Features

Tuesday

November 14, 2023

Israel’s imperial problem is ours, too

Israel will win its war against Hamas. But can it win the kind of war the United States lost in Afghanistan? Israel is facing today a dilemma that the West will face tomorrow. For more than sixty years, it has been easy for Western liberals to believe that imperialism is an unnecessary evil. When the US conquers and militarily occupies a foreign country, liberals don’t call it imperialism. It’s merely “regime change,” “nation-building” and “promoting democracy.” Such Newspeak has been powerless to alter the outcome of America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, wars which after successful regime decapitations followed by decades of occupation and trillions of dollars spent on rebuilding failed to establish anything resembling secure liberal democracies in either land.

Ashley Rindsberg

How Harvard befriended Hamas

In the aftermath of the October 7 attack on Israel, when videos were circulating on social media showing the enormities perpetrated on Israelis by Hamas terrorists — women raped, old people and children abducted, civilians murdered en masse — students of Harvard’s leftist groups banded together to condemn... Israel. Members of thirty-four student organizations signed a letter declaring that they “hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.” The spectacle of America’s elite youth engaging in a shameless act of victim-blaming sent shockwaves through the world. Reprehensible as the letter is, the reality is that Harvard’s relentless pursuit of elitism has, for generations, been a breeding ground for antisemitism.

Aidan McLaughlin

A look inside Right Side Broadcasting Network

On a summer afternoon in Erie, Pennsylvania, Right Side Broadcasting Network host Matthew Alvarez was doing what the outlet does best: interviewing diehard supporters of former president Donald Trump before one of his raucous rallies, the WWE-style events that defined his 2016 sprint to the White House and continued after his 2020 election loss. At one point during his cheery canvass of the crowd, Alvarez pointed his microphone at a stocky man wearing a Trump 2024 baseball cap and a “Thin Blue Line” T-shirt. “Joe Biden is a disgrace to this country,” the man said in a thick drawl. “And so are all the left and the RINOs, the globalists, every one of ’em! Kill ’em all! Kill ’em all!” “I agree with you on that,” Alvarez cautiously replied.

Bill McMorris

Was 2023 the year of the labor union?

It is only fitting that the low point of the American labor movement occurred in 2009, the Year of the Rat. The Great Recession may have started with Wall Street speculation in the housing market, but your average American had most likely never heard of Henry Lehman or his siblings until the day Dick Fuld drove the 150-year-old bank bearing their name into the ditch. But General Motors, Chrysler? Cars, even more than Hollywood, jazz and the semi-automatic rifle, are the quintessential American business. How could those get driven into the ground? As soon as freshly evicted homeowners finished packing the remains of their subprime split-levels into the backseats of their battered Tahoes, they went looking for culprits. They settled on the United Auto Workers.

Andrew Bacevich

Why the post-Cold War era is far from over

In various speeches this year, secretary of state Antony Blinken has declared that “the post-Cold War era is over.” The announcement passes all but unnoticed, eclipsed as it is by crises, such as war in Ukraine and the Middle East, that make Blinken’s point in a starker way. Not so long ago, it was taken for granted that the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 had inaugurated a new age. Now, if Blinken is correct, the lifespan of that age hardly exceeds the duration of Tom Brady’s career as a star quarterback. By 1989, the United States had ascended to the status of sole remaining superpower. No challenges to its global primacy — political, military, economic or cultural — were visible anywhere on the horizon.

Henry Olsen

Facing the facts of the West

The century began with a global celebration — the West’s belief in liberal democratic capitalism had battled foes for centuries and emerged victorious. All that remained was for the rest of the globe to melt into the West’s soft and loving embrace. Two decades in, things look much less rosy. China’s rapid rise has not spurred democratization, as many suggested it might; instead it has nourished a massive ideological and political competitor that may supplant the West not only economically but as an arbiter of global culture and behavior. Western decline is not yet inevitable, but Western values will survive and spread only if leaders recognize two clear facts. The first is that the spread of Western values has in large part been due to the dominance of Western power.

