Politics Archives

Monday

August 31, 2020

The China election

Bill Clinton, in a speech heralding China’s entry into the World Trade Organization in 2000, remarked that ‘by joining the WTO, China is not simply agreeing to import more of our products. It is agreeing to import one of democracy’s most cherished values, economic freedom. The more China liberalizes its economy, the more fully it will liberate the potential of its people — their initiative, their imagination, their remarkable spirit of enterprise. And when individuals have the power, not just to dream but to realize their dreams, they will demand a greater say.’It is by now glaringly obvious that this vision didn’t come to pass. For far too long, ‘End of History’ hubris dominated western engagement with China, and hubris led to nemesis.

Sunday

August 30, 2020

Solveig Lucia Gold

American Athens

I never understood why Plato wrote so harshly about democracy. Was he simply bitter over the death of his beloved mentor Socrates? And could his criticism of direct democracy in ancient Athens apply to a representative democracy like ours? Right now, the United States is looking increasingly Athenian. Plato characterized the birth of Athenian democracy as a rejection of expertise. The masses, previously content to defer to experts who knew what was good for the city, were led to believe that they could determine the good for themselves — and that the ‘good’ was whatever they subjectively found pleasurable.

Saturday

August 29, 2020

Stephen L. Miller

2016 all over again

I’m not an election prognosticator. I have no magic insight telling me what will happen on November 3, 2020. Frankly, I have zero idea. But what I do have is a great memory and some polling data that suggests Joe Biden’s media-assisted campaign is headed for an eerily similar crash landing to the one that happened in 2016. The media has once again sealed itself in a suffocating bubble, within which the impossible Trump victory can’t happen. The Democrats find themselves strapped to a low-energy candidate who is a bystander as social upheaval scorches battleground states. It has the look and feel of fall 2016. Democrats, start panicking now. First, Joe Biden’s poll numbers are starting to tighten.

Pedro L. Gonzalez

If anything, America has an under-incarceration problem

John Marvin Weed stood his ground as his assailants encircled him. He had already been pummeled and was bracing himself for more. Weed was with family that day, enjoying Maryland's Great Frederick Fair when a young man asked him for a dollar. When Weed refused, the young man and his brother attacked. In a video of the incident, Weed appears calm, hands low at his sides, as the brothers taunt him. Mild-mannered and middle-aged, Weed was a builder; he helped with his hands. 'He gave so much love to his young niece and nephew, four-wheeler rides, playing in the pool, reading bedtime stories, and so much more,’ said Weed's sister, Lori Hawkins.

Friday

August 28, 2020

Amber Duke

Rand Paul, BLM and DC’s street harassment laws

Over the past week, Washington, DC has turned into a truly dystopian nightmare. Diners at several area restaurants, including the famous Martin’s Tavern in Georgetown, were accosted by a Black Lives Matter mob that bullied them into raising their fists in solidarity with the movement. Restaurant patrons who refused to comply faced further verbal abuse and harassment. The trend continued outside the White House on Thursday night. Attendees of President Trump’s acceptance speech during the Republican National Convention were thrown to the wolves as they left the event, and were chased and screamed at as they made their way back to their hotels. Kentucky senator Rand Paul and his wife Kelley received some of the most aggressive harassment.

Roger Kimball

After the RNC, I am confident Trump will triumph

In most cases, prediction in politics is a mug’s game. Maybe that is why it is such a popular game. I forbear to speculate. But if you step back from the fray and ponder, I think you’ll agree that politics (like most human things) is so fraught with uncertainties that accurate prediction is well nigh impossible. Of course, you might be right in any given case. And if you make more than a couple of correct guesses, you can look forward to being hailed as a genius. But deep down you know that your predictions, whatever elaborate models you deployed to lend them an air of inevitability, remain but guesses. Luck, not rational probability, is the primary motor of your success.

Daniel McCarthy

Trump redefines the race

Helplessness and passivity were the defining themes of the Democratic convention last week. The American people are unable to overcome COVID-19 and an even more all-pervasive racial guilt without the right man in the White House — the nation is weak, and truth be told its would-be savior, Joe Biden, is not strong. But he is nice. The convention emphasized not Biden’s 47-year record in government, but his family and the tragedies it has suffered. Even in building up the nominee, suffering was the dominant trope. Americans must huddle together, and somehow by huddling around Joe Biden everything will be all right.This passivity was perhaps an inevitable byproduct of the rationale behind the Biden candidacy. Is he the best Democrat around?

