boasts enthusiastic grassroots support in pockets of the state. But she has also drawn bipartisan rebuke for incendiary statements calling for martial law to overturn the 2020 presidential election and seemingly expressing support for the mob that stormed the US Capitol. That's left Democrats eager to paint her as the face of the state's Republican Party.
Chase on Tuesday filed a lawsuit alleging that the Republican Party was attempting to tank her candidacy, accusing the state GOP of trying to force a situation where the party's executive committee selects a gubernatorial nominee rather than a traditional convention or primary.
Chase, who has received national attention since the infamous "Stop the Steal" rally on Jan. 6, has attracted a swath of pro-Trump, grassroots support in the commonwealth. "That is my base support," Chase said. "I'm most in line with President Trump"....
Republicans have expressed concern that Chase, if she wins the nomination, will not be able to create a large enough coalition to win in November's general election, especially in the Washington, DC, suburbs of northern Virginia.
That is the understatement of the year.
This is the prospect that could really destroy the Republican Party. A large faction of voters is rallying around the party's nutcases and opportunists. This, in turn, will drive away the reasonable people, which puts the nuts even more firmly in power.
This has the potential to create a political death spiral in which there will be fewer but worse Republicans.
2. "Once You Start Looking for This Pattern, You See It Everywhere"
Now that Republicans seem dedicated to repeating nationally what they've done to themselves in California—systematically alienating voters and making themselves a permanent minority party—I think the biggest problem we're going to be up against is old-fashioned "smug liberalism," a left-wing liberalism grown complacent due to lack of effectual opposition. Heck, if I were a traditional center-left "liberal," I would be feeling extremely validated and vindicated right now, and I would be insufferably smug and complacent. Even more so than those people usually are.
So I think it's noteworthy when you find someone who is not so smug about how the "progressive" ideal is working out, particularly in California.
A theme I have been tracing for years is the way in which "progressive" policies championed in the name of inequality and helping the poor actually enforce a two-tier class society. The promoters of these allegedly progressive ideals, the college-educated upper middle class, tend to prosper under these policies, while the supposed beneficiaries, the poor, get squeezed. It's a pattern you can see in education, in housing, in transportation, in policing, in taxes and regulation—and the more "progressive" a locality's politics, the worse it gets.
California is a leading example, so I was delighted to see an article about this in the New York Times, of all places, and by Ezra Klein, of all people.
He launches off with the example that has been thoroughly exposed by the pandemic: public schools.
You may have heard that San Francisco's Board of Education voted 6 to 1 to rename 44 schools, stripping ancient racists of their laurels, but also Abraham Lincoln and Senator Dianne Feinstein. The history upon which these decisions were made was dodgy, and the results occasionally bizarre. Paul Revere, for instance, was canceled for participating in a raid on Indigenous Americans that was actually a raid on a British fort....
But San Francisco's public schools remain closed, no matter the name on the front. "What I cannot understand is why the School Board is advancing a plan to have all these schools renamed by April, when there isn't a plan to have our kids back in the classroom by then," Mayor London Breed said in a statement. I do not want to dismiss the fears of teachers (or parents), many living in crowded homes, who fear returning to classrooms during a pandemic. But the strongest evidence we have suggests school openings do not pose major risks when proper precautions are followed, and their continued closure does terrible harm to students, with the worst consequences falling on the neediest children. And that's where this goes from wacky local news story to a reflection of a deeper problem.
San Francisco is about 48 percent white, but that falls to 15 percent for children enrolled in its public schools. For all the city's vaunted progressivism, it has some of the highest private school enrollment numbers in the country—and many of those private schools have remained open. It looks, finally, like a deal with the teachers' union is near that could bring kids back to the classroom, contingent on coronavirus cases continuing to fall citywide, but much damage has been done. This is why the school renamings were so galling to so many in San Francisco, including the mayor. It felt like an attack on symbols was being prioritized over the policies needed to narrow racial inequality....
There is an old finding in political science that Americans are "symbolically conservative" but "operationally liberal." Americans talk like conservatives but want to be governed like liberals. In California, the same split political personality exists, but in reverse: We're often symbolically liberal, but operationally conservative. Renaming closed schools is an almost novelistically on-point example, but it is not the most consequential....
Once you start looking for this pattern, you see it everywhere....
California, as the biggest state in the nation, and one where Democrats hold total control of the government, carries a special burden. If progressivism cannot work here, why should the country believe it can work anywhere else?
Now, this is Ezra Klein, who wants to stay in the good graces of the conventional "progressive" left, so he is going to pass this all off as "unintended consequences" or as people being hypocrites who are secretly "conservative" and not willing to sacrifice enough for their "progressive" principles.
