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Remove Children from Sex Offender Registries
With several septuagenarians competing for the presidency, the ghost of the 1990s looms over the 2020 race. Joe Biden has faced criticism for his sponsorship of the 1994 crime bill. President Trump tweeted “Anyone associated with the 1994 Crime Bill will not have a chance of being elected.”
Here’s some context. Violent crime rates in the United States began a steep climb in the mid-1960s and reached their peak in the early 1990s. Americans were extremely worried. Donald Trump, for example, recommended bringing back New York’s death penalty in response to a much-publicized Central Park attack. Politicians listened. Many states passed tough anti-crime measures and in 1994, the federal government got into the act. Though Republicans criticized the federal crime bill for gun restrictions and what they called “pork,” the measure passed the House on a voice vote and the Senate by 61-38 with many Republican votes.
Crime has dropped dramatically since. Was that due to the law? Doubtful. Crime also rose and fell in Canada at about the same rate during the same time period (though it started at a much lower baseline). Some possible causes that have been floated: abortion, immigration, cell phones, and community policing.
In any case, there are good reasons to reconsider some aspects of the 1994 act and subsequent revisions, because we’ve had a chance to see the unintended consequences.
One feature of the 1994 law that has had baleful unanticipated effects was the adoption of sex offender registries. At the time, experts advised that sex offenders never reformed. To protect the community from those found guilty of such offenses after their return to society, registries would require them to identify themselves (sometimes even with signs in their windows). Understandably, penalties were particularly harsh for anyone who harmed a child sexually.
What the law’s authors didn’t anticipate is that children themselves would be caught up in this net. The Juvenile Law Center in Philadelphia has been studying those effects.
The old assumption that sex offenders never change has proved mistaken. The national recidivism rate for all crimes is roughly 40 percent. The rate for adults who commit sex offenses is about 13 percent. For children, the rate is about 7 percent.
Sex offender registries in many states make no distinction between crimes committed by adults against children and offenses children commit against one another. Children as young as 8 years old have been required to register as sex offenders and remain on the registry for life.
Sometimes, children commit serious offenses. But children mature and change. Should a youthful offense or stupid mistake carry a lifetime punishment?
And not all offenses that can land you on a registry are serious. “Isaac E” pleaded guilty to “indecent liberties by forcible compulsion.” He touched a girl’s chest. They were both 12 at the time. But Isaac must post a new picture of himself every year, while the age of his victim is always listed as 12. This makes it appear to anyone who consults the registry years later that the adult Isaac assaulted a child.
Children who have been labelled sex offenders often struggle to lead normal lives after serving time. Strict rules limit where sex offenders can live or work. Some cannot live with family members who have children, and missing a deadline can result in a felony conviction for failing to register. “Gabriel” had been arrested for sexually touching a playmate at the age of 11. He did not reoffend, but he lived on the streets after leaving the Texas Youth Center at age 17 when he failed to find an apartment that would accept him. In a Catch-22 faced by many on registries, he was then arrested for failing to register a home address (a felony) and sentenced to a year in prison. Other offenses that can trip up those on registries: changing their Yelp account username, parking in a different place, failing to have mail forwarded to a new address.
A 15-year-old Pennsylvania girl who took nude selfies and posted them online was convicted of manufacturing and disseminating child pornography. She was charged as an adult and will remain on the registry for life.
A 16-year-old who had been on the Louisiana registry for two years told Human Rights Watch “For sex offenders, our mistake is forever available to the world to see. There is no redemption, no forgiveness . . . There is never a chance for a fresh start. You are finished. I wish I was executed because my life is basically over.”
We’ll likely never know if the tough on crime laws we passed with bipartisan majorities in the 1990s worked or not. But surely some of the injustices — like imposing lifelong pariah status on children — cry out for correction.
What’s Missing from Trump’s China Policy
The Dow plunged 450 points on the opening bell May 6 in response to this presidential tweet: “The Trade Deal with China continues, but too slowly, as they attempt to renegotiate. No! The 10% will go up to 25% on Friday.” Economists eye this brinkmanship fearfully. Bank of America/Merrill Lynch’s global research team, among many others, has warned that a trade war could cause a global recession. Desmond Lachman of AEI notes that there are splash back effects of imposing harsh tariffs. They may succeed in weakening China, but “Any marked slowing in the Chinese economy is bound to have spillover effects on those economies with strong trade links to that country.”
Among those countries with “strong trade links” to China would be ours. Lachman is warning that Trump’s policies may be undermining the strong economy, and that this should worry him looking at 2020. But before we get there, spare a moment to savor the irony of what Trump’s policies have so far achieved on one of his favorite 2016 hobbyhorses — the trade deficit. In 2016, the goods and services trade deficit with China stood at $309 billion (which Trump frequently exaggerated to $500 billion). As of March, 2019, the trade deficit with China was $379 billion — a 23 percent increase.
As nearly every economist will attest, trade deficits are not important. Between 1980 and 2009, US employment rose when the trade deficit went up and fell when the trade deficit came down. Hmmm. Same thing seems to have happened in the first two years of the Trump administration. Employment and trade deficits are both up. Someone should tap Trump on the shoulder and mention this. Actually, don’t bother. Gary Cohn talked himself blue in the face on the subject to no avail. Trump is frequently the embodiment of the joke: “Don’t confuse me with the facts, my mind is made up.”
This is not to say that China should be free to cheat with impunity. But Mr. Trump doesn’t seem to be focused on the most serious threats from China. He seems fixated on the great crime China commits by selling us products, rather than on the threat to privacy and civil liberties China’s authoritarian government represents to its own citizens and to the world.
China’s communist government has permitted free enterprise (to a point) and we all know what a massive difference that has made for the average Chinese. More than 800 million people lifted themselves out of poverty once the state stopped forbidding it.
But in other respects, China has remained as ruthless a Big Brother as Orwell imagined. The internet is successfully smothered by what techies call “The Great Firewall of China.” The press is controlled. In Xinjiang province, up to 3 million ethnic Uighurs and other Muslims have been shipped off to concentration camps. Transgressions that can result in deportation include observing Ramadan, growing a beard, or phoning relatives abroad. While in camp, they are “re-educated.” In March, after U.S. citizen Ferkat Jawdat met with Secretary of State Pompeo, his mother, aunt, and uncle were moved to a camp and then sentenced to eight years in prison as retaliation for Jawdat’s meeting.
But even for those not physically imprisoned, China is erecting a virtual cage for everyone, with cameras equipped with facial recognition software now ubiquitous, “free” health checks that permit the government to collect fingerprints and DNA, mass surveillance by police and neighborhood snitches, and a system that would make Winston Smith cringe: the “social credit system.” This permits Big Beijing to keep tabs on every phone call, text message, jaywalking ticket, and night out with too much drinking. If you transgress, you get demerits, and these can be used to deny plane tickets, jobs, or apartments. Sometimes the state requires that a special ringtone be added to the miscreant’s phone so that he/she will be embarrassed every time the phone rings in public.
That’s only a sampling. Equally worrying is China’s success in exporting this sinister system as part of its “Belt and Road Initiative.”
The Trump administration has very recently begun to impose limits on technology transfers to Chinese tech firms. But the effort has been slapdash. (In 2018, the Commerce Department imposed sanctions on Chinese telecom company ZTE only to see President Trump reverse the decision).
Trump is focused on the non-threat of Chinese exports while ignoring the true threat of China’s totalitarian system reaching abroad. A few weeks ago, CBS censored a comedy that mocked China’s censorship. That ought to worry us more than imported washing machines.
White Males and Abortion
Sen. Doug Jones (D., AL) tweeted in response to anti-abortion legislation passed by the Alabama legislature: “I refuse to believe that these Republican men represent the views of most Alabamians. Their action is both unconstitutional and shameful. The people of Alabama deserve to be on the #rightsideofhistory – not the side of extremists. Women deserve better.”
It seems much more likely that Senator Jones is the one who is out of step. A 2014 Pew poll found that Alabama is among the most pro-life states in the country, with 58 percent saying the procedure should be illegal in “all or most cases.” It’s possible that among the 58 percent who oppose abortion in Alabama, some will find the legislation passed this week to be too extreme, but don’t count on it. Just last year, voters approved a state constitutional amendment declaring that it is “the public policy of this state to recognize and support the sanctity of unborn life and the rights of unborn children.” Fifty-nine percent of voters voted in favor.
Since the vote making abortion illegal in Alabama, Republican members of the Alabama senate have been targets of accusations — mostly that they are male and white. A number of outlets pointed to the fact that all 25 votes in favor of legislation were white, male Republicans. Ok. But the Alabama house has lots of Republican women. The bill’s sponsor in the lower chamber was a woman, as was the governor who signed the bill.
Those who fixate on the “problem” of whiteness may think this is some sort of knock-out blow, but the truth is that these senators are accurately representing the views of their constituents, including women. A 2018 PRRI survey found that 60 percent of Republican women agreed with the statement “Roe v. Wade was wrongly decided and should be overturned.” This compared with only 47 percent of Republican men. Democratic pollster Celinda Lake notes that women tend to be more religious than men, and this aligns with more conservative views on abortion.
