A Certain Idea of America, page 22
Help revitalize small towns. Whatever will help, do it. We lose a lot when we lose those old shared ways and values. We can’t all live in cities and suburbs; we need diversity.
Protect religious freedom. The threats are real and will grow. Americans may not always be breaking down the doors to go to church, but they respect religious life and don’t want to see it under siege. Really, the point of conservatism is to conserve.
Here we degenerate into mere practical political advice for the GOP.
Americans would respect the Republican Party if it gave the impression its leaders are actually noticing America and have a sense of its real plights. If the government is going to be large, people might be inclined to see sober-minded Republicans as the best stewards of it. It is still only the GOP that can perform the fundamental mission of protecting the system that yielded all our wealth and allowed us to be generous with the world and with ourselves—free-market capitalism. Only the GOP can do this, because Republicans genuinely love economic freedom. You fight hard for what you love. Progressives do not love it. They accept it.
Republicans will be expected to foster and encourage the economic growth that can at least make a mild dent in our deficits. When you are understood not to be hostile to all spending you have greater leeway to see it coolly, and go after waste and fraud in spending. Republicans naturally enjoy that.
When you think like this—we are in a crisis, it will get worse, we must accentuate what holds us together and helps us muddle through—it helps you prioritize. These are my priorities as a conservative.
AGAINST THE TEAR-IT-DOWN MOVEMENT
August 17, 2017
The political aspect of the president’s failures this week is to reveal him as increasingly isolated. He is not without supporters, but it’s down to roughly a third of the country and, one senses, soft around the edges. That is not a base, it’s a core. A core can have an impact, but a president cannot govern if that’s all he has. You need something bigger behind you to scare your foes and stiffen your friends. The nation’s CEOs, feeling personal dismay and external pressure, ran for the exits. The president has further embarrassed and frustrated his party on Capitol Hill. That puts in further doubt needed legislation on such popular issues as tax reform and infrastructure, which might fare better if he were not associated with them.
Other fallout the past week is as consequential. Donald Trump is binding himself down with thick cords of rhetorical inadequacy. People felt let down, angry, and in some cases frightened by his inability to make clear moral distinctions when he addressed the events in Charlottesville, Virginia. There were neo-Nazis, anti-Semitic chants, white supremacists; a woman was killed and many people injured. It’s not hard to figure out who and what needed to be castigated—clearly, unambiguously, immediately.
Here is a cliché but only because it is true: In times of stress and fracture, people want a president who’s calm in the storm, who speaks to the nation’s moral conscience, recalls first principles, invokes what unites us, honestly defines the contours of an event, and softly instructs. Mr. Trump did not do any of that. If a leader is particularly gifted he could, in a moment of historical stress, succeed in speaking to the nation’s soul and moving its heart by addressing its brain. This kind of thing comes from love—of the country, our people, what we’ve been. It struck me this week as he spoke that his speeches and statements are peculiarly loveless. The public Mr. Trump is not without sentiment and occasional sentimentality, but the deeper wells of a broader love seem not there to draw from. Seven months in, people know they can look to him for a reaction, a statement, an announcement, but not for comfort, inspiration, higher meaning.
For leadership we turn, as we always do anyway, to each other—to thinkers and respected colleagues, religious figures and neighbors. After the church shootings in Charleston, South Carolina, two years ago, the great and immediate moral leaders were the victims’ families, whose words at the shooter’s bond hearing spread throughout the country within hours. “I forgive you.” “We are praying for you.” It was the authentic voice of American Christianity, of Wednesday night Bible study, of mercy and self-sacrifice. It quieted the soul of a nation: We’ll be OK. This is who we really are.
Those bereaved relatives never quite got the recognition and thanks they deserved. Their love saved the day.
Which gets me, belatedly and now hurriedly, to what was meant to be the subject of this column.
