Mugged Liberals

Five Things You Need to Read Today

1. The Law of Intended Consequences

It's a bit early to tell whether recent spikes in prices for various goods are evidence that inflation is already showing up—though we really ought to be expecting that all the trillions of dollars summoned out of thin air and pumped into the economy over the past year and a half are going to have their impact.

What we can say with a pretty high degree of certainty is that prices are being driven up in part by leftover government "stimulus" in the form of over-generous unemployment benefits.

The idea was to come to the aid of workers who were suddenly put out of a job by the economic contraction at the beginning of the pandemic. But the unemployment benefits have lasted well beyond the point at which vaccines are universally available, and they were made so generous that being unemployed pays better than working. Even for jobs that pay above minimum wage, it's worth remembering that the effective rate of pay for working is only the extra amount above what you could get from unemployment benefits. If you only make an extra $200 a week by working, your actual effective hourly rate is $5 per hour—not very enticing.

So here's any easy economics question: What happens when you pay people not to work? Answer: They stop working.

All of this is not speculation. It's everyday life. I walked into a local pizza-by-the-slice place the other day to grab a quick lunch, and I remarked to the owner that a slice that used to cost a little over $3.00 now costs $4.10, and we had a conversation about unemployment benefits and how they are making it difficult for him to hire workers and also driving up the costs for his suppliers.

That's anecdotal, but here's the bigger picture.

"Democrats have repeatedly asserted that richly expanded unemployment insurance benefits have nothing to do with the latest disappointing jobs numbers and skyrocketing inflation. They are almost surely about to be proven wrong. Just last week, the Department of Labor released Unemployment Insurance (UI) data that includes the first week in which the $300 federal supplement is no longer available to filers in four states. In the first four states ending the supplement, initial UI claims plunged while claims in the states not ending the supplement early increased....

"The UI data release last week marks the first glimpse into a nationwide natural experiment that will unfold over the course of the summer as roughly half the states sees the federal UI supplement phase out earlier than legislated with the other half continuing to provide the supplement through the legislated end date in early September....

"The message from employers is overwhelmingly that they stand ready to hire and fill a record number of openings, but to do so requires applicants willing and qualified to work. At the core of this divide between employers' demand for workers and the supply of willing applicants is the federal government's $300 per week supplement to regularly provide state unemployment benefits. Recent analysis finds that in many states, the enhanced unemployment benefits can easily exceed typical median incomes for households."

You can chalk this up to the "unintended consequences" of unemployment benefits, but when you see legions of leftists cheering on the labor shortage, you realize that its real purpose is to extort higher wages out of employers—who are imagined to be big corporations but are mostly your neighborhood pizza joint—by rigging the labor market against them.

More broadly, the policy adopted supposedly as a temporary measure in the emergency of a pandemic—that people should be able to stay home and get enough money to live on without working—is actually the economic ideal of the illiberal left.

2. He Who Knows Only His Own Side of the Case

I recently sent you a very short excerpt of my review of the latest book by the illiberal nationalist conservative Sohrab Ahmari. The full review is now up at Discourse.

I start out with John Stuart Mill's warning that "he who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that," and I go on to offer Ahmari's book as a perfect example.

As I sum it up, Ahmari "set out to puncture what he sees as the smug complacency of a liberal doctrine that holds sway only by virtue of remaining unexamined. But all he has revealed is that he has not examined it."

"That leads us to the most glaring omission of the whole book. Here and elsewhere, Ahmari mutters darkly about the 'powdered wig' version of liberalism, that is, the classical liberalism of Enlightenment philosophers and the Founding Fathers. It's a bit of a misnomer because the Founders and philosophes were the generation among whom the powdered wig finally fell out of style. But the point is that he repeatedly makes clear that he regards this as the root of all our troubles....