Still, partisan lines remain blurry on abortion. More than a third of Republicans favor keeping abortion legal. Until Brett Kavanaugh’s ascension to the Supreme Court, the issue may not have ranked very high for them. They could vote for Republicans — with whom they agree on other issues — safe in the knowledge that nothing would threaten the regime of legal abortion throughout the nation. Now that the Court has a possible majority for overturning Roe, the calculations of moderate Republicans may change.
Moderate Democrats may be out in the cold too. In the aftermath of the 2018 election, Democrats burst from the gate with legislation that expanded abortion even beyond Roe’s contours. New York passed the Reproductive Health Act that permits even late-term abortions in the “absence of fetal viability, or [when] the abortion is necessary to protect the patient’s life or health.” When health is interpreted to mean “mental health,” it opens a gaping loophole. Sometimes late-term pregnancies must be terminated to save the mother’s physical health — but that doesn’t mean an abortion is required. Even very premature infants commonly survive these days.
Democrats also painted themselves as abortion extremists by opposing the Born Alive Abortion Survivors bill, insisting — falsely — that these abortions are only performed when there are severe fetal abnormalities or when the mother’s life is at risk.
But now Republicans risk being viewed as extremists. With seven states having passed abortion laws that may transgress the boundaries established by Roe, the question now is whether the pro-life cause is best served by this frontal assault strategy. The Alabama law makes no exceptions for cases of rape or incest. And while it’s true that the child bears no guilt for the way he or she was conceived, it may not be prudent to refuse to concede that ground. A 2018 Gallup poll found that 77 percent of respondents want abortion to be legal in cases of rape and incest. The exception has long been included in other pro-life legislation, like the Hyde Amendment.
Whatever happens, these stirrings at the state level may provoke an overdue reckoning about the truth of abortion. It isn’t rare. It is usually performed on perfectly healthy mothers and babies. And it isn’t the only alternative for women unable to raise a child. There are 36 couples waiting for an adoptive child for every one placed. Why is that humane solution so commonly overlooked?
Should Democrats Avoid Women Candidates?
Many Democratic voters are worried that a woman candidate cannot win the presidency in 2020. “I don’t think they’re strong enough to carry it for themselves,” an Iowa voter told the Washington Post. Amber Phillips reports that “female politicians are held by voters to a much higher standard than men,” and points to polls showing that today’s support for Elizabeth Warren (12 percent) and Kamala Harris (8 percent) drops to low single digits when voters are asked who is likely to defeat Trump.
Without denying that some people may harbor misogynistic feelings, and that many Democrats may indeed fear, as Phillips reported, that while they personally would happily vote for a woman for president, their neighbors might not, this doesn’t prove that women are held to a higher standard. The evidence is mixed. It’s never possible to know with certainty what motivates voters. Could Romney’s religion have decided the 2012 race? It’s possible.
Is there an anti-woman bias? Election analyst Karlyn Bowman has found that women are just as likely to be successful in political races as men. And most voters are past the identity politics phase of wanting to vote for a candidate (or oppose one) due to sex.
At the level of presidential politics, the data set is a bit skimpy — one election. Many Democrats seem to believe that Hillary Clinton’s 2016 loss can be chalked up to sex, or, in the words of New York Times op-ed writer Farhad Manjoo, the perception that “American society is wracked at every level by a pervasive and enduring misogyny.”
Or perhaps Hillary Clinton became unpopular for reasons all her own. It isn’t as if she was always unpopular. Twice in her career, Clinton was regarded favorably by a whopping 66 percent of Americans — in December, 1998 when the Monica Lewinsky scandal made her the most prominent wronged wife on the planet; and in November of 2009, while she served as Secretary of State. Even in the midst of the Benghazi hearings in December of 2012, her approval still held steady at 65 percent.
In 2015, Clinton’s approval dipped sharply, down to 49 percent. This drop tracked among all voters, including Democrats, whose support declined from 86 percent to 77 percent. What happened? Clinton didn’t change her sex. She ran into the private email server scandal, and it damaged her not just because of the underlying offense, but also due to her persistent deceit, and the fact that this revived earlier concerns about her dishonesty and “rules don’t apply to me” image from earlier in her career.
The share of voters who are women has been increasing steadily since 1980. The Center for American Women in Politics at Rutgers shows that in 2016, 63.3 percent of eligible women voted compared with only 59.3 percent of eligible men. It’s possible that women harbor self-hating feelings toward women candidates, but that seems unlikely. The data do show clearly that women, especially the unmarried ones, tend to prefer more liberal candidates without regard to sex. And there is one study showing that when Democratic women run against Republican men, some Republican women voters defect to the woman.
What about men voters? Are they the ones who hold retrograde views, thinking women candidates are too emotional or weak to do the job? There may be some of that, but think of Republican voters in 2008. They were lukewarm toward John McCain, the last man standing at the end of the primaries, but they were over the moon for Sarah Palin. A September 2008 CNN poll found that 62 percent of men approved of Palin compared with only 53 percent of women. Asked whether Palin was qualified to be president, 57 percent of male respondents said yes, 14 points higher than among women. In fact, 55 percent of women thought she wasn’t qualified.
You can mine the data in the belief that voters are not “ready” for a woman president. But the truth is probably closer to this: the right woman candidate hasn’t run yet. Qualifications aside (it’s so pre-2016 to fret about qualifications!) if Oprah Winfrey or Michelle Obama jumped into the race, they’d rocket to the top. Great Britain, Israel, Germany, and India for heaven’s sake, have elected female leaders. Is the U.S. more misogynist than those countries?
Not everything reduces to bias. May the best person win.
A Tale of Two Obstructions
Every Republican remembers with disgust the video of Bill Clinton glowering into the camera and declaring “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky. I never told anybody to lie. Never. These allegations are false.”
It’s worth revisiting why that statement was so infuriating. It wasn’t because we — well, let me speak for myself, I — was outraged at the idea of a president having an affair with a young intern (though that was part of it). No, it was the lying. Bill Clinton lied and lied and lied. He even lied under oath. Lying is cheating. Lying displays contempt for other people.
Today, the Attorney General of the United States asserts, in terms that should make Bill Clinton smile, that because the president of the United States was “frustrated and angered by a sincere belief that the investigation was undermining his presidency, propelled by his political opponents, and fueled by illegal leaks” he could not be considered guilty of obstruction of justice.
Other Republicans echo this line, arguing that the nature of the false allegations against President Trump bruited in the press and among some Democrats — that he was a Russian sleeper agent; that the Russians had “kompromat” on him; that some accusations arose from Clinton surrogates — tainted the entire investigation and justified his flamboyant attempts to obstruct it. But the fact that some allegations are outlandish doesn’t mean all allegations are false. Bill Clinton was accused of running illegal drugs through the Mena Airport in Arkansas and being complicit in the death of Vince Foster. By Mr. Barr’s logic, it was therefore ok that he lied under oath about Monica Lewinsky.
“No underlying crime, therefore no obstruction,” they say. But Bill Clinton encouraged his secretary to lie about Monica Lewinsky to avoid embarrassment, not to hide a crime. Many Democrats, but zero Republicans said that that excused it.
Not only do Republicans utterly reverse themselves about the importance of truth telling, they also lean in. William Barr told the world that the president, “fully cooperated with the Special Counsel’s investigation.” This is laughable. Yes, he turned over some documents, and permitted aides to be interviewed, but he fired the Director of the FBI and told Russian visitors that this relieved great “pressure due to the Russia thing.” He ordered Robert Mueller to be fired for risible “conflicts” (such as asking for his old FBI job back, which was itself a lie). He lied about the meeting in Trump Tower; tasked Corey Lewandowski with ordering Attorney General Jeff Sessions to unrecuse himself and instruct the special counsel to limit his inquires only to future election interference. He asked his White House counsel to lie about whether he had ordered Mueller fired. He claimed he could not recall events 30 times in response to written questions. He repeatedly refused requests to sit for an in-person interview, and dangled pardons to those facing criminal trials to discourage cooperation with law enforcement. “Stay strong,” our don-in-chief told his felonious former lawyer — “hang in there.” And throughout it all, he kept up a steady campaign of delegitimization of the Mueller inquiry as a “witch hunt” and a “hoax.”
Anyone would have been upset, Trump’s defenders explain, at being falsely accused. It was his consciousness of innocence, not guilt, that caused him to lash out.
Really? Does that seem logical? An innocent man would have thrown open his files, freely testified, left the investigator unmolested (verbally and with regard to firing), and kept his mouth shut about former associates under indictment.
Besides, Trump’s motive may have been concern that the investigation would uncover other wrongdoing — such as tax evasion or paying off porn stars in the midst of a presidential campaign. Or it’s possible that hiding more contacts with agents of the Kremlin was the true motive — and that it worked. Mueller’s report says that, in addition to Trump’s failure to testify and faulty memory, many witnesses lied, destroyed evidence, and successfully encrypted communications. Given these clear acts of obstruction, Mueller’s report noted, “the Office cannot rule out the possibility that the unavailable information would shed additional light on (or cast in a new light) the events described in the report.” That is what Mr. Trump and his minions call “total exoneration.”
