Republicans seem to be an unhappy lot. Seemingly, they would rather fight over "crumbs" than seize the gold nuggets Biden offers them +++ Tolstoy vs. Trump in 2024GOP candidates should tend to the needs of their family—the party’s voting base. All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. The GOP presidential field might want to reread Tolstoy, rather than watch reruns of “The Apprentice.” If the candidates on Wednesday stumbled through a messy second debate, it’s in part because they continue to obsess over Donald Trump. They’d do better to turn their full attention to the unhappiness in their own family, the Republican base. It’s past time to focus on the voters. Mr. Trump didn’t bother to show up on stage, since he’s already living rent-free in his rivals’ heads. Every participant rolled out a carefully crafted tactic for addressing the front-runner. It’s clear none of these approaches are working, even as it’s equally clear the GOP electorate is open for something that does work. Substantial numbers of voters continue to say Mr. Trump is their first choice, even as far greater numbers of voters say they want someone else or are looking at alternatives. There’s the Chris Christie approach; the former New Jersey governor straps on C-4 to attack Mr. Trump on moral grounds. This is a stone-cold loser with most primary voters, since it cuts too close to 7½ years of unhinged liberal criticism. Sen. Tim Scott takes the opposite approach, deliberately avoiding any reference to Mr. Trump, leaving voters to wonder if he has any view at all. Mike Pence seeks to split the difference, lauding policies he helped craft as vice president while scoring Mr. Trump for personal behavior—a parsing that remains too fine for most voters. Govs. Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley are going directly to policy distinctions. Ms. Haley slams Mr. Trump for his role in overspending and his failure to confront China. Mr. DeSantis faults the former president for failing to get the job done on the border or draining the swamp. All excellent points, and potentially useful going forward. Only right now, most Republicans aren’t looking back on the Trump years with regrets about policy—not as they live under the Joe Biden alternative. Vivek Ramaswamy meanwhile declares Mr. Trump an “excellent” president, coupled with the vague—and therefore ineffectual—suggestion that it is nonetheless time to move on. Mr. Trump’s success in 2016 derived from his accurate diagnosis of what then ailed that unhappy GOP family. A consequential portion of voters were alienated from a Republican professional political class they felt ignored their concerns, cowered to headlines, and ducked big disputes. They wanted a fighter, the hope that the battles could still be won, a promise things would get better. It wasn’t Donald Trump who coined “Let’s Make America Great Again.” That was Ronald Reagan in 1980. Mr. Trump simply resurrected the optimism, presented it in a pugilistic spirit, and united a fractured GOP to win the presidency. This obvious point was lost amid the media’s rewrite of 2016. Mr. Trump’s victory, they said, was rooted in grievance politics, his siren song to the “forgotten” man, one that rested on race-baiting, class envy and bitterness. This analysis was as incorrect as it was convenient to the left, which used it to brand “MAGA” a dangerous movement. Yet a lot of Republican leaders bought into it and even doubled down, teeing up today’s politics of outrage and pandering. Weirdly, that includes Mr. Trump himself and partially accounts for his far angrier 2024 run. The party today is more united in what it dislikes than in what it aspires to be. Today’s GOP is still unhappy, but for different reasons. Mr. Trump in 2016 gave the listless GOP a needed kick in the backside. No one looking at Wednesday’s stage doubts there is a new generation of fighters; no one doubts they are listening to voters. The Republican family is instead unhappy that it is again losing and losing big—in policy fights with the left, in public opinion, in consequential elections. As the polls show, and talks with average Trump voters attest, the electorate is also bone weary of the Trump drama. And it is beaten down by the negativity that radiated from the candidates standing—of all places—in the library devoted to the optimistic Reagan. Consider this simple pitch, aimed squarely at the needs of today’s GOP family: Donald Trump was what the party needed a decade ago. Let’s give him—and his policies—our gratitude. Yet the threat from the progressive left is now critical, and its recent victories were largely enabled by its success at making him the issue. His theater, his