"Yet the guys in the powdered wigs always remain offstage. He never confronts them or their arguments directly. There is no chapter in which Ahmari presents a laudatory biography of Robert Filmer as a way of taking down the anarchic natural-rights philosophy of John Locke. All his attacks are aimed at later manifestations of what he claims is liberalism, which often (as with Heidegger) owe much more to the 19th century backlash against the Enlightenment. He is able to act as if liberalism is an emperor without clothes and dismiss it haughtily by means of sidestepping its most powerful advocates....

"Such superficial attacks on liberalism, such relentless straw-manning, can only succeed to the extent that we are complicit in allowing ourselves to forget the actual arguments and philosophical underpinnings of liberalism.

"Precisely because it is so oriented around preaching to the choir, presenting things in a way that is only likely to be convincing to those who already agree with him, I do not think Ahmari's book will be influential or long-remembered. But the rise of this new strain of intellectual opposition reminds us to increase our own engagement with Enlightenment philosophers and ideas—and with the challenges to them—and to rededicate ourselves to strengthen and extend those ideas through vigorous debate and discussion.

"It is a reminder for us to put on our powdered wigs and get to work."

No, I'm not literally going to start wearing a powdered wig, though in looking this up, I did come across a very interesting little history of the powdered wig. But you know what I mean.

Read the whole review, which I guarantee will be a lot more enjoyable and enlightening than reading the book it's about.

Speaking of wanting to know only your own side of an argument, consider Republican politicians' attempts to ban the teaching of "critical race theory" in public schools—an illiberal solution to an attack on liberalism.

Check out the case against this by four writers who describe themselves as "a progressive, a moderate, a libertarian, and a conservative," including two writers I particularly like, David French and Thomas Chatterton Williams.

"Some of us are deeply influenced by the academic discipline of critical race theory and its critique of racist structures and admire the 1619 Project. Some of us are skeptical of structural racist explanations and racial identity itself and disagree with the mission and methodology of the 1619 Project. We span the ideological spectrum: a progressive, a moderate, a libertarian and a conservative....

"It is because of these differences that we here join, as we are united in one overarching concern: the danger posed by these laws to liberal education....

"Because these laws often aim to protect the feelings of hypothetical children, they are dangerously imprecise. State governments exercise a high degree of lawful control over K-12 curriculum. But broad, vague laws violate due process and fundamental fairness because they don't give the teachers fair warning of what's prohibited. For example, the Tennessee statute prohibits a public school from including in a course of instruction any 'concept' that promotes 'division between, or resentment of' a 'creed.' Would teachers be violating the law if they express the opinion that the creeds of Stalinism or Nazism were evil?

"Other laws appear to potentially ban even expression as benign as support for affirmative action, but it's far from clear. In fact, shortly after Texas passed its purported ban on critical race theory, the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative think tank, published a list of words and concepts that help 'identify critical race theory in the classroom.' The list included terms such as 'social justice,' 'colonialism,' and 'identity.' Applying the same standards to colleges or private institutions would be flatly unconstitutional....

"Let's not mince words about these laws. They are speech codes. They seek to change public education by banning the expression of ideas. Even if this censorship is legal in the narrow context of public primary and secondary education, it is antithetical to educating students in the culture of American free expression.

"There will always be disagreement about any nation's history. The United States is no exception. If history is to judge the United States as exceptional, it is because we welcome such contestation in our public spaces as part of our unfolding national ethos. It is a violation of this commonly shared vision of America as a nation of free, vigorous and open debate to resort to the apparatus of the government to shut it down."

Put differently, the purpose of these laws is to make sure that conservatives only have to know their own side of the case.

If you don't think the intent behind these laws is illiberal, check out Trumpist conservative Charlie Kirk naming his preferred follow-up.

"It's not enough to just oppose Critical Race Theory. Republican governors, legislators, school board members, and parents need to play offense.

"Push for the Bible to be taught in schools. Push for prayer in schools. Push for pro-America curriculums....

"Put Marxists on defense."

This, along with the Ahmari book, is a reminder that although we share some of the same enemies, the nationalist conservatives—who are rapidly becoming the dominant wing of the conservative movement—are not our allies. Their answer to an attempt to use schools for leftist propaganda is to attempt to use schools for religious propaganda.

