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Contents
MARCH 19, 2018 | VOLUME LXX, NO. 5 | w w w. n a t i o n a l r e v i e w. c o m

ON THE COVER Page 24

BOOKS, ARTS
The Entitlement & MANNERS
Crisis Ignored 35 A FAILED QUEST FOR
MEANING
Future historians—and Kevin D. Williamson reviews
Enlightenment Now: The Case
taxpayers—are unlikely to for- for Reason, Science, Humanism,
give our casual indifference to and Progress, by Steven Pinker.

what has been called ‘the 37 A BOOK FOR OUR TIMES

most predictable economic David French reviews 12 Rules for
Life: An Antidote to Chaos,
crisis in history.’ Brian Riedl by Jordan B. Peterson.

38 FOUNDER OF THE EVIL

EMPIRE
Ronald Radosh reviews Lenin:
The Man, the Dictator, and
ARTICLES the Master of Terror,
12 GUN-VIOLENCE RESTRAINING ORDERS CAN SAVE LIVES by David French
by Victor Sebestyen.

An underused tool to prevent mass shootings. 40 SEIZING THE FUTURE

17 LIFE, DEATH, AND POLITICS by Ramesh Ponnuru

Arthur Herman reviews The
Wizard and the Prophet: Two
Debates over abortion and guns take a familiar form. Remarkable Scientists and Their
18 LET THEM WEAR BRACELETS by Barry Latzer Dueling Visions to Shape
Tomorrow’s World, by Charles C.
How electronic monitoring can reduce the incarcerated population and keep the
Mann.
public safe.

20 IN DEFENSE OF LOCAL SCHOOLS by Frederick M. Hess & Andy Smarick 42 FILM: OUT OF AFRICA
Ross Douthat reviews Black
Education reformers should acknowledge the school as community center. Panther.
22 TWO DANTES by Jay Nordlinger
43 THE WORD’S NEW HOME
A visit with a venerable scholar.
Richard Brookhiser wonders where the
words have gone.

FEATURES
24 THE ENTITLEMENT CRISIS IGNORED by Brian Riedl
An $82 trillion avalanche looms.
SECTIONS
27 THE GRAYING OF THE WELFARE STATE by William Voegeli
2 Letters to the Editor
It’s going broke—and that’s not the worst problem.
4 The Week
30 EXCELLENT EASTWOOD by Peter Tonguette 33 Athwart . . . . . . . . . . . James Lileks
A great director gives American heroes their due. 34 The Long View . . . . . . Rob Long
41 Poetry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Sally Cook
44 Happy Warrior . . . . . . Daniel Foster
NATIONAL REVIEW (ISSN: 0028-0038) is published bi-weekly, except for the first issue in January, by NATIONAL REVIEW, Inc., at 19 West 44th Street, Suite 1701, New York, N.Y. 10036. Periodicals postage paid at New York, N.Y.,
and additional mailing offices. © National Review, Inc., 2018. Address all editorial mail, manuscripts, letters to the editor, etc., to Editorial Dept., NATIONAL REVIEW, 19 West 44th Street, Suite 1701, New York, N.Y. 10036.
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per year. The editors cannot be responsible for unsolicited manuscripts or artwork unless return postage or, better, a stamped, self-addressed envelope is enclosed. Opinions expressed in signed articles do not necessarily represent
the views of the editors.
 MARCH 19 ISSUE; PRINTED MARCH 1
Letters
EDITOR IN CHIEF
Richard Lowry
Senior Editors
Richard Brookhiser / Jonah Goldberg / Jay Nordlinger
Ramesh Ponnuru / David Pryce-Jones
Rejecting Despair
Managing Editor Jason Lee Steorts
Literary Editor Michael Potemra While admitting that William F. Buckley Jr. himself would probably have a
Vice President, Editorial Operations Christopher McEvoy more optimistic take, Richard Brookhiser writes: “The conservative movement
Executive Editor Reihan Salam
Roving Correspondent Kevin D. Williamson is no more. Its destroyers are Donald Trump and his admirers” (“WFB Today,”
National Correspondent John J. Miller March 5). This reminds me of a line from Lawrence of Arabia: “Truly, for some
Senior Political Correspondent Jim Geraghty
Art Director Luba Kolomytseva men nothing is written unless they write it.” If the ideals of the conservative
Deputy Managing Editors
Nicholas Frankovich / Fred Schwarz / Robert VerBruggen movement are sound, then there is no reason why they cannot one day rise to
Production Editor Katie Hosmer prominence again in American politics. The challenges faced by WFB dwarf
Assistant to the Editor Kim McCarthy
those we confront in the early 21st century.
Contributing Editors
Shannen Coffin / Ross Douthat / Daniel Foster Buckley and his allies confronted not only a statist post–WWII political con-
Roman Genn / Arthur L. Herman / Lawrence Kudlow sensus in both major American political parties, but also a Marxist ideology with
Mark R. Levin / Yuval Levin / Rob Long / Mario Loyola
Jim Manzi / Andrew C. McCarthy / Andrew Stuttaford intellectual defenders around
N AT I O N A L R E V I E W O N L I N E the world and a serious propa-
Editor Charles C. W. Cooke ganda operation bankrolled by
Managing Editor Katherine Howell
Deputy Managing Editor Mark Antonio Wright a major nuclear-armed nation-
Senior Writers
Michael Brendan Dougherty / David French state. Furthermore, the costs
Critic-at-Large Kyle Smith associated with publishing even
National-Affairs Columnist John Fund
Reporter Katherine Timpf a humble magazine of political
Associate Editors Molly Powell / Nick Tell
Senior Content Manager Grant DeArmitt
commentary were high, and the
Web Producer Scott McKim risks much greater, in a world
E D I T O R S - AT- L A RG E dominated by the Big Three
Kathryn Jean Lopez / John O’Sullivan
broadcasters and a few big-
B U C K L E Y F E L L OW S I N P O L I T I C A L J O U R N A L I S M city newspapers. Rockefeller
Alexandra DeSanctis / Theodore Kupfer
Republicanism, a strain of tax-
C O L L E G I AT E N E T WO R K F E L L OW
Philip H. DeVoe
and-spend big-government
paternalism, was a major force
T H O M A S L . R H O D E S F E L L OW
Jibran Khan in American politics, and libertarian economists such as Hayek were still
viewed as fringe radicals or out-of-date throwbacks. And yet: NATIONAL REVIEW
Contributors
Hadley Arkes / James Bowman / Eliot A. Cohen endures, the Soviet Union is no more, and, outside of a few sociology depart-
Dinesh D’Souza / Chester E. Finn Jr. / Neal B. Freeman ments, Marxism truly is in the ash heap of history. Against this, sycophants
James Gardner / David Gelernter / George Gilder
Jeffrey Hart / Charles R. Kesler / David Klinghoffer defending a man who could not secure a majority of Republican-party-primary
Anthony Lejeune / Alan Reynolds / Tracy Lee Simmons
Terry Teachout / Vin Weber votes seem small.
How do we move forward now? In short, look to the states for creative con-
Vice President Jack Fowler servative reforms, hold fast to first principles, and show a large amount of grace
Chief Financial Officer James X. Kilbridge
Accounting Manager Galina Veygman toward like-minded thinkers and political actors who have disappointed over the
Accountant Lyudmila Bolotinskaya
Director, Revenue and Operations Ryan Molly past few years. I do not know whether it is an unforgivable sin, but I know that
Director, Product & Audience Development Jarreau Weber the country and the cause of limited government and free markets cannot afford
Manager, Office & Development Russell Jenkins
Circulation Manager Jason Ng to see the conservative movement embrace despair.
Head of Integrated Sales Jim Fowler
Senior Account Executive Kevin Longstreet
Michael A. Wood
PUBLISHER CHAIRMAN Dallas, Texas
E. Garrett Bewkes IV John Hillen
FOUNDER
William F. Buckley Jr.

PAT RO N S A N D B E N E FAC T O R S
Correction
Robert Agostinelli
Dale Brott
“The Resegregation Myth” (March 5) requires two corrections. Board of
Mr. and Mrs. Michael Conway Education v. Dowell concerned a school district in Oklahoma, not Kentucky,
Mark and Mary Davis
Virginia James and the economist Raj Chetty now works at Stanford, not Harvard.
Christopher M. Lantrip
Brian and Deborah Murdock
Mr. & Mrs. Richard Spencer
Mr. & Mrs. L. Stanton Towne
Peter J. Travers

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

2
T | w w w. n a t i o n a l r e v i e w. c o m MARCH 19, 2018
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 The Week
 We don’t even want public-school teachers teaching our kids.

 Historically, the National Rifle Association has derived its

political power from two sources. The first is the broad popu-
larity of gun rights, which is sufficient now to ensure that if the
NRA disappeared tomorrow it would be swiftly replaced with a
similar outfit. The second is that it has retained its singular
focus on gun rights. If, in the future, its influence begins to
wane, it will be because it has begun to lose that focus. Consid-
er, by way of example, Wayne LaPierre’s speech to CPAC in the
wake of the Parkland massacre. LaPierre was sure to make his
case against further gun regulation. But mixed in along with
that case were scathing references to “socialists,” condemna-
tions of the Democratic party and the media, and a defense of
President Trump against the FBI. Were the head of the GOP to
make such a case, it would be entirely appropriate. For the NRA
it is not. One need not be a fan of Trump, or a Republican, to
support the right to keep and bear arms; if polling is to be be-
lieved, self-described “liberals” are by no means unified on the
question of guns. Ensuring that they do not become so should
be a high priority for the NRA.

 It’s a shocking statistic, and it went viral: The Parkland mas-

sacre was the 18th school shooting of 2018. Bernie Sanders
and Bill de Blasio tweeted it, and the New York Times, Huff-
Post, and ABC News ran with the number. A week after the
Florida shooting, it had morphed: Politico reported that there
had been “18 mass shootings this year alone.” The only problem
was that the stat was completely wrong. There have not been 18
school shootings in 2018—nor have there been 18 “mass shoot-
ings” nor 18 “massacres” nor 18 of anything like what happened
at Stoneman Douglas High School. The stat originated with
Everytown for Gun Safety, the gun-control group founded by
former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg. The group’s
count is wildly inflated, including everything from an adult
who committed suicide in the parking lot of a long-closed
school to gun violence near the campus of California State
University–San Bernardino to a school police officer’s acci-
dentally discharging his weapon. Depending on how you
define them, there have been fewer than five events that could
qualify as school shootings, including Parkland. That should
be bad enough.
 In the aftermath of Parkland, one idea seems to have garnered
bipartisan support: raising the age at which Americans may
purchase rifles from 18 to 21. President Trump has signaled his
support, as has Senator Marco Rubio. Florida governor Rick
Scott, too, made it clear that he would sign such a measure if it
hit his desk. Given that the perpetrator was 19, one can under-
stand this instinct; one always wishes to go back in time and
ROMAN GENN
hard to conceal, rifles are used extremely rarely in murders and
in crime—less than are knives, hammers, and hands and feet.
They are, however, used constantly for hunting, including by
hundreds of thousands of Americans aged between 18 and 21.
Moreover, it would be peculiar for the federal government to
signal that Americans in this age range may vote, be drafted,
start a family, buy property, and pay taxes, but not exercise the
right to keep and bear a type of weapon that is used in around
2.5 percent of gun-related homicides. Tragedy makes bad law.
 Rick Gates, deputy chairman of the Trump presidential cam-
paign when his business partner, Paul Manafort, ran it, pled guilty
to charges of defrauding the United States and lying to the FBI.
It was the climax of a busy week in Special Counsel Robert
Mueller’s investigation, featuring an indictment of Russian
nationals for election interference, a guilty plea for lying to
investigators from a lawyer tied to Gates and Manafort, and a
new indictment against Gates and Manafort, adding tax-evasion
and bank-fraud charges to prior allegations of laundering $75
million while working for a Kremlin-backed Ukrainian party.
Gates’s plea deal obliges him to cooperate with prosecutors.
Mueller is squeezing Manafort. The prosecutor’s objective seems
twofold. First, he wants to get Manafort to talk because Manafort
appears to be the key to determining whether, as seems decreas-
ingly likely, there was corrupt collusion between the Trump cam-
paign and the Kremlin. Second, Mueller might be trying to justify

prevent attacks before they occur. In practice, though, such a the decision by the Obama administration— particularly the
reform would be only superficially useful. Because they are Justice Department and the FBI, two institutions Mueller long
4 | w w w. n a t i o n a l r e v i e w. c o m MARCH 19, 2018
served—to investigate the Trump campaign. While President
Trump would not be accused of collusion, his judgment would be
faulted for bringing Manafort and Gates, and their extensive ties
to Kremlin agents, into his campaign. We shall see.
 Since the indicted Russian nationals are highly unlikely ever
to stand trial in the United States, one wonders whether one of
Mueller’s principal purposes was to map out for the public one
aspect of Russia’s election meddling in 2016. The picture that
Mueller painted was equal parts malice and ineptitude. Rus-
sians allegedly sought to inflame American passions online
(and, for a time, to help Trump defeat Hillary Clinton), but they
brought meager financial resources to the online effort and
appeared to work only with “unwitting” Americans. And there’s
no evidence that Russian social-media activity made any material
impact on the outcome. We welcome the disclosure, but the
magnitude of the Russian effort shouldn't be exaggerated.
 The House Intelligence Committee released a memo pre-
pared by Adam Schiff (D., Calif.) meant to rebut the famous
Nunes memo, the handiwork of Devin Nunes (R., Calif.), the
committee’s chairman. The dueling memos are about the FBI’s
application to surveil low-level Trump aide Carter Page, and the
beginnings of the Russia investigation. As our own Andrew
McCarthy has ably explained, the Schiff memo actually does
much to corroborate the charges in the Nunes document. It con-
firms that the FBI relied heavily on the dossier compiled by an
investigator trying to dig up dirt on Trump for the Clinton cam-
paign, Christopher Steele. And in attempting to demonstrate
that the FBI disclosed the partisan source of the information to
the court, the Schiff memo instead shows how turgid, mislead-
ing, and incomplete the purported disclosure was (the FBI
appears to have gone out of its way to avoid mentioning the
Clinton campaign). As we’ve said before, there is still much we
don’t know about this episode, and the only way to get a fuller
picture is for the Department of Justice to release as much of the
underlying material as possible.
 Presidential spouses and family members have been intrud-
ing into politics since Abigail Adams cheered on the Alien and
Sedition Acts. Bill Clinton took it to a new level, giving Hillary
responsibility for reforming health care and ultimately backing
her two presidential runs. The Trump clan so far has activated
itself in the second generation: son-in-law Jared Kushner en-
joying an interim security clearance for access to high-level
information; son Donald Jr. giving speeches in India while pro-
moting luxury development projects. What’s inevitable about
this is that blood is thicker than civics; what’s wrong about this
is that we vote for John Adams or Donald Trump, not their fam-
ilies. The latter message may be getting resonance: The presi-
dent said he would let John Kelly make the call on Kushner’s
clearance—which has now been downgraded—and Donald Jr.
did not give the policy-heavy address in India he was allegedly
planning. Good.
 Ronan Farrow’s latest article in The New Yorker is about Karen
McDougal, a former Playmate of the Year whom Donald Trump
allegedly met at a party at the Playboy Mansion in 2006, igniting
a months-long affair (Trump was already married to Melania at
the time). In 2016, America Media, Inc., publishers of the Na-
tional Enquirer, paid McDougal $150,000 for rights to her
story, which it buried (AMI’s CEO, David Pecker, is a friend of
Trump’s). The White House dismisses Farrow’s account as “an
old story that is just more fake news.” President Trump would
have to do all that he is accused of having done to catch up with
the misbehavior of some of his predecessors (LBJ, JFK, FDR).
But times have changed, and the glitzy self-promoter who prized
his louche reputation is now a man in a different arena. Career
pols know the rules; they get scrutinized, and often caught as they
ascend the ladder. The latest Trump tabloid story is one more con-
sequence of seeking a party leader outside the box.
 The annual Conservative Political Action Conference
(CPAC) is a combination of real-world pundits and politicians,
and wild things out of Maurice Sendak. One of the former, our
own Mona Charen, spoke some stern words at a panel at the
most recent conclave. She blasted the inclusion on the program
of Marion Le Pen, granddaughter of the odious National Front
founder Jean-Marie, and expressed disappointment with “peo-
ple on our side, for being hypocrites about sexual harassers and
abusers of women who are in our party,” citing Roy Moore and
unnamed persons “who are sitting in the White House” (could
be Rob Porter, who sat there until recently; could be you-know-
who). For this she was lustily booed, and escorted to the green
room and her Uber by anxious security guards. Good for
Charen, and shame on the noisemakers. Two roads diverged in
a right-wing wood. Which will CPAC take?
 The #Resistance lost touch with reality in February, after At-
torney General Jeff Sessions mentioned the “Anglo-American
heritage of law enforcement” during an address to an associa-
tion of sheriffs. That there is an Anglo-American legal tradition
is a commonplace in legal and historical circles, and Sessions
invoked it appropriately, noting that the role of sheriff is unique
to Britain and the United States. The phrase quickly inspired
wild charges of “white supremacy” and “exclusionary rhetoric.”
This reaction, alas, was not limited to the fever swamps. Among
others, Senator Brian Schatz of Hawaii proposed that the term
had been deliberately chosen to “pit Americans against each
other” and asked whether anybody had ever heard the phrase
used “in a sentence.” Had he done a little research, Schatz
might have discovered that the answer to this is “Yes,” and that
his fellow Hawaiian, President Barack Obama, employed such
constructs regularly when discussing institutions and legal
principles common to Britain and America. This is your brain
on partisanship.
 Every social movement, it has been observed, has three stages:
It begins as a movement, becomes a business, and finally degen-
erates into a racket. (A note to pedants: No, not quite Eric Hoffer.)
If you’re wondering which stage the so-called alt-right is at, con-
sider that Milo Yiannopoulos, the Scott Thorson of the 2016
cycle, was last seen hawking dietary supplements on InfoWars.
But if Yiannopoulos has made it to the third stage in record time,
bear in mind that he had the advantage of starting at the second.
 Four immigration amendments died in the Senate, with
none getting the 60 votes needed to defeat filibusters. The
amendment closest to the Trump administration’s position
got only 39 votes. Republicans should try again to pass a bill
5
 THE WEEK
that improves enforcement of the immigration laws and pro-
vides legal status to illegal immigrants who were brought
here as children and know no other home. That means tempo-
rarily dropping cuts to legal immigration, a good administra-
tion idea but too heavy a lift in Congress. Legalize a strictly
defined subset of illegal immigrants, require employers to
use E-Verify to make sure new hires aren’t illegal immi-
grants, and call it a day.
 When the Trump administration announced that it will unveil
a system of steel tariffs in April, the market spoke: Shares in steel
producers such as Nucor soared, while shares in major U.S.-
based manufacturers such as Ford and Caterpillar sank. The
Trump administration should listen to the markets and bear in
mind that the steel-consuming industries represent a much larger
share of U.S. manufacturing output and employment than does
the steel-producing industry. It won’t be the Chinese who pay the
price for Trump’s steel tariffs (the U.S. consumes relatively little
Chinese steel), but the workers, shareholders, and customers of
American companies engaged in the business of turning steel
into useful things such as cars and buildings. As Bloomberg’s
David Fickling points out, the European and Japanese steel
industries saw substantial reductions in their capacities in re-
sponse to diminished demand after the 2008–09 recession, while
the U.S. was practically alone in the world in seeing no such re-
trenchment. As a result, U.S. steel output is at less than 80 percent
of production capacity, which makes operating profitably diffi-
cult. There is no tariff—even the absurd 53 percent one contem-
plated by the Trump administration—that is going to take away
the need for a painful restructuring in the U.S. steel industry. Best
to face reality and get on with it.
 Encouraging young women to pursue careers in science,
technology, engineering, and math—“STEM” for short—has
been a widespread cause for the last few years. But a new study
published in Psychological Science finds that the more equal-
ity between the sexes a country exhibits, the lower the propor-
tion of women in STEM. In countries where women have few
opportunities, they turn to these fields. Where they have more
opportunities, they do what they want to do—which usually
isn’t STEM. “The upshot of this research is neither especially
feminist nor especially sad,” concludes The Atlantic’s write-
up. Funny how often that happens.
 The supreme court of Pennsylvania threw out the redistrict-
ing map that the state’s Republican legislature had passed. It
was too skewed toward the Republicans, the court noted, point-
ing out that hundreds of random simulations had generated few
maps more favorable to them. It then drew its own map—which
ANDY KATZ/PACIFIC PRESS/LIGHTROCKET VIA GETTY IMAGES
was more favorable to the Democrats than nearly all the simu-
lations. It would still likely lead to Democrats’ having a lower
proportion of the state’s congressional seats than their propor-
tion of the vote. That’s a function of geography, and not unique
to the state: Democratic votes are so concentrated in urban
areas that normal methods of line-drawing, for example ones
that prize compact districts, will tend to their disadvantage. The
state’s high court is implicitly treating statewide proportional
representation as the ideal a map should approach. The U.S.
Supreme Court is essentially being asked to do the same thing
in a pending case. But our system is based on geographic dis-
6 | w w w. n a t i o n a l r e v i e w. c o m
tricts, not proportional representation. Courts should rewrite
neither district lines nor our Constitution.
 Mitt Romney has declared his
candidacy for the Utah Senate seat
that Orrin Hatch is vacating, and
unless the end times occur between
now and November, he should win
in a walk. Ideally it would be nice to
see an up-and-comer like Repre-
sentative Mia Love in the Senate
(though relative to the 83-year-old
Hatch, the 70-year-old Romney is a
stripling). Romney’s political career
has been hobbled by a tendency to
wobble: After flaying Donald Trump
throughout 2016, he dined with
him at year’s end, hoping to
become secretary of state. Withal
Romney is a man of ability, intelli-
gence, and character—the opposite
of the Moores and Nehlens that the
Bannons of this world wanted to unleash on the GOP. He will
make a welcome addition to the Senate, and to the ranks of
Republican officeholders.
 Eric Greitens, a Republican, was elected governor of Missouri
in 2016, running just after having an affair. His mistress told her
own husband, on tape, that Greitens had taken compromising
pictures of her and threatened to blackmail her if she ever talked.
The governor admitted the affair but denied the threat. He has
been indicted for secretly taking the photo anyway: It’s arguably
an invasion of privacy under a state statute. Impeachment is
under consideration. The least reckless course now would be to
resign, which is no doubt why he is resisting it.
 The California Democratic-party convention in San Diego
failed to endorse Senator Dianne Feinstein in her bid for a fifth
term. Feinstein won 37 percent of the vote, compared with 54
percent for state-senate leader Kevin de León (60 percent
would have given de León the party’s nod). The two will face
off in a June primary. Feinstein has a huge war chest. But she
stumbled, thanks to age (she is 84, de León 51) and ideology.
Feinstein belongs to a tier of Democratic elder statesmen,
including Nancy Pelosi, Jerry Brown, Steny Hoyer, Joe Biden,
John Kerry, and Hillary Clinton. All are white and liberal, with
occasional deviations (Feinstein is the most security-conscious
of the lot). Below them bubbles a cauldron of identity politics,
which better reflects the party’s nature. (Bernie Sanders some-
what bridges the gap, to the degree that socialists count as an
identity group.) Democrats are caught between a sense of who
they are and an intermittent fear that embracing their true selves
will only help reelect Donald Trump.
 In Illinois’s third congressional district, longtime incumbent
Democrat Dan Lipinski is facing his first competitive primary
challenge in a decade, from progressive Marie Newman, who
has already earned the intense support of prominent abortion-
rights groups. Lipinski has long drawn the ire of Planned Par-
enthood and NARAL for his near-perfect pro-life voting record,
MARCH 19, 2018
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 THE WEEK
and as Democratic politicians increasingly embrace abortion-
on-demand, far-left contingents have pressured party leader-
ship to condemn anyone who doesn’t fully conform. It appears
to be working. Newman has reeled in endorsements from two
of Lipinski’s fellow House Democrats from Illinois, Jan Scha-
kowsky and Luis Gutiérrez, along with New York Democratic
senator Kirsten Gillibrand. Judging from internal polls, Lipinski
should be able to pull out a win in the March 20 primary, but the
substantial pushback on his own side of the aisle suggests the
intra-party struggle to crush the last resisters on abortion could
get even uglier going forward.
 Vladimir Putin is a master at rattling nerves. He has
now renamed Russia’s 23rd Fighter-Aviation Regiment: It
is to be called the “Tallinn Regiment.” Tallinn, of course,
is the capital of Estonia. The Kremlin website said the
name had been bestowed “to pre-
serve glorious military tradi-
tions.” Estonians remember a
brutal occupation—two of them,
or rather three: first the Soviets,
then the Nazis, then the Soviets
again, for some 45 years. Putin’s
Russia menaces Estonia
in many ways, includ-
ing cyberattacks and
military feints. At
least the Estonians,
along with other
Balts, are in no
danger of growing
complacent.
 “First, their villages were burned to the ground,” began an
Associated Press report. “Now, Myanmar’s government is using
bulldozers to literally erase them from the earth—in a vast oper-
ation rights groups say is destroying crucial evidence of mass
atrocities against the nation’s ethnic Rohingya Muslim minority.”
First the crime, then the cover-up. Evil is stalking Myanmar,
a.k.a. Burma, and the world, despite the bulldozers, knows it.
 Nobody knows exactly what happened at Al Tabiyeh in the oil
fields of eastern Syria, or if they do know, they are keeping it
quiet. The base there is manned by members of the U.S.-led
coalition, including special forces, anti-regime Syrians, and
Kurdish People’s Protection Units. Supported by tanks, artillery,
and rockets, between 300 and 500 pro-Assad fighters moved on
that base, on the way ignoring several warnings. Coalition forces
called for an air strike. First reports said that four Russians and
100 Syrians had been killed. Without explanation, these numbers
rose over the following days. In Washington and Moscow, state-
MIKHAIL SVETLOV/GETTY IMAGES
ments squeezed out of politicians and their spokesmen were ten-
tative, if not irrelevant. The world is asked to believe that the
Russians dead or alive were not under orders from Moscow but
mercenaries enrolled in a private military company. They were
running the risk of the first armed confrontation in many years
between Russia and the United States.
8 | w w w. n a t i o n a l r e v i e w. c o m
 The Erdogan regime in Turkey had a name for its recent mil-
itary offensive in Syria—an ironic name: “Operation Olive
Branch.” Turkish forces fought Syrian Kurdish forces, who are
a major ally of the United States against ISIS. The U.S. embassy
in Ankara sits on a street that was once called Nevzat Tandogan,
after a political leader of the city in the first half of the 20th
century. But the Erdogan regime has renamed the street, call-
ing it . . . “Operation Olive Branch.” Turkey is still a nominal
ally of the United States—a member of NATO—but one with
a twist, to put it mildly.
 China had a 22nd Amendment, so to speak: term limits on the
president. Now those limits have been abolished, setting up Xi
Jinping as president for life. He has accrued more personal
power than anyone since Mao. He looks as unchallengeable as
Putin or Erdogan. Xi Jinping has been a nightmare for advo-
cates of liberalization. He imprisons, tortures, and kills such ad-
vocates with abandon. He has outdone his recent predecessors
in this regard (and they were hardly lambs). Furthermore, Xi
Jinping is determined to extend the reach of China as far across
the globe as he can. We in the democracies will have to be wise,
and ever vigilant.
 Two British academics, Richard Toye and Warren Dockter,
have been peeping through the keyhole of Winston Churchill’s
bedroom and believe they have spotted him in a compromis-
ing position with a lady not his wife. Her name is Doris
Castlerosse, and she was a lady only because she’d married a
peer of the realm, the Viscount Castlerossse. His lordship was
a gossip-writer, her ladyship a much-practiced adventuress.
Rackety people of the kind amused Churchill, and in the mid
Thirties he was several times a guest in a house party on the
French Riviera, and so was Doris. A photograph has them sit-
ting on some rocks on the beach; he painted her portrait and
wrote her a letter containing the words “What fun we had.”
Slightly stronger evidence is a tape, recorded in 1985, on
which Sir Jock Colville, Churchill’s private secretary in the
war, says about his boss, “He wasn’t highly sexed and I don’t
think he slipped up, except once—an affair with Doris
Castlerosse.” Everyone has always accepted that Churchill
was a rigorously faithful husband, but now, in Professor
Richard Toye’s opinion, the tape “does change our view of the
Churchills’ marriage.” One noted historian who is not going to
change his view is Andrew Roberts, about to publish a biogra-
phy of Churchill. The story doesn’t stack up, he says, adding
that the two at the keyhole have merely made Churchill “the
latest casualty of the post-Weinstein phenomenon.”
 After having been accused by various Muslim nations of
weaponizing dolphins, sharks, boars, pigs, hyenas, rats, squir-
rels, half a dozen species of birds, and assorted insects for use
in espionage, Israel has now supposedly resorted to using liz-
ards. According to Hassan Firuzabadi, a military adviser to
Iran’s supreme leader, a recent group of Western visitors (as-
sumed to be pro-Israeli) brought along “a variety of reptile
desert species like lizards, chameleons . . . [whose] skin attracts
atomic waves. . . . They were nuclear spies who wanted to find
out where inside the Islamic Republic of Iran we have uranium
mines and where we are engaged in atomic activities.” Atomic
lizards? The Israelis will stop at nothing.
MARCH 19, 2018
 NATIONAL REVIEW
INSTITUTE

