Canada The Return of Free Québec The surprising resurgence of Québécois nationalism holds lessons for other peoples who do not want to disappear. Vive le Québec libre! Delivered from the balcony of Montreal City Hall by General Charles de Gaulle at the end of his visit to Québec on July 24, 1967, this slogan was long seen, at least in some eyes, as encapsulating the destiny of Québec in the second half of the twentieth century. Québec was still awaiting its great political rendezvous, a rendezvous with its history, as the nationalists put it. It had to become independent and thereby throw off its tragic past. Crushed by the British Conquest of 1760, the country had been forced to evolve under the sovereignty of a not especially benevolent foreign power, becoming a stranger to itself. It had to become its own master. The terms remained to be defined, of course, but unless Canada were to undergo profound transformation and recognize Québec as among its founding peoples—something desired by many Québécois, who wished to believe that the Canadian history of Québec was not exclusively negative—independence seemed more than likely. But it was not to be. In the aftermath of the failure of the second referendum on independence on October 30, 1995, which was decided by a few tens of thousands of votes, it became increasingly obvious that the cause of independence had failed, an impression that only grew with the passing years as the fact of defeat was absorbed and it became clear that the Canadian Federation was not amenable to reform. Québécois nationalism then sunk into a kind of political swamp for more than a decade. For some, the fight for independence even verged on political folklore. And yet, in the past few years, the national question has reconstituted itself before our eyes. There is even talk of a third—and, this time, decisive—referendum. It is the history of this strange trajectory that I intend to sketch over the next few pages, all the more so as the history of the relationship between Québec and Canada offers a magnifying glass for the great ideological transformations that have swept across the Western world these past twenty years: Canada was even, in many respects, their laboratory. One must return to the 1950s to understand Québec’s evolution. At the time, Québec passed for a particularly traditional society in the North American context. The Catholic Church played a major role in the social organization, with some going so far as to refer to it as a “priest-ridden province.” Following the British Conquest of 1760 and even more so the violent suppression of the Patriots’ Rebellion of 1837-38, which sought independence for Bas-Canada, those then known as Canadiens and, later, French-Canadians (the term Québécois only gained currency in the 1960s) turned towards the Catholic Church—or took refuge in it—and made it their foremost national institution, a bit like the Poles and the Irish did in similar circumstances to the degree that they were also dominated peoples deprived of full political existence. But, since 1867, the Franco-Canadian people nevertheless had partial political existence—it was at this time that the Province of Québec was created, after the fashion of a foundational component of the nascent Canadian Federation. There, they constituted a clear majority. French minorities were to be found in other Canadian provinces as well as in those that would be created in the decades following the foundation of the Federation, but they would all be anglicized. Québec unofficially but quite concretely had the status of a national state for the French-Canadians embedded in the Canadian Federation. But it was above all at the dawn of the 1920s, with the work of the nationalists gathered around Lionel Groulx, that this mission was officially taken up. Defeated, profoundly alienated in cultural terms, and economically, as one would later say, colonized, Québec would begin to see the state as the vector of its emancipation, and, for the first time in a long while, some of its intellectuals began to contemplate independence. The traumatic experience of the First World War, although repressed in collective memory, played a role in the matter. French Canadians had no desire to put on the British uniform, for which they felt no particular fondness. They were nevertheless obliged to do so and thus fully resented the consequences of their minority experience in a Canada in which they perhaps had rights but did not have power. Similarly, it was at this time that they once again became aware of the profound hostility towards all things French in Anglophone Canada, particularly with regulation 17, in Ontario, which restricted and even practically forbade the teaching of French and the Catholic religion at school. One must also not underestimate the impact of the great demographic bloodletting of French-Canadians to the United States and, above all, New England, where they formed what were then called so many little Canadas, which have oddly left little trace, in contrast to the Irish, Polish, and Italians, who migrated there in mass as well. From 1936 to 1959, with a notable parentheses between 1939 and 1944, Québec experienced its first autonomist nationalism, incarnated by the regime of the National Union, led by Maurice Duplessis. But Duplessis’ nationalism was excessively conservative for the era, particularly in terms of the moral rigor to which it laid claim and its acknowledged refusal of the welfare state. Above all, Duplessist nationalism adhered to a form of traditional patriotism even as the Québécois became ever more aware of being a dominated and colonized people, foreigners in their own country, and in need of a change of existential attitude were they to become masters of their own  home, if they truly desired this. But if this nationalism has had a bad reputation for sixty years, it is also because it was associated with a traditional society in the grips of true clericalism. This period is wrongly called “le Grand Noirceur,” the Great Darkness. The very existence of this term, contested by historians