3. "There'll Be No Butter in Hell"

Sir Ian McKellen's finest moment in film may well be his unhinged fire-and-brimstone sermon to the Quiverers in Cold Comfort Farm, which conclude with his thunderous warning that "there'll be no butter in Hell." It's certainly relevant to today, because our culture is overrun with secularized Quiverers who delight in being regaled with stories of human sinfulness and the awful torments that await them as retribution.

I thought of this when I came across an insane look at the inside of an environmentalist's head when she goes to the grocery store.

"Is there any truly ethical way to buy groceries in America?

"In short: no. Americans now spend only 10 percent of their budgets on food, Lorr notes, while in 1900 it was 40 percent. Our food is the cheapest in the world because we import so much of it from places where things like labor and antibiotics are cheap....

"No label is to be trusted. But we choose the 'organic'-labeled shrimp or the 'free range' eggs anyway, because what's the alternative? Buy the eggs without the cage-free label and you may as well be deliberately upholding chicken suffering. 'Organic' might signify zero about the shrimp's farmed origins, but it's a gesture of hope....

"So what do you do? I have no idea. Personally, I react to the impossibility of doing no harm while shopping with a disordered impulsivity. Terrified of the grocery stores, I forage at my local bodega, eating the mark-up like a deserved punishment while probably engaging completely equivalent supply chains. I'm tipping wildly, but only because it helps me disburden myself of the feelings associated with what I know about grocery stores."

There'll be no butter in the hell of going to the store to buy butter.

But I found an even more extravagant and disturbing example of this new secular Puritanism: the lingerie chain Victoria's Secret has gone "woke" and has come out against male sexual desire, which is a bit like a petroleum company coming out against oil or a tobacco company coming out against smoking. Then again, both of those things have already happened, so I supposed we should have expected this.

Kat Rosenfield provides some interesting observations on this.

First, I like the fact that she starts by recognizing that this is a decision that comes from desperation.

"Victoria's Secret has long been the embarrassing uncle of the underwear world, a dinosaur ambling across the lingerie landscape in a threadbare 1990s-style slip nightie, a relic of both a culture and a consumer model that no longer exist. Its catalogue, a boon to teen boys in the pre-digital age whose dads were too square to have a stash of Playboys, was discontinued in 2016. Its biggest attraction, a runway show that aired on cable TV and featured a stable of anatomically improbable models wearing prosthetic angel wings, was cancelled in 2019, after a multi-year ratings plummet. Its perfumed retail stores are shopperless tombs, anchored to decaying malls that nobody goes to anymore."

This is a pattern I've pointed to in late-night TV. They haven't lost their audience because they went woke. They're going woke because they've already lost a broad audience, so they're searching for something they hope will get them attention. Hence the new Victoria's Secret PR campaign.

"[L]ike so many 1990s-era properties steeped in cultural nostalgia, Victoria's Secret is trying to reboot itself for a new and enlightened age—clipping the wings of its Angels and hiring a new cadre of spokesmodels who better represent the diverse tastes of the modern consumer. The new squad, who will not just model and promote the brand but serve as advisors to its majority-female board, includes actress and UNICEF ambassador Priyanka Chopra Jonas, plus-size model and activist Paloma Elsesser, and trans swimsuit model Valentina Sampaio.... Its most famous, and most unexpected, new model is Megan Rapinoe, the all-star soccer player who was named FIFA's best player of the year in 2019.

"For a brand that has always shamelessly catered to the heterosexual male consumer, strategically airing its runway show and debuting its new collections just in time for Valentine's Day, as boyfriends rush to lingerie stores en masse in search of gifts, the hiring of Rapinoe as a spokesmodel is like a hot poker to the eyeball of the male gaze. The new face of Victoria's Secret is a tough-as-nails athlete and longtime gay rights activist, married to a women's basketball player. And while she did once famously show up to an award ceremony wearing formal shorts and an oversized blazer with nothing underneath, she's not generally known as an icon of either fashion or femininity.