REMEMBERING WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY JR.

In Celebration of the Life and Legacy of the Founder of the Conservative Movement

Please join us as we honor the life and legacy of our founder, William F. Buckley Jr.

This February marks ten years since William F. Buckley Jr. s passing. To celebrate his revered life and his powerful legacy,
National Review Institute will host half-day forums in cities across the country that reflect on Bill s accomplishments
and highlight the role of the NR mission today.

Notables include:
L. BRENT BOZELL III, RICHARD BROOKHISER, DR. EDWIN FEULNER, JACK FOWLER, NEAL FREEMAN
DAVID FRENCH, JONAH GOLDBERG, CHARLES KESSLER, KATHRYN JEAN LOPEZ, RICHARD LOWRY,
ANDREW C. MCCARTHY, JAY NORDLINGER, JOHN O’SULLIVAN, RAMESH PONNURU, REIHAN SALAM,
JOHN YOO AND MORE..
NRI s half-day conferences are part of our Buckley Legacy Project, which protects, promotes, and enhances the
consequence and ongoing influence of our founder‒William F. Buckley Jr. Launched in 2015, The Buckley Legacy Project
is designed to make Buckley s work on crucial, relevant topics accessible to our supporters, friends, and allies within the
conservative movement. Through the Buckley Legacy Project, NRI promoted the republication of The Unmaking of a
Mayor, partnered with the Hoover Institution to honor Firing Line s golden anniversary, and has held several book
events and discussions that further examine and remember Buckley s honorable legacy.

We are pleased to bring this series of half-day conferences to our friends and supporters across the country.

JOIN US IN A CITY NEAR YOU

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 THE WEEK
 As the U.S. media covering the Winter Olympics fawned over
the all-female cheerleading squad from North Korea, it turns out
something much darker goes on with these women behind the
scenes. According to a Bloomberg report, North Korean defec-
tors have revealed that these women and other sports ambas-
sadors from the country are routinely forced into sexual slavery.
“They go to the central Politburo party’s events and have to sleep
with the people there, even if they don’t want it,” according to
one account. Another defector referred to these events as “Plea-
sure Squad” parties. The regime’s Olympic charm offensive will
not fool anyone paying the slightest attention.
 When Mirai Nagasu, an American figure skater, landed a
triple axel at the Pyeongchang Olympics, Bari Weiss, a New
York Times opinion-section editor notable for not being another
down-the-line liberal, fired off a tweet. “Immigrants: they get
the job done,” she wrote, quoting the musical Hamilton. A po-
tential problem: Nagasu is not an immigrant; the daughter of
immigrants from Japan, she was born in California. Yet a
social-media mob and some of Weiss’s colleagues deemed the
missive not saccharine, nor clumsy, but—outlandishly—a
ghastly racist sin. “I felt that tweet denied Mirai her full citizen-
ship just as the Internment did,” a New York Times employee re-
portedly wrote in an internal company chatroom. Leave it to a
figure skater to handle the situation with more grace: Nagasu told
reporters she took no offense.
 Team Reject, skip John Shuster calls it. He led the U.S. men’s
Olympic curling team to a poor finish at the 2014 Winter Olym-
pics and was cut from the training program run by the sport’s na-
NAGASU: KIRILL KUDRYAVTSEV/AFP/GETTY IMAGES; MANFRED: ELSA/GETTY IMAGES
tional governing body. So was his Olympic teammate John
Landsteiner. They recruited a few more outcast curlers to form
their own team, or rink, which won the U.S. Olympic trials last
year. Sweet comeback, that, until they collapsed at Pyeongchang
last month, going 2–4 in pool play and facing elimination
against the defending Olympic champions, Canada. Improbably,
the Rejects beat their northern neighbors and a few days later
found themselves in the final, against the heavily favored
Swedes. Final score: U.S.A. 10, Sweden 7. The Swedish curlers
and the Yanks are friends—a couple of the former had gone to a
wedding of one of the latter—in an event that gets high marks
for sportsmanship. Gold-medal Olympian Shuster returns to his
part-time job at a sporting-goods store. The rules of curling may
remain mysterious to most Americans, but they just got a crash
course in its culture. It’s a model of the Olympic spirit.
10 | w w w. n a t i o n a l r e v i e w. c o m
 It’s the morning after at Evergreen State College, and there’s
plenty of cleaning up to do. Last spring, radicals at the Olympia,
Wash., institution held a “Day of Absence,” on which white stu-
dents, faculty, and employees were instructed not to come to
campus. When a white professor defied the ban, he was sur-
rounded by an angry mob, threatened with violence, and hounded
from campus, after which the demonstrators occupied the
president’s office. A year later, applications have plunged by
about 20 percent, staff is being laid off, and the college is so low
on cash that it has had to dip into emergency reserves (in part
because the professor who defied the color line won a $500,000
settlement). Yet the story may still have a positive ending. The
Day of Absence has been canceled, for this year at least, and
this fall a course called “Liberal Education in the College
Bubble,” designed to counter what its teacher calls “self-
censorship and lack of viewpoint diversity,” will be offered as
an elective. Evergreen State has always been a liberal campus;
it wouldn’t be Evergreen if it weren’t. But by toning down the
hostility, eliminating segregation, and accepting a little true
diversity, perhaps it can recover its bearings.
 Arcata, Calif., is a college town (Humboldt State), so you
won’t be surprised to learn that it has a Green-party majority on
its city council, a ban on cultivation of genetically modified
organisms, and lots of homeless people. When the statue-
toppling craze broke out last year, Arcatans looked around and
found no convenient monuments to Confederate generals or
slave-owning Founders, so they seized on President William
McKinley, whose sins include winning the Spanish–American
War and annexing Hawaii. McKinley, whose statue has stood
in Arcata since 1906, makes a rather lackluster villain, and
being assassinated should earn him a bit of sympathy, but he
was an imperialist, and in a pinch, that’s enough. So down
comes McKinley . . . eventually: It turns out that before he
can be carted away, the city must amend its General Plan to
explain how the statue’s removal will affect land use, trans-
portation, housing, and public safety, and file with the state
an official review of the environmental effects, at a cost of
$65,000 and months of delay. At least the onerous regulations
are a temporary check on the town’s asininity.
 Baseball commissioner Rob
Manfred is resolved to institute
rule changes to speed up the game.
He thinks that extra innings should
start with a runner already on sec-
ond base. The players’ union
opposes Manfred’s larger vision,
and plans to institute a runner-on-
second rule in spring-training exhi-
bition games have fallen through,
although proposals for using it in
the All-Star Game or the low minor
leagues are still floating. Manfred
needs to think through what he
wants. Is it faster pace of play? Or
shorter games? The two objectives overlap, but they’re not the
same. Starting extra innings with a runner on base does nothing
to quicken the pace of play. It only increases the odds that the
suspense of an extra-inning game will end sooner.
MARCH 19, 2018
  Hollywood has its Citizen Kane, we have our Citizen Cooke.
Charles C. W. Cooke—familiarly Charlie—came to us from
England, and, specifically, from Oxford University. Like many
an immigrant, he has more enthusiasm about America than most
who are native-born. He is the kind of person who freshens and
instructs us. Today, he is editor of NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE, and
is a newly minted American citizen. The best blessings are mutu-
al, and Charlie and America will do each other plenty of good.
 “Eagle-eyed” is a cliché synonym for sharp-sighted, but he
had the real thing: bright, piercing, embedded in a brow mold-
ed clearly as a head on a coin. He was passionate, without
melodramatics—no stage tears. And to the frustration of
scoffers eternally on the lookout for clerical hypocrisy, his
books were open and free of taint. Billy Graham had his fail-
ings, as the Book he believed in assures us he would have had:
He was too close to presidents—too naïve about their seeming
agreement with him, too awed by their worldly power. His true
audience was not them, but the millions to whom he spread the
word. The Christian life asks a lifetime of commitment, includ-
ing membership in a church. Graham did not minister to that
process; his job was to open the door to outsiders, and to re-
mind the lukewarm that the door was ever there, waiting to
admit them. Dead at 99. R.I.P.
SECOND AMENDMENT
After Parkland
HE horrifying massacre at Stoneman Douglas High
of the facts or being less than entirely forthcoming about their
intentions. Notwithstanding their use in high-profile crimes
such as the Parkland massacre, semiautomatic rifles are used
in a vanishingly small share of U.S. homicides, as indeed are
all rifles and shotguns combined. The firearms most com-
monly used in violent crimes are—no surprise—the most
common ones, mainly semiautomatic handguns. There is no
meaningful definition of “assault weapon,” but what is most
broadly indicated by that term is a semiautomatic firearm
with a detachable magazine—which is to say, the great ma-
jority of firearms sold every year in the United States. A pro-
hibition on such “assault weapons” would amount to a
general prohibition on common firearms, which is constitu-
tionally impermissible. It also is unlikely to be effective, giv-
en the millions of such weapons already in private hands,
without a national program of confiscation, something most
gun-control advocates loudly forswear, at least in front of the
news cameras.
As with so much that is wrong in our society—not only
violent crime—the events in Parkland were no surprise to
those closest to the situation. And they should not have been
a surprise to the police or to the school authorities, who were
well aware, having been repeatedly warned, of the killer’s
stated intention to do exactly what he did. There were dozens
of calls to the Broward County sheriff’s office, as well as
calls to the Palm Beach sheriff’s office and the FBI. The kill-
er was well known to the police and to school authorities
both. Nobody did anything. All of the laws, school interven-
tions, and mental-health programs in the world aren’t going

T School in Parkland, Fla., has been marked by much that

is maddeningly familiar: the serial failure of law-
enforcement and mental-health authorities; the ghoulish oppor-
to do any good if those in positions of responsibility are
unwilling or unable to act. There was ample reason to put at
least an assault charge on the killer—he was thrown out of
tunism of the blame-the-NRA crowd; the dearth of fruitful Stoneman Douglas for assault—which would have prevented
good-faith debate about mitigatory reforms in the aftermath. his legally buying any firearm. But nothing happened.
What can be done? It was not the NRA that failed those students in Florida.
The first and most obvious measure that should be taken is
to face up forthrightly to the fact that schools are targets, and
to begin treating them as such. That involves some trade-offs
that can be difficult to calculate: For instance, schools would
benefit from better entry controls, but also from more emer-
gency exits, and it is difficult to do both effectively at the
same time. Armed guards are potentially valuable, but only
potentially: Neither the armed on-site school policeman in
Parkland nor the three deputies who arrived shortly after the
shooting started lifted a finger to stop the killing. There may
be some value in a Texas-style school-marshal program, in
which interested school employees are given extensive back-
ground checks and substantial, ongoing active-shooter train-
ing before being permitted to discreetly arm themselves on the
job. But that program remains untested. Again, there will be
questions of trade-offs: In Philadelphia, police officers have
on more than one occasion prevented a student from bringing
a gun into a school, but they also have found themselves in
trouble for everything from mishandling their own firearms to
assaulting students. We favor meeting force with force—we
JOE RAEDLE/GETTY IMAGES

see few if any viable alternatives—but that is something that

school administrators and police officials should go into with
their eyes open.
Those who believe that homicide can be radically reduced
by prohibiting particular classes of firearms are either ignorant Teachers from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School return after school shooting

11

Gun-Violence Restraining
Orders Can Save Lives
An underused tool to prevent mass shootings
BY DAVID FRENCH
I
N the annals of “See something, say
something,” there are few more
heartbreaking and infuriating reads
than the transcript of an informant’s
call to the FBI on January 5, 2018. In a
13-minute detailed report, a person
claiming to be close to Parkland, Fla.,
school shooter Nikolas Cruz described
in excruciating detail Cruz’s mental
problems, his violent tendencies, and
the concern that he would go “into a
school and just [shoot] the place up.”
The caller listed Instagram accounts,
described pictures of Cruz posing with
guns, and said that Cruz was “into ISIS”
and had threatened his mother with a
rifle before she died. The FBI did noth-
ing. Five weeks later, Cruz walked into
Marjory Stoneman Douglas High
School, opened fire with his AR-15 rifle,
LUBA MYTS
and killed 14 students, two coaches, and
one teacher.
12 | w w w. n a t i o n a l r e v i e w. c o m
A single FBI failure to act would have
been bad enough, but it turns out that
person after person had called authorities
to report Cruz’s behavior, including—
most notably—Cruz himself. He called
local authorities to say that he was “deal-
ing with a bunch of things.” He told
police that he’d been in a fight and was
struggling with the death of his mother.
Nothing was done. No one acted. Then
Cruz killed kids.
As America reels from the latest mass
shooting, three trends are emerging. First,
time and again mass shooters raise red
flags before their fatal rampage. They’ll
exhibit evidence of radicalization (as did
the Orlando, Fla., nightclub shooter and
the Fort Hood killer), they’ll exhibit evi-
dence of extreme mental distress (as did
the Sandy Hook shooter and the Virginia
Tech killer), or they’ll engage in danger-
ous or threatening behavior (as did Cruz).
Both sane and insane killers have a hard
time keeping their murderous intent to
themselves. They broadcast their dan-
gerous proclivities, especially to those
who are closest to them.
Second, the bureaucratic systems de-
signed to protect the public fail with
depressing regularity. Since 2015, mass
shootings in Charleston, S.C.; Orlando;
Sutherland Springs, Texas; and Parkland
happened after federal authorities either
failed to properly update the background-
check system or failed to follow up on
warnings from the public. The Virginia
Tech shooting happened after a state
court judged the shooter to be a danger to
himself, yet that information was never
passed on to the federal background-
check database.
Third, family members and others
close to shooters often see warning signs
but don’t possess the legal tools neces-
sary to intervene. The Tucson mass
shooter and the Aurora, Colo., killer both
had extensive histories of troubling con-
duct but did not exhibit behavior that
would have required institutionalization.
Conservatives and liberals respond to
these failures differently. Liberal gun-
control advocates lead with simple,
repetitive responses: Make it harder to
purchase firearms. Ban the “deadliest”
weapons. Ban high-capacity magazines.
Conservatives hear the rhetoric and roll
their eyes. As Washington Post fact-
checker Glenn Kessler has shown, not
one of these so-called commonsense gun
restrictions would have stopped any
mass shooting since 2012.
Such restrictions also represent a form
of collective punishment. The only people
who we know would be affected by a so-
called assault weapons ban are law-
abiding Americans. Criminals—especially
mass killers, who often plan their attacks
months in advance—would have no prob-
lem circumventing purchase restrictions
in a nation awash in millions of AR-15s,
tens of millions of high-capacity maga-
zines, and hundreds of millions of semi-
automatic handguns and rifles.
Conservative responses are more
promising. The leading “left of boom”
suggestions—enforcing existing gun
laws better and strengthening the
nation’s mental-health system—at least
have the virtue of targeting actual crimi-
nals or providing greater resources to
identify and institutionalize the danger-
ously mentally ill. But they both still
MARCH 19, 2018
depend on large, impersonal bureaucra-
cies to perform vital functions—the very
bureaucracies that we’ve seen are most
prone to failure.
But there is something new under the
public-policy sun, a proposal that both
the Left and the Right can embrace—a
“left of boom” solution that can keep
guns out of the hands of dangerous peo-
ple without the collective punishment of
larger gun-control proposals and without
relying on vast bureaucracies to function
beyond their demonstrated capacity. The
proposal is targeted, protects due process,
and is already saving lives.
It’s called a gun-violence restraining
order, or GVRO.
On February 16—two days after the
Parkland massacre—I wrote about the
GVRO in NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE. I
described the GVRO as a local-court order
that allows law enforcement to temporar-
ily remove guns from a potential shoot-
er’s home. It is usually sought by a person
in a close relationship with the potential
shooter. A well-crafted GVRO law should
contain the following elements:
1) It should limit those who have stand-
ing to seek the order to close relatives,
those living with the respondent, and per-
haps also school principals or employers.
2) It should require petitioners to
come forward with clear and convincing
evidence that the respondent is a signif-
icant danger to himself or others.
3) It should grant the respondent an
opportunity to contest the claims
against him.
4) In the event of an emergency, ex parte
order, a full hearing should be scheduled
quickly—ideally within 72 hours.
5) The order should lapse after a
defined period of time (30 days would be
acceptable) unless petitioners can pro-
duce clear and convincing evidence of
continued need.
The GVRO avoids bureaucracies.
Family members or principals could go
straight to local court. It imposes
accountability. Local judges would be
forced to rule promptly on the request,
and if the order were granted, local law
enforcement would be forced to respond
quickly. It protects liberty. A high burden
of proof and a requirement that petition-
ers provide admissible evidence such as
sworn statements, photographs, or text
messages would limit the chances of
abuse. Finally, the process is familiar.
Americans are used to restraining orders
in other contexts, and the GVRO wouldn’t cent lives. Each one escalates the gun-
have a steep learning curve. control debate and exacerbates political
Though the idea originated in progres- polarization. Americans are desperate for
sive circles, there’s nothing inherently an effective and constitutional response.
left-wing about a GVRO. California, There is no single solution to mass
Washington, Oregon, Indiana, and killings, but GVROs could help turn the
Connecticut have passed various ver- tide. A number of people could have
sions of GVRO laws, and similar propos- stopped the Parkland massacre. And that’s
als are under consideration in at least 18 not the only killing that could have been
states. The Trump administration is con- prevented. The Las Vegas shooting is an
sidering backing the concept. exception, but it’s easy to identify other
In fact, I can’t remember writing a shootings before which a GVRO could
piece that received a larger, more positive have given family members or school offi-
bipartisan reaction than my online piece cials a fighting chance to stop a tragedy.
supporting GVROs. America faces a When bureaucracies fail, “See some-
strange reality. Even as overall gun crime thing, say something” just isn’t enough.
has decreased dramatically, mass killings Empowered by a GVRO, families and
are on the rise. Each one is a shock to our school officials may finally be able to do
nation. Each one claims too many inno- something—and save lives.
3 Grreaat Lead
aderrs, 2 Grreaat Books
1 Grreaat Autthhor
Lincoln & Church
hill
Statesmen at Waar
“For years, I have longed to be in the sam me room with
Abraham Lincoln and Wiinston Churchilll. And now
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h giv i en allll off us that
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h with this
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leaders: their points of origin, their temp peraments, the
nature of their ambitions, their leadership styles. I savored
every page of this magnificent work.”
- Doris Kear
e rnns Goodwin, Pulitzer Prize winnerr, author
of Team
e of Rivvals:
a The Political
o Genius
e of Abrraaham Lincoln
Hardcover: 544 pages
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Churchill,
c Ro
oosevvelt
e
& Company
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n Character and Statecraaft
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study of the Anglo-American alliance during the Second
Woorld Waar brilliantly establishes how Roosev
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plomats, spies,
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a warrd
dine, Rhodes Professoor of American
History at Oxford Universityy, author of Lincoln: A Life
of Purpose and Power
H p g
Publisher: Stackpole Books
ISBN: 978-0811718981
Avvaaillab
a le Now - Har
arddcoveer and eeBook
13
THE NATIONAL REVIEW S ailing December 1–8 on
Holland America’s Oosterdam