but anchored in popular memory, testifies to the traumatic nature of this troubled past. This is what 1960 represents in the history of Québec. It was then that the Quiet Revolution began, today still the foundational epic of modern Québec. Québec then underwent a great transformation, a total metamorphosis. The French-Canadian people changed their name, becoming the Québécois. Québec had been conservative, very conservative; it became one of the most progressive places in the Western world. It had been Catholic; it then violently rejected its fate, to such an extent that it became radically hostile to everything touching upon religion, no matter remotely. But this process of accelerated detraditionalization was not accompanied by denationalization. To the contrary, the Quiet Revolution marked a renaissance of nationalism, which now sought to follow its ideas through to their conclusion by embracing the idea of independence, which then very rapidly spread. A marginal phenomenon in 1960, in the space of a decade independence imposed itself as the guiding idea of Québécois nationalism. The objective: a Québec that was free and French. This latter term was particularly significant. Henceforth, the Québécois sought to put their language and their culture at the heart of public life. Social democracy then presented itself as the inescapable horizon of social organization. The first independence movements, the most well known being le Rassemblement pour l’indépendence nationale, were created in 1960 (in fact, the first, l’Alliance laurentienne, a forgotten precursor, goes back to 1957). The great march of the indépendantistes gathered around the Parti Québécois, founded by René Lévesque in 1968, brought them to power in 1976 with the stated project of holding a referendum on independence. The promise would be kept in 1980, but the result would be disastrous, the Yes side receiving the support of only 40 percent of the population and only 50 percent among francophone Québécois, with Anglophones and immigrant-origin communities overwhelmingly voting No.  Pierre Elliot Trudeau, Canada’s prime minister at this time and a man resolutely hostile to Québécois nationalism, used the defeat of the Yes campaign to instigate great political maneuvers that would result in Canada’s constitutional refoundation in 1982. Québec would not be a signatory to this new constitution, which among other things amputated its cultural and linguistic powers, and it still is not to this day. The new constitutional dynamic was defederalizing, with the establishment of a Charter of Rights that simultaneously laid the foundations for government by judges and the ideological supremacy of multiculturalism. I will return to that in a moment. Canada thus experienced, even if it was not immediately aware of this, the great turning point of its history. The 1980s would be marked by the consequences of Québec’s exclusion from the Canadian constitutional framework. Brian Mulroney, the conservative prime minister (1984–93), sought to reintegrate Québec into the Canadian Constitution with the Lake Meech Accord, put forward in 1987, which among other things recognized Québec as a distinct society in the constitution. The accord provoked profound rejection by the English-speaking provinces. It was at this time that what remained of the dualist matrix that some believed to be at the origin of Canada once and for all collapsed. The failure of Meech in 1990 led to a renaissance of support for independence in Québec, leading to a second referendum on independence in 1995, which also failed, though only by a little and in dramatic circumstances. The results were heartbreaking for the nationalists: Yes received 49.4 percent, No, 50.6 percent; 61 percent of Francophone Québécois, who at the time represented 82 percent of the population of Québec, voted for independence. The Anglophones and non-native speakers joined forces to block the nationalists. This led the leader of the Yes camp, Jacques Parizeau, to explain the defeat by reference to “money and the ethnic vote,” an expression for which he would long after be reproached. This second defeat for the separatists in fifteen years broke the back of Québécois nationalism, which then entered a period of decline, of decomposition. The series of events that began in the wake of the defeat of 1995 belongs to our era and illustrate the profound ideological refoundation of Canada. The Québécois had the habit of seeing Canada as a country consisting of two nations forced to redefine their association via an egalitarian pact. English Canadians, for their part, saw it as an Anglophone, even Anglo-Saxon, nation, with a burdensome French minority for the most part concentrated in Québec. They were nonetheless aware of its insurmountable duality and knew it to be less a marriage of love than of reason.  After 1995, this matrix fell apart once and for all and Canada underwent a rapid ideological transformation, already present in the constitution of 1982. Increasingly, it would define itself as a post-national and multicultural country. Pierre Elliot Trudeau had wanted it thus. Appearing before the U.S. Congress in 1977, he had stated that Québec’s independence would be a crime against human history, for it would discredit the possibility of a political community transcending the small-minded framework of the nation-state. This idea fully took hold in the second half of the 1990s. Paul Martin, for example, prime minister from 2003 to 2006, aimed to make Canada the exemplary post-national country meant to incarnate the next step in the history of humanity, a country-world with no substrate of identity. This idea would be pushed to its extremity by Justin Trudeau, who as soon as he came to power in Ottawa in 2015 explained that Canada is a country with no specific cultural core other than its quest for ever-greater diversity. The Islamic veil and even the niqab were celebrated as symbols par excellence of what one must call the diversitarian regime. It was the same thinking that would later encourage the Canadian government to rally behind a mass immigration policy that sought to make Canada a country of 100 million inhabitants by the end of this century—which is rightly seen as an exceptional project of social engineering, inevitably leading to the destabilization of any society subjected to it.  