In June in London, with time on my hands, I walked by Parliament to stare at it. I like the color of its stones. There I noticed for the first time a fierce-looking statue on a towering pedestal. It is a heroic rendering of Oliver Cromwell. He helped lead a revolution that toppled the government. He rose in the military ranks through a brutal civil war and signed the death warrant of an English king, who was beheaded. He brutalized Catholic Ireland and went on to function, arguably, as a military dictator.
He also helped implant the idea that monarchs had best not ride roughshod over Parliament, created England’s first national (and more democratic) army, and widened religious tolerance, at least among Protestants. He died of natural causes, and when the royalists returned they dug him up and, in a piquant touch, beheaded his corpse.
Some fella. And yet there he is, put forth as one of the towering figures of his nation. He is not there because the British mean to endorse regicide or genocide. He is there because he is England. He is part of the warp and woof of that great nation’s story. He is there because the English still appear to love and respect their own history, which they know is one of struggle, not sinlessness. So he’s on a pedestal below which members of Parliament and tourists pass. This is what that statue says: I am Oliver Cromwell and I am here.
There is a movement now to take down our nation’s statues, at the moment primarily those of Confederate soldiers and generals. The reason is that they fought on behalf of a region that sought to maintain a cruel and immoral system, chattel slavery, which they did. But slavery was not only a Southern sin, it was an American one.
The Tear-It-Down movement is driven by the left and is acceded to by some on the right. This is the sophisticated stance. I do not share it. We should not tear down but build.
When a nation tears down its statues, it’s toppling more than brass and marble. It is in a way toppling itself—tearing down all the things, good, bad, and inadequate, that made it. Or, rather, everyone. Not all of what made America is good—does anyone even think this?—but why try to hide from that?
When you tear down statues, you tear down avenues of communication between generations. Statues teach. You walk by a statue of Robert E. Lee with your seven-year-old, and he asks who that is. You say he was a great general. When he’s eight, on the same walk, you explain the Civil War. When he’s ten you explain what was at issue, and how Lee was not only on the losing side but the wrong side. This is part of how history is communicated. We’re not doing it so well in our schools. It will be sad to lose another venue.
Condi Rice said it well, before the current controversy. She did not agree with the impulse to tear down. “Keep your history before you,” she said. Keep it in your line of sight.
And, once the tearing down starts, there’s no knowing where it will end. On this the president is right. Once the local statues are purged the Tear-Downers will look to Statuary Hall, and the names of military bases, and then on to the Founders, to the slaveholding Washington and Jefferson. Then, perhaps, to their words and ideas. In what way will that help us?
Edmund Burke famously said we have a duty to the past, the present, and the future. In the minds of the Tear-Downers only the present is important, and only their higher morality. But they are not the first ever to recognize the truth about slavery. Hundreds of thousands of dead Union soldiers did it before them. There are statues of them, too.
Here is a better way. Leave what is, alone. Be a noble people who inspire—and build—more statues. I’d like one that honors the families of the victims in the Charleston shooting.
More statues, not fewer; more honor, not more debris. More debris is the last thing we need.
JOE BIDEN CAN’T RESIST THE “RIVER OF POWER”
September 14, 2023
It’s been a week of “step away” stories for President Biden, the most significant of which came from the normally sympathetic David Ignatius of The Washington Post. His argument was clear and gently put: Mr. Biden is an admirable figure who’s won great victories, but age has taken too much from him. His supporters can see this, most privately admit it, and he should refrain from putting himself forward as his party’s nominee.
The tempo of such advice is increasing because time is running out for other candidates to gain purchase, raise money, and organize campaigns. Some urgency comes because even though he’s under increased scrutiny as a teller of untruths, Mr. Biden unleashed a whopper this week, on 9/11, after the morning’s commemorations, when he claimed in a speech that he’d rushed to Ground Zero the day after the attack. He hadn’t, and the White House quietly admitted as much; he visited the site with a congressional delegation on September 20, 2001.