2018 Buckley Legacy Conservative Cruise

Join Rich Lowry, Jonah Goldberg, Kevin D. Williamson, Andrew McCarthy, James Lileks,
Scott Rasmussen, Kyle Smith, John O’Sullivan, Kathryn Lopez, Lee Edwards, Charles Cooke,
Cal Thomas, Jay Nordlinger, Ramesh Ponnuru, Jim Geraghty, Katherine Timpf, John J. Miller,
Alexandra DeSanctis, David French, John Hillen, Reihan Salam, John Yoo, George Nash,
Nick Adams, Daniel Mahoney—and more to come—as we sail the sunny Caribbean and visit
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Throughout the year, we’ll mark the 10th Anniversary of ace reporters on the cultural scene Kathryn Jean Lopez,
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mark the centennaries of Russell Kirk and Aleksandr Adams, and military expert John Hillen.
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Life, Death,
And Politics
Debates over abortion and guns take
a familiar form
BY RAMESH PONNURU
G
UNS and abortion have been
neuralgic issues in American
politics for a long time now,
and the divisions are pretty
familiar. They are so familiar that we don’t
often think about the extent to which these
two bitter debates are really the same
debate, just with the sides reversed.
Both the NRA and NARAL deploy the
rhetoric of individualism and libertarian-
ism. They say they want to keep the gov-
ernment from restricting your freedom.
Their opponents, on the other hand, think
of themselves as fighting to protect inno-
cent life. In their most heated moments,
gun controllers and anti-abortionists de-
scribe the other side as bloodthirsty. They
also contest its ownership of individualist
rhetoric, since all they want is for the gov-
ernment to protect individuals from the
threat of lethal violence.
There is no reason of logical necessity
that the anti-abortion and anti-gun causes
should fall on opposite sides of our polit-
ical divide, but that’s the way American
politics has shaken out. People who want to
restrict gun ownership tend not to want
to restrict abortion, and vice versa. That
pattern is even more evident among the
most politically active Americans. Peggy
Noonan, who closed a recent column in
the Wall Street Journal with a call to ban
both assault weapons and abortions after
20 weeks, is a rare exception.
The activists on each side of each de-
bate do not speak for most Americans.
Most voters aren’t “gun nuts” or “gun
grabbers.” The latest Gallup polls show
60 percent agreement with making gun
laws more strict, but only 28 percent sup-
port for a ban on the civilian possession
of handguns. Abortion occasions a simi-
lar division of opinion. Again according
to Gallup’s latest surveys, 29 percent of
Americans think abortion should be
“legal under any circumstances” and 18
percent “illegal in all circumstances.”
Having only a minority on one’s side is
a bigger problem for those seeking a
change in the status quo. For the most
part, it’s the pro-regulation side of both
debates that has to overcome inertia. The
leaders of both the anti-gun and anti-
abortion movements understand the chal-
lenge. Their common tactic is to highlight
the elements of the status quo that have
the least public support.
Thus pro-lifers pushed to ban partial-
birth abortion and are now seeking a ban
on abortions after 20 weeks, while gun
controllers seek to ban assault weapons.
One purpose of these legislative cam-
paigns is to get ambivalent voters to view
the anti-regulation side as extreme and
even alien. Democrats say Republicans
obstruct the popular, modest measure of an
assault-weapons ban because of their feal-
ty to the NRA. Republicans say Democrats
obstruct the popular, modest measure of a
late-term-abortion ban because of their
fealty to Planned Parenthood and NARAL.
The counterattack takes the same shape
in each case. Supporters of gun rights say
that assault weapons differ in no signifi-
cant way from other guns, that the very
phrase “assault weapons” is a propaganda
term rather than a discrete class of guns,
and that banning them will put us on a
slippery slope at the bottom of which lies
a sweeping gun ban. Supporters of abor-
tion rights said that partial-birth abortions
differ in no significant way from other
abortions, that the very phrase “partial-
birth abortions” is a propaganda term
rather than a medical category, and that
banning them would put us on a slippery
slope at the bottom of which lies a sweep-
ing abortion ban.
Both NARAL and the NRA are right
to worry about their slippery slopes. The
most vocal proponents of the small
restrictions do want much bigger ones. If
they succeed in enacting the small restric-
tions, they will get closer to their ultimate
goals. That’s one of their motivations for
seeking the small restrictions: The bans
are designed to expand. When people
notice that a legal gun is just as lethal as a
prohibited assault weapon, and the differ-
ences between the two are cosmetic, the
legality of that gun can be presented as a
loophole in the ban on assault weapons, a
loophole that needs to be closed.
The press tends to view both guns and
abortion the way liberals do. That means,
among other things, that a lot of journalists
don’t notice the parallels. When a ban on
assault weapons failed in the Florida legis-
lature after the Parkland shootings, many
of them noted that politicians allied with
the NRA had defied public sentiment.
When a ban on abortions after 20 weeks
failed in the Senate earlier this year, not
many of them pointed out that politicians
allied with Planned Parenthood had
blocked a modest and popular measure.
And of course the anti-abortion and
anti-gun causes don’t line up in perfect
parallel. Public opinion on abortion has
been quite stable for a long time, while
support for gun rights has increased over
the years. The legal status of guns and
abortion are also different: The right to
abortion that isn’t mentioned in the
Constitution has received more judicial
protection than the right to guns that is.
The arguments over guns and abortion
tend to come into contact with each other
in the form of accusations of hypocrisy.
Senator Kamala Harris, a liberal Demo-
crat from California, tweeted after the
Parkland massacre: “We cannot tolerate a
society and live in a country with pride
when our babies are being slaughtered.”
Conservatives pointed out that she votes
in lockstep with NARAL on abortion.
Supporters of gun control, meanwhile,
frequently jeer at Republicans: If they’re
so “pro-life,” why won’t they restrict the
guns that are responsible for more than
33,000 deaths in our country each year?
These accusations almost never move
anyone to change his mind.
A supporter of gun control can support
abortion on the ground that unborn chil-
dren don’t have the same claim to legal
protection that the teenagers killed in
school shootings do. There’s nothing
inconsistent in that argument; it is sim-
ply, many of us are convinced, mistaken.
We pro-lifers can maintain consistent
principles while treating guns and abor-
tion differently because every abortion
ends the life of an unborn child, while
the vast majority of guns are never used
to kill anyone.
The gun debate revolves around
whether the use of guns to kill people
should lead us to restrict their availability
even for other uses. The abortion debate
concerns whether we should treat abor-
tion as a kind of killing at all. In an aver-
age week, guns kill more than 600 people
in America, and everyone agrees it is a ter-
rible thing. In an average week, abortion
kills more than 17,000 unborn children in
America, and we are bitterly divided over
whether it is a terrible thing. And that’s
where the parallels end.
17

Let Them
Wear Bracelets
How electronic monitoring can reduce
the incarcerated population and keep
the public safe
B Y B A R R Y L AT Z E R
EW YORK’S governor, Andrew
N Cuomo, just announced a
bail-reform program. Details
were not yet available at
press time, but it’s clear that Cuomo
intends to release thousands of arrested
persons, even suspected felons, with-
out bail.
Meanwhile, across the Hudson, New
Jersey has already launched its bail-
reform plan. It replaces money bail with
an algorithm that scores recently arrest-
ed defendants on dangerousness plus
the likelihood of their appearance at
court hearings. In the first three months
of operation, three-quarters of the state’s
defendants were released. After six
months, New Jersey’s non-sentenced
jail population declined 20 percent and
was 35 percent lower than it had been
two years earlier.
That’s good for the defendants, who
don’t have to spend time in jail in the
event that they’re unable to make bail.
But is it safe for the public? As with virtu-
ally every other criminal-justice reform,
these experiments increase public risk.
Any reform that keeps parolees, proba-
tioners, or pretrial defendants out of jail or
prison, either by making their sentences
shorter or by replacing incarceration with
release to the community, is risky.
Unfortunately, the risk is significant.
Nationwide, one in three released pre-
trial defendants fails to comply with the
requirements of discharge. They don’t
show up for court proceedings (23 per-
cent), or they get arrested for another
crime (17 percent). Maybe an algorithm
can reduce these failures. Maybe not.
With parolees, the risks are even
greater. These are people who have
Mr. Latzer is an emeritus professor of criminal justice
at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and the
author of The Rise and Fall of Violent
Crime in America.
18 | w w w. n a t i o n a l r e v i e w. c o m
served time in prison, and many of them
are dangerous. Two-thirds are rearrested
within three years of release. The most
recent data, for 2015, reveal that more
than 340,000 probationers and parolees
failed to comply with the requirements
of release in a single year and as a result
were reincarcerated.
Nevertheless, release to the community
is unavoidable. Among defendants con-
victed of a felony, 31 percent are sen-
tenced to probation or some other
conditional discharge instead of prison.
Eight of ten felons serving time in prison
are released to parole before they com-
plete their sentences.
The real-world choice, then, is not
between unconditional freedom and con-
finement of all offenders for life. It is
between release with adequate safe-
guards and release without them. But cur-
rent safeguards are inadequate. Probation
and parole officers, overwhelmed by mas-
sive caseloads, can’t closely monitor all
Deterrence comes from the
subject’s awareness that he is being
monitored: He knows that they know
where he is at all times.
of their charges. And given the reformist
trend, we are likely to see even more
releases. So what can we do?
The answer is right in your smart-
phone or on your car dashboard. The
latest GPS technology can be used—
and is already being used worldwide—
to track the whereabouts of offenders.
We should expand electronic monitor-
ing (EM) of prisoners released to
parole, offenders sentenced to proba-
tion, and arrested persons not yet adju-
dicated (pretrial defendants) as much
as is feasible and affordable. With
ramped-up EM, we get the best of both
worlds: additional crime deterrence
and reduced incarceration. It’s a win-
win proposition.
EM is built around GPS, the Global
Positioning System, familiar to millions
of drivers, for whom it provides traffic
and location information. This proven
tracking technology is widely used by
government, industry, and private citi-
zens and is already applied to offenders
in Europe. GPS is powered by about 31
Earth-orbiting satellites launched and
operated by the U.S. Air Force. These
satellites emit radio signals that travel
to Earth at the speed of light. The sig-
nals indicate the exact location of the
satellite and the precise time of the
transmission, determined by an onboard
atomic clock.
Once a GPS receiving device picks
up signals from at least three satellites,
geometry-based software calculates
(by triangulation) the location of the
device in latitude and longitude. With
four satellite signals, the device can
determine the precise time of the trans-
mission. Location and time data for a
person wearing or carrying the receiver
can be transmitted to a remote site,
such as a monitoring service, and
synched with street maps that enable
the monitors to determine the exact
city, street, and even house number of
the subject. With continuous signals,
monitors can track the movement and
speed of the target. Location informa-
tion is accurate within 16 feet; with aug-
mentation systems, it can be accurate
within centimeters.
Here’s how tracking would work in
the criminal-justice context. Parolees,
probationers, and released pretrial
defendants would be required to wear a
GPS-enabled ankle or wrist bracelet.
Deterrence comes from the subject’s
awareness that he is being monitored:
He knows that they know where he is at
all times.
Probation and parole officers will be
able to track the subject in three different
ways. First, by demarcating certain no-
go areas—geofenced exclusion zones—
the device can alert authorities when the
subject has physically entered a prohib-
ited location. So, for example, a sexual-
assault victim’s residence or workplace
could be rendered electronically off
limits to the subject. If he enters the
geofenced location, the GPS tracker
will transmit his location and the time
of entry.
MARCH 19, 2018

Tracking device
Second, geofenced inclusion zones,
such as a drug-treatment clinic or a
place of employment, can be created to
ensure that the subject meets his obliga-
tions. He can receive audible reminders
from the GPS device, which contains
software programmed to serve the par-
ticular requirements of each subject.
The software will “know” where and
when the person is supposed to go—and
the device will announce this. He then
will be able to check in on arrival, per-
haps at a kiosk in the facility.
The third way in which monitoring
can be used is through daily tracking of
the subject’s location. Since GPS
reveals the movement of the person
along with time information, the author-
ities can geomap crimes in an area over
a given period, daily perhaps, and deter-
mine whether the subject was at or near
a particular crime scene at the time of
the offense.
This technology is already being uti-
lized to monitor offenders throughout
the United States. A Pew survey in 2015
found that the use of electronic tracking
devices by criminal-justice agencies
rose nearly 140 percent in ten years and
that more than 125,000 people were
electronically monitored. But given that
more than 4.6 million people were in
community supervision at the end of
2015, this is a drop in the bucket.
For a country virtually wedded to tech-
release arrange-
ments without EM.
Expansion will re-
quire the purchase or
lease of many GPS devices along with
the additional costs of maintaining
them. Parole and probation officers
won’t have the time to monitor the
transmissions, so this activity will have
to be outsourced, probably to a private
company similar to a home-burglar-
alarm business. Special software may
have to be developed and supported. A
Florida study sponsored by the U.S.
Justice Department, covering the years
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2001 to 2007, found that EM cost $3,274
per year per offender.
As usage increases, however, savings
of scale should reduce outlays. In addi-
tion, if monitoring is successful, it will
keep offenders out of jail and prison
and thereby reduce incarceration costs.
These reductions could easily offset the
added costs of EM. In the Florida study,
for instance, confinement cost $20,108
per inmate per year—more than six
times the annual expense for EM.
How long would a subject have to be
monitored? This would depend on his
criminal-justice status. For a released
pretrial defendant, tracking would end
when he showed up for all of his court
hearings, culminating with his trial or,
more typically, his plea hearing. The
median time between arrest and adjudi-
cation in such circumstances is 127
days. For probationers, who have been
convicted and sentenced to conditional
release instead of jail or prison, the
monitoring would terminate when the
probation period expired, usually after
one to three years. The tracking of
parolees would continue for the duration
of the unserved portion of the sentence,
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There is no question that expanded
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sentence and the proportion spent in
prison at the time of parole. Recent
data indicate that parolees would face
about two years of monitoring on aver-
age, with an extra seven months for
violent offenders.
Civil libertarians undoubtedly will
object to governmental monitoring, but
with regard to criminal-justice sub-
jects, their objections may not be per-
suasive. To be sure, 24/7 monitoring is
intrusive, and the thought that govern-
ment agents could potentially determine
the location of a person at any time, day
or night, is unsettling. On the other
hand, EM will disclose only the location
of the subject, not his activities. One
also must bear in mind that EM is a path-
way out of confinement, which is a far
greater intrusion. And if we balance the
imposition caused by tracking against
the need to protect the public from
crimes by people who are demonstrated
offenders, the needle swings strongly in
favor of EM.
The principal legal challenge to elec-
tronic monitoring is likely to be a
Fourth Amendment claim that it
amounts to an illegal search and seizure.
This is going to be a hard sell for the
civil libertarians, especially in typical
parole or probation cases, where the
tracking will last for only a few years,
or with pretrial defendants, who proba-
bly will be monitored for less than five
months. These criminal-justice subjects
already are under numerous stringent
restrictions that pass Fourth Amend-
ment muster, and a year or two of loca-
tion monitoring is likely to be viewed
by the courts as just one more accept-
able imposition.
Electronic monitoring is the future of
criminal-justice reform. It provides a
compromise between public safety
through incarceration on the one hand
and public risk through release on the
other. It will enable us to free more peo-
ple at risk of committing crime while
providing additional assurance for the
general public. It won’t be cheap to
operate, but it will cost a lot less than
jails or prisons. It won’t provide sub-
jects with unrestricted freedom, but it
beats incarceration hands down. (If you
were facing jail or an ankle bracelet,
which would you choose?) It’s not a
panacea, but it’s far better than freeing
proven risks on the honor system, as we
currently do.
20 | w w w. n a t i o n a l r e v i e w. c o m
In Defense of
Local Schools
Education reformers should acknowledge
the school as community center
BY FREDERICK M. HESS &
ANDY SMARICK
W
HEN it comes to America’s
schools, the pillars of con-
servative thought tend to
be school choice and local
control. There’s a quiet assumption that
the two fit hand-in-glove. But it’s be-
come clear that this might not always be
the case.
And this matters—a lot. Schools
account for the lion’s share of state and
local spending and are woven into the
fabric of the community. In 2018, a host
of imperiled Republican governors and
state legislators will need to work over-
time to address the concerns of families
who’ve felt overlooked by policymakers
and distrust reforms associated with the
mess in Washington.
“Local control” has historically meant
that an elected board oversees all public
schools in a community. Kids are
assigned to a school in the local district
based on where they live (or with limited
choice among district schools). This sys-
tem’s strengths are clear: It’s familiar, the
community controls the system through
the ballot box, kids go to school with
neighbors, and—as a self-contained,
time-tested unit of local government—it
offers a bulwark against bossy dictates
from distant authorities.
This has all made district schools quite
popular, remarkably so given the drum-
beat of advocates who routinely assert
that America’s schools are “failing.” In
the last decade, well more than half—
and as high as 70 percent—of parents
gave their local schools a grade of “A” or
“B,” and, going back two decades,
Gallup has found that generally three-
quarters of parents are satisfied with
their oldest child’s education.
At the same time, critics justifiably
criticize the bureaucracy, rigid contracts,
Mr. Hess is the director of education-policy studies,
and Mr. Smarick is the Morgridge Fellow in education
studies, at the American Enterprise Institute.
parochial politics, and lethargy that can
characterize big urban districts. For a lot
of parents, charter schools or voucher
programs that make it possible to enroll a
child in a better, safer school can be a
godsend. A new poll by the American
Federation for Children found that more
than two-thirds of likely voters support
the concept of school choice, defined as
giving “parents the right to use the tax
dollars designated for their child’s educa-
tion” toward paying for a public or pri-
vate school that “best serves their needs.”
Given its appeal, advocates have dis-
missed any potential conflict between
choice and local control by blandly
observing that parental choice is the
“most local of local control.” As
Education Secretary Betsy DeVos has
put it, “the answer is local control. It’s
listening to parents, and it’s giving more
choices.” But this belies real tensions.
After all, the local-district system is
premised on tradition, continuity, and
geography; choice on innovation, mar-
kets, and voluntary associations.
In most of public life, there is friction
between the market and time-tested
norms and institutions. Markets are dis-
ruptive precisely because they upend
familiar routines.
In education, reformers routinely
laud local government and neighborly
ties, and then pivot to celebrating “dis-
ruptive innovation,” the Uber-style tai-
loring of schools to kids, efforts to
shutter “dropout factories,” and the end
of “zip-code education.”
That this tension has been overlooked
is due largely to the fact that it’s less evi-
dent in the urban coastal bastions that are
the focus of the contemporary education
debate. These are the districts with which
education advocates, major media, and
influencers are most familiar. In these
cities, the attraction of neighborhood
schools can be diminished by the imper-
sonality of massive school districts, high
rates of mobility, the districts’ persistent-
ly poor performance, and the widespread
availability and use of private options.
But the conflict between choice and
local control is very real across much of
suburban and rural America—especially
in red states, where parents and communi-
ty members tend to be satisfied with and
protective of their local schools. The vast
majority of the nation’s 14,000 districts
are small, fully a third consisting of just
one or two schools. In the 70 percent of
MARCH 19, 2018
school districts that enroll fewer than
2,500 students, individual relationships
with the local schools tend to be personal.
Across much of the nation, the zip-
code-based schools that education
reformers decry are a hub of the com-
munity. They help define local identity.
Their sports teams are sources of pride
and an anchor of routine. Their accom-
plishments and foibles are touchstones
of local conversation. They offer pre-
dictability; parents know where their
children will go to school. It is easier for
children to become friends with chil-
dren who live nearby and for parents to
get to know their neighbors. In this way,
local schools serve as engines of social
capital—bringing people together and
strengthening communities.
School choice allows families to escape geographic
monopolies and become part of voluntary school
communities that must earn and maintain their loyalty.
Given all this, it’s understandable that
families in such communities might re-
gard school choice as a threat more than
an opportunity.
School-choice advocates have com-
pelling responses. School choice allows
families to escape geographic monopo-
lies and become part of voluntary school
communities that must earn and maintain
their loyalty. It can crack open hide-
bound systems, introduce healthy com-
petition, and bring pressure to bear on
unresponsive bureaucracies or anachro-
nistic contracts. It can complement and
enrich community dynamics rather than
weaken them.
But school choice can also involve
transporting students to schools far out-
side their neighborhoods, the disruption
of valued routines, and policies that sep-
arate neighbors. This should give pause
to those who care about community ties,
quality of life, and social capital.
None of this is intended as a brief for
school districts. The authors of this arti-
cle are both longstanding proponents of
expanded educational choice. But it’s
worth grasping why so many Americans
remain attached to the local school sys-
tems that reformers routinely denigrate.
Even after a quarter century of steady
growth in charter schooling, private-
school choice, and home schooling,
more than 80 percent of the nation’s stu-
dents attend district schools.
In urban locales where school choice
has flourished and been celebrated, there
has been energetic backlash from portions
of the community. In Newark and New
Orleans—where district schools strug-
gled for decades and charter schools have
excelled—many residents decried an
“invasion” of outsiders and successfully
reinstituted local school boards.
In suburban communities such as
Douglas County, Colo., right-leaning
parents turned skeptical about school
choice. In Massachusetts, a high-profile
ballot initiative to allow more charter
schools failed largely because suburban
parents feared more school choice would
disrupt their local schools.
This is not to suggest that conserva-
tives should retreat from their decades-
long support of school choice. It does,
however, mean recognizing that reform-
ers have erred in casually ascribing cri-
tiques of dysfunctional big-city systems
to all of the nation’s 14,000 districts.
More fundamentally, it argues for recog-
nizing two legitimate, competing visions
of localism—one geographic, one volun-
tary and market-based. Both have much
to recommend them.
What does that mean in practice?
First, approach school choice as part
of an education agenda rather than the
sum of it. For instance, career and tech-
nical education has such appeal because
it’s an inclusive, practical way to address
a real concern of countless families—
whether their kids will be prepared for
the world of work. Expanding online
options and dual-enrollment models are
examples of choice-based reforms that
could complement local systems.
Second, promote school choice with
an eye to respecting, rather than slight-
ing, concerns about how “disruption”
can upend communities. This means
talking about school closures as regret-
table, not a bloodless consequence of
vibrant markets. It means empathizing
with, rather than ridiculing, suburban
parents concerned that school choice
might disrupt their communities. And it
means acknowledging that conventional
notions of school choice are frequently a
poor answer for much of rural America,
where the next-closest junior high might
be 40 miles away.
Third, seek policy solutions that respect
the healthy desire for both community
and choice. For example, some cities
have allowed charter schools to employ
“neighborhood preferences,” meaning the
school remains primarily choice-based
but local families have a better shot of get-
ting in. And in New Orleans, most of the
charter schools are now overseen by an
elected board. While the details matter
immensely, there’s real value in seeking
ways to empower families while also
respecting geographic communities.
Lastly, part of what fuels nervousness
about school choice is the sense that
communities and their heritage are
being sacrificed in the service of some
grand policy agenda. This concern can
be strongest in conservative communi-
ties. In smaller towns, when they talk
about schools, residents and community
leaders frequently bring up the impor-
tance of high-school sports or the ways
that elementary schools help bring new
parents into community networks. State
and local leaders working to expand
school choice should explore ways to
protect the civic goods offered by local
systems, for example by permitting stu-
dents in choice-based schools to partici-
pate in the sports teams of traditional
public schools and encouraging partner-
ships that enable alternative and tradi-
tional schools to cooperatively raise
funds for good causes and host commu-
nity activities.
In recent decades, school choice has
brought dynamism, discipline, and inno-
vation to a sclerotic system. But along the
way, its proponents have sometimes lost
sight of the virtues of neighborly, locally
controlled schools. At a time when many
voters feel discounted, discombobulated,
and disconnected, state and local officials
should approach school reform in a man-
ner that’s sensitive to these concerns.
21