"But of course, that's the point: Rapinoe is as far as it's possible to be, in aesthetic and public persona, from the leggy, lacey look of the Angels era. And she is therefore the perfect choice to spearhead Victoria's Secret's awokening, at a time when straight men—and, by extension, the women who want them—are being pushed to the cultural margins."

That last point is the interesting one. Women are now supposed to pretend that they have no interest in how they look to men or in being sexually desirable to the man in their lives. This is supposed to be unseemly, not for the old religious reasons, but for the new secular reasons. Yet of course the overwhelming majority of women are heterosexual—more than 95%—and they do want to be desired by men. It's just necessary, in woke circles, to pretend that they don't.

"In an interview with the New York Times, Rapinoe decried the old Victoria's Secret for being 'patriarchal, sexist, viewing not just what it meant to be sexy but what the clothes were trying to accomplish through a male lens and through what men desired.'...

"But the young women who desire men—as in, the vast majority of young women—might question the notion that they were harmed by the existence of lingerie designed to appeal to their intended sexual partners....

"The broader tendency is to treat any desire for men like a character flaw, a burden, an embarrassment.... To be horrified by one's own sexual orientation, and every possible expression thereof, is the side effect of a culture that flattens everything from personal relationships to aesthetic taste into a political framing."

Note, though, that this is all pretense and marketing, and as Rosenfield points out, the brands that benefit from this are marketing lingerie that is trashier than anything Victoria's Secret used to produce, but they deploy the right feminist "empowerment" marketing as protective cover.

About a year ago, I linked to an illuminating article in which Rosenfield placed "antiracism" books in a well-established genre of exploitative self-help for insecure women. "Our most beloved self-help books are all about fixing something that came broken, delving into the psyche and excavating everything that's wrong with you.... What matters is that whatever is wrong—with the engine, your life, the world—it's definitely all your fault."

We see the same thing here: "Nobody makes an easier mark for the woke industrial complex than a young woman convinced that she's bad and broken and can only get better—morally, spiritually—if she buys the right products."

This idea that it is wrong for a young woman to care about what is attractive and desirable to men, the idea that she should renounce or repress something so normal and natural, strikes me as obviously abusive and—not a word I usually leap to—misogynistic. It is an attempt to make women hate themselves.

But that's the hallmark of the woke outlook. Just as you can get away with peddling racist ideas so long as you market them as "antiracism," so you can get away with misogyny by marketing it as feminism.

4. Mugged Liberals

Is crime rising? Yes, but the story is a little more complicated than you might think. Before you start drawing wider conclusion, I suggest you check out this overview of the data in The Dispatch.

"The FBI won't release its official data until September, but preliminary findings from the bureau and local law enforcement agencies indicate that murder rates rose by at least 25 percent nationally. If that bears out, the US would eclipse 20,000 murders in a year for the first time since 1995.

"'We're going to see the largest one-year rise in murder that we've ever seen,' Jeff Asher, crime analyst and co-founder of AH Datalytics, told The Dispatch....

"Research indicates that cities that increased their police budget were just as likely to see an increase in murder as places that decreased them—the murder rate was up in 84 percent of cities that reduced their budget and 74 percent that raised them....

"Despite historic surges in homicide and aggravated assault, overall violent crime increased by only 3 percent.... Steep declines in rape and robbery drove down the violent crime rate—each decreasing by double digits.

"Property crime has been decreasing for generations but saw a steep decline in 2020 because of COVID lockdowns. Burglary and larceny-theft were way down, resulting in property crime decreasing by about 8 percent....

"'A way to look at this is that the crimes that rely on mobility fell and the crimes that generally occur between people that know each other rose,' Asher said."

While I wouldn't jump to many broad political conclusions, we know from experience during the great crime wave that began in the 1970s that delegitimizing the police, reducing their numbers, and failing to enforce the laws is exactly the wrong thing to do during this new mini-crime wave.