legal troubles, even his age now stand in the way of an urgent GOP correction. Our wins are eminently obtainable—our beliefs in freedom, and entrepreneurship, and national strength held by much of the nation. This country’s best days are still ahead of it, but first we have to win. That’s going to take a new generation of capable leaders. Here’s my plan. The GOP candidates who keep crafting their every move around Mr. Trump are caught in the past. Today’s unhappy GOP family wants to be inspired by a new, optimistic future. And: A Government Shutdown for DummiesA band of malcontents refuses to support funding bills while accomplishing nothing.By The Editorial BoardThe old saw is that faculty politics are so bitter because the stakes are so low. The same principle now seems to hold sway in the U.S. House of Representatives, which is on the verge of shutting down the U.S. government in order to achieve—nothing at all. Funding for the government runs out at the end of the fiscal year at midnight Saturday, and a handful of House backbenchers have refused to vote for bills to keep it open. On Friday they blocked a bill that would have kept it open for a month while also reducing spending, fortifying border security, and creating a bipartisan fiscal commission. This stopgap bill would have failed in the Senate in any case. And a Senate bill to keep the government open for 47 days with $12 billion for disaster relief and aid for Ukraine also can’t pass the House without Democratic votes. But the GOP malcontents promise to oust Speaker Kevin McCarthy if he passes something with Democrats. Bluto and the Faber College boys in “Animal House” couldn’t have come up with a more stupid and futile political gesture as this looming shutdown. The responsibility lies with the likes of Florida’s Matt Gaetz and Arizona’s Andy Biggs, who seem to want a shutdown as a show of political manhood. They certainly won’t end up cutting any spending, and a shutdown will probably result in more. Republicans control only the House, so a bipartisan agreement is inevitable to fund the government. But this isn’t really about policy at all. If it were, House Republicans would have passed the 12 annual spending bills that they could then negotiate with the Senate. It’s their only chance to get something past President Biden’s veto pen. Yet until this week the same Republicans calling for “regular order” in appropriations and who slam continuing resolutions were blocking spending bills out of pique. The real goal of the malcontents seems to be to topple Mr. McCarthy for personal spite. If Mr. McCarthy is forced to seek Democratic House votes, the Democratic price will be even more spending. Then the Gaetz Republicans will call for a motion to vacate the chair, and Mr. McCarthy could lose his speakership. But then what? What suicidal imperative would cause anyone else to sign up to be Speaker? At this point it’s like volunteering to be the next wife of King Henry VIII. The result is unlikely to be different. It’s a shame that a handful of holdouts are able to hold the entire GOP House hostage. Most House Republicans came to Washington to check Democratic spending and achieve what else may be possible in divided government. They put a ceiling on spending in the debt-ceiling deal this year, but they risk giving that back with the shutdown stunt. It’s all so pointlessly stupid, with failure foreordained. Their constituents wanted conservative policies, but the Gaetz Republicans are playing personal games. Again, another black professor-administrator blew an opportunity. Apparently a lot of money was thrown at Ibram Kendi awakening his "incompetence/theft" gene and everything went down hill from there.. +++ How Ibram X. Kendi Broke Boston UniversityThe university totally committed itself to his ideology. It hasn’t backed off despite the scandal.By David Decosimo The debacle that is Boston University’s Center for Antiracist Research is about far more than its founder, Ibram X. Kendi. It is about a university, caught up in cultural hysteria, subordinating itself to ideology. After suddenly laying off over half his employees last week and with his center producing almost nothing since its founding, Mr. Kendi is now facing an investigation and harsh criticism from numerous colleagues complaining of financial mismanagement, dysfunctional leadership, and failure to honor obligations attached to its millions in grant money. Such an outcome was entirely predictable. In June 2020, the university hired Mr. Kendi, created and endowed his center, and canceled all “classes, meetings, and events” for a quasi-religious “Day of Collective Engagement” on “Racism and Antiracism, Our Realities