Two Dantes
A visit with a venerable scholar
B Y J AY N O R D L I N G E R
Cambridge, Mass.
‘W
HEN I was a student,
long ago, I heard about
the famous Dante Della
Terza,” I say. He says,
“Dante Della Terza is me!” Yes, indeed.
He is one of the great Dante scholars of
our time. They share a name, yes. It hap-
pened “innocently,” says Della Terza,
with a smile. “That is what my mother
named me.” He has another connection to
Dante through his last name. The poet’s
rhyme scheme, remember, is terza rima.
Dante Della Terza has an office high in
Widener Library, here at Harvard. It is
stuffed with books, journals, and memen-
tos, of course. On his desk, within reach,
are the three key volumes: the three can-
tiche of The Divine Comedy, namely
Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso. Della
Terza’s copies show many years of use.
Della Terza is a professor emeritus,
having retired 25 years ago, in 1993.
Today, at 94, he comes to this office
three days a week. In general, he
spends his days as he always has: read-
ing and writing.
He was born in 1924 (two years after
Mussolini came to power). His home-
town is Sant’Angelo dei Lombardi, in
the province of Avellino, in the region of
Campania (southern Italy). His father
was a “worker,” he says—specifically,
an electrician. “I had to start from a very
humble position,” says the renowned
professor. He was the middle of three
sons. His older brother, Ettore, became a
judge; his younger brother, Aldo, be-
came a banker.
Little Dante was very, very bright. He
went to a prestigious liceo, or high school,
in the town of Avellino: Pietro Colletta,
named after a Neapolitan general and his-
torian (1775–1831). He then won a place
at a prestigious institution in Tuscany: the
Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa. He
was on his way.
Della Terza was joined in Pisa by
another boy from Avellino Province,
who also attended Colletta. His name is
Antonio La Penna, and he became one
of the great Latin scholars of the day.
22 | w w w. n a t i o n a l r e v i e w. c o m
(Like his classmate, Della Terza, he is
still with us.)
In Pisa, Della Terza was trained by
Luigi Russo, a literary critic born in 1892.
The student has great and abiding affec-
tion for the teacher. Indeed, Della Terza
points to a photo of Russo, on the wall.
When Della Terza was a student, many
people read The Divine Comedy as a reli-
gious work, he says. They regarded Dante
Alighieri as a saint. Obviously, there is a
religious component to the poem—but
the “dramatic aspects,” says Della Terza,
are well-nigh inexhaustible.
He was 15 when the war began; 21
when it ended. Probing a bit, I say, “It
was difficult, I imagine.” “Yes,” he says.
And one more time: “Yes.” And that’s all.
From Pisa, he went to Zurich, to study
at the famous polytechnic institute (alma
mater of Einstein). He was taught by
Theophil Spoerri, the Swiss philologist.
Then Della Terza himself taught—in
Paris, at two famous lycées: Henri-IV and
Louis-le-Grand. Eventually, he made his
way to America.
He had met an American girl,
Mollie, from Seattle. They got married.
They would have two children, Giorgio
and Grazia.
In America, Della Terza came under the
influence of another scholar, another great
literary critic, Leo Spitzer, from Vienna.
Yet I should mention other teachers, other
influences—ones Della Terza did not
know in the flesh but rather from books.
Very important to him is Francesco
De Sanctis. “He came from the same
province I came from,” Della Terza points
out. De Sanctis was born in 1817 in a little
place called Morra Irpina. In 1937, it was
renamed Morra De Sanctis. A political
opponent of the Bourbons, De Sanctis
had to flee Italy in the 1850s, and he
found refuge in Zurich, where he taught
at the polytechnic institute.
He meant a great deal to Benedetto
Croce—who, in turn, meant a great deal
to Della Terza and others. De Sanctis
was “a great mind of the 19th century,”
says Della Terza, and Croce was “a great
mind of the 20th.”
Another such mind was Erich
Auerbach, born in Berlin in 1892 (the
same year as Luigi Russo). Auerbach
plumbed Homer, Dante, et al. as few had.
Della Terza was one of the first to trans-
late him into Dante’s language, Italian.
In America, Della Terza taught at
UCLA. Then, in the early 1960s, he was
invited to come to Harvard. His patron
was Renato Poggioli, a Florentine, and
a specialist in Slavic languages and lit-
erature. He was a titan in the field of
comparative literature. Indeed, he was a
founder of that field.
Della Terza is known for Dante—at
least by me—but he has other authors.
Two of them are Dante’s great contem-
poraries, Petrarch and Boccaccio.
Petrarch is the fount of lyric poetry,
says Della Terza; Boccaccio is the fount
of a storytelling prose.
The professor has also written about
Tasso (16th century) and about his own
times, the post-war 20th century. Umberto
Eco was a good friend. (The author of
The Name of the Rose died two years ago,
at 84.) One of Della Terza’s books is
about European intellectuals in the
United States. He might well have con-
sulted himself, among others.
Asked about his favorite writers,
Della Terza makes a tender statement:
“Leopardi was always very dear to me.”
He is talking about Giacomo Leopardi,
the poet who lived from 1798 to 1837.
“He was often physically ill, but he had a
great lucid mind, a creative mind.”
Across the decades, Della Terza taught
many students who became leading
lights themselves. One of them is Luigi
Fontanella, who, in addition to being a
scholar, is a poet, playwright, and novel-
ist. “I am 74,” he tells me, over the phone.
But he is still one of Della Terza’s kids, so
to speak—and a protégé of whom Della
Terza is especially fond.
Fontanella is now at Stony Brook
University in New York. He has many
letters and other materials related to
Dante Della Terza. (One day, he may
write a little book about the professor.)
These materials are kept in a file
marked, simply, “Dante.” We chuckle
over this. Usually, when a professor of
Italian has a file marked “Dante,” it is
devoted to Alighieri.
“He was a great teacher,” says
Fontanella of Della Terza. “He was able
to combine scholarship with personal
experience—with his travels, with his
relations to other writers. It was a plea-
sure to listen to him. He would use a par-
ticular passage as a vehicle to other
domains—domains beyond the literary:
a historical domain, a philosophical
domain, and so on.”
His knowledge was vast, says Fontan-
ella. He had read everything, in classical
MARCH 19, 2018
 Dante Della Terza in his office at Widener Library, Harvard, on February 21, 2018
languages and modern languages. Also,
he had “an incredible memory” and a
lively sense of humor. He was not mere-
ly erudite, Fontanella emphasizes: “He
entered deeply into the spirit of a text.
He was able to capture the soul behind
the words.”
Up in Widener Library, I ask Della
Terza, “What would you ask Dante, if
you could meet him? Any mysteries you
would like cleared up?” Della Terza
thinks for a moment and says, “I would
ask for forgiveness. We do not have the
knowledge of him that he deserves. You
would like to be up to it, but there is the
problem of the centuries that separate us.”
Della Terza says that everyone should
read Dante, or try to. He makes life bet-
ter. At the same time, you need “assis-
tance.” Almost no one can pick up Dante
and get him, just like that. Still, “the per-
son who has the courage to put aside the
difficulties will find himself rewarded,”
Della Terza says. (I am struck by that
word “courage.”) “After a while, you
JAY NORDLINGER
find yourself involved in the story.”
Paradiso is the most difficult of the
cantiche, says Della Terza, because of
theoretical and doctrinal considerations.
Inferno is “more human.” It is “at the
level of life.” It is about “the mistaken
activities of men,” and what happens to
them as a result. Purgatorio? A ’tweener,
let’s say.
I ask whether it is possible truly to
know and love the poem in translation.
“This is a very good question,” says Della
Terza. The answer, in a nutshell, is yes,
with the right translation—but there’s
nothing like the real thing (if I may adapt
a 1960s song).
How many times has he read the
Comedy? Hundreds? Many hundreds?
Della Terza sort of shrugs and smiles. I
then ask how much of the poem he ever
memorized. (There are 14,233 lines.)
Many cantos, he says. It was compulsory
when he was a student. And then he
starts, from the beginning, unbidden.
“Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra
vita”—he goes on for eleven more
lines, four tercets. He recites the poem
musically and dramatically. He is
utterly focused and his eyes are lit up.
He first encountered these lines when
he was 15 or so.
“Have you ever written poetry your-
self?” I ask. No, he says. “Just prose. I
never used poetry for personal expres-
sion. I like it, but I did not do it.” At this,
he smiles warmly.
I quote to him the judgment of T. S.
Eliot: “Dante and Shakespeare divide
the world between them. There is no
third.” Does Professor Della Terza
agree? Yes. I then ask the old, old
question, “Who is greater, Dante or
Shakespeare?” Judiciously, he hesitates
to answer, saying that each deserves his
place and must be granted his authority.
But it is Dante, his fellow Italian—the
founder of the Italian language, in a
sense—with whom he has spent his life.
Della Terza uses the word “accompani-
ment.” Dante has accompanied him, and
he has accompanied Dante. They have
been good for each other, I think.
When you meet Dante Della Terza,
you feel you have touched something
historic: a link in a golden chain,
maybe. When we part, we decide we
will not say addio, which is like a final
goodbye. Instead, it’s arrivederci, see
you later.
23
 The Entitlement
Crisis Ignored
An $82 trillion avalanche looms
BY BRIAN RIEDL
HE American polity recently tore itself apart debating the
T morality of adding $1.5 trillion in tax cuts to the national
debt. Yet the $82 trillion avalanche of Social Security
and Medicare deficits that will come over the next
three decades elicits a collective shrug. Future historians—and
taxpayers—are unlikely to forgive our casual indifference to what
has been called “the most predictable economic crisis in history.”
Conservatives used to prioritize long-term fiscal solvency.
For years, Republican leaders from Newt Gingrich to Paul
Ryan to Mitt Romney called for modernizing Social Security
and Medicare before they collapse under the weight of 74 mil-
lion retiring Baby Boomers. Then Donald Trump won 88 per-
cent of Republican voters—and the presidency—while
pledging that “there will be no cuts to Social Security, Medicare
& Medicaid.” Six months later, a Pew poll revealed that only 15
percent of Republicans support trimming Medicare, and only
10 percent support Social Security reform. (Democratic support
is 5 and 3 percent, respectively.)
In other words, the entitlement-reform generals have no army.
Today, concerns about Social Security and Medicare are dis-
missed as the dying voice of the out-of-touch Washington estab-
lishment. For conservative leaders, the surest path to credibility
ROMAN GENN
Mr. Riedl is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
24 | w w w. n a t i o n a l r e v i e w. c o m
with the grassroots lies in focusing on working-class “real
America” concerns such as globalism and income inequality.
And nothing could be more tone-deaf than depriving struggling
families of their earned Social Security and Medicare benefits
because of some green-eyeshade budget-deficit paranoia.
Capitol Hill has taken notice. Six years ago, Congress focused
on entitlement grand deals, budget caps, “supercommittees,” and
a war on spending and debt. Today, Republican-controlled
Washington wants nothing to do with Social Security and
Medicare reform or serious deficit reduction. The recent budget
deal essentially repealed the spending caps, while the debt limit
and the ban on pork-barrel earmarks may be eliminated entirely
and the latest congressional Republican budget dropped the
longstanding goal of achieving balance within a decade. The
commendable effort to replace Obamacare was sabotaged by
Republican governors opposed to paring back Medicaid growth.
Even the $1.5 trillion tax cut—despite its many merits—has
poisoned the well for spending reform. It would be politically
suicidal to cut taxes for corporations and then turn around and
slash Medicare for seniors. Thus, when Speaker Paul Ryan
recently made public statements suggesting entitlement reform
as a way to close the budget deficit, Mitch McConnell and others
quickly popped his trial balloon. Too risky, too unpopular, and
too partisan after cutting taxes.
MARCH 19, 2018
T HE 2009–12 tea-party movement seemed like an oppor-
tunity to address the Social Security and Medicare costs
driving long-term spending and debt. But in hindsight,
it’s clear that this grassroots movement’s focus was more nar-
row and short-term.
The Tea Party’s spring 2009 emergence partially was due to
pent-up anger at President George W. Bush’s earlier domestic-
spending spree. The desire of Republican voters to support a like-
able wartime president in the face of unhinged liberal opposition
had caused many to mute their frustration over No Child Left
Behind, a massive farm bill, the Bridge to Nowhere, and a large
Medicare drug benefit. The inauguration of a new Democratic
president made it politically costless for Republicans to once
again loudly oppose spending and deficits.
The primary cause of the tea-party movement was the budget
deficit’s recession-driven rise from $161 billion to $1.4 trillion
between 2007 and 2009. Republican voters justifiably fixated on
the $700 billion financial bailout and $800 billion stimulus law
as unaffordable giveaways to special interests.
Obama’s deficits, which broke the trillion-dollar mark for the
first time in history, seemed to put American finances on a course
akin to that of Greece, if not Weimar Germany. Republicans picked
up 63 House seats in 2010 largely on calls to rein in spending, end
the stimulus, repeal Obamacare, and balance the budget. The Tea
Party and the new Congress geared up for a new war on spending.
But the deficit was not structural. It was a temporary deficit
driven by the recession. The economy (weakly) recovered on its
own, the bailouts were repaid, and most stimulus spending eventu-
ally expired. Additionally, President Obama raised taxes on upper-
income families by $100 billion per year, and the Budget Control
Act saved $100 billion per year in defense and domestic spending.
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So the deficit declined largely on its own, falling back to $438
billion by 2015—without any Greece-style collapse or uproot-
ing of Social Security or Medicare. This made the anti-deficit
activists look like the boy who cried wolf—bringing to mind
President Reagan’s quip “I am not worried about the deficit. It is
big enough to take care of itself.” Ross Douthat spoke for many
when he recently wrote in the New York Times that, while he still
supports structural spending reforms, he now believes his earlier
deficit-reduction insistence was unnecessarily apocalyptic.
The Tea Party never wanted to overhaul the Social Security
and Medicare systems driving the long-term debt. It wanted to
rage against compassionate conservatism, Wall Street bailouts,
and trillion-dollar deficits—each of which was gone by 2013.
A ESOP’S wolf eventually did attack—and the neighbors
who had been burned earlier now refused to believe it.
Similarly, the anti-deficit hysteria of the Great Re-
cession has given way to a backlash of complacency. The
entitlement-driven debt collapse seems like the future dystopia
that never arrives and therefore is no longer taken seriously.
This complacency could be catastrophic. Social Security
and Medicare reform has fallen off the radar precisely when it
is the most urgent.
Between 2008 and 2030, 74 million Americans born between
1946 and 1964—or 10,000 per day—will retire into Social
Security and Medicare. And despite trust-fund accounting
games, all spending will be financed by current taxpayers. That
was all right in 1960, when five workers supported each retiree.
The ratio has since fallen below three-to-one today, on its way to
two-to-one by the 2030s. So by the time my daughters (ages five
ublish
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25
and two) are adults, each married couple will be responsible for
the Social Security and health care of their very own retiree.
Imagine the burden those exorbitant taxes will place on young
couples who are already struggling to buy a home and afford day
care on early-career salaries.
These demographic challenges are worsened by rising health-
care costs and repeated benefit expansions from Congress.
Today’s typical retiring couple has paid $140,000 into Medicare
and will receive $420,000 in benefits (in net present value), in
part because Medicare’s physician and drug benefits are not pre-
funded with payroll taxes and are only partially funded by retiree
premiums. Most Social Security recipients also come out ahead.
In other words, seniors are not merely getting back what they
paid in. By 2030, 74 million retirees will join a system that—by
design—runs a substantial per-person deficit.
Over the next 30 years, according to data from the Con-
gressional Budget Office, Medicare will run a $40 trillion cash
deficit, Social Security will run a $19 trillion cash deficit, and
the interest on the resulting program debt will be $23 trillion.
(To inflation-adjust these figures, trim by one-third.) The rest of
the budget will remain roughly in balance, as tax revenues con-
tinue growing faster than the economy (even if the new tax cuts
are made permanent) and all other combined spending contin-
ues growing slower than the economy.
In short, the entire $82 trillion long-term-deficit projection
comes from the Social Security and Medicare shortfalls and their
resulting interest costs. This unsustainable level of borrowing
would wreak havoc on global financial markets, interest rates,
and economic investment, not to mention the federal budget.
Even readers inclined to be skeptical of 30-year projections
should take this one seriously. Future inflation rates are indeed
anyone’s guess, but the existence of 74 million Baby Boomers
retiring into Social Security and Medicare is an actuarial reality.
These projections even optimistically assume a slowdown in per
capita health costs. They are the rosy scenario.
Furthermore, the spending avalanche has already begun.
Since 2008—when the first Baby Boomers qualified for early
retirement—Social Security and Medicare have accounted for
72 percent of all inflation-adjusted federal-spending growth
(with other health entitlements responsible for the rest). The vast
majority of savings from spending caps, deep defense cuts, and
rising tax revenues have simply fed the Social Security and
Medicare beast, which will grow by another $130 billion annual-
ly over the next decade. That is the equivalent of creating another
Defense Department every five years, yet it will occur automati-
cally, with no congressional votes and scant media coverage.
And as federal resources shift to the elderly, Washington is
beginning to run out of offsets. This has contributed to the
deficit’s expanding from $438 billion to $666 billion over the
past two years. Even before the recent tax cuts, CBO projected
that annual budget deficits would surpass $1 trillion within five
years and reach $2 trillion a decade after that. Unlike the earlier
recessionary budget deficit, these Social Security– and Medicare-
based deficits will continue expanding. CBO projects that, over
the next 30 years, the national debt will grow from $20 trillion
to $92 trillion ($52 trillion after inflation)—or much higher if
interest rates return to historically typical levels.
These figures are so large that, at some point, something has to
give. Will it be responsible policy changes now, or a Greek-style
crisis of debt and taxes later?
26 | w w w. n a t i o n a l r e v i e w. c o m
P OLITICIANS brush aside the issue by promising easy fixes.
Tax the rich? Doubling the 35 and 37 percent tax brackets
to 70 and 74 percent would close just one-fifth of the long-
term Social Security and Medicare shortfall. Even seizing all
annual income earned over $500,000 would not come close.
Popular proposals to more aggressively tax banks, investors,
hedge-fund managers, and oil and gas companies are a cumula-
tive rounding error compared with these deficits.
On the spending side, slashing the defense budget to European
levels would close just one-seventh of the gap. Cutting waste
and foreign aid can close only a small percentage of it.
In reality, balancing the long-term budget without reforming
Social Security and Medicare (and fast-growing Medicaid)
would require either nearly doubling income-tax rates across the
board or eliminating nearly every remaining federal function.
President Trump seems to be moving towards the latter
approach. Consistent with his campaign pledge, his first budget
proposal allowed Social Security and Medicare spending to
grow on autopilot from $1.6 trillion to $2.9 trillion over the
decade. To accommodate this spending, he proposed leaving
defense spending at its lowest level since the 1930s, and cutting
the rest of the federal government nearly in half, as a percentage
of GDP. Cheering conservatives should note that the steepest
cuts would come not only from Obamacare and Medicaid but
also from the non-defense discretionary portion of the budget
that includes veterans’ health care, infrastructure, homeland
security, and health research. Despite these savings, CBO’s
score still showed a $720 billion budget deficit a decade from
now (not counting the new tax cuts). After all, phasing out nearly
half of non-defense discretionary spending would finance only
26 days of Social Security and Medicare each year.
Steep economic growth could close only some of the short-
fall. Growth rates will already be limited by the labor-force
slowdown caused by Baby Boomer retirements and declining
birth rates. That leaves productivity to drive growth. Let’s dis-
regard CBO’s projection that labor productivity will continue
growing at the 1.2 percent average rate of the past 30 years and
instead assume the white-hot 1.8 percent rate that prevailed
from 1992 through 2005. The resulting higher incomes and tax
revenues would seem to close 40 percent of the funding gap—
until one accounts for the fact that higher incomes would auto-
matically result in higher Social Security benefits when these
workers retired. Wealthier retirees would also likely consume
more Medicare benefits because they could better afford the
copays, further reducing the savings.
Nor can purposeful inflation avert difficult choices. In the short
term, higher inflation can dilute some of today’s $20 trillion
national debt. However, Social Security and Medicare benefits
and payments are also tied to inflation, so future liabilities would
expand. Additionally, Washington would have to pay much
higher interest rates when borrowing to finance those benefits.
On the flip side, low interest rates also cannot make this debt
affordable. CBO’s projected $92 trillion national debt 30 years
from now already assumes that interest rates will remain far
below the historical average. The soaring national debt is more
likely to raise interest rates, adding tens of trillions in interest
costs to this rosy scenario.
Finally, there is the “too bad, kids” argument that Social
Security and Medicare represent an unbreakable, unamendable
promise to the elderly, consequences be damned. Of course,
MARCH 19, 2018
today’s teenagers never signed up for this budget-busting deal.
Besides, benefits have been repeatedly expanded far beyond
what current retirees were promised while working. For example,
President Bush and Congress decided in 2003 that taxpayers
would pay 75 percent of the typical senior’s prescription-drug
costs—with no payroll-tax increase through which workers
would “earn” this benefit. Why is that unearned handout any
more sacred than Medicaid or food stamps? Given that current
and near-retirees are the wealthiest age groups (even when
excluding their illiquid home equity), these expanded benefits are
difficult to justify.
Those reasonably claiming “I just want the benefits I earned!”
should be considered allies for reform. Setting lifetime Social
Security and Medicare benefits equal to the net present value of
each person’s lifetime contributions to the systems—and not a
penny more—would eliminate most of the long-term shortfall.
More realistically, Social Security can be addressed by grad-
ually raising the eligibility age and more aggressively means-
testing benefits for wealthy retirees. Medicare reform can
require that upper-income seniors pay the full cost of their physi-
cian and drug coverage (which, unlike hospital coverage, is not
“earned” with prior payroll taxes) and eventually transition to a
premium-support model that harnesses private-sector choice and
competition to slow cost growth. These reforms would largely
shield younger taxpayers, because drowning the next generation
in taxes is no better than drowning them in debt.
Restructuring cannot wait. Every year of delay sees 4 million
more Baby Boomers retire and get locked into benefits that will
be difficult to alter, and yet the window is closing fast on the long-
standing promise to exempt current and near-retirees. More than
one-third of all Baby Boomers have already retired, and another
third will retire over the next six years. When the benefits of 74
million Baby Boomers are set to explode the federal budget,
grandfathering them out defeats the very purpose of reform.
S URVEYS suggest that the American people do not want to
have a conversation about Social Security and
Medicare. We want to spend one-third of our adult lives
in taxpayer-funded retirement. We also want to preserve spend-
ing on defense, welfare, infrastructure, and veterans at their cur-
rent levels, all without stratospheric tax increases.
Today’s politicians do not want this conversation, either. They
came to Washington to play Santa Claus, not the Grinch. Neither
party wants to sign up for a suicide mission, especially if the other
party is not on board.
It was far easier to cut taxes by $1.5 trillion, in a way that
simultaneously reflected strong tax policy and delusional bud-
get policy. Unless Washington reins in Social Security and
Medicare, no tax cuts can be sustained over the long run.
Ultimately, the math always wins. The deficit will continue
expanding, key programs will continue to be squeezed, and
taxes will rise until politicians and voters finally confront the
elephant in the room.
Frédéric Bastiat long ago observed that “government is the
great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the
expense of everybody else.” Reality will soon fall like an anvil
on Generation X and Millennials, as they find themselves on the
wrong side of the largest intergenerational wealth transfer in
world history.
The Graying
Of the
Welfare State
It’s going broke—and that’s not
the worst problem
BY WILLIAM VOEGELI
less than 150 years old, the welfare state
T
HOUGH
takes its moral bearings from ancient forms of
human association. In 1984, New York governor
Mario Cuomo analogized it to a family, “sharing . . .
benefits and burdens for the good of all.” Philosophy profes-
sor Elizabeth Anderson compared the welfare state to an
Amish barn-raising, where every community member pitches
in to help a young farmer get started. The practice is based on
the understanding that each beneficiary “will reciprocate
when other members of the community need their barns
raised.” A social-insurance program, such as Social
Security or Medicare, is “no different in principle from the
barn-raising system,” Anderson argued. “It’s just on a vastly
larger scale that, due to its size, requires an intermediary admin-
istrative apparatus.”
These older arrangements, which shaped our expectations
about what other people would do for us, and we for them,
were established over millennia when life expectancy and the
population’s age distribution were strikingly different from
what they are today. If there were no welfare states, families
and small communities would be challenged by modern life’s
unprecedentedly large proportion of old people in the popula-
tion, the demographic feature that sets our era apart from every-
thing previously known to the human race. The welfare state
will face challenges, too—some that are larger-scale versions of
those confronting smaller, more intimate social arrangements,
and others that are unique.
The proportion of the American population over the age of
65 was 3.9 percent in 1900, 8.4 percent in 1950, 12.4 percent
in 2000, and 15 percent in 2016. The Census Bureau expects it
to exceed 20 percent by 2050. This graying is not a uniquely
American phenomenon. Twenty-seven percent of Japan’s pop-
ulation was 65 or older in 2016, as were 23 percent of Italy’s
and 21 percent of Germany’s.
For most of human history, life was poor, nasty, brutish, and,
consequently, short. One reason there are so many more old
people now than in all previous epochs is that adults are living
longer than they used to. By one analysis, covering the period
Mr. Voegeli is a senior editor of the Claremont Review of Books and a
contributor to the American Project at the Pepperdine School of Public Policy.
27
from 1400 to 1745, male aristocrats in England who reached
the age of 21 had an average life expectancy of an additional
41 to 50 years. We can safely assume that few people less
favorably situated than noblemen enjoyed such longevity.
Still, lifespans from 62 to 71 are not dramatically lower than
the most recent (2014) figure for all 21-year-old American
males, who can expect to live, on average, a further 56 years
and three months.
The bigger reason for the worldwide senior boom is that chil-
dren are so much more likely to survive long enough to become
adults. Less than 300 years ago, child-mortality rates in north-
ern Europe were between 33 percent and 50 percent. Such
deaths, horrifically frequent by modern standards, were the
biggest reason average life expectancy at birth was between 30
and 40. As recently as 85 years ago, one out of every 13
American children died before the age of five. The latest (2015)
figure is one out of every 154. In 2014, 98.7 percent of the
American males born in 1993 were alive, as were 99.1 percent
of the females.
Percentages are fractions, of course. One way they can grow
over time is for the numerator—the number of people 65 and
over, in this case—to increase rapidly while the denominator,
the total population, increases slowly. Both are happening, in
America and around the world. Demographers believe that at a
fertility rate of 2.1 (i.e., 1,000 women will, on average, give
Increasing longevity and declining birthrates are going to
exacerbate every fiscal, political, and social challenge
related to the welfare state.
birth to a total of 2,100 babies during their childbearing years),
a nation’s population will remain stable, barring any changes
in net migration or mortality. For most of human history, fer-
tility rates were at least two or three times this replacement
level. People had so many children for obvious, powerful rea-
sons. Where a large portion of the population is engaged in
subsistence farming, children were needed for their labor.
Abstinence, never popular, was the one highly reliable form of
contraception. High child-mortality rates required high
birthrates for those who hoped to have even some offspring
survive to adulthood. Other than through bearing and raising
children, women had few pathways to economic security or
social status.
As all these factors have changed in prosperous modern
nations, fertility rates have fallen. The global fertility rate is
now below 2.5, half what it was in the 1960s. In prosperous
nations, it has been below the 2.1 replacement level for
decades. According to the Organisation for Economic Co-
operation and Development, the U.S. fertility rate, which has
not exceeded 2.1 since 1971, stood at 1.8 in 2015. The Census
Bureau reports that in 1976, 10.2 percent of women between
the ages of 40 and 44 (born, that is, between 1932 and 1936)
had never had children. By 2000, for women born between
1956 and 1960, the peak of the Baby Boom, the figure was 19
percent. In 1976, the proportion of women between 40 and 44
who had had just one child was 9.6 percent; in 2000, it was
16.4 percent.
28 | w w w. n a t i o n a l r e v i e w. c o m
For all that, a fertility rate of 1.8 renders America fecund com-
pared with many other industrial democracies. The 2014 aver-
age fertility rate for the 28 developed or nearly developed
nations studied by the OECD was 1.7. Canada’s fertility rate was
1.6 in 2013, the most recent year with data the OECD could use.
In 2015, Germany and Japan each had a 1.5 rate. Italy’s was 1.4,
and the figure was 1.3 for Spain and Poland.
‘W ILLthe world ever grow young again?” asked
Ted C. Fishman in Shock of Gray (2010). It can’t
be ruled out, he concluded, but neither could he
identify any particular reason to expect such a reversion. For
some time now, reasonably well-informed citizens have been
aware of and concerned about the threat these long-term,
apparently irreversible demographic trends pose to the welfare
state. Advanced industrial nations designed and launched their
welfare states just as the age distributions that had prevailed
for millennia were beginning to change. Welfare-state archi-
tects and advocates assumed, plausibly, that future demo-
graphic realities would be fundamentally similar to those
known throughout history. A famous example was economist
Paul Samuelson’s bland assurance in a 1967 magazine column
that there was no reason to be concerned about the fact that
social-insurance programs are “actuarially unsound,” providing
benefits far in excess of the contributions made to them. The
“national product is growing at compound interest and can be
expected to do so for as far ahead as the eye cannot see,” he
argued. Moreover, “always there are more youths than old folks
in a growing population.”
But, we now know, not in a stagnant or declining popula-
tion. Increasing longevity and declining birthrates are going
to exacerbate every fiscal, political, and social challenge
related to the welfare state. In 1950, according to the OECD,
there were 142 Americans 65 and over for every 1,000
between the ages of 20 and 64. By 2000, there were 209,
and the OECD predicts that by 2050 there will be 403.
Roughly, we’ll have gone from seven workers for every
Social Security recipient in the middle of the last century to
five workers for every two recipients in the middle of this
one. Nations with bigger welfare states and lower birthrates
than America’s will face even more-severe problems. The
OECD projects that by 2050, France, Germany, and the
Netherlands will all have more than 500 people 65 or over
for every 1,000 between the ages of 20 and 64. In that situa-
tion, two workers’ taxes will not suffice to pay for one senior
citizen’s benefits.
If the world does not grow young again, the welfare state
will face problems that are easy to understand but will be very
hard to solve. The Population Reference Bureau projects that
the U.S. will have to increase the proportion of GDP devoted
to Medicare and Social Security from the present 8 percent to
MARCH 19, 2018
12 percent by 2050. As a matter of both politics and econom-
ics, devoting an additional four GDP percentage points to two
legacy social-insurance programs is likely to prove more
daunting than it sounds. Over the past half-century, federal out-
lays fluctuated within an extremely narrow range, from 17.2
percent of GDP to 24.4 percent. Most of the big “increases”
took place during economic contractions: Federal spending
grew relative to the economy in large measure because the
economy was shrinking.
Lyndon Johnson’s presidency did see a volitional increase in
federal spending of 3.2 percent of GDP, from 16.6 percent in
1965 to 19.8 percent in 1968. But that surge required a perfect
storm: historically strong economic growth combined with an
optimistic commitment to guns and butter from a nation that
believed it possible to contain Communism in South Vietnam
while building a Great Society at home. In the ensuing era of
heightened skepticism about government’s competence and
integrity, which lasts to this day, federal spending has generally
(in 38 out of the 47 years from 1969 through 2015) fallen
between 18 and 22 percent of GDP.
To devote an additional 4 percent of GDP to the two biggest
welfare-state programs for a period of decades will, then, be
very difficult to do. But it will also be very difficult not to do.
A philosopher-king might determine and then impose the opti-
mal mix of tax increases, benefit cuts to Social Security and
Medicare (such as later retirement ages and increased insurance
Faster economic growth is the deus ex machina that would
alleviate the hard political choices in our future.
deductibles), and spending cuts that affect nearly every other
government undertaking (Medicare and Social Security
accounted for 39 percent of all federal spending in 2015)—or
face deficits unlike any seen since World War II. But presidents
and legislators will be far more constrained when attempting to
enact policies that have serious adverse effects on large num-
bers of voters.
Before GDP percentages can be redistributed, they must be
produced. Faster economic growth is the deus ex machina that
would alleviate the hard political choices in our future, but
also the result you would least expect from a society with a
disproportionately large number of people either retired or
nearing the end of their working years. Not only are brisk pro-
ductivity gains less likely in such a society than in a younger
one, but the risk-taking and unconventional thinking that pro-
duces companies such as Apple and Facebook are always
more common among people in their 20s and 30s than those
in their 60s and 70s. If an older America’s economy grows
more slowly in the coming decades, it might be necessary to
shift more than four GDP percentage points to avoid reducing
our social-insurance programs.
The 20 most recent Democratic-party platforms all demon-
strate that, to the welfare state’s advocates, any contradictions
or inherent difficulties it might have are trivial problems com-
pared with the single important one: the implacable opposition
of its greedy, callous enemies. Defeat them, and all will be well.
Always and simply, the cure for the ailments of the welfare state
is more welfare.
U NTIL the last Baby Boomer dies sometime in the sec-
ond half of this century, the welfare state’s struggles
will, however, highlight the fact that it was built on
weak foundations. Yes, it will be harder and harder to keep the
promises made over the past 85 years. But it was always going
to be difficult to pay for the welfare state, which pandered to
and reinforced democracy’s self-destructive habit of maxi-
mizing the benefits we’re entitled to receive while minimizing
the duties we’re expected to perform. The 21st century’s
demographic realities mock the conviction of Bernie Sanders
Democrats that overturning Citizens United is the only thing
standing between America and Scandinavian social democ-
racy. “Medicare for All” is a fantasy, given that we’ll need
stalwart efforts and exceptional good luck to preserve Medi-
care for anyone.
The welfare state’s sociological challenges in a gray
America will be at least as severe as its financial ones. The
welfare state is supposed to be a modern nation acting like a
big family or community, but families and communities have
boundaries that make clear who’s in and who’s out. A Left pre-
occupied with diversity and inclusion, convinced that people
of good will can easily combine the two, stands against any
real community’s inevitable attention to commonalities and
exclusion. At many Barack Obama campaign events in 2012,
after the president spoke, the crowd heard a recording of the
Bruce Springsteen song “We Take Care of Our Own.” Good
Democrats liked the “take care” part, but the 2016 election
shows that many Trump voters, the people Springsteen sings
about, were much more interested in “our own.” High immi-
gration rates conduce to “welfare chauvinism,” in the words of
Thomas Edsall of the New York Times. This disposition ties
welfare benefits to “the explicit proviso that only legal resi-
dents qualify and that public spending on behalf of illegal
immigrants be eliminated.”
The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson calls the effort to fortify the
welfare state against the effects of low birthrates by accepting
more and more immigrants “the doom loop of modern liberal-
ism.” The leftist vision would realize the best of several
worlds: diversity and inclusion and governmentally guaran-
teed economic security. But, Thompson laments, the evidence