Yet that has been the policy in many big cities. Consider San Francisco, where retailers have been shutting down their stores or reducing their hours because of a wave of shoplifting. The culprit? "Proposition 47, the 2014 ballot measure that reclassified nonviolent thefts as misdemeanors if the stolen goods are worth less than $950." The result is that local police have stopped bothering even to arrest shoplifters, and retailers are either just taking the losses or fleeing.

But there is a backlash building. They used to say that a neoconservative is "a liberal who's been mugged." In Irving Kristol's original quote, it was "mugged by reality," but in popular usage, it just got shortened to "mugged." It was a common story in the 1970s and 80s to see people's politics move away from trendy leftism once they got some real-world experience with rising crime.

Our current era is, in many respects, 20th Century Lite, and my hope is that we will make all the same mistakes, but we will make them faster and recover from them faster. So I'm already starting to notice a backlash.

New York City looks like it's on its way to getting a soft-on-crime District Attorney. But Los Angeles already went that direction, and their DA is facing a huge backlash.

"'There's no way we can get to meaningful prison reduction in this country without looking at more serious crimes,' Mr. Gascón, who also supports ending cash bail and eliminating the prosecution of juveniles as adults, said in an interview....

"But the prospect of convicted murderers getting out early, or getting lighter sentences than they would have received in a previous era, has fueled an effort to force a recall election next year and remove Mr. Gascón from office. More than a thousand volunteers, as well as dozens of paid workers, are collecting signatures for the recall at gun stores, bail bonds offices, and even outside Mr. Gascón's home....

"Mr. Gascón, 67, who was propelled into office by grass-roots activists in the aftermath of the police killing of George Floyd, is one of the nation's most progressive prosecutors in one of America's most liberal cities, and yet he is facing an intense backlash in enacting the sorts of policies demanded by protesters last year and aimed at reducing the vast racial disparities in arrests and prosecutions."

In Minneapolis, where George Floyd was killed and where the "Defund the Police" movement initially got the most traction, activists have sued the city for cutting its police force too much, in effect denying them the protection of the laws. The suit recently succeeded.

"A Minneapolis judge has sided with residents who sued the city over police staffing levels, saying the mayor and City Council failed to keep the adequate number of officers required by the municipal charter.

"Hennepin County Judge Jamie Anderson's order to add officers to the Minneapolis Police Department comes amid a citywide spike in violent crime and calls to defund the police after the May 2020 death of George Floyd. Anderson's ruling, delivered on Thursday, said Mayor Jacob Frey and the council in understaffing the police force 'failed to perform an official duty clearly imposed by law.'...

"'This is a huge victory for the Petitioners and all residents of Minneapolis, especially those in the most diverse neighborhoods feeling the brunt of rising crime rates,' Doug Seaton, president of the Upper Midwest Law Center, said in a statement. The nonprofit law firm, which is part of the conservative Minnesota think tank the Center of the American Experiment, filed the suit last year on behalf of eight White and Black residents of high-crime neighborhoods."

We can see a similar pattern with the candidate who emerged, after a botched vote-counting, as the winner of the Democratic primary for mayor in New York City.

"[A]s the campaign entered its final months, a spike in shootings and homicides drove public safety and crime to the forefront of voters' minds, and [Eric] Adams—the only leading candidate with a law enforcement background—moved urgently to demonstrate authority on the issue....

"Mr. Adams, who cast himself as a blue-collar candidate, led in every borough except Manhattan in the tally of first-choice votes and was the strong favorite among working-class black and Latino voters. He also demonstrated strength with white voters who held more moderate views, especially, some data suggests, among those voters who did not have college degrees—a coalition that has been likened to the one that propelled President Biden to the Democratic nomination in 2020."

This is a trend to watch. The dogmatic "woke" left is a small minority of mostly white, college-educated voters, while black and Hispanic voters are emerging as the new conservative base of the Democratic Party—which includes a greater sympathy for a "law and order" message.

