Spectator Editorial

This has, so far, been a year of hard lessons. Spiraling inflation has given households an expensive economic refresher course. A land war in Europe has offered an unwelcome reminder of old geopolitical and military truths. But arguably the most important lesson of 2022 concerns the point at which these economic, military and geopolitical considerations converge: energy. On this vital issue, the West has suffered from an epidemic of amnesia in recent years. Too often energy security has either been taken for granted by policymakers and voters, for whom the last energy crisis had become a distant memory, or actively disparaged by an environmental movement whose hardline hostility to fossil fuels has become received wisdom in polite circles.

Toward the end of the summer, Republicans found themselves with a severe case of pre-midterm jitters. This ailment is prone to flare up every four years, as the opposition party frets over whether it can deliver the incumbent president and his party the clobbering that has come to be expected. A common symptom of this nervousness is for the out-of-power party to wonder if it might fare better with the voters if it set out a substantive policy agenda, rather than simply relying on anger at the other side’s overreach.

When hundreds of thousands of migrants surged to the southern border soon after Joe Biden took office, administration officials urged patience. Donald Trump had “dismantled” the system, homeland security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas insisted when asked about chaotic scenes at the border last March. “It takes time to rebuild it virtually from scratch,” he said. Well, the Biden administration has now had plenty of time — and there is no end to the border crisis in sight. Eighteen months on from Mayorkas’s assurances, the numbers are no less staggering. In June alone, Customs and Border Protection reported more than 200,000 apprehensions. So far this year, law enforcement has encountered more than 1.5 million migrants in attempted border crossings.

In contemporary finance, a bank’s “head of responsible investing” is meant to be an apostle of woke capitalism: a very modern kind of money man who tours the world touting all the good their employer is doing. So you might have expected a speech on climate change and finance by Stuart Kirk, the man with that job title at HSBC Asset Management, to be a bromide-filled snoozefest about the win-win nature of the transition to the green economy. But Mr. Kirk’s address at a recent conference on “Moral Money” was nothing of the sort. Instead, he delivered a broadside against the fashionable idea that climate change is a risk that no financial institution can afford to ignore.

Do you remember Rebekah Jones? Don’t worry, we’d forgotten about her too. At the height of the pandemic, she resigned as a low-level functionary in Florida’s public health bureaucracy and accused her state’s governor, Ron DeSantis, of cooking the books on Covid. There was never much evidence to back up Jones’s claims of data manipulation, but that didn’t stop her becoming a pandemic-era media darling. She was given seemingly endless airtime on cable news while newspaper profiles heralded her as a brave whistleblower. Boosted by this favorable coverage, the kooky data scientist even announced a congressional run. But it is now as clear as could be that Jones was wrong.

America is a young nation — and young at heart. Our national ethos is centered on those four words in the Declaration of Independence, “the pursuit of happiness.” In order to pursue anything, you need a certain vigor. America had vigor even before the youth culture of the Sixties revolutionized how we thought about age. That decade ushered in the famous slogan “don’t trust anyone over thirty.” We’re not nearly so politically incorrect now, but the mentality still holds. America is forever prodding and poking its young, waiting for some wellspring of Talmudic wisdom to come gushing forth. What does Gen Z think?! Gen Z would just like to finish high school, thank you very much.

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.

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.

"The test of a first-rate intelligence,” F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, “is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” Fitzgerald wrote that in 1936 in an essay called “The Crack-Up.” At the time, the US economy was coming out of the Depression. A Democratic administration was expanding the reach and influence of the federal government, notably into areas of the economy where it did no good, and war was on the horizon. On the bright side, inflation in 1936 was 1.46 percent and GDP was growing at 12.9 percent per year, which is even higher than the capitalists of the CCP have recently claimed for China.

Meta is meant to be better — better than Facebook, better even than reality. In the future, a second Edward Gibbon may wonder not just whether it was a good idea for the federal government to encourage Mark Zuckerberg and a handful of talented techies to launch a Revenge of the Nerds coup against the minds and manners of America, but also what it was about reality that made us want to escape it so badly in the first place. There has never been a society more blessed than that of the United States.

'Welcome to 2030. You’ll own nothing. And you’ll be happy.” This is not a quotation from George Orwell or Aldous Huxley. It is not even supposed to be dystopian. If it is fiction, it is not because it is implausible, but because it has yet to be accomplished as fact. These are the opening lines from a social media video issued by the World Economic Forum in 2016, and generated from “the input of members of the WEF’s Global Future Councils.” These visionaries have further delights in store for us: “Whatever you want, you’ll rent... The US won’t be the world’s leading superpower… You’ll eat much less meat… A billion people will be displaced by climate change. We’ll have to do a better job at welcoming and integrating refugees.

Every president is a hostage to fortune, but every president makes his own luck. The George W. Bush presidency was redefined by the 9/11 attacks and ruined by its response. The crash of the markets in 2008 pushed Barack Obama ahead of John McCain in the polls. The Democrats’ choice of Hillary Clinton in 2016 was their misfortune and a gift to Donald Trump. Would Joe Biden have won in 2020 without Covid-19 closing the global economy? The first year of the Biden presidency ends as it began, only with less luck. Biden tells us that the sky is falling and that legislation can heal the planet, but his administration cannot organize a vote in Congress. Through the fall, Biden’s wild spending plans were held hostage by the Squad in the House and by Democratic moderates in the Senate.