None of this is to suggest that the Congress should impeach Trump. There are prudential reasons to avoid that course. The president would relish the mud fight, voters are already exhausted, and an election is only 18 months away. But the Mueller Report provides abundant evidence that the president attempted to obstruct justice and abused his power. The past few weeks have seen the Attorney General and most of the Republican party distort those findings and attempt to hoodwink the Republican rank and file.
Is lying wrong? Depends upon the meaning of the word “is.”
Will Conservatives Give Russia a Pass?
The conservative media world, along with all but a few Republican members of Congress, are in the process of handing Vladimir Putin his greatest victory yet. They are ignoring the copious evidence in the Mueller report that Russia interfered in our election and continues to do so. Pace Jared Kushner, it was a whole lot more sinister than a “couple of Facebook ads.”
The narrative has now taken hold that the Mueller investigation originated with the Steele dossier. On Fox News, Ed Henry said that the FBI relied on the dossier to “get this whole thing going.” Breitbart referred to the “debunked Russia hoax,” and a Wall Street Journal editorial demanded to know how “the partisan propaganda known as the Steele dossier become the basis for an unprecedented FBI probe of a presidential campaign . . . “
As the Mueller report makes clear, and as even the infamous “Nunes memo” of 2018 conceded, the investigation did not begin with the dossier. It began when a foreign government (believed to be Australia) “informed the FBI about its May 2016 interaction with [George] Papadopoulos and his statement that the Russian government could assist the Trump Campaign.”
Sixteen members of the Trump campaign had direct ties with Russians or Russian agents, including President Trump. Some of these were benign. Some were not. Paul Manafort was sharing polling information and plans for winning midwestern states with Konstantin Kilimnik, who has ties to Russian intelligence. Is it the received Republican wisdom now that this was not, at the very least, eyebrow raising?
As for Trump’s connections to Russia, we now know that throughout most of the campaign, even as he was issuing tweets like this one on July 26, 2018 “‘[c]razy’ to suggest that Russia was dealing with Trump . . . [f]or the record, I had ZERO investments in Russia.” In fact, he had been negotiating one of his largest real estate projects ever, for a Trump Tower Moscow, until just the previous month.
But even if the investigation had begun with the Steele dossier, so what? As they say in legal circles: res ipsa loquitor — “the thing speaks for itself.” The Mueller report is sober and meticulous. The dossier is hardly mentioned. If Republican partisans skip over the documentation of Russian meddling because they’ve internalized Donald Trump’s sense of grievance, they are disserving the nation.
The Russian interference was and is far more extensive than a few Facebook and Twitter posts, though those were noxious enough. The IRA (Internet Research Agency), an arm of the Russian intelligence services, along with the GRU (Russia’s foreign intelligence service), also organized “dozens” of actual rallies, hacked into the computers of the Democratic Party, maliciously spread falsehoods, stoked already existing divisions between Americans of different races and ethnicities, and planted malware. More worrying, the report notes that the Russians aimed at actual voting infrastructure:
Victims included U.S. state and local entities, such as state boards of elections (SBOEs), secretaries of state, and county governments, as well as individuals who worked for those entities. The GRU also targeted private technology firms responsible for manufacturing and administering election-related software and hardware, such as voter registration software and electronic polling stations.
In August 2016, GRU officers targeted employees of [redacted], a voting technology company that developed software used by numerous U.S. counties to manage voter rolls . . .
The independent counsel did not further investigate these attempts to subvert elections because “The Office understands that the FBI, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, and the states have separately investigated that activity.”
Or perhaps not. According to the New York Times, former Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen wanted to make blocking Russian interference in the 2020 election a top priority. She was warned off by Trump’s chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, who made it clear that the president still regards any mention of Russia as a personal slight.
In a continuation of patterns established under communism, Russia has exerted malign influence on elections in many nations. Throughout the democratic world, they seek to sow the kind of division and distrust they enjoy in mother Russia. Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Ukraine, Hungary, and other former Soviet captives have been particularly hard hit, but the Russians have also stirred the pot of Catalan succession in Spain, boosted Marine Le Pen in France, and helped Brexit in Great Britain. In 2017, the Netherlands switched to all paper ballots to prevent Russian hacking of its election.
What is the difference between other democracies and the U.S.? Only here does dismissing the threat of Russian interference now equate with loyalty to the president.
Did Bernie Sanders Steal His Wealth?
In 2016 and 2017, Bernie Sanders raked in over a million bucks. Last year, his gross income was down to $561, 293 — still not too shabby. The point is not to rib the senator about his membership in the top 1 percent, though that’s tempting. Nor is it to chide him for his relatively paltry charitable donations. His contributions to charity represented only 3.4 percent of his income, it’s true, but compared with some of his competitors in the Democratic field, that was generous. Beto O’Rourke reportedly contributed only one-third of one percent of his 2017 income ($370,412), and he may have underpaid his taxes by $4000 by taking medical deductions in excess of the permitted amount. Amy Klobuchar, Kamala Harris, and Kirsten Gillibrand all gave less than 2 percent of their incomes away. Cory Booker and Pete Buttigieg have yet to release their tax returns, and of course, President Trump is hiding behind a spectral audit (still not complete, three years on?) that in any case would present no legal obstacle to disclosure. Why he is hiding his “beautiful” tax returns is up to the imagination.
The question for Bernie Sanders is: How can you sleep at night knowing that you became rich at the expense of the middle class and the poor?
“But I didn’t,” he would doubtless protest. “I made my money by selling thousands of copies of Our Revolution.” Speaking on Fox News, he was defiant: “If anyone thinks I should apologize for writing a bestselling book, I’m sorry, I’m not going to do it.”
But he should apologize, according to his own logic. How many times has Bernie Sanders alleged that “millionaires and billionaires” are siphoning off all of the nation’s wealth and hoarding it for themselves? Here’s a typical example from a 2015 interview with the Des Moines Register:
Is it right that the middle class continues to disappear while there has been a massive transfer of wealth from working families to the top one-tenth of 1 percent? Trillions of dollars in the last 30 years have flowed from the middle class to the top one-tenth of 1 percent. And the American people say, ‘No, that’s not right.’
It’s also not true. Not remotely. Millionaires and billionaires acquire wealth by producing products and services that other people want to buy, from computers to Greek yogurt to bad books like Our Revolution. Sure, some millionaires and billionaires are born into wealth, but even they haven’t subtracted from the net worth of any other American. In fact, the rich tend to improve the lives of other Americans by 1) providing them with jobs, and 2) buying the products they manufacture, and 3) paying high taxes; and 4) contributing generously to charities (well, most rich people anyway, not presidential contenders)
As for Sanders’s notion that we have witnessed a “transfer of wealth from working families to the top one-tenth of 1 percent” — this is gibberish. How did that transfer happen? Were working families taxed heavily and the tippy top one percenters excused? In that case, though it would be wrong to call it a transfer of wealth (the money wasn’t being deposited in Bill Gates’s account), it would amount to the rich being free riders when it comes to enjoying the goods of government including national defense, roads, food inspection, and so forth.
But, of course, that’s fantasy. As the Tax Foundation reports, in 2016, the top 1 percent earned 19.7 percent of total national income and paid 37.3 percent of income taxes. We have progressive tax rates, so the top 1 percent paid average taxes of 26.9 percent, which is seven times higher than taxpayers in the bottom half of the income distribution.
As the for the “shrinking middle class” Senator Sanders is always lamenting, it is shrinking, but only because so many more Americans are joining the upper class. If middle class is defined as households between two-thirds and twice the median household income, then the percentage has declined from 61 percent in 1971 to 50 percent in 2015. As Mark Perry of the American Enterprise Institute notes, those people can only go one of two places: up or down. Most of those who are no longer in the middle class are in the upper class (though some fell below as well). In 1969, fewer than one out of 12 households earned $100,000 or more. By 2016, 27.7 percent were in that category. Politicians thrive on stories of decline and victimization, but the story of the past few decades – despite ups and downs – is one of increasing national wealth.
Bernie Sanders is a one percenter. If his wealth is tainted, it isn’t because he siphoned it from others, but because he earned it by peddling twaddle.
Twitter Ain’t America
An appropriately Twitteresque meme circulated recently on that platform: Write a sad story in just three words. This was an homage to Ernest Hemingway, who, challenged to write a sad story in only six words, grabbed the nearest blank paper and scrawled, “For sale: baby shoes. Never worn.” Or so the story goes. It’s too good to check. Responses to the three-word challenge ran the gamut from “People trust CNN,” to “Trump elected again.” I suggested, “Twitter represents America.”
It would be a sad story if it were true, but there are many reasons to doubt that Twitter represents anything other than a cacophony of curmudgeons.
Consider the Biden touching imbroglio. For days and days, Twitter and other social media were alight with Biden hashtags and hot takes. The phrase “creepy Joe Biden” generated half a million Google searches. In part in response to this, cable commentators speculated about whether Biden’s MeToo moment (which it really wasn’t) would prove fatal to his potential presidential run.
Or not. A number of surveys this week show that voters, in general, are in a different world from social media. The key constituency for a Biden bid — Democratic primary voters — are untroubled by reports of his excessive touching. A Quinnipiac poll of California Democrats (California has an early primary next year), found that 71 percent did not regard the touching as a serious issue. That included 67 percent of women. A Morning Consult poll found that Biden is a double-digit favorite among Democrats for the nomination, and enjoys a 14-point lead in early voting states. A separate poll of Iowa Democrats also put Biden at the top of the list.