grows that “cultural heterogeneity and egalitarianism often cut
against each other.” Aging nations “import” young workers for
the same reason nations lacking oil deposits import fossil fuels.
Beyond the general need to fortify the economy and tax base,
the welfare states of relatively prosperous and aging societies
often become heavily dependent on immigrants from poorer,
younger nations. Fishman reports that Spain’s growing immi-
grant population includes many Ecuadorians working as care-
givers for old, native Spaniards. Among the consequences is
that the emigration of so many people from Ecuador in search
of work in wealthier countries has made the country they left
behind older and less prosperous.
And it’s not just to the foreign-born that we outsource the
tasks of generating the wealth that welfare states require and
29
delivering the services they promise. Elizabeth Anderson’s
contention that social insurance is just community sharing
undertaken on a vastly larger scale ignores the evidence and
logic that dramatically changing the scope of an activity usual-
ly changes its nature. An “intermediary administrative appara-
tus” is needed when we set out to replicate, in a modern nation
of millions, a small community’s reciprocal exchanges. But the
people who constitute that apparatus will inevitably acquire
interests and dispositions of their own, ones that may well
leave them indifferent or even hostile to a national project of
sharing and caring. “He who undertakes for a wage to be com-
passionate for 40 hours a week,” says political scientist
Clifford Orwin, “will soon be so for no hours a week.” No mis-
sion statement or professional code of conduct can force
employees to regard their clients the way we regard friends and
family members.
This problem is likely to become acute in our new century,
set apart demographically from all that has gone before. Not
only will there be more old people than ever, but a larger pro-
portion of them than in the past will spend their final years
without a spouse, with few if any siblings, and few if any chil-
dren. Even if the welfare state finds the money to pay the profes-
sional caregivers who act in lieu of family members, who will
guard the guardians in our “kinless” future? If the nursing-home
employees or visiting caregivers are abusive or just mediocre,
and the “client” is incapable of demanding better treatment, who
will be left to know, care, or intercede?
Absent a medical breakthrough, for example, the most reli-
able way to avoid Alzheimer’s disease will be to die of some-
thing else before it afflicts you. The Alzheimer’s Association
calculates that 3 percent of Americans between the ages of 65
and 74 have this form of dementia, as do 17 percent of those
between 75 and 84, and 32 percent of those 85 and older. As the
number of very old people increases, while the proportion of
them who have relatives engaged with their lives and struggles
declines, the welfare state will be called on to solve problems
for which it is ill prepared. Seen in this light, Europe’s growing
reliance on euthanasia in nations with some of the world’s old-
est populations and most extensive welfare states is shocking
but not especially surprising.
For all the attention paid to the welfare state’s precarious
finances, then, an aging population might cause more problems
related to insufficient social capital than ones related to insuffi-
cient financial capital. The same fundamental paradox is impli-
cated in the provision of both love and money: Welfare states
were created to simulate families and communities when those
forms of association were considered inadequate to meet the
challenges of modern life. The existence and operations of the
welfare state, however, steadily displace the older, more inti-
mate forms of human association, whose atrophy leads to the
expansion of the welfare state. As political scientist Alan Wolfe
wrote in Whose Keeper? (1989), “the Scandinavian welfare
states, which express so well a sense of obligation to distant
strangers, are beginning to make it more difficult to express a
sense of obligation to those with whom one shares family ties.”
The danger is that “as intimate ties weaken, so will distant ones,
thus undermining the very moral strengths the welfare state has
shown.” If the welfare state turns out to be the cure for which it
has also become the disease, then it will be remembered as a
disease without a cure.
30 | w w w. n a t i o n a l r e v i e w. c o m
Excellent
Eastwood
A great director gives American heroes their due
BY PETER TONGUETTE
soldiers never die; they just fade away,” said
‘O
LD
General Douglas MacArthur, but what about
old directors? In the fall of 2016, as the presi-
dential contest between Donald Trump and
Hillary Clinton raged on, I caught up with the latest film of one
such director, a man who at that point had been perched behind
cameras for some 45 years: Clint Eastwood.
On the strength of such spare, sinewy masterpieces of action
as Pale Rider (1985), Unforgiven (1992), and A Perfect World
(1993)—as well as the gentle, good-natured character studies in
Breezy (1973) and Bronco Billy (1980)—Clint Eastwood was, I
had long thought, one of America’s finest directors. In recent
years, however, I feared that he had begun to slip ever so
slightly: Changeling (2008) was too dependent on the dubious
talent of Angelina Jolie, and J. Edgar (2011) too dependent on
the old-age makeup layered on Leonardo DiCaprio.
So I waited a while to catch Sully (2016), the director’s docu-
drama-like treatment of actions taken by pilot Chesley “Sully”
Sullenberger (Tom Hanks) to bring about the safe landing of US
Airways Flight 1549 on the Hudson River in 2009. By the time
I saw it, the drama had already been in theaters for about a
month, earning more than $100 million at the box office. The
film’s subject matter also gave me pause: Was a crash landing
that unfolded over just 208 seconds sufficient to support an
entire film that needed a beginning, middle, and end?
Yet, in the theater that day, I came to the conclusion that the
audiences who had flocked to Sully were not simply responding
to the re-creation of a single, well-publicized incident—not
even one as harrowing as the “miracle on the Hudson” engi-
neered by Sullenberger. No, Eastwood had made a film that
touched deeper, more primal nerves. Far from slipping—let
alone fading away—Eastwood had come up with a bold final
act. Going against the prevailing winds in Hollywood, Sully
was the second of three consecutive Eastwood films—it was
preceded by 2014’s American Sniper and followed by the
recently released The 15:17 to Paris—whose raison d’être was
to celebrate the guts and glory of real-life Americans.
In making Sully, Eastwood sought neither spectacle nor
shock; after all, nearly everyone already knew the outcome of
the midair collision with birds that necessitated the plane’s water
landing. What’s more, Eastwood chose to replay the incident,
in full and in part, so often that it ultimately lost its teeth.
What, then, was his aim? In the end, the near-disaster, and
Mr. Tonguette has written about the arts for the Wall Street Journal, The
Weekly Standard, and The New Criterion. He is the editor of the book
Peter Bogdanovich: Interviews.
MARCH 19, 2018
 Sullenberger’s response to it, allowed Eastwood to highlight the
qualities he admires most: grit, humility, and competency.
On those counts, Eastwood finds much to commend not only
in Sullenberger and his stolid, sturdy co-pilot Jeffrey Skiles
(Aaron Eckhart) but also in the air-traffic controller who, though
unaware of Sullenberger’s intentions, reacted with level-headed
professionalism. The selfless first responders who sprang into
action (an eagle-eyed ferry captain and daring scuba divers from
the NYPD) also shine under Eastwood’s admiring eye.
Eastwood uses the investigation undertaken by the National
Transportation Safety Board to contrast the real-world toughness
of Sullenberger and Skiles with the armchair quarterbacking of
their inferiors. The film depicts the cool, calm camaraderie
between Sullenberger and Skiles, who navigate their plane’s
unplanned descent in the same even-tempered tones they used
moments earlier to discuss the merits of porterhouse versus rib-
eye steaks. “I’m just so damn proud,” Sullenberger says to Skiles
after listening to the cockpit voice recording toward the end of the
investigation. “And you—you were right there.”
There was something striking, too, about seeing Sully in the
middle of the 2016 election. Sully’s commemoration of the
heroic doings of honest, honorable Americans gelled with then-
candidate Trump’s praise of what he called—as he did in his
address to the Republican National Convention—“our law-
enforcement officials” or “our great veterans.” (In a conversa-
tion with Hugh Hewitt, Victor Davis Hanson described Trump
as unique among Republican candidates for adopting “the first-
person plural possessive ‘our’—‘our miners,’ ‘our farmers,’
‘our workers,’ ‘our vets,’ ‘our soldiers.’”) It seemed to me that
Eastwood and Trump were swimming in the same waters, and
that if there was an audience for a film such as Sully—especially
ROMAN GENN
in a year when most box-office champs were either infantile
comic-book adaptations (Captain America: Civil War) or corn-
ball children’s fare (Rogue One: A Star Wars Story)—there just
might be voter demand for Trump.
I T was not the first time that Eastwood had found himself in
tune with cultural currents. In his star turn as the title cop in
Dirty Harry (1971), Eastwood made a decisive stand for the
law and order promised by the Nixon administration. According to
Peter Bogdanovich, the film was so firmly pro-police that its direc-
tor, the great Don Siegel, was anxious that “all his liberal friends
would disown him because of the picture’s persuasive portrayal
of how difficult it has become for police to apprehend criminals.”
Yet the film proved resonant enough to result in five
sequels, including Sudden Impact (1983). In that brilliant,
Eastwood-directed film, Dirty Harry halts a hold-up with the
assistance of his friends—“Smith and Wesson,” as he refers to
them—and utters a line so memorable it was later picked up by
Ronald Reagan: “Go ahead, make my day.” The certitude of
the line—and the resolution in Eastwood’s delivery—is what
stands out. Confident that he is in the right, and that no one in
the room is tougher, Harry enjoys calling the bad guy’s bluff.
In later films, the filmmaker continued to flex the same sort of
muscular moralism, expressing outrage at a fictitious philan-
dering commander in chief in Absolute Power (1997) and
sympathy for the lonely plight of the falsely accused in the
superb True Crime (1999).
Yet Eastwood has never seemed more responsive to the tastes
and views of his audience than in his recent films: American
Sniper, about Navy SEAL Chris Kyle; Sully; and The 15:17 to
31
Paris, about the three Americans—two of whom served in the
military—who stopped a terrorist attack on a train from
Amsterdam to Paris in August 2015. The link between the films
is obvious: Each is based on widely admired real-life figures. But
Eastwood, speaking recently to the New York Times, denied that
the overlaps were intentional. “You think about enough things in
this life,” he said. “When you make a movie, you let things fall
where they may.” Yet the connection is clear; film fans would
have to go back to the late-career celebratory biopics by John
Ford—The Long Gray Line (1955), about Army sergeant Martin
Maher, or The Wings of Eagles (1957), about naval aviator Frank
“Spig” Wead—to find a comparable series of films.
What’s more, Eastwood surely recognizes that his recent efforts
have upset his standing among many in the critical and prize-
bestowing establishment. Positive portrayals of God-fearing,
country-serving citizens are not exactly their thing. To be sure,
American Sniper was received enthusiastically by critics, but it
pocketed just one Oscar, despite its six nominations. By con-
trast, Eastwood’s Mystic River (2003) and Million Dollar Baby
(2005)—great films, no doubt—received six Oscars between
them in a three-year window. Sully managed a solitary Oscar
nomination, while The 15:17 to Paris has received mostly dis-
missive reviews. Yet let us not feel too sorry for Eastwood, who
has bypassed the establishment to find an audience receptive to
these films: American Sniper had box-office receipts totaling
more than $547 million worldwide, and The 15:17 to Paris will
probably emerge as a modest commercial success.
In fact, The 15:17 to Paris is Eastwood’s most accomplished
and intriguing film since Flags of Our Fathers (2006), a poetic,
underrated examination of the brouhaha that engulfed the sol-
diers whose likenesses were captured (or not) in Joe Rosenthal’s
classic photograph Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima. Like the ear-
lier film, The 15:17 to Paris casts its lot not with generals but
with the guys in the trenches—in this case, Spencer Stone, Alek
Skarlatos, and Anthony Sadler (who play themselves as adults).
The trio grew close as youngsters, all enamored of the armed
forces, in Sacramento, Calif. Stone later entered the Air Force,
and Skarlatos, the National Guard. The film tracks the three
from childhood through their summer 2015 European vacation,
which culminates in their decision to extend their trip to Paris—
unaware that they would encounter, and thwart, an armed terror-
ist with deadly intentions.
In The Hollywood Reporter, critic Todd McCarthy expressed
the same reservations about The 15:17 to Paris that I had about
Sully: “Is there a full-length feature film in the dramatic but
blink-and-it’s-over incident,” the critic asked, before answering
his own question. The movie is mostly composed, he says,
“unfortunately . . . of banal, drama-free, quotidian scenes that
merely reinforce the men’s status as regular Joes who, one day,
had the opportunity for greatness thrust upon them.”
Yet, to my thinking, the many scenes of the pals ribbing one
another, flirting with pretty girls, or arguing over selfie sticks not
only are appealing (like the jocular esprit de corps so often found
in the films of Howard Hawks), but they also emphasize a far
darker point: the way terrorism infringes on the everyday. The
audience watching the film may know that Stone, Skarlatos, and
Sadler are nearing a fateful confrontation, but the men them-
selves—like the other passengers on the train that day—have no
warning until it happens.
Much has been made of Eastwood’s roll of the dice in casting
32 | w w w. n a t i o n a l r e v i e w. c o m
Stone, Skarlatos, and Sadler, but the decision turns out to be no
mere stunt. According to the New York Times, the men kiddingly
proposed the casting of Chris Hemsworth, Zac Efron, and
Michael B. Jordan, but how easily a lesser director could have
selected such actors—and what a mistake it would have been. In
eschewing such performers, Eastwood is tacitly acknowledging
the limitations of young male talent in Hollywood. Simply put,
are there very many movie stars between the ages of 20 and 30
who could credibly re-create the moment when Stone places the
terrorist in a chokehold?
O N the heels of American Sniper and Sully—not to men-
tion his amusing appearance at the 2012 Republican
National Convention—Eastwood’s political positions
are no secret, but in The 15:17 to Paris, the director speaks even
more clearly than usual. Early in the film, a concerned teacher
meets with the single mothers of Stone and Skarlatos, whose sins
amount to little more than staring out the window during class.
When the teacher makes an amateur diagnosis of attention-deficit
disorder, suggests medication for both kids, and warns of the
grim odds faced by single-parent children, you can practically
see Eastwood’s off-camera eye-rolling. Spencer Stone’s mother
is more explicit in her disagreement. “My God is bigger than
your statistics,” she defiantly tells the teacher, in the latest
instance of Eastwood’s recent, surprising interest in the eternal.
(Recall Eastwood’s quietly haunting 2010 film Hereafter, with
its gently, almost cautiously expressed openness to the prospect
of life after death.)
The 15:17 to Paris is a film in which prayer is spoken of
openly and military service is presented as a viable career choice;
it’s also a film that delights in proving wrong the many authority
figures who regard young Spencer, Alek, and Anthony as trou-
blemakers or losers. A gym teacher reprimands Anthony for
exclaiming “What the hell?”—not exactly the sort of language
likely to shock the man who played Dirty Harry—while an Air
Force instructor admonishes Stone for preparing to confront a
reported active shooter instead of hiding beneath his desk. How
severely these three were underestimated.
More notably, Dorothy Blyskal’s elegantly constructed screen-
play is preoccupied with how easy it would have been for the
men not to have been on that train that day. What if their mothers
had forbidden the boys to play “war”? What if Stone had
remained in his pre–Air Force position as a worker at a Jamba
Juice? What if Sadler had been unable to join Stone and Skarlatos
on the trip to Europe? Who else, the film asks, would have
stopped the man on the train? Human life was spared because a
few good Americans showed up on cue—that’s all there is to it.
From Dirty Harry to Bronco Billy, Eastwood has breathed life
into more than one make-believe hero. Now, ahead of his 88th
birthday, the director has turned to crafting aesthetically lean,
emotionally straightforward films about the authentic heroes of
our own age—and, in his most recent, put the real men in the
very roles fate assigned them. How many modern artists have
devoted themselves to expressing feelings of national pride?
The list is not especially long—maybe Norman Rockwell, with
the Four Freedoms series of paintings, or Morton Gould, with
the musical composition “American Salute,” and Michael
Cimino, with the “God Bless America” finale of The Deer
Hunter—but let us now add Eastwood to it.
MARCH 19, 2018
 Athwart
Happiness Is a Warm Gub
T the rate boycotts and severed relationships
A are being announced, it’s possible that you’ll
be forbidden to say the letters “N,” “R,” and
“A” near a public building by the time this
issue hits the stand. The Herman’s Hermits song “I’m
Henry the Eighth, I Am” may be banned from radio play,
because the singer pronounces the name “Ennery,” which
sounds a lot like “NRA.”
The NRA will be super-extra evil for a while, until the
National Outrage Corps swings to something else, but
guns will remain our culture’s No. 1 source for meaning-
less overreaction. Perhaps you’ve heard about the student
who was banned from school because he threatened to
cause mayhem . . . with a mathematical symbol.
News reports said it was “a poorly judged quip” bran-
dished in a small classroom. A student drew a square-root
sign, and another student noted that it “looks like a pis-
tol.” Said in jest, no doubt. The student who drew the
math-gun said, “Let’s just get to work before I shoot you
with a pistol,” and then, being boys, they may have
belched or broken wind, from one student to another in a
math class.
Somehow this turned into a rumor that the square-root-
drawing student was planning a shooting, and because
this wasn’t Florida—where the “See something, do squat
about it” rule has infected law enforcement—the police
searched the kid’s home for weapons.
As well they should have! The Framers did not intend
for people to have math guns that shoot 3.1415926
rounds per second!
It’s possible the student would have been suspended if
he had said, “This math symbol looks like a Pop-Tart out
of which someone has taken a bite, giving it the shape of
a firearm.” In 2016, a Maryland judge upheld the suspen-
sion of a kid who brandished a thin pastry and pretended
it was a gun, so that’s a whuppin’.
But what if the student had said, “This math symbol
looks like a Pop Tart chewed to resemble a chicken fin-
ger”? Immediate expulsion. After all, in 2001, according
to the L.A. Times, an “8-year-old boy was suspended from
school for three days after pointing a breaded chicken fin-
ger at a teacher and saying ‘Pow, pow, pow.’” Presumably
the school had already banned assault fish-sticks.
But what if the student were a fan of Woody Allen—his
earlier, funnier work—and had said, “This math symbol
looks like a Pop-Tart chewed to resemble a chicken fin-
ger used as a gub”? In Take the Money and Run, Allen’s
character tries to hold up a bank by sliding a note to the
teller, but his handwriting is so poor the clerk thinks the
holdup note says Woody is pointing a “gub.”
The school administration would have to look at the
movie and conclude that since Allen’s character said he
Mr. Lileks blogs at www.lileks.com.
BY JAMES LILEKS
wrote “gun,” the math symbol shaped like a Pop-Tart bit-
ten to resemble a chicken finger was practically a fully
automatic AK-47 shotgun with a bump stock, and the kid
would be expelled.
But what if the student had said, “This math symbol
looks like a Pop Tart chewed to resemble a chicken finger
used as a gub in Take the Money and Run, where Woody
Allen carves a gun out of a bar of soap”? The school
administrator would have been justified in calling the
police, who’d explain that citing Woody Allen was prob-
lematic these days, given the accusations and the
#MeToo climate.
“We’re not saying you can’t reference Woody Allen
movies,” Officer Friendly would say. “But until there’s a
critical mass of opinion about whether he should be
shunned or just given diminishing attention until he dies,
it’s best you don’t bring him up.”
“Can I write the word ‘gub’ on a piece of paper and
put it in my pocket and not tell anyone?” the student
might ask.
“Not if anyone’s talking about Woody Allen.”
“Okay, great, no one ever talks about Woody Allen. So
I can carry around the word ‘gub’ wherever I go?”
Worried looks between the principal and Officer
Friendly. Next week, signs all over school: THIS IS A GUN-
AND GUB-FREE ZONE.
Two weeks later, a kid throws a tater-tot at a friend
after pretending to pull an imaginary grenade pin with his
teeth, and leftists on Twitter are mocking those who
protest the kid’s expulsion. “Guess the situation needed a
good guy with a gub.”
Actually, someone was arrested for writing the word
“gun” on a piece of paper. In Wisconsin a guy was
buzzed into a school, walked past the office without
checking in, then went to a classroom and handed them
a piece of paper containing the word “gun.” He was
arrested for disorderly conduct, and perhaps being an
unlicensed mime.
You can infer his message: What if he’d had the real
thing? Ergo? Ban guns, no doubt. The story might have
been different if someone had stopped the guy the second
he passed the office without checking in and handed him a
note that said “BZZZZZZ AEEEIEIIAHEIAH” to indicate he’d
been tasered and was now twitching on the floor with a
spreading stain in his pants.
The only obvious solution to this is to ban the NRA,
which used its mind-control beams to keep Florida offi-
cials from dealing with an obvious problem before it was
too late and kept the cops from stopping it while they
were on the scene. How do they operate those beams?
Satellites? Ban the NRA from using rockets. Sign the peti-
tion! Demand that NASA cut off its support of NRA
brain-controlling pro-gub space rays!
No? Then you hate kids.
33
 The Long View
CSI: POTUS
Episode 118:
“POTUS & The Active Shooter”
(continued from previous page)
CUT TO: EXT. HIGH SCHOOL—DAY
A swarm of police cars. The place is a
major crime scene. Radios squawk.
Flashing lights. Helicopters overhead.
Media vans. CAMERA MOVES past the
scene and LANDS ON:
TV REPORTER (FEMALE): . . . police here
on the scene have no new information
about the active shooter inside the
school. It’s a standoff, with casualties
unknown. Sheriff, do you have any
strategy for resolving this?
SHERIFF: Well, Noreen, as you know,
current protocols require us to move
with extreme caution. We need to be
mindful both of the health and safety of
our team as well as the relevant gun-
control statutes. Our policy here is to
take a wait-and-see stance and—
WE HEAR the screech of tires. Every-
thing stops. The CAMERA PANS to find:
POTUS, riding up on a three-wheeled
All Terrain Vehicle. He gets off the ATV,
smooths his blue suit, and adjusts his tie.
SHERIFF: (to POTUS) Sir, I know what
you’re thinking but it’s simply not pos-
sible to go in there. We have a team of
teen psychologists on the way and
we’re handling this in the way we’ve
been trained—
POTUS: Hey, Sheriff, do you have
any ice?
SHERIFF: Ice? For what?
POTUS: For this.
POTUS suddenly punches the Sheriff
hard in the jaw. The Sheriff goes down.
POTUS approaches the main doors to
the school. He’s about to open them
when he stops.
POTUS: Wait a sec.
He removes a white handkerchief
from his back pocket and uses it to
open the doors.
POTUS (CONT’D): I do not need a lot of
high-school-kid germs, let me tell you.
34 | w w w. n a t i o n a l r e v i e w. c o m
I’ve got a budget to pass this week.
He strides into the school without
hesitation.
CUT TO: INT. SCHOOL CAFETERIA—
MOMENTS LATER
THE CAMERA moves through the
large cafeteria. Students are taking
cover beneath the tables. WE HEAR
the sound of a plastic fork scraping
against a plastic plate.
CAMERA PANS UP AND FINDS:
POTUS, sitting at a table, unflappably
eating from one of the school-lunch
trays. He’s clearly enjoying the maca-
roni and cheese. He takes a bite, leans
down, and speaks to some students who
are crouching underneath the table.
POTUS: Is this like a normal lunch for
you guys? Because it’s pretty good.
When’s pizza day?
A STUDENT (MALE, teens) looks up.
STUDENT: Usually Tuesdays.
POTUS nods.
POTUS: Guess I should come back on
a Tuesday, huh?
Another STUDENT (FEMALE, teens)
looks up.
STUDENT 2: Um, sir? I thought you were
here to save us?
POTUS sighs and puts down his fork.
POTUS: Okay. Okay.
He stands, and from the folds of his
immaculate blue suit he produces two
sawed-off shotguns.
POTUS (CONT’D): What this school
needs . . .
He cocks both shotguns one-handed
style.
POTUS (CONT’D):. . . is a little discipli-
nary action.
CUT TO: INT. SCHOOL HALLWAY—
MOMENTS LATER
POTUS strides down the hallway. He
stops at the library door. The Librarian
(FEMALE, attractive, 20s) runs to him.
LIBRARIAN: What are you doing? This is
a gun-free zone!
POTUS smiles.
POTUS: Doesn’t seem that way this
afternoon, sister.
LIBRARIAN: The teachers’ union strictly
forbids any use of firearms or—
BY ROB LONG
POTUS: Hey, honey, you got a com-
plaint? Do me a favor and send it to
Crooked Hillary.
LIBRARIAN: Did you just call me
“honey”? I am so offended! This is a
classic hashtag #MeToo!
POTUS: Hey, baby, listen up. I came
here for two things: To have some mac
and cheese and kick a little crazy teen
ass. And I am all out of mac and cheese.
He turns and faces the doors, raises his
left foot, and smashes them open.
POTUS (CONT’D): Knock, knock, nutjob.
POTUS walks into the library and into a
hail of bullets.
CUT TO: EXT. HIGH SCHOOL—MOMENTS
LATER
POTUS exits from the main doors,
straightening his suit and tie. He stops
for a moment as lines of students race
from the building, some stopping to
offer him “high fives” and expressions
of thanks. As he guides his hair back
into place, the LIBRARIAN approaches.
She hesitates. This is hard for her to say.
LIBRARIAN: I guess I should say thanks.
I mean, I’m still a strong supporter of
gun control, but—
POTUS shrugs. He puts on his sun-
glasses.
POTUS: Lady, you do what you want.
I don’t want to get into a debate. I just
came to save some kids.
He starts to go. She reaches out and
stops him.
LIBRARIAN: Wait. That came out
wrong. Let me start over. It really was
amazing what you did back there. And
I don’t just mean the way you raced
towards the shooter. The brave way
you saved all of us.
POTUS: Yeah, well. Maybe I’ll see you
around. In the meantime, I’ve got a
meeting of the G7 to get to.
LIBRARIAN: Mr. President, before you go,
I just want to say . . . you are . . . you are
. . . you are my president, too. I don’t care
if it’s normalizing. I just . . . I just . . .
She kisses him. As she pulls away,
POTUS smiles. She smiles back. As
POTUS reaches out to grab her in his
signature way, we:
FREEZE FRAME
END CREDITS
MARCH 19, 2018
Books, Arts & Manners
A Failed
Quest for
Meaning
KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON
Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science,
Humanism, and Progress, by Steven Pinker
(Viking, 576 pp., $35)
P
ROFESSOR STEVEN PINKER of
Harvard has written a 500-plus-
page advertising pamphlet for
the Enlightenment. He doesn’t
quite make the sale, in spite of his having
the good fortune to be pitching the best
product . . . ever, really.
Good Steven Pinker argues that the
Enlightenment represented an escape
from dogma, one in which the emerging
combination of the scientific method
and political liberalism put every claim
and creed to the test of reason. Bad
Steven Pinker believes—and believes
hard—that the Enlightenment is itself a
dogma and a tribe and a scripture. Case
in point: Countering the argument that
Enlightenment ideals fail because peo-
ple are not perfectly rational actors,
Pinker writes, in emphatic italics: “No
Enlightenment thinker ever claimed that
humans were consistently rational.”
Throughout his new book, Enlightenment
Now, he offers that same observation
repeatedly, as though it were not only
dispositive but self-evidently so. From
Spinoza to Laplace to Pinker: There is no
escaping apostolic succession, after all.
Bad Steven Pinker!
Professor Pinker, like Saint Paul, has a
S P O N S O R E D B Y National Review Institute
great talent for making the good news
sound positively dreadful—unbearable,
even. Which is a shame, because there is
so much good news in his book. And
charts! Goodness, are there charts, charts
and charts and charts charting the rise of
human flourishing on every axis from
educational attainment in India to female
literacy in Pakistan to anti-black hate
crimes in the United States. Hooray, and
well done, humanity. If those are the
charts, then bring on the charts!
But this isn’t a book about charts, really.
This is a book about the MEANING OF LIFE.
Seriously.
Professor Pinker begins with an anec-
dote about a student who, after a lecture,
asked him, “Why should I live?” After
satisfying himself that this was not a case
of suicidal ideation or mere smart-assery,
he answers:
As a sentient being, you have the poten-
tial to flourish. You can refine your fac-
ulty of reason itself by learning and
debating. You can seek explanations of
the natural world through science, and
insight into the human condition through
the arts and humanities. You can make
the most of your capacity for pleasure
and satisfaction, which allowed your
ancestors to thrive and thereby allowed
you to exist. You can appreciate the
beauty and richness of the natural and
cultural world. As the heir to billions of
years of life perpetuating itself, you can
perpetuate life in return.
He goes on in that mode for a while,
and even the most casual reader will
notice that he offers a great deal of “YOU
CAN” but no “YOU SHOULD.” Which is to
say: He does not answer the question. As
it turns out, he answers the question nei-
ther in short nor at length. “Explaining
the meaning of life is not in the usual job
description of a professor of cognitive
science,” he writes, “and I would not
have had the gall to take up her question
if the answer depended on my arcane
technical knowledge or my dubious per-
sonal wisdom.” No, he appeals to a higher
power: “But I knew I was channeling a
body of beliefs and values that had taken
shape more than two centuries before me
and that are now more relevant than ever:
the ideals of the Enlightenment.”
Professor Pinker runs into a problem
common among a certain kind of modern
thinker: the constitutional optimist with
an evangelical commitment to atheism,
which he confuses with reason. The famil-
iar problem leads to the familiar error: He
leaps, without warrant, from physical sci-
ence to metaphysical certitude.
This is a real handicap for Professor
Pinker’s work. For example, it would in-
deed be very difficult to write a convinc-
ing defense of the Enlightenment without
considering the roadblocks thrown up in
the way of reason-led progress by super-
stition and religious fanaticism. But that is
a separate question from religious claims
themselves, a fact that ought to be obvi-
ous even to those who find such claims
preposterous. Pinker here isn’t honoring
the Enlightenment—he’s engaged in
familiar us-vs.-them tribalism. E.g.:
It was reason that led most of the En-
lightenment thinkers to repudiate a belief
in an anthropomorphic God who took an
interest in human affairs. The application
of reason revealed that reports of mira-
cles were dubious, that the authors of
holy books were all too human, that nat-
ural events unfolded with no regard to
human welfare, and that different cul-
tures believed in mutually incompatible
deities, none of them less likely than the
others to be products of the imagination.
That is fairly sloppy stuff: There is the
fallacious appeal to authority (“most of
the Enlightenment thinkers”), the failure
to understand the claims of the other side
(of course reports of miracles are dubi-
ous: miracles are unlikely—that is what
makes them miracles), the ad hominem
(it would hardly come as a shock to any
Christian familiar with the biography of
Saint Peter that he was “all too human”—
accompanying the Prince of Peace in His
last days, Peter got into a knife fight), the
juvenile (as a matter of logic, it simply is
not the case that if not all religious
claims can be true simultaneously, then
all of them must be false), etc. None of
this stuff is very much germane to
Professor Pinker’s argument; he simply
cannot help himself. If you doubt that
this is base, tribal, googly-eyed, us-vs.-
them stuff, consider this bit: “Early gov-
ernments pacified the people they ruled,
35
BOOKS, ARTS & MANNERS
reducing internecine violence, but im-
posed a reign of terror that included slav-
ery, harems, human sacrifice, summary
executions, and the torture and mutila-
tion of dissidents and deviants. (The
Bible has no shortage of examples.)”
This appears a few sentences above men-
tions of the Chinese civil war and Idi
Amin. Of course it is the case that
accounts of violent episodes can be
found in the Bible, but that is not why the
Bible appears in that sentence. It appears
as a tribal signifier. US ain’t THEM.
Better that Professor Pinker should
have taken the advice of A. J. Ayer and
eliminated the metaphysics altogether. It
isn’t as though the real-world problems
of fanaticism and primitivism would
have left his volume too slender: The
Islamic State exists, and, if it’s explicit
anti-intellectualism you’re looking for,
consider the etymology of “Boko
Haram”—literally, “Books are forbidden.”
In metaphysics as in politics and poker,
it is hard to beat something with nothing,
and, as ethics go, “The universe is headed
for heat death, eventually” isn’t exactly
compelling. Marcus Aurelius advised
his reader not to worry too much about
life, death, or reputation, because, soon
enough, we’ll be dead, everybody who
knew us will be dead, everybody who
might have remembered us will be dead,
etc. “‘This man was the last of his house’
is not uncommon upon a monument,” the
emperor-philosopher wrote. “How solici-
tous were the ancestors of these men about
an heir! Yet someone must, of necessity,
be the last.” Which is sunshine in a glass
compared with maximum entropy.
The problem for Professor Pinker is
that there isn’t any really good way to
get from JUST THE FACTS to an ethical
creed, from the reason and science of
his subtitle to the humanism. He tries to
get around this with rarity: Humans and
human institutions (along with sentient
beings and life in general) are examples
of low-entropy situations, which are
very rare in the universe. Professor
Pinker in fact follows the rhetoric of
the creationists and intelligent-design
cranks (he must shudder to do so) when
he explains the Law of Entropy: “If you
walk away from a sandcastle, it won’t
be there tomorrow, because as the wind,
waves, seagulls, and small children
push the grains of sand around, they’re
more likely to arrange them into one of
the vast number of configurations that
36 | w w w. n a t i o n a l r e v i e w. c o m
don’t look like a castle than into one of
the tiny few that do.”
The echo of the Reverend William
Paley’s Divine Watchmaker is unmistak-
able. Professor Pinker uses his story for a
different purpose, of course: While those
who would seek to discredit evolution
argue that the fact of the universe argues
for a creator in the same way that the exis-
tence of a watch implies the existence of a
watchmaker, Professor Pinker argues that
the rarity of the orderly bits of the uni-
verse makes them special, valuable, inter-
esting. But: To whom? And: Says who?
There isn’t anything about the Second
Law of Thermodynamics that says, or
even implies, that we should prefer ther-
modynamic disequilibrium over thermo-
dynamic equilibrium. It’s only temporary,
anyway. There isn’t any scientific reason
to prefer a world with humans in it to one
without, or a world with happy humans in
it to one with unhappy humans in it.
(“And what if God prefers your tears to
your studying?” asked Rabbi Mendel, no
relation to the Right Reverend Gregor
Mendel, who laid the foundations of
genetics when he wasn’t running the
abbey in Brno.) If you want to get from
thermodynamics to politics and ethics,
there’s a bit more work involved than
Professor Pinker has here done. “WE’RE
THE ENLIGHTENMENT, WE’RE THE GOOD
GUYS, FOLLOW US!” won’t do it.
This is unfortunate, because Professor
Pinker believes that the ideals of the
Enlightenment “are now more relevant
than ever”: There are challenges to the
Enlightenment, to liberalism, and to mate-
rial progress. Tribalism is, at the moment,
resurgent, no less here in the United
States than abroad: President Trump is
being joined at this year’s Conservative
Political Action Conference by Marion
Maréchal–Le Pen. The new tribalists of the
West are not very much impressed by the
low prices at Walmart, the improving
quality of life in urban China, or the rising
literacy rate among Afghan girls. Neither is
Boko Haram. Neither is the Islamic State.
The young men of the West are really
not so different from the young men of
Pakistan, and when they see the tribalism
of the Islamic State on television—or the
tribalism of Central American gang
members in Los Angeles County—they
do not think to themselves: “Thank . . .
whomever . . . for the Enlightenment!”
No, they start looking around for a big-
ger and meaner tribe, which is the origin
of the authoritarian populism that gives
Professor Pinker the willies in the sec-
ond half of his book. The Enlightenment
doesn’t give them everything they want;
like an overindulgent parent, it gives
them everything they need and then
some, material blessings far in excess of
anything that their peers a generation or
two ago might have dreamed of, but
want is in the end not an economic force
but a spiritual one, and it is infinite.
They have all of the calories and kilo-
watt-hours they could ever use. But
they are not happy. If you want to argue
that they should be happy—that they
should cherish the Enlightenment and
its accomplishments—then you had
better be ready to be in the dogma busi-
ness, full-time.
And that is what makes the author’s
failure here all the more dismaying.
Professor Pinker, and many others like
him, understand the Enlightenment as a
force of opposition to the civilization
that produced it, the civilization we
used to call “Christendom.” Professor
Pinker’s account has the new gospel of
Enlightenment arising from the muck of
Christian civilization, with its witch
hunts and inquisitions, protected by a
few true believers toward whom we still
look today for guidance. But the actual
Enlightenment happened in the Christian
world. They had gunpowder in ancient
China, but the Enlightenment and the
Industrial Revolution happened where
they happened, and when they hap-
pened, for a reason. To properly defend
the Enlightenment and its ideals
requires grounding the Enlightenment
in the culture that produced it, which
offends Professor Pinker’s cosmopoli-
tan instincts, to say nothing of his instinct
for sneering at Christianity.
“Cult” is the first syllable in “culture,”
and Professor Pinker’s professed human-
ism is a creed, not a scientific deduction.
A creed grounded in what? Being nice?
The scientific method? Please. It’s
grounded in a tribal identity, a little tribe
comprising Professor Pinker, Sam
Harris, and the ghost of Christopher
Hitchens. That sounds like a fun dinner
party, but it’s hardly the basis for a civi-
lization. Pinker is dead-on about much—
and much that is important—but he
remains limited by what must be de-
scribed as intellectual pettiness, which
isn’t what you want in a book professing
to lay out the meaning of life.
MARCH 19, 2018