Will Collins

Poland and Hungary learn different lessons from history

For decades, the European Union was dominated by a combination of French élan and German economic clout. By the late 2010s, a conservative Budapest-Warsaw alliance seemed poised to challenge this arrangement. The ideological firepower was supplied by Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, who emerged as an unlikely spokesman for the international right, while Poland’s booming economy and large population lent the partnership some much needed heft. The Polish elections in mid-October not only marked the end of the Law and Justice party’s near-decade of conservative rule; they offered another blow to a Polish-Hungarian relationship already fraying over the war in Ukraine.

Thomas Eaton

Indian Exodus: the Jewish population exits after 2,000 years

In December the Gate of Heaven synagogue in Thane, a city that links the peninsula of Mumbai with the Indian mainland, will light the Chanukah menorahs as it has annually since its opening in 1879. Among the initial members were Jews whose ancestors may have arrived in India during the time of King Solomon, when Middle East trade routes were established to exchange iron, peacocks, gems, ginger and other spices. Over the many intervening centuries, waves of Jewish immigration have washed up on the Indian shores from different ends of the earth. The varying groups came with separate traditions and practices and ways of living, but they shared prayers and faith, a distinct identity in a country where identity carries great importance.

Mary Kate Skehan

The promise and peril of Facebook Marketplace

Items currently available for sale on Facebook Marketplace within eleven miles of my kitchen table (a partial list): Two antique candlesticks, $20 One 1994 Lane cedar chest, $110 One Birkin philodendron, $20 Drunk Elephant Bronze Drops, $30 I became a Facebook Marketplace power user when my husband and I moved from a one-bedroom in San Antonio to a lovelorn Victorian in Pennsylvania. We had 3,000 square feet to furnish, and a budget depleted by closing costs and moving expenses. Marketplace is a classified-ad section of Facebook that was introduced as a less-seedy alternative to Craigslist, a place your grandma could browse for an antique footstool without stumbling across a solicitation for feet pics.

Friday

October 20, 2023

Spectator Editorial

DC under the influence

Corruption and influence peddling seem to be running rampant in Washington these days, but that’s nothing new. We have a rich history of political scandal that goes back to our founding. America loves the spectacle of bringing a politician down: it’s part of our heritage. The tyrant King George started it all when he demanded higher taxes on tea and quartering soldiers in colonialists’ homes. Our rebel forebears weren’t having it and thankfully we have the Third Amendment to ensure it can never happen again. Aaron Burr, of course, is one of America’s favorite politicians to have been run out of public life.

Tulsi Gabbard

After the Maui fires

Maui, Hawaii It’s been almost eight weeks since the wildfires devastated Lahaina. Within a few days of the fire, I went to West Maui, visiting the community, friends and people I’ve known and worked with for years. Lahaina was once the capital of the Kingdom of Hawaii. It was a lush wetland, a destination that everyone wanted to go and visit. But thanks to a long history of plantation owners and corporations diverting water and streams away from their natural course to benefit their business interests, it’s now a community that is dry, arid, struggling with drought and brush fires every year. People around the world have seen the devastation, but the images don’t do it justice.

Roger Kimball

The changing season brings a change in politics

If you are paying attention, you know that nature is full of inklings and adumbrations. I am writing in New England in mid-September — and it was just about a week ago that a subtle change in the atmosphere proclaimed the advent of autumn. It was not just that the weather listed cooler; it was also that the entire sensory gestalt shifted. The world suddenly bristled with different smells and colors and sounds. Browns and yellows and reds were edging out summer greens in the leaves. The roads were carpeted with acorns. You knew that the world was confronting you with different prospects and expectations. Something similar happens in the world of politics. For a long time, a certain narrative reigns.

Mary Katharine Ham

The case against the Thanksgiving dinner fight

As we come upon the treacherous holiday season before a presidential election, there will be plenty of people in media who tell you it is your moral responsibility to ruin food and fellowship with political confrontations. Armed with the emotional IQ of one of those idiots tossing perfectly good soup on the Mona Lisa — an ineffectual waste of vittles and dignity — these columnists insist that you must not let Aunt Margie’s incorrect opinions stand, lest democracy die in the darkness of her benighted worldview. You must serve countervailing takes as hot as the mashed potatoes, no matter the cost to family comity. It doesn’t have to be this way. There was a time, not too long ago, when we didn’t have to turn every breaking of bread into a struggle session.