5. The Last Helicopter Out of Saigon

I'd like to end this edition on a happier note, but I have to cover the unfolding disaster in Afghanistan, where President Biden has taken what is now a bipartisan strategy of isolationism and withdrawal to its logical conclusion, evacuating some of the last US forces in Afghanistan in the dead of night and essentially handing the country over to the Taliban.

It's an ignominious departure.

"The US left Afghanistan's Bagram Airfield after nearly 20 years by shutting off the electricity and slipping away in the night without notifying the base's new Afghan commander, who discovered the Americans' departure more than two hours after they left, Afghan military officials said."

As one military blog puts it, "The US military's 'orderly and safe' departure from Afghanistan is making the Red Army's retreat from the same country more than 30 years ago look like mission success by comparison... The Onion, a satirical website, prophesized this exact scenario 10 years ago with its July 8, 2011 story: 'US Quietly Slips Out Of Afghanistan In Dead Of Night.'"

The Taliban are quickly taking advantage, and an eerie sense of doom is hanging over Kabul.

"With his military crumbling, President Ashraf Ghani of Afghanistan fired a crucial part of his command structure and brought in a new one. He created a nebulous'supreme state council,' announced months ago, that has hardly met. And as districts fall to the Taliban across the country, he has installed a giant picture of himself outside the airport's domestic terminal....

"'There's no hope for the future,' said Zubair Ahmad, 23, who runs a grocery store on one of the Khair Khana neighborhood's main boulevards.'Afghans are leaving the country. I don't know whether I am going to be safe 10 minutes from now.'...

"More than a quarter of the country's 421 districts have been seized by the insurgents since early May, in a sweeping campaign that has largely targeted Afghanistan's north and even seen some provincial capitals besieged by Taliban fighters.

"In some places, government forces are surrendering without a fight, often because they have run out of ammunition and the government doesn't send more supplies or reinforcements....

"Accordingly, citizen militias are on the rise again in Afghanistan, with various ethnic and regional factions stirring up a volunteer effort to defend themselves against the Taliban's advance."

Thomas Joscelyn paints a grim picture.

"[W]hile it is true that no provincial capitals have yet fallen to the Taliban, it is only a matter of time. The Taliban's fighters have encircled multiple provincial capitals, deliberately waiting for US and NATO forces to fully withdraw from the country before seizing at least some of them. To give just two examples from recent days, Taliban fighters have made incursions into Kunduz and are on the outskirts of Mazar-i-Sharif, two of Afghanistan's 34 provincial capitals. Many more provincial capitals are surrounded....

"Much of the offensive is taking place in the north, far from the Taliban's traditional strongholds, but in locations where al-Qaeda-affiliated groups are known to operate....

"These al-Qaeda-affiliated outfits fight under the Taliban's banner, so they advertise their role in the war only on occasion. Still, there is ample evidence pointing to their participation in the Taliban's jihad. Their presence in the Taliban's campaign became obvious after President Obama withdrew the vast majority of U.S. forces by the end of 2014. Months later, in the spring of 2015, the Taliban opened a major offensive across the north. That campaign was a harbinger of the current offensive....

"The Taliban and its al-Qaeda allies went on the offensive immediately after the U.S. signed a withdrawal agreement with the group on Feb. 29, 2020. The jihadists have launched multiple offensives since then, including the most recent one. Yet US and UN officials continue to pretend that there is some sort of 'peace process.' This is delusional."

None of this defeat was necessary, and it stems mostly from the fact that in recent years, we simply stopped trying to succeed. "In October 2018, the US military stopped relying on estimates of the number of Taliban controlled and contested districts, arguing that such figures are 'of limited decision-making value' to leaders and all that mattered was progress toward a 'political settlement.'"

As to the consequences, notice those reference to al-Qaeda. We are re-creating the situation that existed before September 11, 2001—but this time we're making it even harder for the US to fight back if al-Qaeda once again uses Afghanistan as a safe haven from which to attack us.