There is a message here for candidates and also for ordinary Twitter denizens. It’s tempting for candidates to pitch their messages to the Twitter audience. It can provide a sugar high of immediate positive feedback. And who doesn’t love sugar? But as the Hidden Tribes project has found, the Democrats who post to social media like Twitter are markedly to the left of Democrats as a whole. As Nate Cohn and Kevin Quealy break it down in The New York Times, 53 percent of Democrats, but only 29 percent of Democrats who sound off on social media describe themselves as moderate or conservative. Seventy percent of Democrats at large, but only 48 percent of social media Democrats say political correctness is a problem in America. Fifty-three percent of Democratic social media posters say they have become more liberal over time, versus only 30 percent of other Democrats.
The social media Democrats are not only more “woke” than typical Democrats, they are also more educated (47 percent have a college degree compared with 33 percent of non-posters) and more white (71 percent versus 55 percent). Forty-five percent of those who are active on social media have contributed to a political cause in the past year, compared with only 14 percent of other Democrats.
Candidates who mistake the Twitterverse for the Democratic electorate may be in for a rude shock.
The domination of social media by hyper-partisans is probably one reason why Americans have so many misconceptions about one another. Also, websites like YouTube and cable TV programmers have figured out how to monetize our political preferences by feeding us exactly what they think we want to hear. This leads to intensified polarization.
We’re all familiar with surveys showing that more Americans would be upset if their child brought home a potential spouse of the other party than would object to a fiancé of another race. That’s an arresting finding, suggesting that we’ve made huge progress on one prejudice only to substitute a new one.
Partisans have also misled us. FiveThirtyEight reported on poll results showing what the parties think of one another. Asked to estimate how many Democrats were atheists or agnostics, Republicans guessed 36 percent. The true number is nine percent. Democrats thought 44 percent of Republicans were 65 or older. The correct figure is 21 percent. Republicans thought 46 percent of Democrats were black. The actual number: 24 percent. And Democrats believed that 44 percent of Republicans earn $250K or above. The true share: 2 percent.
There is money and fame to be had for the partisan shriekers — and there is no shortage of those feeding at that trough. But most Americans, 77 percent, remain in what the Hidden Tribes survey dubbed “the exhausted majority.” They still believe that “our differences are not so great that we cannot come together.” Candidates who hope to lead us out of our current slough will keep that in mind.
Biden and the Problem of Touch
If I profane with my unworthiest hand
This holy shrine, the gentle sin is this:
My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand
To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss.
— William Shakespeare. Romeo and Juliet, Act I, Scene 5
Joe Biden’s explanatory video in response to stories of his sometimes overly exuberant physicality was well-played. He seemed relaxed, sincere, unscripted, and above all, not supine.
The matter of physical touch is, well, touchy. One person’s affectionate hug is another’s creepy, unwelcome invasion of personal space. Biden does seem to have stepped over the line at times. Free advice: inhaling the aroma of a woman’s hair and kissing her head when you’ve just met is not recommended. But most of the time, it seems that Biden’s hugs, shoulder rubs, and Eskimo kisses were well-received. He is physically demonstrative with women, but also with other men and particularly with children.
“Social norms are changing,” Biden acknowledged, assuring viewers that he “gets it.” But before we close the books with the MeToo-inflected conclusion that touching is “problematic,” we might want to consider some other evidence currently in the news that suggests we aren’t touching enough.
According to the General Social Survey, the huge study of America’s cultural patterns that has been conducted for decades, Americans are having less sex now than they did 30 years ago. Some of that is the consequence of an aging population. But even among Americans aged 18-29, nearly a quarter reported that they had been celibate for the previous year, compared with 14 percent in 1989.
It is well known that married adults have more sex than single, divorced, or even cohabiting adults, and that married people report higher levels of both sexual satisfaction and happiness. The trend away from marriage thus virtually guarantees that more people will be isolated and vulnerable to the diseases of loneliness, which include drug and alcohol abuse. Marriage rates are plunging for those with only a high school degree or some college, and though college graduates have high rates of marriage, they tend to marry later in life. That leaves many young adults without romantic partners. And it turns out that screens make very poor substitutes.
There is no delicate way to say this: Screens can deliver orgasms but they are completely unable to provide the other benefits of human contact. People who are not romantically involved or who lack close friends or family are also missing out on the kind of touches that Mr. Biden sometimes inappropriately delivered — back rubs, head kisses, hand holding, and bear hugs.
There is a wealth of psychological literature showing that skin to skin contact is critical for the normal mental development of human infants. All but the most fragile preterm babies do better when cuddled in their mothers’ arms than in incubators. Studies have shown that babies in Romanian orphanages who were provided with nutrition and clean diapers but were rarely held or spoken to, grew into emotionally stunted children.
In childhood too, physical contact is critical for children’s wellbeing. When fathers roughhouse with their young children, the kids are better able to regulate their emotions, including aggression, and are found to be more popular with their peers than children who lack this kind of play.
Our need to touch and be touched never subsides. Chronic loneliness has been found to be as harmful to health as smoking. Studies have found that hugs don’t just relieve stress and release oxytocin (the bonding hormone), they can also reduce susceptibility to the common cold, lower blood pressure, and diminish pain. And when humans pet animals, both experience physiological benefits. Even just holding hands with a loved one while enduring a painful medical procedure has been found to make the experience more bearable. When close couples hold hands, their heart rates and brain waves tend to synchronize.
Most of us just aren’t designed to live the kind of solitary lives that excessive entanglement with technology is encouraging. We are social and also tactile creatures. Our recent social trend away from marriage and toward silicone companions is the equivalent of taking people away from a roaring fireplace surrounded by loved ones and placing them in solitary steel and glass pods. Let’s not lose sight of our affective natures even as we police the excessively handsy amongst us.
Mueller Did the Right Thing
It seems that “13 hardened Democrats” or “angry Democrats” did not deliver a politically-motivated, illegitimate hit job after all. Based on what we know so far, the special counsel’s office reported that it did not find evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government. This is a fabulous vindication of the integrity of the system.
No one is noticing that. Instead, the Trump team is gorging on schadenfreude, and the anti-Trump team is choking on bile.
It’s fair to say that those who spent hour upon cable TV hour lovingly anticipating that President Trump would be frog-marched from the White House in handcuffs after the delivery of this report have egg on their faces. It isn’t clear which hurts more, the disappointment about being wrong or the worry about drooping ratings.
But there’s plenty of egg to go around. Team Trump spent nearly two years denouncing the Mueller investigation as a “rigged witch hunt.” By one count, the president used the term “witch hunt” more than 1,100 times. He mercilessly eviscerated his own attorney general, Jeff Sessions, for the sin of following Justice Department guidelines instead of corruptly abusing his office to shield Mr. Trump from scrutiny. At various times, the president has also suggested that the inquiry was a sinister plot of the “deep state;” a ploy by supporters of “crooked” Hillary Clinton to extract revenge (while also suggesting that the real collusion was between Democrats and the Russians); and an “illegal hoax” perpetrated by the “fake news” media. President Trump claimed that the Mueller probe was staffed by “very bad and conflicted people,” and that the investigation was a “disgrace to our nation.”
The battlespace was thus prepared for a Mueller report that would be devastating to the president. His supporters would disbelieve anything that reflected badly on Trump because the investigation itself, along with the law enforcement bodies tasked with carrying out their responsibilities in an impartial fashion, had been discredited.
Yet, when it turned out that the investigators did not invent or plant evidence, did not default to process crimes like lying to investigators, did not spring a perjury trap, and, above all, did not permit their own feelings or political preferences to taint the administration of justice, there has been no embarrassment from team Trump. On a dime, they have reversed themselves completely. A totally corrupt witch hunt has become a total vindication. (It wasn’t that. Even Attorney General William Barr’s letter acknowledged that the report did not “exonerate” the president on the charge of obstruction of justice.) But even if it had been a clean bill of health, how can they trust the Mueller people? Weren’t they thoroughly corrupt? A disgrace?
President Trump has a long history of impugning anyone or anything he perceives as a threat to his own interests and flattering anyone he thinks can help him. When he feared he would lose an election, he denounced the voting as “rigged.” Judge Curiel became a “Mexican” judge when Trump feared he might rule against him in the Trump University case. Gold star parents, deceased heroic senators, Charles Krauthammer, S.E. Cupp, Jeff Bezos, and an endless list of others have joined the ranks of the slighted. On the other hand, if you repent and join the Trump fan club — as pretty much the entire invertebrate Republican party has done — then you are swiftly forgiven and elevated. Lindsey Graham went from “nasty” and “dumb mouthpiece” to favorite golfing buddy in a trice.
This transparently solipsistic approach to the world would be of little interest if it were just a quirk of a New York businessman. But when Trump employs the tactic to undermine confidence in institutions like the justice system, he does lasting damage.
The “witch hunt” was nothing of the kind. Honorable people did the right thing. Politics did not taint a criminal investigation. But that reality is buried under an avalanche of bad faith.
More Misconceptions About College
Now that we’ve all had a good airing of grievances about elite colleges and their attendant injustices, let’s get some perspective.