and Our Roles,” during which Mr. Kendi and his colleagues were treated as sages. They denounced voter-identification laws as “an expressly antiblack form of state violence,” claimed Ronald Reagan flooded “black communities with crack cocaine,” and declared that every black person was “literally George Floyd.” One speaker said that decades ago “literal uprising and rebellion in the streets” forced the creation of black-studies programs in universities nationwide, and now was the time to revolutionize the “whole institution” and make antiracism central to every discipline and a requirement for all faculty hiring. That summer many BU departments published Kendi-ist “antiracist” statements limiting academic freedom and subordinating inquiry to his ideology. With their dean’s oversight and approval, the School of Theatre passed a plan to audit all syllabi, courses and policies to ensure conformity with “an anti-oppression and anti-racist lens” and discussed placing monitors in each class to report violations of antiracist ideology. The sociology department publicly announced that “white supremacy and racism” were “pervasive and woven into . . . our own . . . department.” In the English department’s playwriting program, all syllabi would have to “assign 50% diverse-identifying and marginalized writers,” and any “material or scholarship . . . from a White or Eurocentric lineage” could be taught only “through an actively anti-racist lens.” They even published hiring quotas based on race: “We commit to . . . hiring at least 50% BIPOC”—an acronym for black, indigenous or people of color—“artists by 2023.” I had recently earned tenure and was serving as a member of BU’s Faculty Council and as chairman of its Academic Freedom Committee. By fall 2020, I was hearing from faculty—all progressives—who were disturbed by what was unfolding in their departments on campus but terrified to speak up. They had seen colleagues face major professional damage for falsely being denounced as racist. I tried to help, but the Academic Freedom Committee had no real power. We could only ask the senior administration to act. It did nothing. Activist faculty weren’t the only ones transforming BU into an officially Kendi-ist institution. The push was coming from the university’s highest levels. In spring 2020, the Faculty Council had approved a major strategic plan for the university over the next decade. All that remained was a board of trustees vote. Suddenly, a revised plan was presented: Being an “antiracist” institution, with specific reference to Mr. Kendi, was proposed as one of the university’s five main aims. At a September 2020 Zoom meeting, and with explicit reference to Mr. Kendi’s hire, BU President Robert Brown announced several universitywide “antiracist” initiatives, including a task force to examine and expunge racism from BU. A dean claimed the administration would examine not only policies and practices but even ideas—and not only for racism but for whatever might “facilitate racism.” I pointed out in the meeting that “any notion of ‘antiracism’ presupposes a definition of ‘racism.’ Beyond civil-rights law and common sense, what counts as ‘racism’ is essentially contested and reflective of competing ethical and political views.” I said it sounded as if the university was officially endorsing Mr. Kendi’s views. I asked if his notion of “racism” would guide the BU task force, and I noted that his view that every disparate outcome is caused by and constitutes racism is controversial and rejected by conservatives such as the economist Glenn Loury and progressives such as the Black Marxist Adolph Reed Jr. and my former teacher Cornel West. Mr. Brown didn’t answer me directly. Immediately, several deans came after me in the chat. I was clearly uninformed and confused; now wasn’t the time for “intellectual debate.” They implied I might not actually oppose racism. I wrote a letter to BU’s president that afternoon, stressing that beyond the problems with Mr. Kendi’s vision, the more fundamental issue concerned betraying the university’s research and teaching mission by making any ideology institutional orthodoxy. Nothing changed. Even now, BU is insisting it will “absolutely not” step back from its commitment to Mr. Kendi’s antiracism. Mr. Kendi deserves some blame for the scandal, but the real culprit is institutional and cultural. It’s still unfolding and is far bigger than BU. In 2020, countless universities behaved as BU did. And to this day at universities everywhere, activist faculty and administrators are still quietly working to institutionalize Mr. Kendi’s vision. They have made embracing “diversity, equity and inclusion” a criterion for hiring and