But a country cannot be boiled down to a pure ideological experiment. It must, at least theoretically, recognize some foundations. Trudeau’s Canada thus proposed to make Amerindian nations, now presented as “First Peoples,” as founding communities. As for the English and the French, formerly considered to be the country’s founding peoples, they are no longer seen as anything but two communities among others, all having arrived in the context of the numerous waves of migration that populated the country. This allowed the country’s origins to be de-Europeanized and also de-Westernized. At the level of the Western world, Canada became a true Wokistan. Not surprisingly, Québec was not destined to recognize itself in this new Canada, in large measure founded on its negation and even the censorship of its existence. It was in large part in reaction to this context that nationalism set about refounding itself, in circumstances very unfavorable to it. We must return to history for a moment: The 1995 referendum defeat broke the back of nationalism and demoralized it, to such a point that it became convinced that it had to undertake its own diversitarian modernization and demonstrate that it had fully converted to what would come to be called the inclusive society. For ten years, Québécois nationalists were under the diversitarian spell. They would on the whole snap out of it starting in 2007-8 with what is known as the crise des accommodement raisonnables, which witnessed a generalized challenge to multiculturalism in Québec in the name of a more traditional conception of national identity. The historic Francophone majority once again claimed to be a culture of convergence. From that moment on, a shock, inscribed in the logic of history, became visibly political, between the Canadian multiculturalist regime and Québécois nationalism. In the fifteen years that followed, it would radicalize considerably. Québec obviously could not accept Canadian multiculturalism, which entailed its symbolic humiliation by demoting it from the status of a founding people to that of one community among others in a plural Canada. This symbolic humiliation was accompanied by a loss of political power, with immigrant-origin populations increasingly betting on the Canadian constitutional system to evade the most basic demands of cultural and linguistic integration. The identitarian fragility of a little Francophone nation in North America is not to be underestimated. Whenever the Québécois seek to present themselves as the identitarian norm for the immigrants, they are accused of ethnic supremacism. Similarly, it quickly became apparent that mass immigration sought to once and for all demographically lock up Québec’s political future in the Federation by creating a blocking minority capable of imposing its veto on the souverainiste movement. Mass immigration has contributed to Anglicizing Québec as never before, resurfacing the ancestral and rationally well-founded fear of disappearance. The Québécois began to become aware that, between now and the end of the century, perhaps even much earlier, they risked becoming a minority in their own territory—the only one where they may, where they ever could, exercise full sovereignty. And yet, and this will not really come as a surprise, it was on the religious dimension of immigration’s demands that Québécois society dug its heels in. For Québécois society remains overwhelmingly antireligious—some will say this is at once its strength and its weakness. Faced with the demands of Sikhs and, above all, Muslims, it quickly perceived the return of religion. It was in this spirit that Québécois nationalists brandished secularism. Very concretely, it was a question of opposing Islamist demands formulated in the language of Canadian multiculturalism and made sacred by the Charter of Rights at the heart of the constitution of 1982. Secularism allowed communitarianism to be transcended and restored a political form to the nation. Starting in the late 2000s, the quest for laïcité became inseparable from Québécois nationalism. A first effort to draft a Charter of Secularism was put forward in 2013-14 by the ruling indépendantistes, before ending up in an amended version in 2019—when the time had come for the autonomistes to be in power. It is noteworthy that it was autonomist nationalists, rather than independentists, who succeeded in writing secularism into law. The twenty years that followed the 1995 referendum saw Québécois nationalists shift from the quest for sovereignty to the quest for Québécois identity. Nationalism had to seek the defense of this identity in the Canadian framework by reaffirming the principle of Québec First, without quite severing the relationship with Canada. For some, this stance was sincere; for others, it was strategic. Autonomism thus presented itself as a necessary detour before one day once again possibly taking up the cause of independence. But the identitarian shift of Québécois nationalism inevitably entailed a return to independence, for Law 21, the Secularism Charter, is fundamentally contrary to the spirit of the Canadian Constitution. A few years from now, the Supreme Court of Canada will have to reach a verdict regarding it. It is not just possible but likely that the court will declare part or all of it void. A constitutional crisis would then follow, with the Canadian regime dismantling an identitarian law very strongly supported in Québec. It is likely that this shock will bring about a new push for independence, all the more so because the autonomist nationalism that has been in power in Québec since 2018 has very little to show for itself. It believed itself capable of repatriating many of the powers of the federal government to the Québécois government. It has not succeeded in this. Ottawa always flatly refuses any such thing. Without wanting to, the autonomists have proven the impossibility of defending Québécois identity and, indeed, Québécois autonomy within the Canadian framework. This can only favor a renaissance of independentism. One must keep this in mind to understand the renaissance of the Parti Québécois, the historic vehicle of Québécois independence, since 2022, after most analysts foresaw its disappearance. Since 1995, the PQ had gone from one defeat to the next, except in 2012 when it scored an electoral victory but was barely able to form a minority government. Many thought independence had been once and for all defeated and condemned to a residual existence in the folkloric margins of Québécois nationalism. That was not the case.  