Yet the most interesting line here is, "Once you start looking for this pattern, you see it everywhere." You sure do, and that's why it's such a problem for the left to have someone pointing it out. Other people might notice, and they might draw some implications that go farther than Klein can manage.
3. Libertarians in a Pandemic
Speaking of public schools, nobody could have made a more effective case against them than the schools themselves have done during this pandemic.
Part of the way the welfare state leads to a two-tier class society is that it offers us the choice between a poor-quality service provided for free and a high-quality service available only to those capable of paying a relatively large amount of money (or buying a house in a very expensive neighborhood). So those in the lower tier can only get the low-quality "free" stuff, while the upper-middle-class people who design and run the whole system can afford to escape from it to provide for their own needs.
The pandemic has fully laid this bare. Private schools have been resourceful and agile and have adapted to continue providing effective in-person or "hybrid" schooling (part in-person, part online) during the pandemic. Large numbers of public schools, by contrast, have not only failed to do so but have not even made a plausible pretense of trying.
David French laments that this could provide an enormous opportunity for an opposition party that was actually trying to win over voters—and solve real problems—rather than pandering to an increasingly insane base.
If you've heard it once, you've heard it a thousand times—a nation needs a healthy political opposition. I'll go further. A state needs a healthy opposition. A city needs a healthy opposition. And the most basic definition of a healthy opposition is a political party that 1) exists and 2) is fundamentally grounded in reason and evidence.
Sadly, in multiple states and jurisdictions, the GOP can't functionally meet the first criterion, and during the Trump era an increasing number of national political figures have utterly abandoned the second. The Republican Party is essentially absent from our nation's major urban centers. It's been reduced to an ineffectual rump in our nation's largest state [California]. And let's not mince words—these realities hurt our nation in concrete ways.
Let's take, for example, public education. In the last few days, a quartet of stories have illustrated how there is a crying need for reasonable political opposition, and that one-party rule can functionally grant the worst and most radical voices disproportionate influence and power even in spite of majority opposition....
There is an opening for a responsible right. There is a necessity for a responsible right. When will the GOP finally possess the wisdom and courage to seize the opportunity that's so plainly before it?
Click through to the piece, because he provides more details on the left's horrible malfeasance every time it is given unopposed management of public education.
But maybe we won't have to wait for the Republicans to become an effective opposition party again. Here's an interesting overview of how the pandemic may be changing the politics of "school choice" by eroding support for public schools among the upper middle class.
Since the advent of the school-choice movement, its most tenacious and effective blue-state opponents have been affluent suburban parents who have an interest in defending the exclusivity, perceived quality, and fiscal stability of their [public] schools. That has meant ensuring that district borders are stringently enforced, local property-tax wealth flows into local district schools, and exits to nondistrict alternatives are kept to a minimum. School-choice policies threaten to undermine every one of these pillars: Interdistrict-choice programs would allow out-of-district students to enroll, thus undermining schools' exclusivity and perceived quality, and they'd enable parents dissatisfied with district schools to find alternatives, diverting resources in the process....
[T]he COVID-19 school closures have disrupted the community-specific social capital that has been so essential to the political strength of district education....
Though not all of the families that have been forced to embrace 'pandemic pods' to educate their children are thrilled about it, at least some of them will decide that micro-schools are a better option than traditional district schools after the pandemic subsides. Others will look to the relative success of high-performing charter networks and Catholic schools in navigating the tumult of the past year as a reason to welcome increased choice. And while support for the teachers' unions has remained stable in recent months, some evidence indicates that support for educational-choice reforms has been rising. Why fight over reopening your local district school if you can send your child somewhere else, without having to move to another town or another state?...
As disastrous as the pandemic has been for education in the short term, it might be the deus ex machina that leads to a more pluralistic educational system in America.
Of course, we could emerge from the pandemic and go straight back to the status quo—though it looks as if the teachers' unions are stubbornly resisting in-person teaching, which means that they will drag out the potential cause of their own demise as long as possible. So this is a story I will continue tracking.
4. "Medievals with Lattes"
Here are more grounds for hope that we're not headed for a nationwide downward spiral like California's, where the party on the right self-destructs, leaving no opposition to the craziest parts of the party on the left.
That's a real danger, and as one example, the ACLU has officially gone AWOL, deserting the cause of civil liberties.
The American Civil Liberties Union will announce Tuesday it's embarking on an aggressive racial justice agenda that includes support for a reparations bill.... The 101-year-old ACLU is shifting its emphasis from defending free speech to forcefully tackling systemic racism amid a racial awakening in the US.
There you have the shift from old-fashioned liberalism to illiberal 21st Century racial politics, in microcosm.
And yet this transmogrification of the left is calling forth some of the crucial intellectual opposition it requires, and if the right cannot plausibly provide it, others will step in to fill the gap.