Stories like this are so instantly checkable you wonder, again, why Mr. Biden would court embarrassment. After twenty-two years memory might scramble things, but CNN followed up with a report on other recent false claims, citing three in a single speech last month, one of them “long debunked.” It’s possible Mr. Biden has been telling these stories so long he’s become convinced they’re true. The disturbing consideration is that while repeated lying is a characterological fault, not knowing you’re lying might suggest a neurological one.
Last December I hoped the president’s advisers would take him aside and use some friendly persuasion. The age problem will only get worse, but it also offers a chance to cement his legacy. They could tell him, “You kept every promise you made to the party in 2020. You got rid of Donald Trump. You got us out of Afghanistan. You passed huge FDR-level bills that transformed the social safety net…. Boss, what a triumph! You did your job in history. You fulfilled your role.” He could go out an inspiration, announcing he wouldn’t throw his support behind any one candidate but would trust the party to decide.
I still think that’s the way to go. But only Joe Biden can remove Joe Biden. And there’s every sign he means to hang on—even past eighty-two, and after more than fifty years operating at the highest levels of public life, and having achieved all the glittering prizes.
In insisting on running he is making a historical mistake. Second terms are disaster sites, always now. He isn’t up to it; it will cloud what his supporters believe is a fine legacy and allow the Kamala Harris problem to fester and grow. She is proof that profound and generational party dominance in a state tends to yield mediocrity. Politicians from one-party states never learn broadness. They speak only Party Language to Party Folk. They aren’t forced to develop policy mastery, only party dynamics. They rely on personal charm but are superficial. Going national requires developing more depth, or at least imitating depth. She didn’t bother to do that.
Obviously if the president took himself out of the 2024 race, chaos would follow. Democrats would immediately commence a hellacious fight, sudden and jagged. A dozen governors, senators, and congressmen would enter the race. There would be no guarantee it wouldn’t produce a repeat of the 2020 Democratic primaries, when the party flag was planted so far to the left on such issues as illegal immigration that it thoroughly tripped up the eventual victor’s first term, and may account for his eventual loss.
There is no guarantee a man or woman thought to be essentially moderate, who would therefore be attractive to independents and centrists in the general election, would emerge, as Mr. Biden did in 2020. There is no guarantee the eventual nominee would be able to beat Mr. Trump. On the other hand, polls suggest it’s no longer assumed Mr. Biden would beat Mr. Trump.
But it would be a fight fought by a party newly alive, hungry, and loaded for bear. It would be turning a page from the endless repetition we’re caught in. It would introduce an unknown factor for Mr. Trump, should he be the Republican nominee. And presumably it would unveil a candidate who could wage a vigorous and physical campaign. The closer the election gets, the less you can imagine Mr. Biden commanding a real reelection drive, one with enough energy and focus, while Mr. Trump, who looks physically worse than Mr. Biden, seems in his brain to be exactly what he was in 2016 and will continue with his mad vigor.
I close with the fact that whenever I think of Mr. Biden’s essential nature and character I think of What It Takes, Richard Ben Cramer’s great history of the 1988 presidential campaign, Mr. Biden’s first. This, as I have written, annoys me because I found Cramer a rather tricky and light-fingered fellow. He was also an indefatigable reporter with a gift of gab and a real voice who produced a classic of modern politics. Thirty years after publication, it presages a great deal of what we observe each day of Mr. Biden, and it is suggestive of the origins of the Hunter Biden problems and allegations.
For one thing, Joe Biden has always been obsessed by real estate and fancy houses, and money was always an issue. On a house he would buy a few years into his first Senate term: “The house is gorgeous, an old du Pont mansion in the du Pont neighborhood called Greenville, outside Wilmington. It’s the kind of place a thousand Italian guys died building—hand-carved doorways, a curbing hand-carved grand staircase that Clark Gable could have carried a girl down, a library fit for a Carnegie…. And a ballroom—can’t forget the ballroom.” He bid more than he had, “but Biden never let money stand in the way of a deal. He got in the developer’s face and started talking—fast.” He got the house—he always got the houses—and thereafter scrambled to cover its cost.