A Book for
Our Times
DAVID FRENCH
12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos,
by Jordan B. Peterson (Random House
Canada, 448 pp., $25.95)
F
OR a myriad of reasons—not
the least of which is that I used
to concentrate my law practice
on suing universities for violat-
ing students’ First Amendment rights—
most of my public speeches, most of my
public interactions, and much of my
writing have been aimed squarely at
America’s Millennial generation. It’s not
breaking any ground to note that, aside
from those young people who occupy
the comforting confines of ideological
extremism, many millions of American
young people just seem lost.
They’re deeply suspicious of orga-
nized religion, yet they can’t escape the
nagging need for transcendence in their
lives. They want answers to great ques-
tions, but they’re suspicious of authori-
ty. They want purpose, but they don’t
know what purpose means apart from
careerism. Oh, and all but the most polit-
ically correct are keenly aware that
mankind is fallen, that men and women
are different, and that, while the post-
Christian West has allegedly killed God,
it can’t seem to replace him with any-
thing better.
This is the landscape of spiraling
rates of anxiety and depression, of
extended adolescence, and of a genera-
tion of young men who’ve been told
that masculinity is “toxic” but not
taught how to live in a way that recog-
nizes or even cares to comprehend their
true nature.
S P O N S O R E D B Y National Review Institute
Or, as University of Toronto psychol-
ogist Jordan B. Peterson explains in a
key passage from his book 12 Rules for
Life: An Antidote to Chaos, “What has
emerged from behind [the corpse of
Christian dogma], however—and this is
of central importance—is something
even more dead; something that was
never alive, even in the past: nihilism, as
well as an equally dangerous suscepti-
bility to new, totalizing utopian ideals.”
The Western world replaced its ancient
morality—rooted in and developed from
Christianity—with an inevitably inade-
quate invented value system.
As Peterson says, “We cannot invent
our own values, because we cannot mere-
ly impose what we believe on our souls.”
Peterson has become a sensation and
a lightning rod. His YouTube videos
receive millions of views, and the mere
mention of his name infuriates social-
justice warriors. He achieved a degree
of public prominence when he famous-
ly refused to bow to pressure to use
“chosen” pronouns for transgender
people (unless specifically asked), and
he’s got little patience for far-left cul-
tural intolerance.
But an unwillingness to bow to politi-
cal correctness describes any number of
Jordan B. Peterson uses his rules as a
launching pad to help the reader
rediscover something that’s been lost.
conservative culture warriors, most of
whom aren’t close to becoming Internet
sensations and will never write books
that are the talk of the Anglosphere,
earning headlines in the United States,
Canada, and Great Britain. Why is
Peterson different?
The key can be found in his book. If
you were to design in a laboratory a
message and a messenger perfectly cali-
brated to scratch the itch of millions of
lost Millennial souls, Peterson’s your
man and 12 Rules for Life is the mes-
sage. Superficially, it’s a self-help book,
providing a helpful set of maxims that
can, to borrow a phrase from a previous
self-help sensation, help the reader live
a purpose-driven life.
But that’s just the hook. The core of the
book is really something else entirely.
From Rule 1, “Stand up straight with
your shoulders back,” to Rule 12, “Pet a
cat when you encounter one on the
street,” Peterson uses his rules as a
launching pad to help the reader redis-
cover something that’s been lost: not
just the tools to improve your life but
an entire moral framework that’s
anchored not only in psychology but
also, crucially, in copious amounts of
Biblical analysis.
In fact, there’s so much Bible in
Peterson’s phenomenally successful
book that I never, ever want to hear
another hipster Christian declare that
“Scripture can’t reach kids these days.”
Oh, really? It turns out that when a
writer artfully connects Biblical pas-
sages to historic moral and philosophi-
cal developments, interprets them in
light of his own knowledge of psychol-
ogy, and presents the passages not as a
pastor but as a professor, then secular
readers will mainline it like heroin.
Critical to Peterson’s presentation is
how little he asks the reader to trust him.
Simple points are supported by combi-
nations of elaborate personal stories,
brief digressions into the history of
Christianity, and extended discussions of
modern psychological theories and inter-
esting psychological experiments. Yes,
he talks about simple things such as body
posture, but he does so in the context of a
far more complex discussion of the psy-
chological effects of victory and defeat
throughout the animal kingdom and in
human societies.
Yet even as he speaks about science
and scientific truth, he shuns science
fetishism and places even ethics in its
proper place, declaring religion “older
and deeper,” concerned with “ultimate
value.” “That is not the scientific
domain,” he says. “It’s not the territory
of empirical description.” It is the land
of dogma, and Peterson argues (direct-
ly defying modern convention) that
dogma is necessary. “What good is a
value system that does not provide a
stable structure?”
He speaks with a refreshing indiffer-
ence to political correctness. The book
reads as an earnest search for truth
wherever he can find it, not an argument
37
BOOKS, ARTS & MANNERS
targeted specifically against any given
intellectual or political fad. And it’s this
search for truth that is the true counter
to the cultural Marxism and stifling
intellectual conformity of the modern
academy. All too many conservatives
learn what intolerant progressives want
them to believe and then simply do the
opposite, but even that form of opposi-
tion allows social-justice warriors to set
the agenda. It allows them to dictate
your conduct.
Peterson’s book is something else
entirely. Yes, of course, he knows and
deals with the intellectual and moral
arguments of the past few decades, but
he’s far more interested in mining for
moral truths in the vast sweep of human
history, with the Bible perhaps the central
reference of his entire literary project.
But make no mistake, this is not a
“Christian” book, and it’s not necessarily
written for a Christian audience. Indeed, as
a conservative Calvinist Christian, I found
some of his critiques of Reformation the-
ology unconvincing. Moreover, readers
who are already grounded in a Biblical
worldview will find some of the counsel
extraordinarily elementary.
But this is not a book aimed at people
who are steeped in complementarianism
or who fully understand that a person’s
fundamental goal in life is not to achieve
happiness but rather to “take up his
cross” and follow the teaching and
example of Jesus Christ. This is a book
aimed at people who’ve been wrongly
taught to scorn Christianity, who’ve
been asked to invent their own belief
system, and who do actually believe that
the central goal in life is to be happy. In
other words, it’s a book aimed squarely
at the cultural majority.
For that lost world, this book is a bea-
con of light. People who read it and
apply its lessons will find themselves
reading the words of Christ, demonstrat-
ing moral courage, and standing tall not
primarily to vindicate their own rights
but to love and serve others. Peterson
describes a purpose-driven life that tells
each person there is a way to make
tomorrow better than today and there is
wisdom in forgotten or despised places.
It’s not a book designed to blaze a trail to
the boardroom or to maximize any per-
son’s health or wealth. Instead, it’s got a
simpler and more profound purpose: to
help a person look in the mirror and
respect the person he or she sees.
38 | w w w. n a t i o n a l r e v i e w. c o m
Founder of
The Evil
Empire
RONALD RADOSH
Lenin: The Man, the Dictator, and the
Master of Terror, by Victor Sebestyen
(Pantheon, 592 pp., $35)
S
INCE the fall of Communism
in the Soviet Union and its
client states, major biogra-
phies of Stalin have appeared,
as well as books dealing with the Soviet
Union during that brutal tyrant’s rule.
Somehow, scholars have gravitated
toward exploring the nature of the total-
itarian state Stalin ran but have paid rel-
atively less attention to the founder of
the Soviet state, Vladimir Ilyich
Ulyanov, known by his adopted name
of Lenin.
The absence of a post-Soviet Lenin
biography has finally been corrected,
with this brilliant and compelling portrait
of the Soviet state’s founder by Victor
Sebestyen, a Hungarian-born journalist
and historian now living in Britain. It
could not have arrived at a more appro-
priate time. As the author writes, Lenin
was “the kind of demagogue familiar to
us in Western democracies”—one who
promised “anything and everything,”
who offered “simple solutions to com-
plex problems,” who “lied unashamed-
Mr. Radosh, an adjunct fellow at the Hudson
Institute and a contributing opinion columnist at the
Daily Beast, is a co-author of Spain Betrayed:
The Soviet Union in the Spanish Civil War
and the author of Commies: A Journey through
the Old Left, the New Left and the
Leftover Left.
ly,” and who called those he opposed
“enemies of the people.” For Lenin, he
writes, “winning meant everything; the
ends justified the means.” He was,
Sebestyen says, the godfather of “‘post-
truth’ politics.”
Sebestyen’s book is a needed correc-
tive to many who condemn Stalin but
characterize Lenin as a humane revolu-
tionary whose legacy Stalin betrayed.
This, of course, was the argument made
by Stalin’s exiled opponent, Leon
Trotsky, whom Stalin had assassinated
while he was living in Mexico. It was
also the thesis of Trotsky’s prominent
biographer, the Polish-born scholar Isaac
Deutscher, who believed that if Trotsky
had been in power, somehow the Soviet
Union would have turned out differently.
Stephen Cohen, an American histori-
an of Russia, made the case for Nikolai
Bukharin as the only possible alterna-
tive leader of the revolution. Cohen
believed that Bukharin would have built
a democratic form of Communism,
under which no reign of terror would
have developed. But that was not to be:
Stalin controlled the party machinery,
and quickly isolated Bukharin and then
had him executed after a show trial.
Gorbachev viewed his own project as
taking the Soviet Union “back to
Lenin.” He was suggesting that under
Lenin, a humane Communist society
had been in the process of being built,
and that this project had been abandoned
by Stalin. After reading Sebestyen’s
book, it will be impossible for any seri-
ous person to make that argument. It
was Lenin’s ideology, and the system
Lenin created, that led to the birth of the
totalitarian state.
Sebestyen covers Lenin as a private
person as well as a thinker and revolu-
tionary. He takes us through his prosper-
ous youth as the son of a government
employee “who enjoyed the pleasures
of a country squire’s life” and whose
family lived in a spacious, comfortable
home. Lenin was not political until the
death by hanging on May 8, 1887, of his
beloved 21-year-old brother, Alexander
Ilyich Ulyanov, who was part of a plot to
assassinate the czar. From that moment
on, the 17-year-old Vladimir became
dedicated to waging revolutionary war.
Eventually forced to go into exile in
London and Switzerland, Lenin came to
represent both idealism and a coherent
ideology, all for the purpose of creating
MARCH 19, 2018
a better future after a revolution took
place. Lenin offered young Marxists he
met the dream of a better Russia. “It is
easy to forget,” Sebestyen writes, “the
fervent idealism of some of the early
Russian Marxists, along with the ruth-
lessly ambitious and power-hungry
careerists the movement attracted at the
same time.” Lenin helped recruit both
types to the cause.
Lenin’s appeal, Sebestyen argues,
owed much to the fact that he was “opti-
mistic and uplifting.” No one could pre-
dict in the first decade of the 1900s that
the ideology Lenin’s followers expound-
ed would lead to a Mao, a Pol Pot, or a
Ceausescu. The bible of the new move-
ment was Lenin’s famous treatise “What
Is to Be Done?”—a pamphlet that gave
revolutionary dreamers a program and
tactics. It demanded commitment to
revolution as a profession, and under-
standing of the necessity of building a
revolutionary party that would bring the
working classes to the consciousness
that was needed to make revolution pos-
sible. The future horrors of Communist
If the need was for what Lenin
called ‘revolutionary terror,’ he did not
hesitate to use it.
rule were not explicit in this idea, but
it was the very basis of Leninism, and
it made the totalitarian state inevitable in
Russia once Lenin and his devoted group
of cadres took power.
Sebestyen takes us through Lenin’s
dramatic return to Russia in a sealed
railroad train provided by Germany.
Taking command of the various
Bolshevik groups, he inspired them to
carry out actual revolution rather than
wait until all factions of the Russian
Left would back his program.
Sebestyen also shows that Lenin had
already formed his idea of rule by ter-
ror, which he believed a successful rev-
olution necessitated. As early as 1900,
writing Georgy Plekhanov, the founder
of Marxism in Russia, Lenin com-
plained about “liberals” who thought
“revolutions can be made by people
who wear kid gloves.” Plekhanov
admonished him, writing, “There is no
call for abusing liberals. . . . Liberalism
in itself deserves respect.” It was a les-
S P O N S O R E D B Y National Review Institute
son from the master that Lenin conspic-
uously ignored.
Lenin’s first unleashing of the
Bolsheviks’ mass terror came in the sup-
pression of sailors at Kronstadt, who had
greeted him with an honor guard when
he arrived at the now famous Finland
Station in Petrograd and who had shelled
the czar’s Winter Palace when the revolu-
tion broke out. Now, in February 1921,
these sailors demanded free elections,
independent trade unions, a free press,
and the abolition of the hated Soviet
secret police, the Cheka. “This is a
rebellion and they must be shown no
mercy,” Lenin proclaimed. “They must
be destroyed. There will be no compro-
mise.” On March 4, Leon Trotsky arrived
WE’VE MOVED!
in Petrograd with 20,000 Red Army (fulfillment houses)
troops, preparing to attack the Kronstadt
sailors on their ships. The result was what
Sebestyen calls a “massacre,” in which
thousands of the Bolsheviks’ opponents
were slaughtered. It was the seminal
event that produced the first mass disillu-
sion among Bolshevik supporters. For
decades after, when the Soviet state took
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hesitate to use it. Harlan, IA 51593-0208
Lenin, like Robespierre, was an
ascetic. He lived modestly, eschewed the Or visit us for faster service at:
perks others got from being leaders, and nationalreview.com/care
did not even eat at the fancy Kremlin
restaurant other apparatchiks frequent-
ed. “He loathed,” Sebestyen writes, “the
big, boozy seven-course dinners with
endless vodka toasts and macho story-
telling that became the norm among
Communist chieftains.”
He also knew that many Bolshevik
leaders in Petrograd, where people
were going hungry, sold food to black-
39
BOOKS, ARTS & MANNERS
marketeers at huge prices. Lenin,
Sebestyen notes, “was always concerned
that corruption—and bureaucracy—
might eat into the soul of the Party.” Yet
he did nothing about it. Indeed, an old
Party comrade wrote to him that the old
Party spirit had been “replaced by a new
one-man rule in which the [local] Party
boss runs everything,” and that bribe-
taking had “become universal.” Lenin
ignored the warning, but he acknowl-
edged that the Bolshevik Party “con-
sist[ed] of ten percent . . . convinced
idealists, ready to die for the cause, but
incapable of living for it, and ninety
percent . . . unscrupulous time-servers
who have simply joined the Party to
get jobs.”
Instead of dealing with the corrupt
bureaucracy he had helped to create,
Lenin waged war against the Church,
urging confiscation of all Church valu-
ables and demanding that raids on
Church property be carried out “with
merciless determination.” To clergy who
would try to stop the attacks from
Chekists, Lenin had a simple answer: The
“greater the number of clergy and reac-
tionary bourgeoisie we succeed in exe-
cuting for this reason,” Lenin instructed
the Cheka, “the better.”
Lenin, readers are told at the start of
the book, “had not always been a bad
man, but he did terrible things.” “The
worst of his evils,” Sebestyen informs
us, “was to have left a man like Stalin in
a position to lead Russia after him. That
was a historic crime.” It also is clear that
Stalin, in claiming he was only carrying
out the path laid out by Lenin, was
telling the truth. The horrors of the
Stalin years were but an extension of the
terror begun by Lenin, although carried
out to a length at which Lenin might
have recoiled.
Lenin, however, had provided thou-
sands of followers throughout the world,
who saw that an actual Communist state
had been created, with an ideology and
tactics they sought to emulate. The hor-
rors they in turn created in their own
nations, from China to Eastern European
client states to Cuba and North Korea,
were their versions of Lenin and Stalin’s
Gulag. For that, it was Lenin who must
get the blame.
Victor Sebestyen’s superb biography is
a commentary on how, with even the best
of intentions, adoption of a revolutionary
ideology can lead to a living hell.
40 | w w w. n a t i o n a l r e v i e w. c o m
Seizing the
Future
ARTHUR HERMAN
The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable
Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape
Tomorrow’s World, by Charles C. Mann
(Knopf, 640 pp., $28.95)
A
NEW Volvo ad sums up the
theme of this book: “There
are two types of people in the
world: those who fear the
future, and those who embrace it.” In
Charles Mann’s new book, the Wizards
are thinkers who push technological inno-
vation to confront the world’s biggest
challenges, while those who fear the
future, the Prophets, devote themselves to
(in Mann’s words) “decrying the conse-
quences of our heedlessness” in advocat-
ing technological solutions, whether they
seek to feed the planet’s faceless masses
or to deal with climate change.
In Mann’s view, the clash between
these two sets of visionaries is epito-
mized by two men whose legacies are
still celebrated in their own circles but
who are not so well known to the public.
They also happen to be Americans. One
is Norman Borlaug, the father of the
Green Revolution and winner of the
Nobel Peace Prize in 1970, who used
new agricultural methods to save tens of
millions from starvation. The other is
William Vogt, one of the founding fathers
of modern ecology and a fierce critic of
the kind of optimism that motivates
Wizards like Borlaug and others whose
(in Mann’s paraphrase) “faith in human
Mr. Herman, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute,
is the author of 1917: Lenin, Wilson, and the
Birth of the New World Disorder.
resourcefulness is unthinking, scientifi-
cally ignorant, even driven by greed
(because remaining within ecological
limits will cut into corporate profits).”
To Mann’s credit, he doesn’t automat-
ically endorse the Prophets’ scorn for
technological solutions to the world’s
problems, or their disdain for capitalism.
But there’s no denying that the author of
The Wizard and the Prophet is something
of a Prophet himself and wants to warn us
of the unforeseen consequences of tech-
nological progress, even when its fiercest
critics get proven wrong.
Wizard Norman Borlaug grew up in
rural Iowa, the child of Norwegian
immigrants who found in their tiny town
of Saude, in Mann’s words, “a landscape
at once chillingly vacant and full of
promise.” Here is Mann’s description of
the world into which Borlaug was born in
1914: “The new arrivals built cabins from
logs chinked with mud; grew clover,
wheat, maize, and oats; pastured a few
milk cows; let their dogs run free. Half the
area’s inhabitants were Norwegian; most
of the rest were Czech—Bohemian, as
people said then.” Lutheran Norwegian
parents told their children not to date the
Bohemians, who were Roman Catholics;
while “in the Norwegian church, men
sat on one side, women on the other.
Ministers wore white ruffs and black
satin stoles. Services were in Norwegian
until the early 1920s. At Christmas the
congregation placed a tree in the church
entrance, lighted candles tied to the
branches. After the service everyone
unwrapped presents together.”
In this close-knit, austere world with
no telephones, no radios, and no newspa-
pers except the local paper from nearby
Cresco, the only escape was education.
Norm Borlaug applied himself to study
with the same focus and energy that he
brought to plowing a straight furrow or
building a pig brooder; eventually those
studies took him to the University of
Minnesota, where he combined varsity
wrestling with a passionate war on the
stem-rust fungus that had wiped out half
the grain crop in North America in 1916.
That led Borlaug to become an expert in
developing hybrid strains of plants that
could outperform their parents by mixing
their genetic inheritances. This project
attracted the attention of the Rockefeller
Foundation, and when Borlaug arrived in
Mexico in 1944 to help boost crop yields,
he was launched on a career that would
MARCH 19, 2018
ultimately transform agriculture in the
Third World from a subsistence enter-
prise lurching from one natural disaster
to another, with millions dying from
malnutrition and hunger as a matter of
course, into a world where Mexicans,
Indians, Indonesians, and others could
regularly feed themselves—the so-called
Green Revolution.
Born in 1902, William Vogt grew up in
an only slightly more prosperous house-
hold than Borlaug’s—on old Long Island,
said Vogt, “before the automobiles, the air-
ports, the mosquito control commissions,
the shopping centers, the billboards, and
the hot dog joints” arrived, when it was
still a world of farms and fishing villages,
as well as vast millionaire estates of the
Great Gatsbys of the day.
Although Manhattan was only 20 miles
away, Billy Vogt saw New York City only
once a year, to see Santa Claus at one of
the department stores. Mann writes, “The
crowds in the stores frightened him—an
early memory was of being mashed into
the back of an elevator—and he returned
with relief to his home.” Those experi-
ences left Vogt with a lifelong fear of
crowds and a longing for “the pleasures of
solitude” of his boyhood home. If the mis-
sion of Borlaug’s life was to get families
out of grinding poverty, Vogt’s was to halt
the kind of urban and suburban sprawl that
devoured his boyhood home and to resist
Wizards like Borlaug, who saw technolo-
gy as the path to progress. For Vogt, it was
instead the path to planetary destruction.
Vogt’s career began literally with bird
feces, when the Peruvian government
hired him as an ornithological expert to
explain to them why the birds whose
poop underlay the country’s highly prof-
itable guano industry were disappearing.
Vogt’s conclusion was a game-changer:
The reason was that the birds’ environ-
ment was being destroyed by warmer
ocean waters, which were killing off the
tiny plankton that was their primary
source of food. Over the next decades,
Vogt would expand his conclusion about
the brittle relationship between species
and their environment to include human
beings: We live in a world where we can-
not exceed our biological limitations any
more than birds or whales or polar bears
can; what we can do, that other species
cannot, is destroy that world in our heed-
less quest for resources and profits.
The result was Vogt’s 1948 book Road
to Survival, which, Mann notes, “became
S P O N S O R E D B Y National Review Institute
the blueprint for today’s environmental to expand the planet’s supply of drinkable
movement.” It offered to sympathetic water, with Wizards pushing such tech-
readers two key concepts. The first was a nologies as desalinization and Prophets
new conception of environment, not as urging water conservation; how to find
the natural factors that affect humans but enough energy, a fight that pitted such
as the factors (e.g., quality of air, water, technologies as fracking against renew-
and soil) that are affected by humans, ables; and, finally, how to deal with
usually negatively. For example, Vogt global warming and genetically modi-
asserted that America’s founders were fied organisms and foods (GMOs).
“one of the most destructive groups of Who ultimately wins? Again, Mann’s
human beings that have ever raped the sympathies are clearly with the Prophets,
earth,” turning the natural paradise they but he’s too good a journalist to deny that
found in 1620 into “a shambles.” the Wizards generally wind up with the
The second was the concept of “carry- best of the argument, both on scientific
ing capacity”: the notion that there are grounds (as with GMOs) and on moral
only so many resources that nature can grounds (as with Borlaug’s Green
supply, and only so much humanity it can Revolution). Borlaug himself, speaking
support. Margaret Sanger made Vogt to Mann shortly before his death in 2009,
national director of Planned Parenthood answered his critics this way: Where
Federation of America after reading Road would the world be today if we had the
to Survival, because she, too, saw limiting same growth in population and affluence
population growth as an imperative. but none of the crop-yield increases his
Environments have limits that can’t be research helped to set in motion?
ignored or overcome, wrote Vogt, no Where indeed. And where would the
matter how much technology we throw at world, including the Prophets them-
them. The later term would be “sustainabil- selves, be if the Wizards hadn’t kept
ity.” It was a view reinforced by Eugene pushing the limits of what can be accom-
Odum’s Fundamentals of Ecology, pub- plished using technology to address
lished five years later, in 1953, which seemingly intractable problems? It’s a
treated carrying capacity as if it were a question Al Gore should be asking every
scientific law, although, as Mann admits, time he flies off in a private jet to the next
“Vogt’s argument was intuitively power- climate-change conference. Such techno-
ful but intellectually shaky.” logical optimists as Matt Ridley and
That didn’t stop Vogt and Odum’s Steven Pinker may overstate their case—
growing army of disciples, and soon the in Pinker’s case, to the breaking point—
battle with the Wizards was on—over but in the end, the Volvo ad has it right:
how to produce more food, with critics “The future is for the unafraid.” On bal-
denouncing Borlaug’s Green Revolution ance, the Borlaugs look more impressive
for overthrowing traditional social struc- than the Vogts, despite Mann’s efforts to
tures and deploying toxic pesticides; how press the opposite case.
SOMETIMES THE FROST COMES EARLY
Sometimes the frost comes early when it might
Have held its crystallizing of the leaves.
But it views warmth as pain, and so believes
It must be kind and decimate the night.
I view the wilted shrouds in morning light
That once were strong, with sap-coursed veins alert
To sun, to rain. But a particular hurt
Like frost, inflexible, is structured tight
As iron bands, and nothing can assert
Itself against the freezing of the sap,
Which stunts the stem and leaf, and leaves a gap
That cannot soon be filled, until the dirt
Warms in another season, and the sight
Of seedlings once again can put things right.
—SALLY COOK
41
 BOOKS, ARTS & MANNERS
Film
Out of Africa
R O S S D O U T H AT
L
IKE Wonder Woman before it,
Black Panther arrived in the-
aters as something more than
just a movie. It is a vessel for
liberal piety and multicultural hope, a
blockbuster attempt to effectuate the
union of our era’s defining Hollywood
genre, the comic-book extravaganza, with
the identity-politics concerns that domi-
nate the Trump-era Left. The fact that it is
not technically the first blockbuster featur-
ing a black superhero, as Wonder Woman
was not technically the first to feature a
superheroine (let alone a female action
hero), is irrelevant to the excitement: What
matters is that they’re the firsts of this
moment, the first attempts to harness the
power of Marvel and DC for the causes of
anti-racism and “the future is female,” the
first chance to make the superhero genre
into an auxiliary of anti-Trumpism.
For conservatives inclined to be skep-
tical of such politically engineered Mo-
ments, the actual movies have come as
something of a relief. To the extent that
there were real politics in Wonder Woman
(as opposed to politics just superimposed
upon it), they were the neocon-hawkish
“no appeasement of the Germans” sort,
with some traditional romance instead of
the original comic’s kinks and a star who
combined a very modern vision of female
physical omnicompetence with the old-
fashioned virtue of being insanely hot.
And now likewise in Black Panther,
you have a story whose moral arc actu-
ally bends away from the radicalism
implied by the title—a story that asks us
to pull for an ancient hereditary monar-
chy and against a revolutionary, to
admire a society that’s put up walls and
self-segregated for generations, and to
choose a vision of black power that rejects
violent racial redress in favor of that old
Booker T. Washingtonian standby of edu-
cational uplift.
The ancient monarchy is Wakanda, a
hidden kingdom in the heart of Africa,
with overtones of King Solomon’s Mines
DISNEY/MARVEL STUDIOS
and Prester John and El Dorado. To the
world outside, it’s just another impover-
ished statelet—but that’s actually because
Wakandan technology is so advanced,
42 | w w w. n a t i o n a l r e v i e w. c o m
Chadwick Boseman in Black Panther
thanks to extensive deposits of vibrani-
um, the world’s most awesome metal,
that it has no difficulty cloaking its
bustling mega-city and maglev trains and
hovercraft from the prying eyes of
Westerners and fellow Africans alike.
The king of this fair country is also, con-
veniently, a superhero, thanks to a flower
potion that grants him the usual-for-these-
movies superhuman strength. As our story
begins, a succession is in process: King
T’Chaka is dead, long live King T’Challa
(Chadwick Boseman), who has already
been doing apprentice-superhero in a pan-
ther costume rigged up by his entertain-
ing scientist sister Shuri (Letitia Wright),
who is basically Q to his James Bond.
But there is trouble in paradise.
T’Challa’s love interest, Nakia (Lupita
N’yongo), and his friend W’Kabi (Daniel
Kaluuya) both think Wakandan isolation
needs to end, that either humanitarian aid
or some kind of military adventurism is a
moral obligation for so powerful a king-
dom. And bigger trouble is coming from
outside, where a cousin of T’Challa, Eric
Killmonger, has grown up on the streets
of Oakland and taken up the mantle of
that city’s Black Panthers, allied himself
with a giggly South African arms dealer
(Andy Serkis, in a rare enfleshed rather
than motion-captured appearance), and
set his sights on a triumphant return
home. The son of a father who was exe-
cuted by T’Chaka for choosing black
power over Wakandan splendid isolation-
ism, Killmonger is a muscled killer (his
last name is a nickname from his days in
special ops) and a would-be revolutionary,
determined to claim the Wakandan throne
and all its vibranium weaponry in order to
turn the world of imperialists and colo-
nizers upside down.
As embodied by the swole and charis-
matic Michael B. Jordan, he gets most of
the best lines and the most straightfor-
ward argument; he is also presented,
from the first, as a murderer and a fanat-
ic, which is why some of the most inter-
esting reactions to the movie have come
from left-wing writers accusing Ryan
Coogler, the movie’s talented African-
American director, of selling out the rev-
olution by stacking the deck in favor of a
tame neoliberal meliorism.
Such are the perils of yoking woke-
ness to a corporate franchise, but a fairer
reading is that Coogler is trying to strike
a balance among three worldviews—
post-colonial radicalism, liberal humani-
tarianism, and the deep and abiding and,
yes, reactionary appeal of an ancien
régime to call one’s own. That balancing
isn’t quite successful because it can’t be
quite successful, but it makes Black
Panther a lot more interesting than the
average superhero movie; its fantasy is
still a fantasy and sometimes an absurd
one, but it’s one with more genuine rele-
vance to our world than the umpteenth
battle against a cosmic supervillain.
The movie is also a good study in why,
while the pursuit of representation for its
own sake (make sure that part X is always
played by ethnicity Y, have the Bechdel
Test beside you while you write your
script) is exhausting and a scourge of art,
the pursuit of representation for the sake
of discovering new and interesting stories
can be a great artistic boon. Black Panther
is more interesting than Avengers 17 or
whatever precisely because it sets out to
tell a story about Africa, not just a story
about a guy with superpowers—and there
are many more African stories, real and
fictional, waiting to be told.
Especially, perhaps, stories about the
human future, where the combination of
African religiosity and fecundity and the
developed world’s decadence will make
the erstwhile dark continent far more
influential than most of us now recognize.
There is no Wakanda, or not yet, to lead
the way in shaping what that influence will
look like. But the act of imagining the
kingdom is not just an attempt to envision
a different African past, an alternative to
subjugation. It’s an exercise in useful in-
spiration for a billion-plus people whose
destiny, for good and ill, will inevitably
overlap with and help determine ours.
MARCH 19, 2018