tenure, have rewritten disciplinary standards to privilege antiracist ideology, and are discerning ways to circumvent the Supreme Court’s affirmative-action ruling. Most of those now attacking Mr. Kendi at BU don’t object to his vision. They embrace it. They don’t oppose its establishment in universities. That’s their goal. Their anger isn’t with his ideology’s intellectual and ethical poverty but with his personal failure to use the money and power given to him to institutionalize their vision across American universities, politics and culture. Whether driven by moral hysteria, cynical careerism or fear of being labeled racist, this violation of scholarly ideals and liberal principles betrays the norms necessary for intellectual life and human flourishing. It courts disaster, at this moment especially, that universities can’t afford. Mr. Decosimo is an associate professor of theology and ethics at Boston University. +++++++++++++++++++++++++ A fascinating, thought provoking Op Ed. +++ The American the Israeli Left Loves to HateMoshe Koppel’s Kohelet Forum takes on judges, bureaucrats and the legacy of socialism to build a more democratic, free and Jewish stateBy Elliot Kaufman The problem isn’t that Israelis disagree; it’s that they agree on so much that isn’t so. Overfed on demographic projections, the Israeli right says the last remaining obstacle to its political dominance is the Supreme Court, a self-perpetuating liberal stronghold that rules beyond its remit as an enlightened guardian class. Once it is cut down to size, right-wingers announce, they will overthrow the “old Israel” and replace it with a “new Israel” designed in their own image. The opposition replies, in so many words, that you’re right about the court—its extraordinary powers are your only obstacle—and that’s why we need it. The more the right aggrandizes the power of the court, stressing its unusual and antidemocratic features, the more other Israelis see it as democracy’s last best hope. The country’s broad center wants judicial reform in the abstract but doesn’t trust tomorrow’s majority to govern. That’s how you end up with a popular pro-democracy movement that is against returning power to the people. Moshe Koppel, the man who most trusts his fellow Israelis to govern themselves, is thus considered by the cognoscenti one of the most dangerous men in Israel. One intellectual tells me, “The three American immigrants who have left the biggest mark on Israel are Golda Meir, Meir Kahane and Moshe Koppel.” One was the prime minister who nearly led Israel to total defeat in 1973, one a radical-right rabbi assassinated by terrorists in 1990. The third I sat down with in Jerusalem to discuss the future of the Jewish state. Mr. Koppel founded and leads the Kohelet Policy Forum, a well-connected conservative-libertarian think tank of a kind Israelis hadn’t seen before. Liberals in Israel have begun to speak of Kohelet roughly in the way Americans on the right speak of George Soros, as the private and even foreign actor behind most every dastardly plot. “We just do research and give advice,” Mr. Koppel says. “We don’t run the country.” True, but where did the push to reform Israel’s judiciary come from? Court reform has been Mr. Koppel’s issue for 20 years, long before most politicians would give it the time of day. The ideas are Kohelet’s. That’s not all. The Nation-State Law, which made international headlines in 2018 by sharply defining Israel’s Jewish character, flowed from Mr. Koppel’s pen. The 2019 reversal of the U.S. legal stance against Israeli settlements can be traced to Kohelet scholarship and influence. Name an effort to unleash the forces of competition in Israeli commerce, education and culture, and it is likely Kohelet’s doing. “I learned how the system works, how you get stuff done in the Knesset,” Mr. Koppel says. “It turns out it’s not that hard. The important thing is to control the text and give credit to everybody but yourself. And on that basis, I started dabbling in this stuff.” Dabbling because politics isn’t his first career, much less his birthright. A mathematician and professor emeritus of computer science at Bar-Ilan University, Mr. Koppel grew up in an Orthodox Jewish home in New York. He moved to Israel in 1980, at 24. He is now 67, but Israeli politicos love to treat him as an American. “There’s a whole bunch of blue bloods,” he says. “Every time I have a meeting with these people, the first thing they tell me is how many generations they’ve been in Israel, as if to say, ‘So who are you?’ ” That most of Kohelet’s funding has come from U.S. Jews is treated by critics as illegitimate, even though “the left in this country has an endless array of organizations funded by one European government or another.” Even Mr. Koppel’s free-market conservatism is sometimes dismissed as an American import. “To the best of my knowledge,” he counters, “socialism wasn’t invented in Israel either.” Besides, “the idea of conservatism is pretty deeply baked into the Jewish tradition, and Israel is the Jewish state.” The conventional wisdom is that Israel must choose—either become more Jewish and less democratic, or more democratic and less Jewish. Mr. Koppel turns that on its head. To become more Jewish, Israel must first become more democratic, and more free. “The old Zionist notion that the big state will guide its citizens to the ideal balance of Jewishness and democracy has it exactly backwards,” he writes in his 2020 book, “Judaism Straight Up.” A more limited state will “create the opportunity for us to figure it all out for ourselves.” He sees Judaism “as a kind of language, as something that evolves from the bottom up,” he says. When it hardens into diktats from books, rabbis or bureaucrats, the creative genius of the people withers. “Israel needs to provide its citizens freedom not only from foreign enemies and foreign cultures,” he writes, “but from their own government and from unelected power-brokers.” That’s the Kohelet Forum mission. Founded in 2012, Kohelet focuses on national sovereignty, “true representative democracy,” and “individual liberty and free-market economics, which I regard as a single topic,” Mr. Koppel says. It adds up to a unified vision for unleashing Israel’s greatest advantage: its people. “I’m telling you, if we could ever set the genius in this country free, everything will look like high-tech,” he says. “High-tech managed to outpace the regulators. But look at every other industry in Israel. The banks are a cartel. The electric company is a monopoly. The standards authority. . . .” Mr. Koppel is off to the races, covering building regulation, import restrictions, broadcast licenses, unions and schools. In each area, he can point to accomplishments, allowing some competition or transparency or decentralizing authority. Progress is slow, but major advances are possible. Not long after our interview, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced his intention to open the Israeli market to goods approved by the European standards authority. As for judicial reform: “Let me tell you what happened and why this court is different from every other court,” Mr. Koppel begins. “When Labor Zionists realized that they probably were not going to control the country going forward in the way they had before 1977”—the first time they lost an election—“they started shifting power to the courts.” Justice Aharon Barak, who joined the Supreme Court in 1978, led a “judicial revolution,” in which the court freed itself from the normal restraints that protect the political sphere. Oh, and “the justices have managed to keep reproducing” using their conspicuous power on the committee that selects new justices “Judge [Richard] Posner called the Israeli justices ‘enlightened despots,’ ” Mr. Koppel says, quoting a 2007 article by the American jurist for the New Republic. Judge Posner concluded, “What Barak created out of whole cloth was a degree of judicial power undreamed of even by our most aggressive Supreme Court justices.” This court may not let itself be reformed. In 1992, Justice Barak said, “The people are sovereign, and the Basic Laws are supreme,” and pledged to rule “in complete subservience to the words of the Basic Laws,” which the court has treated as a de facto constitution. Now the justices say they can overturn Basic Laws, too. Mr. Koppel is persuasive, and this year his ideas have finally had their moment. But when this Israeli government championed them, they met broad and spirited opposition. A protest movement brought the country to its knees and caused Mr. Netanyahu, badly weakened, to step in and order a retreat. What went wrong? “If you want to do something major, you need to do it in a very thought-out and deliberate manner,” Mr. Koppel says. “The government did not prepare properly. It was rushed.” By the time leaders reached out to compromise, opposition had hardened. “Those who are now in the coalition,” he sums up, “are going to need to learn how to govern responsibly—and they haven’t.” It didn’t help that the attorney general, an independent civil servant granted quasi-judicial power by the court, had ordered Mr. Netanyahu to refrain from any involvement in the judicial-reform effort. This hobbled it, especially since “Bibi is probably the most moderate guy in his coalition.” Mr. Koppel has moderated, too. “All I have done since Jan. 4, when