Emmet Penney

Meet Meredith Angwin, the grandmother changing the energy industry

Along a twist in the Connecticut River within an old-style colonial Vermont home lives Meredith Angwin, the Jewish grandmother who saw what almost no one else did: the coming downfall of the American electrical system. Three years ago, Angwin self-published Shorting the Grid: The Hidden Fragility of Our Electric Grid, the first-ever explanation for laymen of America’s labyrinthine, abstruse power markets. Her diagnosis was simple and troubling: when America moved away from the monopoly utility system in the Nineties toward restructured electricity markets, all players were divested from the responsibility of keeping the lights on.

Bridget Phetasy

The new wave of woman hate

It was in the late 1990s, during then-President Bill Clinton’s scandal, when I first concluded that neither major political party actually cared about women. I watched — in horror — as the Democrats downplayed the allegations and defended Clinton’s actions rather than fully supporting Monica Lewinsky. Republicans exploited her testimony in order to discredit and weaken the president. Both parties used her to advance their own agendas at the expense of Lewinsky’s dignity and well-being. While the adults around me were concerned with the political fanfare, I only saw a young woman caught in the crossfire, enduring public scrutiny, humiliation and personal trauma while the media feasted on the spectacle.

Melanie Notkin

The rise of the underground free speech groups

Robin McDuff still lives in the same California town where she and other feminists formed a community back in the 1970s, during the heyday of the women’s movement. But by the end of the decade, McDuff had already begun to drift away from feminist orthodoxies. She’d been working in the anti-rape movement where victims said they wanted the man who assaulted them to understand the pain they caused, apologize and learn why never to do it again. They didn’t want them in jail. But most of McDuff’s feminist peers were fixated solely on incarceration as justice. “These women had no interest in considering any nuance of a case,” McDuff, now sixty-nine and retired, told me. “Nuance and feminism have never done well together.

Daniel McCarthy

The future looks Republican

In presidential elections there’s no such thing as a Pyrrhic victory. Winning is everything — and neither party would ever openly admit there could be advantages to losing. Yet the outcome of the 2020 election wasn’t entirely unlucky for the Republican Party or even Donald Trump himself. And as both parties look to next year’s contest, far-sighted strategists can see a bigger picture beyond Trump and Biden. Whoever won in 2020 was going to face the ugly but necessary task of withdrawing US forces from Afghanistan, where twenty years of nation-building had failed to establish a free state that could resist the Taliban. Trump might have executed the withdrawal more successfully than Biden. But if he had, would the media have covered him more favorably? Of course not.

Paul Wood

‘We must defend our territory’: on the frontline of Europe’s migrant woes

Lampedusa, Italy The motorcade carrying Italy’s prime minister is being held up by a wild-eyed pirate. With a bushy black beard, sun-blasted face, tattooed forearms and a single earring, he stands in front of the convoy of a dozen police cars, extending a flattened palm. Blue lights flash, engines idle and somewhere behind blacked-out windows sit Giorgia Meloni, the prime minister, and her important guest, Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission. The pirate is Giacomo Sferlazzo, leader of the protests that began on the island of Lampedusa after around 100 small boats carrying migrants arrived there on a single day in September. Really he’s a local musician, professional puppeteer and, as he describes himself, a Marxist-Leninist follower of Antonio Gramsci.

Ben Domenech

Migrant mania comes to sanctuary cities

The first thing you see when you climb out of the Rio Grande into Eagle Pass, Texas, is the homely site of the municipal golf course. Nine holes along the river expanded to eighteen via different tees, the pruned grass of the course is scuffed and torn from the hundreds of thousands of footsteps that have crossed it just this year, rubber soles that trekked from Central and South America to get to this godforsaken patch of green that signifies the US of A and everything it holds for the migrant who dreams of a new life. As welcomes go, it’s no sparkling torch of Lady Liberty.

Stephen R. Soukup

Justin Trudeau is tanking Canada’s economy

In September the leaders of the world’s most powerful nations met in New Delhi for the annual G20 Summit to address such heady matters as the war between Russia and Ukraine, the future of energy production and the criticality of food security. Everyone smiled for the cameras, shook hands politely and agreed to do their best to do something about everything, just so long as they weren’t asked to make any enforceable commitments. At the end of the weekend, all the great men and women of the world put their shoes back on, took one more group photo and bid adieu to their friends (and enemies). Then they all headed for home. All, that is, except one.