City Desk
The Word’s
New Home
RICHARD BROOKHISER
N
O one reads any more, do
they? You are reading this,
evidently, but are you reading
reading—sitting down, light
on, concentrating—or just doing what I
so often do, skimming? What was the last
novel I read? The first two volumes of the
melancholy Norwegian. But there are
four more, untouched by me. In my youth
I would have burned through all the suck-
ers in a month. A friend of mine, a jour-
nalist no less, says he doesn’t read
articles anymore, only headlines. Preach,
brother. My printed subscription copy of
the Broadsheet of the Resistance, which
flops in the hall in front of my apartment
every morning as a marker (like the
blood on the doorposts in Exodus) that
someone older than 60 lives there, might
as well be an anthology of headlines for
all the time I spend on it. Drudge was a
visionary, cutting out backfill. Young’uns,
standing in elevators, walking the streets,
eating their meals, hunch over tiny
glowing screens unable to tap out any-
thing longer than phrases, and can tap out
those only because they pad them with
smiling or frowning yellow faces, or clips
of reaction shots from 20-year-old TV
shows. Where have the words gone?
One place they have gone is podcasts.
Not biting into a pod of detergent and
spewing it out before you die, that’s
something else. But podcasts are the
recorded Sermonettes on the Mount by
which we receive information these
days. Welcome back, Homer, we’ve got
you booked through Burning Man, just
tap your white cane up to the mic and
start reciting.
S P O N S O R E D B Y National Review Institute
My wife is beginning to write a book.
Her editor is the son of a Nobel laureate,
but that is Oldthink. Because he is a
clever man who keeps his finger on the
pulse, he has my wife recording podcasts
even before the book is begun.
Once, when authors recorded publici-
ty, we went to studios—not comfortable
or well-appointed studios, we were only
authors after all, but studios with boom
arms and insulation foam on the walls.
More Oldthink. Now your apartment is the
studio, and the equipment comes to you.
My wife’s topic is the state of person-
al relations in an era of political contro-
versy (how she came to think of such a
thing, I cannot imagine). Part of her
technique—she practices the talking
cure—is to interview persons in relation-
ships and ask them, When did your sig-
nificant other’s exercise of the franchise
make you want to reach into his or her
mouth and pull out the esophagus? What
happened next? (And, because my wife
is a wise questioner, Why?)
Podcasts are the recorded Sermonettes
on the Mount by which we receive
information these days.
The first couple who volunteered to
be podcasted as well as interviewed
comprised a 20-year-old English model
(though at 20 his modeling career is
winding down, so he has taken an exam
to sell life insurance) and a 30-year-old
mixed-race American woman who is a
photographer. The podcaster was a
bearded young man, midway between
their ages. My wife and I could be their
parents, maybe grandparents. Ever the
hostess, my wife could not let people
come to our apartment without feeding
them, so we went to the liquor store
beforehand and bought two bottles of
Riesling. There was also food; as a Jew,
she would remember what that was; as a
Gentile, I recall only the wine.
The bearded podcaster was first to
arrive. We live above an avenue with
buses, roadwork, fire trucks, ambu-
lances, drunks, madmen, and the long,
not-withdrawing urban roar. I have
filmed documentaries when the sound
man stopped everything because an air-
plane was passing 39,000 feet above
us. Oldthink, oldthink. Our podcaster
checked out the sound quality in my
wife’s office, and was good to go. At the
last minute, he realized he had forgotten
his audio card, but since the publisher’s
office is only seven blocks away, he was
able to retrieve it in a jiffy (the advan-
tages of living in a city-state).
Next came our interview subjects.
They live, of course, in the borough
across the river. Our building in the
omphalos has filled up with young peo-
ple, but they are jammed four or five to a
two-bedroom unit, and each pays a for-
tune for a slice of that; better maybe to go
to the borderlands and suck up the com-
mute. The podcaster wanted to interview
each subject individually, to establish
background information. While one
spoke (he brash, she shy), the other sat
on the living-room sofa, sharing Riesling
and solid food with my wife and me. My
role, though off-stage and uncredited,
was vital. For the purposes of the pod-
cast, my wife was the Talent, so it was
important that she not wear herself out.
So I swelled a progress, started a scene
or two, and reminded her and the guest
we were with to save it for the mic.
Preliminaries done, my wife and the
couple disappeared to be recorded to-
gether. I swept up crumbs and checked
the phrases on my tiny glowing screen.
After it was over and the subjects had
left, the podcaster had only one note for
my wife: When an interviewee is making
a point, even if you understand it, don’t
say so; rather give a (silent) glance to
suggest, Interesting, say more. Silence,
minus the glance, is classic Viennese
talking cure, but my wife has always
been too empathic for that. The point, for
podcasting, is to get pure, recordable bits.
My wife is a pro, she will hit her mark.
The whole show took three hours; it
will be boiled down to 30 minutes. I will
let you wait until it goes up to hear what
the model and the photographer fought
about and how they fared. Or wait until
the book is published, to read. (Do buy
it—no library borrowings, please.)
Maybe the podcast is the future of the
word, from Let there be light through We
shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight
in the hills. Stay tuned.
43
 Happy Warrior
Brushing Alone
ERE’S a wager: Within five years of this writ-
H ing, I will be able to determine your political
views entirely on the basis of which brand of
toothpaste you purchase.
Crest? Strong supporter of school choice. Colgate? Not
a big fan of the farm bill. Arm & Hammer? More like
Hammer & Sickle, because you want single payer.
You scoff, but I already know that your views on Delta
Airlines and Hertz rental cars now strongly correspond to
how compelling you found the many cable-news appear-
ances of a teenaged survivor of the Parkland school shoot-
ing. Who’s to say that opportunists on both sides won’t,
from here on, be able to find some way to drag one’s con-
sumer preferences and brand loyalties into the next tribalist
sortie or national tragedy? I think the smart money is that
they can and they will. To update Mencken: Nobody’s ever
gone broke underestimating the negative partisanship of
the American public.
For the last three years, our national conversation has
been alternately pessimistic, decadent, and Millenarian
in its timbre: Things are getting worse and more profane,
and the rate of the worsening and the profaning is accel-
erating, and at the end of it lies God knows what but it is
going to be huge and fearsome and possibly sublime.
Against the existential panic and dread of all that—
against the Flight 93 election and “Enjoy Arby’s” and
the funereal images from Samantha Powers’s victory
party for Hillary Clinton—conservatism is, by default,
Ecclesiastean in its conviction that there is nothing, or at
least very little, novel about a given political moment. I
try to temper myself with that serenity. But the discourse,
such as it is, in the wake of the Parkland shooting does
seem to me to have revealed some previously unseen
fatigue in the institutional jointure that is now only barely
holding us together.
It isn’t surprising that the corporations implicated in the
fight between gun restrictionists and Second Amendment
advocates have by and large chosen to cut ties with the
National Rifle Association. Anyone who has spent time
around the public-relations arms of Fortune 100 compa-
nies—or worse, their “corporate social-responsibility”
teams—knows that these weren’t panicky decisions by
c-suites overreacting to hashtags. Nor were they the result
of cold-blooded cost-benefit analyses. Rather, and simply,
these companies cut loose the NRA because their decision
makers agree with the gun restrictionists. They come from
the same milieus in the same schools and have been incul-
cated with the same neoliberal article of faith that what’s
virtuous is profitable and vice versa—“doing well by
doing good” and all that.
No, what’s surprising is that the fight should have so
definitively shifted to this field. That corporations have
become our “last association standing,” as James Poulos
presciently noted just a few months ago, is less about
44 | w w w. n a t i o n a l r e v i e w. c o m
BY DANIEL FOSTER
their suitability to the task of hosting such weighty cul-
tural and political debates and more about the dearth of
other options:
Many of us are simply unable to find rest, relaxation, or
repose in the social institutions—clubs, churches, unions,
even families—that have sharply waned as equality has
waxed. And precious few alternatives, apart from the cor-
poration, have arisen in their place. It’s not just civic life
that’s hurting. It’s our personal lives—our feelings and our
hearts. As institutions have failed to nourish and anchor us,
so too have our neighbors and the state. So we now turn to
the corporation for shelter.
That corporations—and, to be merely redundant,
social media—are pretty much the whole ballgame now
means that dominant ideologies can no longer afford to
except them from the exercise of raw power politics. To
wit, the Republican lieutenant governor of Georgia’s
naked Twitter threat: “I will kill any tax legislation that
benefits @Delta unless the company changes its position
and fully reinstates its relationship with @NRA.
Corporations cannot attack conservatives and expect us
not to fight back.”
So refracted is our present point of view that the guy
from the “government shouldn’t pick winners and losers”
party is advocating using state power to punish a private
actor while at the same time ending a bit of corporate wel-
fare. (What other bizarre synergies might this moment
afford us? Can we find a way, somehow, for white nation-
alism to reform occupational-licensing laws?)
This withering of our institutions and associations also
means we have to ask the ones we’ve got left to do more
and varied ideological heavy lifting. Thus we have NRA
head Wayne LaPierre sprinting miles afield of his orga-
nization’s lane to criticize the “wave of European social-
ists” taking over the Democratic party. Say what you
will on the merits, the NRA used to count scores of
Democrats among its friends on Capitol Hill. That its
leadership feels it has no other choice but to cash out the
purity and credibility that comes from single-issue disci-
pline to shore up its support on the right tells us that our
institutional crisis and our Manichaean tribalism are not
two phenomena but one.
It should be said that the NRA didn’t start this trend. It
barely took all 15 minutes of Milo Yiannopoulos’s fame,
after all, to get the American Civil Liberties Union to go
wobbly on its very raison d’être so as to stay on the right
side of Berkeley’s undergraduates.
In fact, I suspect these two seductions—of the NRA by
the MAGA set and the ACLU by the social-justice war-
riors—will be seen as major inflection points in the consti-
tutional epoch, as our order moves on from institutional
pluralism to institutional dualism.
Think Coke versus Pepsi.
MARCH 19, 2018
 CONNECTING
Science, Faith & Reason
XFIVE PROOFS OF THE EXISTENCE OF GOD — Edward Feser