While the number of high school graduates heading off to college has increased in recent years, the percentages graduating with a four-year degree have not increased much. Many students, especially those who are the first in their families to attend college, drop out before receiving a degree. (They cannot drop out of student loan payments though.)
Data from the Lumina Foundation show that among Americans aged 25-64, 52.4 percent have no more than a high school diploma (though 15.4 percent of them attended college for a while). An additional 5.2 percent received a certificate of some kind, and 9.2 percent obtained an associate’s degree. What most people think of when you say “college,” is a four-year institution. Only 21.1 percent received BA degrees, and another 12.2 percent also earned graduate degrees. Adding the last two categories brings the fraction of Americans with college or graduate degrees to just over one third.
While most of the conversation in the past week has focused on highly selective colleges like Yale and Penn, it’s important to remember that only a small number of America’s colleges are selective. As FiveThirtyEight has reported, more than 75 percent of undergrads attend colleges that accept at least half of all applicants. The number who attend selective colleges — i.e., schools that accept 25 percent or fewer is just four percent. And the number who attend schools in the very top tier, colleges that reject 90 percent or more, can be counted on your fingers and toes. You can probably guess most of them. (Though not all. On this US News list, Pomona College came in at #11, and the Minerva Schools at Keck Graduate Institute came in first.) Less than one percent of college students attend these elite schools.
Most students attend commuter schools, which tend to be community colleges. Even among those at four-year institutions, almost 25 percent attend part-time. Half of college students are also working, not getting plastered at frat parties.
There’s a healthy debate in policy circles about whether our current cultural preoccupation with college for all is a good thing or not. Some people who are funneled toward college might be a better fit for vocational training, apprenticeships, or other life paths; and while there is no doubt about the association between college completion and higher income, there is uncertainty about the causal relationship.
Rather than gnash our collective teeth about whether Jason or Jessica can get into MIT, we might want to focus on all students, those who are headed for college and those who are not. Every student in elementary and high school should be learning about the “success sequence.” The phrase was introduced by Isabelle Sawhill and Ron Haskins of the Brookings Institution and has lately been reinforced with a study by W. Bradford Wilcox and Wendy Wang of the Institute for Family Studies.
What they’ve found is that students have it within their power to virtually guarantee a middle- or upper-class income if they follow three steps. Those three basics are 1) finish high school, 2) get a full-time job, and 3) get married before having children. Young people who follow all three steps have only a 3 percent likelihood of living in poverty when they reach young adulthood. Eighty-six percent of Millennials who put marriage first had incomes in the middle or upper third, compared with 53 percent who had children before marriage. The success sequence works for those born into poverty too. Seventy-one percent of Millennials who grew up in the bottom third of the income distribution were in the middle or upper third by young adulthood if they followed the three steps. Among African-Americans, 76 percent who followed the success sequence achieved the middle class or above, and among Hispanics, the percentage was 81 percent.
With all of the emphasis on a tiny sliver of the top 1 percent of students, most young people can get the impression that they are doomed to a lesser life. In fact, avoiding a few pitfalls like dropping out of high school, having a baby out of wedlock, or failing to find employment is a ticket to success.
There’s a bias among writer types to pay attention to Princeton and Columbia. But that’s not really where the action is in helping most Americans.
Liars and Cheats
Operation Varsity Blues has unleashed a veritable orgy of stereotypes. “Entitled white kids” have been trending, along with told-you-so’s about how the system is “rigged.” Several commentators have suggested that this scandal should quiet concerns about affirmative action because the criminality of Felicity Huffman, Lori Loughlin, and Co. proves that whites are willing to do anything to get ahead. A writer at The Week declared meritocracy a fraud, while the New York Times perceived a “lesson in harsh racial disparities.”
“This scandal exposed the fact that there is a misplaced emphasis on so-called affirmative action inequities, rather than privilege,” one education consultant told the New York Times. The paper quoted a black parent: “You often hear talk about pulling yourself up by your bootstraps and that college admission is based on merit. What this story tells me is that the playing field is not level based on race and wealth.”
A Washington Post columnist hit the same theme, asking: “Now that the FBI has shown what stealing a college slot really looks like, can we stop making students of color feel like frauds?” Theresa Vargas, noting that she spoke from personal experience, complained that:
For so long, people of color who have attended elite schools in this country have felt the need to prove that they deserved to be there. They have accepted that no matter their grades or SAT scores, people will look at them as affirmative action recipients and talk about them, sometimes to their faces, as tokens.
. . . all those people who have blamed poor brown and black kids for taking the spots of ‘more deserving’ white kids through affirmative action should have been looking closer at who really didn’t earn their seats.
Whoa. This is stealing a base. The FBI has not shown that every white kid who gets into college has bought and/or lied his or her way in. As for the stigma that attaches to affirmative action, that’s an unfortunate and inevitable by-product of racial preferences. It’s one of the reasons to oppose them. It’s great to be at Stanford, but much less satisfying if you are saddled with the suspicion of being an affirmative action baby.
Many of the lamentations this week about “white privilege” and “poor minorities” have seemed frozen in a time warp. Black and poor are no longer synonymous. As the Institute for Family Studies reports, the share of black men in the upper third of the income tier rose from 13 percent in 1960, to 23 percent in 2016.
A bunch of cheats lied and bribed their way into some top schools. They deserve the scorn and criminal prosecutions they’re facing. But the rush to say “See, this proves the system is rigged for rich, white kids,” is not proved. Yes, wealth confers benefits (even without cheating). And some wealthy people are also black, brown, and other tones. But college admission standards also explicitly “privilege” some minorities at the expense of other minorities and the majority. As the suit by a group of Asian Americans against Harvard has shown, Asian Americans have the lowest admit percentage of any group — along with the strongest credentials. Black students admitted to Harvard over the last 17 years had average SAT scores of 703.7 compared with 766.6 for Asian admittees, and 744.7 among whites. It’s not a huge difference, but it’s not a conspiracy in favor of whites either. If anything, the unfairness to highly qualified Asian students, and not the Operation Varsity Blues, is what casts the meritocracy into doubt.
Isn’t it extraordinary that the students who got into top schools by fraud seemed to have little trouble performing there? This should cause more raised eyebrows than the finger-wagging about privilege. What does this say about grade inflation and academic rigor?
What this scandal and the intense interest it has sparked demonstrate, among other things, is that we’ve come to invest way too much importance in brand names. You’d almost think parents wanted prestige for themselves more than the right fit for their child. The opaque nature of admissions decisions, together with schools’ dishonest claims of “holistic” evaluations of each candidate only invite cynicism. When my brother was a student representative on his college’s admissions committee, he noted that a few applications got a special FI stamp in red. That stood for family influence. The family in one case was named Ferrari.
Perhaps a better system would be to eliminate all preferences — racial, ethnic, geographic, legacy, donor, sports — all of it. Take students of proven ability who want to learn, and provide scholarships based on need. It might just improve everyone’s morale.
If You’re Serious About Climate…
Do you ever wonder why people run for office? I mean, unless you’re a total cynic, you must assume that at least part of the motivation is wanting to do good. Sure, you want fame and prestige, but you also have strongly held views and want to affect public policy, right? So why in the world would you engage in sabotage of the ideas you hope to advance?
That’s undeniably what Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Ed Markey have done with their juvenile Green New Deal.
Consider: The caricature of environmentalists is that they are just using climate change as a stalking horse for their true agenda, which is to socialize the entire economy. And lo and behold, what does the Green New Deal resolution call for? Net zero carbon emissions in 10 years, universal health care, guaranteed jobs for all, family leave, paid vacations, refurbishing every single building in the country to meet environmental standards, eliminating nuclear power, and on and on. In fact, most of the resolution doesn’t even address climate change. Here’s a flavor:
To promote justice and equity by stopping current, preventing future, and repairing historic oppression of indigenous peoples, communities of color, migrant communities, deindustrialized communities, depopulated rural communities, the poor, low-income workers, women, the elderly, the unhoused, people with disabilities, and youth (referred to in this resolution as “frontline and vulnerable communities”);
Okaaaaay. So what Ocasio-Cortez and Markey have achieved, along with all of the Democrats who’ve endorsed this childish wish list, is to make themselves look like dummies, and to reinforce the impression that they are totally unserious about combating climate change.
If they were committed to mitigating what they claim to believe is a looming catastrophe, you might imagine that they would study the question for at least a few minutes, and even swallow hard and make some tough choices about the way forward. That’s what others have done.
Recently, the Union of Concerned Scientists issued a statement noting that the “sobering realities” of climate change “dictate that we keep an open mind about all of the tools in the emissions reduction toolbox – even ones that are not our personal favorites.” In other words, they don’t like nuclear power, but they concede that it is necessary.
As Sam Thernstrom of the Energy Innovation Reform Project points out, renewables get all the love, but they are simply incapable of meeting the energy demands of our whole economy. It’s not that the sun goes down at night and the wind doesn’t always blow. It’s that in some regions, the sun gets weak and the wind stops blowing for months at a time. Batteries are improving, but not fast enough to make an all-renewables power grid practical for some time.