this reform was announced, is speak to opponents of reform,” he says. “If you can have this conversation the way it should be had, which is from behind the veil of ignorance,” setting all interests and identities aside, “you can reach compromises.” The veil of ignorance, a thought experiment from the work of philosopher John Rawls, might appeal less to a politician than to a mathematician. “Unfortunately,” Mr. Koppel laments, “people absolutely refuse to put themselves behind this veil of ignorance.” At first, they make arguments about Israel’s lack of checks and balances, and Mr. Koppel will surprise them by agreeing—and proposing solutions to strengthen the Knesset’s oversight of the government and raise the bar to pass a Basic Law. “The solution to the improperly calibrated relationship between the executive and the legislature is not to have the judges take more authority for themselves,” he says. “If you have a problem with the legislature and executive, fix it.” Here they lose interest, he says, because checks and balances are merely their “formal argument.” What really motivates them is fear of what the right might do. “They basically say, look, our tribe prefers that the administrative state and the judicial bureaucracy have more power than the elected government because they advance our interests more than the elected government does.” Mr. Koppel sympathizes, “but you don’t get to call that democracy.” Where does judicial reform go from here? “I think the government should reach a compromise, and then say it is moving no further,” he says. That is a big comedown, but it’s what Israelis tell pollsters they want. Mr. Koppel would change the way Israelis select judges “roughly in the direction of the German system.” A selection committee, appointed proportionately by the Knesset, would need a supermajority to install a judge. Compromise would be written into the system, but you might miss that if the opposition keeps yelling “coup.” The protest movement is in one sense “a testament to Israeli democracy,” but it has taken some disturbing turns. “I didn’t anticipate that they would be willing to use the army as part of the game,” he says, with reservist protests, threats of disobedience and the military brass weighing in. Kohelet’s largest donor, American investor Arthur Dantchik, was hounded for months by protesters in his Philadelphia suburb until he agreed to stop funding the think tank. A friend of Mr. Dantchik’s tells me the billionaire never expected it to get so nasty. Haaretz, a left-wing newspaper, writes approvingly that “30 Israelis from Philly” succeeded in “convincing” Mr. Dantchik. In April opponents also barricaded and vandalized Kohelet’s offices. Compromise won’t be easy. “Just yesterday,” Mr. Koppel says, “I was sitting with somebody on the other side. He complained to me that the guys to his left”—he means politically—“keep asking him, ‘Why do you want to work out a compromise? Bibi is on the ropes.’ ” Mr. Koppel reflects on the turmoil, “There’s a lot of people in this country who are absolutely certain that they should be prime minister.” But “Bibi has been around forever, and he has kind of clogged the system. That’s why he gets so much hostility. Most of his opponents are his former underlings who wanted to move up.” This year, the old Israeli elite and the average voter have frustrated Mr. Koppel’s ambitions, causing him problems to no end. But unlike so many on both sides, he hasn’t lost faith in his countrymen or their shared project. “My favorite vision of the return of the Jews to Israel is in Zechariah,” one of the prophetic books of the Hebrew Bible. “There’s nothing grandiose there. He just says, ‘In the end of days, old Jewish men and women will sit again in the streets of Jerusalem, and little boys and girls will play in the streets.’ And after 2,000 years, my parents are those old people, and my kids, my grandchildren, are those kids. Everything else is a bonus. I can’t believe my good fortune that it happened to me. So, do I think we’ll be OK? We’ll be fine. We’re just having a little bit of a fit here. We’ll get past it.” Mr. Kaufman is the Journal’s letters editor. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ From a very dear friend and fellow memo reader: Hanson's historical perspective helped me better understand the complexities and fragility of this war. You can read "The Ukrainian Gordian Knot" here. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ This young lady has been turned into a robot. What a tragedy. Her life was stolen by her parents and society's nut cases. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ |
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