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“A watershed book. Feser has completely severed the intellectual legs upon which modern atheism
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How Human Nature is More Than Science Can Say — Michael Augros

M any scientists and philosophers believe that we are no more than a machine. There is no
afterlife and our existence is purely the outcome of chance events. The core of this belief is
a philosophical assumption that modern science tells all there is to know about us and the world.
With cogency and clarity, Augros exposes that assumption to the light and demolishes it. He shows
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“Far and away the best book I have ever read about the nature of mankind. On a scale of 1 to 10, I have to give it a 12.”
— Peter Kreeft, Ph.D., Professor of Philosophy, Boston College

XGALILEO REVISITED — Dom Paschal Scotti

G alileo is the name often invoked by those who say science and religion are in opposition. But is
that really the lesson to be drawn from the life of Galileo? No other work has brought together
such a complete description of the historical context of the controversies surrounding Galileo in
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GAREP . . . Sewn Softcover, $18.95
“Prof. Scotti’s richly detailed book brings that vibrant world to life and helps us to understand
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XTHE CASE FOR CATHOLICISM — Trent Horn

T he most up-to-date, comprehensive, and thorough defense of the Catholic Church against
Protestant objections in print, especially relevant for the 500th anniversary of the Protestant
Reformation. It answers arguments put forward by early Reformers as well as contemporary
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CCATP . . . Sewn Softcover, $19.95
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