Other technologies, by contrast, are on the shelf and ready to go. Nuclear power, though it gives left-wingers the shakes, is safe and reliable. The accidents make headlines, but nuclear plants have not been responsible for a single death in the United States. Three Mile Island caused no damage to human beings. Even Russia’s 1986 Chernobyl meltdown, which caused many to predict tens of thousands of cancer deaths in its wake, has shown nothing of the kind. A 2015 National Institutes of Health paper found that “In spite of the best efforts of statisticians and epidemiologists, the claimed Chernobyl-induced cancers and mutations have yet to manifest themselves.” And the U.S. has been using compact nuclear reactors for decades in submarines and aircraft carriers without a single accident.
The greatest reductions in greenhouse gas emissions were achieved by France in the 1970s and 80s when that country made a big switch to nuclear energy. They reduced their carbon emissions by 2 percent per year, while still providing their people with affordable energy.
Carbon capture is showing promise too. Net Power has opened a new natural gas plant in La Porte, Texas that buries all of the excess carbon dioxide underground.
None of the choices we face is cost free. But if people are serious about addressing climate change, they must, at the very least, acknowledge the simple reality that you cannot stamp your foot and demand that the entire U.S. economy be transformed in 10 years. Evaluate the trade-offs. Be serious, or risk becoming a joke and making your issue a punchline too.
Trump’s Fatal Attraction
The good news is that the Trump/Kim summit in Hanoi did not result in a deal – because any deal would be nothing but a scam perpetrated by Kim Jung Un. Selling the same rug repeatedly is a North Korean specialty. The Kim dynasty inked agreements to denuclearize in 1985, 1992, 1994, 2005, 2007, and 2012. You’ve seen the results. Pyongyang violated every one, and marched inexorably toward nuclear weapons and ballistic missile technology. It’s bad enough to confront the prospect of a nuclear-armed North Korea, it would be worse to, in effect, subsidize it, which is all that was on offer.
Why would Kim give up his nukes? To get American aid to improve his economy? Fantasy. He runs a prison state that actually exports slaves to countries like China, Kuwait, and Qatar. His goal is not to develop the economy, but to remain firmly in power and to conquer South Korea. He saw what happened to Muamar Qaddafi when he gave up his nuclear program, and to Saddam Hussein who only pretended to be working on one.
That much must be obvious to Trump’s advisors, if not to Mr. Trump himself, who seemed so eager for a deal that he announced before the Hanoi summit that the US was dropping the demand for a full accounting of North Korea’s nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs. If that sounds precisely like what President Obama did vis a vis Iran, it should.
For now, Trump has side-stepped the trap Kim prepared. While he may have avoided one bad outcome, his behavior was so bizarre and sycophantic toward Kim personally that he still departs Hanoi trailing a stench of shame.
There is just no mistaking it, our president gets excited in the presence of dictators. Appearing with Kim at a press conference, the president warned reporters – as he never has regarding the leaders of democracies — to show respect to Kim. “Don’t raise your voice please. This isn’t like dealing with Trump.” Trump himself went way beyond diplomatic niceties, contrasting Kim favorably with other “rich kids” who didn’t turn out so well.
Even if Mr. Trump could overlook the millions who have been persecuted (it’s a crime to visit a South Korean website), starved, tortured, and worked to death in the Hermit Kingdom, it’s beyond appalling that he would offer a pass about the torture and murder of a young American, Otto Warmbier. Recall that in 2017, Trump had said, “Otto’s fate deepens my administration’s determination to prevent such tragedies from befalling innocent people at the hands of regimes that do not respect the rule of law or basic human decency.” But off Teleprompter, Trump demonstrated his characteristic sympathy for dictators caught behaving badly. “He [Kim] tells me that he didn’t know about it, and I will take him at his word. . . . I don’t believe he knew about it.”
Nor did he believe Mohammad bin Salman knew about Jamal Khashoggi’s murder. And he took Vladimir Putin’s word over the judgment of the US intelligence agencies about Russian interference in the 2016 election.
The Philippines president Rodrigo Duterte has launched a vicious program of state sanctioned murders of suspected drug addicts and dealers. According to the Philippine National Police, the state has killed more than 5000 people since Duterte’s election in 2016. Others estimate that the true number is closer to 20,000. Amazingly, Duterte does not dispute this. “What is my sin? Did I steal even one peso? . . . My sin is extra-judicial killings.” On another occasion he said, “Hitler killed 3 million Jews. Now there are 3 million drug addicts. I’d be happy to slaughter them all.”
The world is full of misery, and American leaders sometimes have to deal with unsavory characters. But nothing required President Trump to pick up the phone in 2017 and say to Duterte, “You are a good man . . . . you are doing an unbelievable job on the drug problem.
Many countries have the problem, we have the problem, but what a great job you are doing, and I just wanted to call and tell you that.”
Explaining the need for a wall on the southern border, Trump offered this odd report from a conversation with China’s Xi Jinping, who apparently told the president that China has no drug problem because they employ the death penalty. He found this exhilarating. “If we want to get smart, we can get smart,” Trump said. “You can end the drug problem, can end it a lot faster than you think.”
It would be less disturbing if Mr. Trump’s chief weakness were for porn stars and money. Alas, his attraction to thugs seems even stronger.
Unwarranted: Elizabeth Warren’s Flawed Idea
Elizabeth Warren, one of the – what is it now, 211 candidates for president? – seems intent on proving that having been a Harvard law professor is no bar to fatuous policy prescriptions. She has endorsed the farrago of foolishness called the Green New Deal, promises to tax the rich “make the economy work for us,” and recently proposed a shiny new policy idea fresh from 1971 – government-funded, universal pre-school.
Decade after decade, this old chestnut is trotted out as a pro-family, pro-middle class reform, and every time, assumptions about government’s competence to perform this task are blithely assumed.
Any sentence that begins “In the wealthiest country on Earth . . .” is bound to introduce a massive government program of some sort and Warren is no exception. She urges that “affordable and high-quality child care and early education should be a right, not a privilege reserved for the rich.” Sounds expensive. Who will pay? Warren proposes to tax the wealth of “ultra-millionaires — those with a net worth of more than $50 million. ”
Two things about taxing the rich: 1) they don’t have enough to pay for the fond schemes of politicians, and 2) they can afford to pay the estate planners and tax lawyers who know how to minimize taxes.
But even supposing the “ultra-rich” would hold still while the state extracted a fixed yearly portion of their net worth, any plan for universal pre-K deserves skepticism — the opposite of what most news stories convey. ABC News, for example, contends that “The benefits of early child care have long been documented, even showing taxpayers can make money back when investing in high-quality early education.”
This is tendentious and wrong. The links ABC provided don’t even support its assertion. The first is to a National Education Association publication (hardly a neutral arbiter), citing one famous study of extremely high-quality day care, the Abecedarian Early Childhood Intervention Project. That program got good results, but it was utterly unrepresentative of most daycares in the US. It was generously-funded and staffed by college graduates. Teachers read aloud to the children, responded to their questions, and encouraged their abilities. According to a 2006 survey by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, only 9 percent of American pre-schools were rated “very high quality.”
The second link ABC provided also references the small, unrepresentative Abecedarian program, but this paper, far from agreeing that the benefits of daycare are “documented,” notes that the matter is “strongly contested.”
Not only are high-quality daycares rare, there is abundant data that daycare can be harmful in large doses, especially for very young children, and particularly for boys. A Tennessee study found that kids enrolled in pre-K seemed at first to perform well on cognitive tests, but fell behind their peers by third grade. “You have school systems that are pushing pre-K when they have demonstrably failing K-12 systems,” Dale Farran, one of the study’s authors told FiveThirtyEight. “It makes me cringe.”
The sort of program Senator Warren envisions has already been implemented — in the Canadian province of Quebec. Universal pre-school for just $5 (later $7) a day was introduced in 1997. The number of families placing their children in care increased by 33 percent. But a follow-up study in 2015 found that boys in daycare showed more hyperactivity and aggression, while girls showed more separation anxiety. Quebec’s teenagers who had “benefitted” from the program were less happy with life in general than those from other provinces, and Quebec experienced a “sharp increase” in criminal behavior among those who had been in care.
Among the many cautionary notes to arise from the Canadian experience was the effect universal pre-school had on parents. As the Atlantic reported, a 2015 study found that “the parents of girls were two times less likely to spend time reading to, laughing with, or doing special activities like going to the library with their child.”
There is a relentless push to move children and even babies into the arms of the educational establishment even as there is near universal agreement that our schools leave much to be desired. Who has confidence that Senator Warren’s scheme would produce quality care at a reasonable price? And who doesn’t worry about the three-year-olds pushed too soon from the nest?
You Can’t Say That on Twitter
She tweeted that “men are not women,” and for that, Meghan Murphy, a feminist journalist, was banned from Twitter. An anodyne statement of biological reality qualifies as “hate speech” for some of the gnomes at Twitter HQ. Murphy received a rote notification that “you may not promote violence against, threaten, or harass other people on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, or serious disease.”
Excuse me, but that sound you heard was me spitting my coffee across the desk. I cannot count the number of times I’ve been harassed on Twitter on some of the above grounds. Twitter has benefits, but let’s face it, threats, vile abuse, and harassment have become a key part of Twitter’s brand. Louis Farrakhan has an account. Terrorists romp through its pixels with ease, and the Russians deploy bots like biological agents. Only a select few offenders are punished or banned.