Bridget Phetasy

Why I won’t vote

Almost exactly a year ago, I wrote a piece titled ‘The battle cry of the politically homeless’ in which I lamented the toxic tribalism that’s infecting our politics and pitting neighbor against neighbor, sister against brother, parent against child. ‘Democracy doesn’t die in the darkness; it dies when politics become team sports, in full view of a bloodthirsty, cheering electorate.’ At the end I wondered, ‘We will return to the Dark Ages or we will evolve. Is that likely? I dunno. Have we evolved that much from the Roman Colosseum? Barreling into 2020 — it doesn’t seem like it.’ In the last year, the globe has been ravaged by a pandemic that put the ineptitude of American institutions and leaders on display for the world.

The Spectator

Full transcript of President Trump’s RNC 2020 speech

Thank you very much. Thank you very much.Friends, delegates and distinguished guests, please. I stand before you tonight honored by your support, proud of the extraordinary progress we have made together over the last four incredible years and blooming with confidence in the bright future we will build for America over the next four years.We begin this evening — our thoughts are with the wonderful people who have just come through the wrath of hurricane Laura. We are working closely with state and local officials in Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, Mississippi. Sparing no effort to save lives while the hurricane was fierce, one of the strongest to make landfall in 150 years. The casualties and damage were far less than thought possible only 24 hours ago.

Wednesday

August 26, 2020

Amber Duke

Kristi Noem, first female president?

Former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley effectively launched her 2024 presidential campaign during her Monday night speech at the Republican National Convention to much media fanfare. Less noticed was an equally qualified and camera-ready Republican woman that is arguably much better positioned to carry the party torch post-Trump: South Dakota governor Kristi Noem. The media was split on reactions to Haley's audition: some mocked her declaration that America isn't a racist country, but others applauded her as the GOP's own 'return to normalcy' and 'compassionate' candidate. Voters who support the Trump agenda ought to be wary of this praise.

Dominic Green

Where is Biden’s post-convention bounce?

Convention season ain’t over till the dead cat bounces. A dead cat bounce, as followers of the animal spirits of the market know, is a small recovery in the value of a declining asset. As the wisdom of those who work in tall buildings has it, even a dead cat bounces if you drop it from a high window.The week before the Democratic convention, the polls showed Donald Trump trimming Biden’s double-digit lead into single figures. The numbers varied, but they averaged out to suggest that Biden was 7 or 8 percent ahead — not yet within the margin of error, but trending toward it.The Democrats’ non-conference that was nearly in Milwaukee was meant to arrest that decline.

Will Lloyd

We are all Rachel Dolezal now

As late as 2014, most Americans felt there was no need for the country to make any changes to address black-white inequality. 2015 was the year the future arrived. Donald Trump rode down the escalator. Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between The World and Me was a publishing sensation. Freddie Gray died in Baltimore. The ‘Great Awokening’ — the journey of white liberals to the left of every other group in American society on racial issues — began. And in Spokane, Washington, there was the case of Rachel Dolezal. Like the Trump campaign, or Coates’s writing, or Gray’s death, the inglorious circus that surrounded Dolezal, a white woman caught pretending to be black, X-rayed American race relations. Dolezal was not sui generis.

Karol Markowicz

The most memorable RNC speakers are not the stars

Let’s be real, the warm-up acts are never the draw. For every Jimi Hendrix opening for the Monkees (true story) there’s, well, every other opening act you’ve ever sat through to get to the main event. But the Republican National Convention has, for better or worse, managed to flip that on its head. The most memorable speakers, so far, have not been the stars. On Monday, Nikki Haley and Tim Scott did great. But Monday night’s most important moments came from Rep. Vernon Jones and Mark and Patricia McCloskey. Jones talked about supporting Donald Trump and what kind of havoc that wreaked in his own life. The McCloskeys spoke of being ordinary people who had been threatened at their home by the mob we see on our TVs.

