Features

Monday

April 18, 2022

In search of a Biden doctrine

Considering how likely we all are to be blown to pieces by it within the next five years, the atomic bomb has not roused so much discussion as might have been expected,” wrote George Orwell in 1945. The public conversation soon caught up with the lethal realities of the nuclear age. The possibility of annihilation loomed over politics, domestic and foreign, for much of the second half of the twentieth century. Then, with the fall of the Berlin Wall, it faded into the background. Thanks to Vladimir Putin, the threat has returned to the fore. The isolated and unpredictable strongman in the Kremlin is not shy when it comes to reminding the world of Russia’s nuclear arsenal.

Daniel McCarthy

Why Putin won’t save NATO

Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is the best thing to happen to NATO since 1989. No amount of cajoling by American presidents could get the Germans to increase their defense spending to 2 percent of GDP, as the alliance asks. The Russian president found a way to persuade them. Putin has also persuaded Finns and Swedes that joining NATO is a good idea. Not for the first time, a war is having the opposite of the effect its instigator intended. Putin may yet get what he demanded from Ukraine and the West right before his invasion. NATO membership may be on the table for everyone else but not for Ukraine. Russia wants its possession of Crimea to be acknowledged by Kyiv, and that too is within Putin’s reach.

Matt Purple

Springtime for Cold War nostalgics

My favorite spy movie cliché of all time is the secret agent stuck in the 1980s. The threats have gone asymmetrical, terrorists slip across borders, but our hero longs for the simple days when the world was divided between good Westerners and bad Russians. “You’re a fossil!” sneer his girlboss department administrator, his vegan drone pilot, his tech whiz who has just hunted down a non-state actor by crosschecking the latest SIGINT with a Yelp! review of an Iraqi yoga studio. Cut to him muttering under his breath à la Judi Dench in Casino Royale: “Christ, I miss the Cold War.” Now, suddenly, those who miss the Cold War are having a moment.

Michael Auslin

What Ukraine means for Asia

If Asia has entered the debate over the war in Ukraine, it is primarily through questions over the role China is purported to be playing in supporting Russia. Given the now-infamous declaration of a “partnership without limits” by Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping during the Beijing Olympics just weeks before the invasion, many observers have searched for signs of Chinese aid, military or economic, to Russia in the conflict. The scope of devastation in Ukraine and the probable war crimes being committed by Russian troops understandably mean less attention has been paid to how the conflict might affect geopolitical stability in the Indo-Pacific region. The exception is Taiwan — there has been considerable speculation over the influence of Ukraine on Beijing’s calculations there.

Tevi Troy

How to avoid World War Three

The Russian assault on Ukraine has awakened the West to the fact that we may be back in a Cold War — or worse. After a few decades’ respite in which the United States did not find itself in conflict with any nuclear powers, presidents must consider a world in which nuclear-armed Russia and China actively oppose US interests and deliberately test American resolve. This reality will become even more complicated if a hostile Iran gets its hands nuclear weapons too. The return of Cold War-style geopolitics means the return of Cold War-style statecraft. Presidents will once again face the difficult task of calibrating their actions to advance US goals while avoiding escalation toward possible nuclear confrontation.

Bill McMorris

Of Mahler and mandates

On February 23, 1897 a slight Austrian eccentric walked into the parish church of St. Ansgar and St. Bernhard in Hamburg, affirmed his belief in the Holy Trinity, the one, holy, Catholic, and apostolic church, and received the sacrament of baptism. Some months later, Gustav Mahler was named principal director of the Viennese court opera — a post that would have been denied to him had he not converted from Judaism. One hundred and twenty-five years after his baptism, the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts honored Mahler by performing his Second Symphony with legendary guest conductor Michael Tilson Thomas.

Bridget Phetasy

I am woman. Watch me push

My husband and I recently attended the virtual childbirth classes offered by the hospital where I am registered to deliver our first child. We are classic first-time parents. We have no idea what to expect. Excited and terrified, we’re aware that no matter how much we prepare, there is really no way to. So we signed up for the six-hour class on a Saturday, hoping to get some sense of what labor would be like and the standard procedures at the hospital. The three nurses who taught the class had been bringing babies into the world for well over a decade. They seemed funny and capable. However, it wasn’t long into the training before they started referring to us as variations on a theme of pregnant: “pregnant people,” “pregnant persons,” “birthing persons.