When founder Jack Dorsey was asked on Sam Harris’s podcast why suspensions and other disciplinary actions always seem to go in a PC direction, Dorsey was phlegmatic, “I don’t believe we should optimize for neutrality.” That was Silicon Valley-speak for “We are not fair.”
That is his right. It’s a free country, and, though hailed as the national cyber townhall, Twitter is a private company. It has declined to engage Murphy directly (Dorsey: “We don’t have a robust appeals process”), but has churned out agitprop about “hateful conduct” with metronomic regularity. This is not to say that Twitter applies even its own vague and shifting standards evenly. I and others have tweeted concerns about the trans movement — particularly with regard to children — without repercussions. But that must have been sheer luck. In Murphy’s case, the company targeted her for violating a policy that it had changed without any public notice. This is the new ban on so-called “deadnaming” — using the former name of a person who transitioned to the other sex. If Murphy’s lawsuit gains any traction, the company may have to explain itself. Until then, we are left to consider the Orwellian dystopia that travels under the name progressivism.
One of Meghan Murphy’s thought crimes consisted of asking, in response to someone else, “How are transwomen not men? What is the difference between a man and a transwoman?” That is what is known as a challenge, not an epithet. It earned her a warning. She also referred to a trans-identified male as “he” — that is the forbidden practice of “misgendering.”
Murphy, along with many feminists and some conservatives, resists the trans movement’s efforts to permit people who are born male to enter women’s restrooms, locker rooms, prisons, and other environments where, as Murphy puts it, “women feel uncomfortable seeing a penis.” This is a live issue. In Washington, DC, women at a downtown health club have retreated to toilet stalls to change clothes since the club now refrains from stopping men who enter the women’s changing room. Who’s to say who belongs where? Wouldn’t want to put a foot wrong in the new gender-neutral utopia. One trans person Murphy identified in print as male was seeking to counsel women at a rape crisis center in Vancouver, though the center hires only women.
Murphy’s website, Feminist Current, has questioned the science and ideology behind transgenderism, and Murphy is indignant that people with XY chromosomes can compete in women’s sports. Personally, I might have taken a softer tone, adding some acknowledgment that people with gender dysphoria deserve compassion. But Murphy is expressing a point of view, dammit, and way too many opinion arbiters here in Oceania won’t have it.
Twitter is hardly alone. Many a mandatory diversity workshop, college orientation, and hotel policy do the same. Three female undergraduates are suing Yale for a fraternity culture that they say enables harassment. Fraternity parties, they claim, place men in positions of power. Ok, but notice the language in the lawsuit: “Simply put, fraternities elevate men to social gatekeepers and relegate women and non-binary students to sexual objects.” Non-binary students?
Murphy’s objection is that this sudden reimagining of what it means to be human has been imposed, not agreed upon, and certainly not discovered by science. Many women, concerned about hurting someone’s feelings, especially — as Murphy phrases it, someone from “a marginalized group” — are shy about standing up for themselves and their own comfort. Above all, these matters need frank discussion, not authoritarian diktats issuing from our Twitter overlords.
An Opening for a Party of Reality
Here they come, the newly resurgent Democrats, ready to take on “the man” (Rep. Rashida Tlaib); protect America’s middle class from “attack” by big corporations and billionaires (Sen. Elizabeth Warren); provide Medicare for all (Sen. Kamala Harris); offer universal pre-K (Julian Castro); and fight capitalism in general without any idea of how it works (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez). The Democratic Party is lurching to the left like a confused American driver on a British highway.
As the New York Times’ Thomas Edsall notes, it isn’t just leaders who are stampeding to the port side. Democratic voters are becoming more liberal too. In the past 17 years, Pew Research has found, the percentage of Democrats who described themselves as liberal jumped from 30 to 50 percent. This is reflected in issue positions. In 2008, the percentage of Democrats who agreed that immigrants here illegally should be permitted to become citizens was 29 percent. That increased to 51 percent in 2018. Between 2010 and 2017, the portion who said “racial discrimination is the main reason many blacks can’t get ahead these days” rose from 28 percent to 64 percent. (Notably, among white liberals, 79.2 percent agreed that discrimination was the main thing holding blacks back, whereas among black respondents, the percentage was lower — 59.9 percent identified discrimination as the obstacle to progress. Hmm.)
The liberal nostrums on offer are utterly disconnected from the actual challenges the nation faces. It’s hard to see how the “war on the middle class” theme can get traction in an economy with 3.9 percent unemployment. Poverty has been declining and middle incomes have been increasing since 2013. Jobs are plentiful. Median household income reached $61,372 in 2017, which is higher than comparable countries like Canada, Germany, France, Britain, and Denmark, and exceeded only by a handful of tiny rich nations sitting on oil (Norway) or numbered bank accounts (Switzerland and Lichtenstein). US median household size, meanwhile, has declined, so individual wealth has increased even more than the income numbers reflect.
Admittedly, facts need not impede a good political pitch. Republicans have succeeded by offering their own fractured fairy tale about what ails the nation. They’ve insisted that we are being overrun by illegal immigrants, when border apprehensions are at an 18-year low. They assert that immigrants bring crime, which is false. They’ve claimed (along with some progressives like Bernie Sanders) that outsourcing has decimated U.S. manufacturing, when the real story is that automation has been the chief cause of lost manufacturing jobs. And they’ve claimed that globalization has hollowed out the middle class when, in truth, global trade, while costing some jobs, has created far more and provided middle-income Americans with a bounty of affordable products, thus improving their standard of living.
Republicans and Democrats alike encourage victimhood. We need a party that will address the true problems we face.
As a governing matter, our greatest problem is that we are not behaving like citizens, but like consumers. We are gorging on entitlements and washing them down with tax cuts. The bill? What bill? We can always borrow more! Medicare’s trust fund runs out in 7 years. Social Security’s, in 15. But what the hell, let’s have free college! Bartender, let’s have another tax cut, this time for the middle class! (By the way, what ever happened to that pre-election pledge?)
Any individual who behaved the way our nation does would be obese and broke.
Also, we are living in a civic cesspool. Our language, our manners, and our hatreds are out of control and out of all proportion to our problems. We are marinating in mutual contempt and suckers for conspiracy theories. Do you think the Covington High imbroglio was bad? Wait until deep fakes come along. They are video impostures. Any politician (or anyone else) will appear to say anything. Imagine the kids at the Lincoln Memorial having the N word put into their mouths by video manipulation.
It’s not that our problems are so intractable, it’s that our spirits are so sour. We desperately need some uplift, some commitment to the rule of law, more suspicion of centralized power, and a stab at trust. It’s a lot to ask of a political party, and frankly, most of our problems, like the decline of families and churches, are pre-political. But leadership is important, and the majority of Americans are not at the extremes. A recent survey found that 54 percent of Democrats would like their party to be more moderate. And two of the most popular Republican elected officials are Maryland’s Larry Hogan and Massachusetts’s Charlie Baker.
That’s a start.
Gillette Is Not Wrong
Is the new Gillette razor ad a radical feminist attack on masculinity – the commercial embodiment of a woke sensibility? I was prepared to think so. But having watched it twice, I find a lot to like. The ad has been panned by some conservative commentators. With all due respect, I think they are falling into a trap. They seem to have accepted the feminist framing. Feminists see culture as a Manichean struggle. It’s women versus men. Women are benign and men are malign. For society to progress, men must change. We must extirpate “toxic masculinity.”
Understandably, this rubs conservatives the wrong way. I’ve risen to the defense of masculinity many times myself. But is the Gillette ad really “the product of mainstream radicalized feminism—and emblematic of Cultural Marxism,” as Turning Point USA’s Candace Owen put it? Is it part of “a war on masculinity in America,” as Todd Starnes argued on Fox News?
Conservatives stripping off their coats to get into this brawl are like the man who, seeing a barfight unfold, asks “Is this a private quarrel or can anyone join in?”
Let’s figure out what the fight is about before taking sides.
There were a couple of undercurrents in the Gillette ad that suggested feminist influence – the term “toxic masculinity” should itself be toxic – but overall, the ad is pretty tame, even valuable. I have no idea if it’s the best way to sell razors, but as social commentary, it’s not offensive. “The Best Men Can Be” begins by showing men looking the other way as boys fight, shrugging “boys will be boys.” It shows men laughing at a comedy portraying a lout pantomiming a lunge at a woman’s behind. It shows kids teasing a boy for being a “freak” or a “sissy.” These are followed by more uplifting images of men breaking up fights, interfering with men who are harassing women, and being loving fathers to daughters. We hear a quote from former NFL star Terry Crews, saying “Men need to hold other men accountable.” These images didn’t strike me as a reproof of masculinity per se, but rather as a critique of bullying, boorishness, and sexual misconduct.
By reflexively rushing to defend men in this context, some conservatives have run smack into an irony. Imaging themselves to be men’s champions, they are actually defending behavior, like sexual harassment and bullying, that a generation or two ago conservatives were the ones condemning. Sexual license, crude language, and retreat from personal responsibility were the hallmarks of the left. It was to epate la bourgeoisie that leftists chanted “Up against the wall, [expletive]” on college campuses. Liberals were the crowd saying “Let it all hang out,” “If it feels good, do it,” and “chaste makes waste.” Feminists were the ones eyeing daggers at men who held chairs or doors for them, and insisting that a “woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.”