Tuesday

August 25, 2020

Jacob Heilbrunn

Melania’s moment

Free Melania? She made her jailbreak tonight. Whether or not President Trump wins re-election, she was out to save, as far as possible, her own reputation. The voice was soothing, the sentiments compassionate and the delivery emollient. She found her voice. Her good fortune was to be preceded by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo who blabbered from the roof of Jerusalem's King David Hotel about Trump’s great foreign policy victories. The media complained about Pompeo breaking norms, but the only thing he really helped break were his own presidential ambitions by coming across as a dullard. His eminently forgettable speech set Melania up perfectly. The mainstream media could barely constrain its enthusiasm for her.

Roger Kimball

The GOP’s ‘Great American Story’ will play well at the ballot box

I can’t prove it, but it would not surprise me to discover that the architects of the Republican convention had read Wilfred McClay’s Land of Hope: An Invitation to the Great American Story. That book was published last year by Encounter Books. I am the publisher of Encounter Books. So when I tell you that I believe it is a great book — at last, an effective answer to Howard Zinn’s pink, anti-America People’s History of the United States — take it with a grain of salt. But after you savor the salt, I think you’ll agree with me. Since it was first published in 1980, Zinn’s book has poisoned the minds of millions of high school students.

Amber Duke

The difference between the RNC and the DNC, according to the Trump campaign

The Republican National Convention kicked off last night with big ratings — the C-SPAN livestream broadcast of the event had five and a half times as many viewers as the Democratic National Convention a week prior. According to the Trump campaign, that wasn't the only major difference between the two events. The Spectator asked Trump campaign spokesman Tim Murtaugh during a press call Tuesday to describe what he viewed as the main contrast between the RNC and the DNC after the former's first night of programming. Murtaugh pointed to the fact that the RNC included multiple everyday Americans as speakers, as well as the fact that the party united around its nominee, President Donald Trump.

Dominic Green

The Republicans have a race problem

Congratulations to Sen. Tim Scott for delivering one of the best speeches on the opening night of the Republican meta-convention, and combining an inspiring personal story with a dog whistle louder than Kimberly Guilfoyle.Guilfoyle merely bellowed a passing slur at ‘cosmopolitan elites’. As the daughter of a Puerto Rican ‘immigrant’, a cable news star, the ex-wife of a governor and the girlfriend of the President’s son, she knows a member of the cosmopolitan elite when she sees one — for instance, when she looks in the mirror.Scott went beyond hypocrisy. ‘They want to take more money from your pocket and give it to Manhattan elites and Hollywood moguls, so they get tax breaks,’ he said of the Democrats.

Toby Young

Make America Normal Again

To win in November, Trump should seek inspiration from President Alexander Lukashenko, the 65-year-old autocrat who has ruled Belarus since 1994. He trounced his liberal opponent in the presidential election in August with 80 percent of the vote. I’m not suggesting Trump emulate Lukashenko’s methods. Among other things, the man dubbed ‘Europe’s last dictator’ disqualified his three main political opponents at the beginning of the race, imprisoning two of them. He has never won an election with less than 75 percent of the vote, although none have been found to be free and fair by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), an election monitoring body.

Charles Lipson

Playing with fire

Some conflicts begin with clear aims but morph into endless battles, the original motives forgotten. The timeless metaphor for self-sustaining battles is Jarndyce and Jarndyce, the inheritance case at the heart of Charles Dickens’s Bleak House. ‘Jarndyce and Jarndyce drones on,’ he wrote. ‘This scarecrow of a suit has, over the course of time, become so complicated, that no man alive knows what it means... Innumerable children have been born into the cause; innumerable young people have married into it; innumerable old people have died out of it.’ Now we have Portland v. Public Order. What Jarndyce was for the law, Portland is for the lawless. For over two months, young demonstrators have gathered each night in Oregon’s largest city.

Chadwick Moore

Republicans actually make better TV

Here’s a question no one will ask. How is it possible the Republicans — the party universally deplored and maligned by Hollywood, Big Tech, and all of mainstream media — consistently manage to pull off far better production quality in broadcast content than the Democrats?This was fully evident Monday on night one of the Republican National Convention where the GOP delivered a sleek, well-produced, visually and audibly impressive presentation to American voters. Stack that next to what we saw from the Democrats last week, who have virtually every millionaire and billionaire in Hollywood and Silicon Valley on their ideological side — yet apparently, that support doesn’t extend to basic production, styling, or home office assistance.