Madeleine Kearns

Children’s lives depend on parents’ rights

Yaeli Galdamez was a “girly girl,” her mother Abigail Martinez said in a recent interview. As a child growing up in El Salvador and California, she dressed in princess costumes and later had crushes on boys. But after she was bullied for her appearance in middle school, Yaeli began developing symptoms of depression. In eighth grade, she attempted suicide by overdosing on pills. Her mother was desperate to get her the help she needed. So as a sophomore Yaeli began regularly seeing the psychologist at her local high school. But the family says that her counseling for depression was accompanied by a focus Abigail knew nothing about: the school psychologist spent two years encouraging Yaeli in a male identity, Andy (sometimes Andrew).

Christopher Caldwell

Cheugy, Gu and you

New executives at Tiffany, the venerable American jeweler, have decided to hawk what used to be called “bling.” Just before Covid hit in late 2019, LVMH bought Tiffany & Co. for $16 billion. LVMH, which started out as the high-end luggage company Louis Vuitton, has taken over all manner of fancy wine, perfume and clothing emporia. The Tiffany buyout was the largest in luxury-sector history. Bernard Arnault, chairman of LVMH, installed one of his sons, Alexandre, as executive vice president. “It’s time,” Alexandre said recently, “to push the boundaries a little bit.” In a bunch of recent press reports, we’ve been given a hint of what that means.

Peter Wood

Stop reading

Like you, I enjoy reading. I know, of course, because you are reading this. But perhaps you also share my interest in preventing others from reading. In case you are not yet enlisted in the Restricted Literacy Movement, allow me to point out our three basic claims. (Call it RLM, why don’t we: acronyms don’t have to be read, after all.) First, literacy beyond the rudimentary has become unnecessary. Most people can do their jobs and find fulfilling leisure without it. Second, attempting to produce literacy in the unwilling is an expensive, typically futile undertaking. Third, literacy is simply harmful to many who have acquired it. It engenders discontent, self-doubt and destructive impulses.

Zoe Strimpel

Dan Savage has fallen out of love with the left

It was a suspenseful business, arranging to meet Dan Savage, America’s most famous giver of sex advice, LGBT rights advocate, porn-festival organizer and all-round cult figure. He was by turns stern, snappy and apologetic in his emails; he was brisk in his replies and then months would pass with no word. And so I breathe a sigh of relief when Savage approaches the outside table of the café I suggested in the Capitol Hill area of Seattle. He is wearing jeans, bright orange hightop sneakers and layered flannel shirts. He walks softly, with the supple watchfulness of a teenage boy. He also talks softly — a contrast with his more forceful podcast voice — apologizing for being five minutes late.

Josie Cox

Joining the SoulCycle cult

"She’s in a cult,” my husband told our friends over dinner recently, eyebrows slightly arched, kind of — but not really — joking. I’m not, of course, but I’m oddly comfortable with the accusation. The day before, I’d done The Double. After dropping my daughter off at school and mumbling something about an urgent meeting to one of the mothers hoping for a chat, I caught the subway to the West Village and didn’t exhale until I stepped into the reception area, where the inoffensive grapefruit aroma of a $42 Jonathan Adler candle swaddled me like a mollified newborn. I was in.

Matthew Continetti

Revenge of the populists

In February 2021 the FBI indicted L. Brent Bozell IV for crimes committed during the Capitol riot. The significance of Bozell’s presence in the rabble that broke into the Senate chamber was not lost on the media. “Mr. Bozell’s father is a high-profile right-wing activist known for infusing his politics with Christian values,” the New York Times mentioned in its write-up of the arrest. And Bozell’s grandfather, L. Brent Bozell Jr., had been William F. Buckley Jr.’s debate partner, Joseph McCarthy’s and Barry Goldwater’s ghostwriter, the founder of Triumph and organizer of the first anti-abortion protest in the United States. Liberal critics traced the arc of the American right from Bozell Jr.