The left won that cultural battle. Standards of conduct for both sexes went out the window. Whereas men had once been raised to behave themselves in front of women — “Watch your language, there are ladies present” – they were instead invited to believe that women deserved no special consideration at all.
As I’ve written many times, the MeToo movement may conceive of itself as a protest of “traditional masculinity,” but that’s only because memories are short. It’s actually a protest against the libertine culture the sexual revolution ushered in. Some men are behaving really badly – harassing women, bullying each other, and failing in their family responsibilities. Some women are too, though the MeToo movement doesn’t acknowledge that aspect of things. But these behaviors are not “traditional.” They’ve always existed, of course, but they went mainstream with the counterculture, which is now the culture. In any case, everyone, left and right, who values decent behavior should be able to agree that encouraging men to be non-violent, polite, and respectful is not anti-male. It’s just civilized.
Conservatives should applaud that aspect of the Gillette message. Progressives, in turn, should grapple with the overwhelming evidence that the best way to raise honorable men is with two parents. We may wish it were otherwise, but fathers — as disciplinarians, role models, and loving husbands — are key to rearing happy, healthy, and responsible sons, as well as self-confident, happy, and high-achieving daughters.
That’s the cultural reform we so badly need. Any corporate volunteers? Apple? Google?
Don’t Ask Government for Love, Tucker
Tucker Carlson is completely right about one thing – the decline of marriage is a great challenge of our times. I’ve written a whole book about it. So, you’d think I would rejoice that Carlson’s rant-heard-round-the-right focused on it. Sorry, no. I’ve rarely seen such a cynical and misleading use of television.
Everything that is going wrong with this country, Carlson instructed his viewers, is the consequence of “uncaring” politicians. They don’t care about your 19-year-old son who’s high on pot. Why? “It’s not an accident.” It’s because “our leaders understood that they could get rich from marijuana.” Never mind that 62 percent of voters say they want to decriminalize marijuana.
“Our ruling class,” Carlson intones, doesn’t care that firms like Bain Capital strip mine companies and leave retirees without benefits because “it’s the way they run the country.” To the barricades, comrades!
Citing election results in France, Brazil, Sweden, the Philippines, and Germany, among others, Carlson detects “entire populations revolting against leaders who refuse to improve their lives.” Not quite. France chose a centrist by a huge margin. In Sweden, the fascist party made gains but still received less than 18 percent of parliamentary votes. In Germany, Angela Merkel is being replaced by her own hand-picked successor. Sounds like continuity. Only Brazil and the Philippines made big changes.
But focus on that word “refuse.” Governments are not misguided or simply unsuited to cure the woes of mankind. Nor are they following the will of electorates who demand lower taxes and higher benefits. No, they are lining their own pockets and laughing. Yes, Carlson actually suggests that our unhappiness results from indifferent leaders:
Dignity. Purpose. Self-control. Independence. Above all, deep relationships with other people. Those are the things that you want for your children. They’re what our leaders should want for us, and would want if they cared.
Kim Jong-un, call your office.
Carlson comes within range of some important matters – but only to shed heat rather than light. He states that “manufacturing, a male-dominated industry, all but disappeared over the course of a generation.” That’s false. As a share of total employment, manufacturing has declined steadily for three generations; from 33 percent in 1947 to 8 percent in 2015. And yet, thousands of high paying manufacturing jobs are going begging. It’s estimated that 2.4 million manufacturing jobs may go unfilled in the coming 10 years due to a shortage of skilled workers. And sectors beyond manufacturing are also hurting for workers. Trucking, agriculture, hotels and restaurants, and Silicon Valley are all having trouble hiring.
When Carlson compared the situation of inner cities in places like Newark and Detroit with current strains in rural America, I hoped he was going to make a worthwhile point about what family disintegration does to communities. Instead, he made no sense. He made slashing reference to liberals not caring about high-crime, low-employment, broken-family inner cities because “they were benefiting from the disaster, in the form of reliable votes.” Conservatives, he continued, diagnosed a failure of big government. But that was not entirely true because “virtually the same thing has happened decades later to an entirely different population. In many ways, rural America now looks a lot like Detroit.”
Wait a second. If the problem was government programs that encouraged a culture of poverty, the extension of the same patterns to new populations supports, rather than undermines the case, doesn’t it?
But Carlson isn’t interested in analysis, he’s interested in incitement. For him, the demon is free market capitalism, which he blames for “destroying families.” He doesn’t explain how it is that intact poor families so often manage to enter the middle class or above despite capitalism.
A better explanation for the troubles of inner cities as well as rural areas is that single-parent families damage people’s capacity to achieve. They cause poorer school performance, more mental illness, more crime, less employment, more drug abuse, and, yes, less overall happiness. One is tempted to say that if Tucker Carlson really cared, he would take the time to examine the families who are doing well despite economic changes. He would note that married men with only high school diplomas are more likely to be employed than unmarried men with some college.
Carlson did no more than state the obvious when he thundered that culture is linked to economics. Who has ever denied this? Describing our troubles as the result of bad faith on the part of our leaders (who do not love us, sniff) or “worship” of capitalism, is infantilizing and manipulative.
On Being Too Nice in Politics
Mitt Romney’s declaration of independence from Donald Trump as he takes his seat in the U.S. Senate has been illuminating – more for the responses than the op-ed itself. Professional speculators are asking whether it’s the opening gambit of a 2020 primary challenge (his denials notwithstanding) or mere virtue signaling?
The unappeasable left has drummed its fingers on the table, demanding to know whether Romney will oppose absolutely everything Trump does. If you are truly appalled at Trump, they insist, you must obstruct every judge, deregulation, and foreign policy move. Anything less taints you as insincere or useless. If Romney doesn’t vote like a liberal Democrat, he could pace up and down Pennsylvania Avenue with an “Impeach Trump” sandwich board and still be dismissed as a wuss.
The right, by contrast, has adopted a world-weary tone. “Oh, he’s unethical. Tell us something we didn’t know.” They dismiss moral objections as overly fastidious. Thus, David Limbaugh: “This type of self-congratulating moral preening from Romney will have the precise opposite effect Romney intends as it will further entrench Trump supporters, who are just really sick of being demonized. Yes, these types of unsolicited attacks on Trump are shots at his supporters.” Is there such a thing as a solicited attack? Anyway, you see how this works. Those who stick to standards are “preening,” and worse, they are insulting voters. But that’s a fallacy. There are plenty of Trump supporters who don’t excuse everything Trump does. They are fully capable of saying “Yeah, can’t deny that Trump is a jerk and a liar, but I do like some of his policies.” They are not guilty of Trump’s sins, and Trump shouldn’t try to evade responsibility by hiding behind their skirts.
Ben Shapiro assumes that Romney must be considering a primary challenge. It would fail, he contends, because “Republican voters have . . . learned the lesson that character doesn’t matter — ironically enough, from 2012 Mitt Romney, whose sterling character plus five bucks bought him a cup of coffee in that election cycle.” It’s not clear whether Shapiro is endorsing this interpretation or just reporting it, but it is common on the right, and by the way, also on the left. People have a weakness for believing that their own side is being hammered by the unscrupulous tactics of their opponents. Republicans believe that Democrats demonize them as racists, commit voter fraud, and change the rules to suit their own purposes. Some of this is true (see my second book, Do-Gooders for many examples of the first offense), and see Harry Reid’s filibuster rule change for an example of the third. Democrats believe that Republicans suppress minority votes, bend the rules for their own purposes, and rely on scare tactics. Some of that is true is as well. Ask Merrick Garland.
It’s always possible to rationalize your own departure from ethics by claiming self-defense. You’ll never lack for examples of the other side’s perfidy – but that doesn’t justify it. If it did, we’d never be able to have decency at all.
Nor is it settled that Mitt Romney was defeated because he was too much of a gentleman. I’d wager that many of those who voted for Barack Obama in 2012 were thinking “A candidate who says that 47 percent of the nation are indolent ‘takers’ is not my kind of guy.” Besides, he was running against an incumbent president whose approval ratings were above 50 percent in the final weeks of the race. And despite all of that, he still managed to get a bigger share of the popular vote (47.2) than Donald Trump achieved in 2016 (46.1). And don’t forget, Trump’s opponent was under FBI investigation – an inquiry that was reopened a week before the vote.
The fable that John McCain was felled by excessive delicacy in 2008 is also absurd. A two-term Republican president had just presided over a (perceived) failed war and the worst economic crisis in decades. It would have been a steep uphill struggle for any Republican even without the collective swoon for the charismatic first black major party candidate.
Whatever Romney’s motive may have been in penning the critical op-ed – it’s clear that what he wrote is the truth, which is worth a lot these days.
One of the chief grievances Republicans nurse is that they are portrayed as “bad people” for holding the views they do. Someone who believes in color-blind admissions is not a racist. A skeptic of government regulation is not a polluter. A believer in American world leadership is not a warmonger. But if you slip into defending Trump’s character, as opposed to some of his actions, you risk living down to the caricature.