Check out an excerpt in Persuasion of a new book John McWhorter is publishing serially on his Substack blog, about racial politics as a new and intolerant religious dogma.
I write this viscerally driven by the fact that all of this supposed wisdom is founded in an ideology under which white people calling themselves our saviors make black people look like the dumbest, weakest, most self-indulgent human beings in the history of our species, and teach black people to revel in that status and cherish it as making us special. Talking of Antiracist Baby, I am especially dismayed at the idea of this indoctrination infecting my daughters' sense of self. I can't always be with them, and this anti-humanist ideology may seep into their school curriculum. I shudder at the thought: teachers with eyes shining at the prospect of showing their antiracism by teaching my daughters that they are poster children rather than individuals....
Lord forbid my daughters internalize a pathetic—yes, absolutely pathetic in all of the resonances of that word—sense that what makes them interesting is what other people think of them, or don't.
Many will see me as traitorous in writing this as a black person. They will not understand that I see myself as serving my race by writing it. One of the grimmest tragedies of how this perversion of sociopolitics makes us think (or, not think) is that it will bar more than a few black readers from understanding that I am calling for them to be treated with true dignity. However, they and everyone else should also realize: I know quite well that white readers will be more likely to hear out views like this when written by a black person, and consider it nothing less than my duty as a black person to write it....
The problem is that on matters of societal procedure and priorities, the adherents of this religion—true to the very nature of religion—cannot be reasoned with. They are, in this, medievals with lattes....
Our current conversations waste massive amounts of energy in missing the futility of 'dialogue' with them. Of a hundred fundamentalist Christians, how many do you suppose could be convinced via argument to become atheists? There is no reason that the number of people who can be talked out of the Third Wave Antiracism religion is any higher. As such, our concern must be how to continue with genuine progress in spite of this ideology. How do we work around it? How do we insulate people with good ideas from the influence of the Third Wave Antiracists' liturgical concerns? How do we hold them off from influencing the education of our young people any more than they already have?
McWhorter's efforts are what we need, at exactly the moment we need it. And that's a reminder of how we're going to get through this era.
5. "And You Claim That I'm in Prison and You're Free?"
I referred you recently to an excellent interview with Natan Sharanksy, whose experiences as a Soviet dissident seem disturbingly relevant again today in describing the ongoing resistance against authoritarian regimes in Russia and Belarus, but even more so in describing the self-imposed intellectual conformism that is becoming more common in America (and not just on one side of our political divide).
The key to this is Sharansky's description of the life of the "doublethinker," the person who says one thing outwardly to avoid trouble with the ruling orthodoxy, while thinking something entirely different in the privacy of his own mind.
Check out a new article where Sharansky describes this in depth and also discusses the psychological effect of shrugging off that mental orthodoxy, a liberation so intoxicating that the dissident's physical liberation seems almost like an afterthought. It is all summed up in this amazing anecdote.
I was no longer afraid, I realized what it was to be free. I could live in history, a real history, with ups and downs, fits and starts, not the bland, ever-changing history-like-putty dictated by the authorities. I could live with real people and enjoy real friendships, not the cautious, constricted conversations of winks and nods among fellow doublethinkers. Most important, I could live without that permanent self-censorship, that constant checking of what you are going to say to make sure it's not what you want to say. Only then do you realize what a burden you've been carrying, how exhausting it is to say the right thing, do the right thing, while always fighting the fear of being outed for an errant thought, a wrong reaction, an idiosyncratic impulse.
And that was why, during nine years in prison, when the KGB would try tempting me to restore my freedom and even my life by returning to the life I once had, it was easy to say "no." I knew what they wanted. They wanted to take me back to this open-caged prison of doublethink.
It was easy enough to remind myself and them who was really free and who is a scared doublethinker. All I had to do was tell some joke about the Soviet leader, Leonid Brezhnev. Thank God, there were plenty of yarns about his arrogance, his crudeness, his senility. One kidded about him forcing Soviet cosmonauts to outdo the American astronauts who landed on the moon by rocketing to the sun, then reassuring them they wouldn't be incinerated because they'd be launched during the night. As I'd tell my interrogators a joke, I'd laugh. And, as normal Soviet doublethinkers themselves, they would want to laugh. But they couldn't, especially if two of them were there together. Laughter would end their careers.
So they'd covered up that temporary glint in their eyes with a tantrum. They'd pound the table, shouting, "HOW DARE YOU?"
"Look," I'd say to them calmly, "you can't even smile when you want to smile. And you claim that I'm in prison and you're free?"
How many people today won't let themselves smile when they want to smile? And how much does a philosophy of reason have to offer people, when it promises them release from these mental prisons?