Jesse Singal

Why we need robust free speech laws

The biggest tragedy of the Russian invasion of Ukraine is, of course, the loss of thousands of Ukrainians, who have been killed because of Vladimir Putin’s insane and horrific actions. But alongside that horror are many other alarming developments. One of them is the near-total suppression of the free flow of information in both Russia and China. As you have likely read, Putin cast the war with Ukraine not as the unprovoked invasion it is but, laughably, as a “special military operation” for “de-Nazifying” the Ukrainian leadership. Russia swiftly passed a law greatly enabling Putin’s propaganda campaign.

Daniella Greenbaum Davis

Ain’t that good news

A few Fridays ago, I met Tablet magazine’s incomparable Liel Leibovitz for breakfast. Over inedible gluten-free banana bread, we caught up on everything from Covid to religion, politics and pop culture. The conversation took a depressing turn, as so many seem to these days. I asked Liel if he had seen some recent ridiculous news — now too distant and unremarkable to even remember — but which highlighted the extreme hypocrisy and self-defeating brokenness of our society. He said that he had, and added: “Isn’t it great?” “Great?” I asked. “Great,” he said. “Just terrific. Things like this make me giddily optimistic.” Liel shared his philosophy with me while we walked to the Upper East Side’s premier kosher butcher — Park East.

Joel Kotkin

How the boomers robbed the young of all hope

"Young people do not degenerate; this occurs only after grown men have already become corrupt.” — Montesquieu, The Spirit of Laws, 1748. The great test of a generation is whether it leaves better prospects for its descendants. Yet by virtually every indication, the baby boomers, and even the Gen Xers, are leaving a heritage of economic carnage — as well as a growing social and cultural dissipation that could shape our future and the fate of democratic self-rule, and not for the better. This legacy comes not from outside forces, but the investment bankers, tech oligarchs and their partners in the clerisy who have weakened their national economies and undermined the chances of upward mobility for most young people.

Thursday

March 24, 2022

Spectator Editorial

What is conservatism for?

Rick Scott recently managed to elbow his way into a jam-packed news cycle with an eleven-point plan to “rescue America.” The Florida senator did not, however, get the headlines he wanted. Senator Scott’s proposals ranged from the trivial, such as a suggestion to name the border wall after Donald Trump, to the obvious: growing the economy was one especially helpful idea. But it was a tax plan that landed him in hot water with colleagues. “All Americans should pay some income tax to have skin in the game, even if a small amount,” suggested Mr. Scott. “Currently over half of Americans pay no income tax.

Chadwick Moore

The United States of Uber

I’m getting into the backseat of an Uber in Washington, DC with a cup of coffee in one hand and a tattered, floppy cloth mask in the other. I’ll make a half-assed attempt to mask up! indulging the Democrats’ last gasps of Covid political theater, only on airplanes and in Ubers, and that’s just to avoid the hassle of getting banned if you don’t. My mask — I only own one — is about as snug as a Kleenex with too-wet noodles for straps. It covers my contagion holes for only a few moments at a time when the loose cloth rests on the tip of my nose. The struggle to keep it up for the duration of the journey is my own bit of theater. “Do you need to switch that mask out?” a flight attendant once asked me. “Oh, no, I could never do that.

John R. MacArthur

Joe Biden is winning

By the middle of January, I’d read some version of the headline “Biden Can Still Rescue His Presidency” so many times that it seemed an algorithm had taken over from the editors. The New York Times placed it above a column by Bret Stephens, a prominent anti-Trump conservative and a member of the pundit pack that earnestly wished the president Godspeed when he entered the White House more than a year ago. Stephens, like most of his colleagues, argued that Biden was “flailing — and failing” — because of what the paper’s news pages have described as a “legislative agenda in shambles.

The Spectator

Fight for the right

Sohrab Ahmari Modern American conservatism is composed of three distinct traditions: libertarian economics, foreign-policy hawkism and social traditionalism. This “fusion” was born of a contingent historical moment, the Cold War, when the Soviet threat forced different social classes and their ideological spokesmen to band together in common cause. There was no eternal principle demanding that these groups tie their destinies together — a fact that became apparent with Donald Trump’s rise, which divided the three camps along various axes of alliance and enmity. Fusionism is dead. Well and truly dead.