He wanted it all and had a sharp eye for how to get it. There is a beautiful speech Cramer presents as Mr. Biden’s. He was sitting around a backyard in Wilmington with friends when his sons were young, and Mr. Biden asked, “Where’s your kid going to college?”
His friend said, “Christ, Joe! He’s 8 years old!” Another implied it wasn’t important.
“Lemme tell you something,” Mr. Biden says, with a clenched jaw. “There’s a river of power that flows through this country…. Some people—most people—don’t even know the river is there. But it’s there. Some people know about the river, but they can’t get in…they only stand at the edge. And some people, a few, get to swim in the river. All the time. They get to swim their whole lives…in the river of power. And that river flows from the Ivy League.”
A lot of hungers, resentments, and future actions were embedded in that speech by Joe Biden, Syracuse Law, class of ’68. They aren’t the words of an unsophisticated man but of a man who wanted things—houses, power, the glittering prizes—and who can’t always be talked out of them.
A TABLOID LEGEND ON JEFFREY EPSTEIN’S DEATH
August 15, 2019
This week we turn the column over to the late Mike McAlary (1957–98), tabloid star and journalistic tough guy.
Here’s Mike:
So I’m talking to this political guy, holds a significant office which I won’t tell you because it’s none of your business. We’re having breakfast in a high-end midtown hotel. Gleaming silver buffet, steam rising, nervous, deferential waiters. He’s right at home. They have everything—waffles, eggs Benedict, golden hash browns.
Naturally he orders fresh berries and I have cantaloupe with a little china cup of cottage cheese. We sort of laugh, like we’re admitting. We’re so important, we must maintain our health for the good of the republic. Pols used to look like pigs, which was often an outer representation of an inner reality. It was all very honest! Now they’re gym rats, on our dime. “Vote for me, I’m completely fit!”
My business went to hell when it started maintaining its health. The old newsrooms—the whiskey in the lower-right drawer of the copy desk, the guy who’d call in sick in a blackout and the next morning forget, bump into his substitute, and scream at his editor: “You’re scheming to replace me!” The sound of the wires, hysterical with news. The nerve-jangling bedlam. Now it’s the dry tap-tap-tap in the gray felt cubicle when anyone’s in the newsroom, which they aren’t because they’ve all got a cable hit.
Anyway, we’re talking and I ask about Epstein. You guys in Washington really interested in this story? He says, “First I have to tell you my Epstein joke: I was stunned to hear about the suicide of Jeffrey Epstein. And so was Jeffrey Epstein!”
I give him a laugh. Good try. But what are you saying? He shrugs. It’s a big subject at Hamptons fundraisers. Otherwise, eh, not really.
I’m thinking but this is the story with everything. Wealth, power, darkness. Princes and presidents. People with secrets. Rumors of spying. Even an English aristo moll on the lam.
He’s the most famous prisoner in America! They put him in a jail, where he supposedly tries to kill himself. So they move him to a special cell, heavily guarded 24/7. Don’t worry, he’s safe, he’s gonna face the music!
Then dawn on a Saturday in high August. Everyone important is away. It’s an entire city run by the second string—novices, kids, and pension-bumpers at the police desk, the news desk, the hospital. It breaks like sudden thunder: Epstein is dead, he committed suicide in his cell!
And then, like, silence. Thunder’s followed by fog.
Government dummies up, no one knows nothin’. Finally on Monday the attorney general has a news conference. He’s very upset! What incompetence! That jail don’t work right!
But incompetence proves nothing, right? If Epstein killed himself, he chose the time he knew the guards were asleep. If Epstein was murdered, his killer chose the time he knew the guards were asleep. Incompetence is completely believable but insufficient.