The new leader of the Parti Québécois, Paul St-Pierre Plamondon, realigned it on a politically promising niche combining identitarian nationalism with social democracy, reminiscent of the evolution of the Scandinavian left. At this writing, the Parti Québécois leads the polls, and if elections were held tomorrow (the next ones are anticipated for 2026) it would very likely form a majority government in Québec. It has already promised to hold a new referendum on independence. Support for independence currently stands at around 38 percent, but one may reasonably believe that the start of the referendum dynamic would cause that number to significantly rise. We know in advance what story will accompany it. Whereas the first referendum, that of 1980, took part in the romantic quest for the country to be born, and that of 1995 appeared as the only possible response to Canadian refusal to recognize Québécois national difference in the framework of the constitutional crisis discussed earlier, the next one, should it take place, will directly concern the survival of the Québécois nation. For that is the true issue at stake at present in Québec. We are simultaneously witnessing the regression of the demographic weight of Québec in Canada and of the Francophone Québécois in Québec. If current trends hold, and everything gives one to believe that they will, Francophone Québécois will become a minority in their own country in a few decades, well before the end of the century. This is what just a few months ago led the Prime Minister of Québec, François Legault, to speak of the approaching “Louisianization” of Québec, an old expression brought up to date that refers to the fate of the Francophones exiled in Louisiana, who today survive only in a folkloric state. He might also have spoken of “Acadianization,” another expression from the past, which refers to the Acadians, a sister people of the Québécois, who were deported in 1755 in what was the inaugural ethnic cleansing of modern times. Even after returning to their homeland at the end of an epic undertaking, they were never able to escape an alienating minority status, and their identity dissolved, as we see above all in New Brunswick, the Canadian province where they gathered. In the short term, the independentists may still win and consequently reverse these trends by establishing Québec as an independent state. The independence of Québec, it must never be forgotten, is considered attainable even by its critics, which question its relevance, never its feasibility. Also, in contrast to other nations seeking independence in the Western world, the Québécois have genuine international support, that of France, which since the “vive le Québec libre” of General de Gaulle has never ceased supporting Québec’s aspiration to nationhood. Jacques Chirac gave explicit support to the independentists in 1995, and more recently former French prime minister Gabriel Attal said he saw in the Québécois cause a model of a French-style society that should be pursued in America. There are obviously some who fear another referendum defeat, which is always possible given the massive support of immigrants and Anglophones for Canadian federalism. The first referendum defeat led to a hostile constitutional takeover in Québec; the second, to the unprecedented demonization of the very existence of the Québécois nation. A third failure, many fear, will lead to the identitarian collapse of the nation. They are not wrong, but everything they fear from a referendum defeat will happen at more or less the same rhythm if no referendum is held and the possibility of independence is not put on the table. Not holding the referendum amounts to losing it while awaiting winning conditions that will never present themselves. Sometimes, sheer will is the last cartridge of a people. Must one include the renaissance of Québécois nationalism among the upsurges of populism and national conservatism elsewhere in the West? Not really, to the degree that Québécois nationalism, which shifted from right to left at the moment of the Quiet Revolution, has stayed there. And yet major qualifications must be made. Distinctions of left and right only ever apply very imperfectly to specific national situations. If social democracy remains dominant in Québec, it has become fundamentally anti-woke. We saw this in the summer of 2020 at the time of the great Black Lives Matter riots, which saw the entirety of the Canadian political class give itself over to a great penitential ritual. Justin Trudeau thus took a knee in Ottawa, proud of feeling guilty and demanding the same contrite face from all. Things were different in Québec. Prime Minister François Legault refused to submit to the concept of “systemic racism,” despite immense media pressure. In the same way, Québec has set its face against cancel culture and the new forms of censorship that cut across the Western world. To conservatives in the United States and elsewhere, Québécois resistance would probably seem moderate, but in the Canadian environment it is fundamentally transgressive. The same could be said of Québécois secularism, which would seem very minimalist to a Frenchman but allows one to stand up to multiculturalism. Whatever the case, antiwokism is now at the heart of nationalism, whether autonomist or independentist. And this is not a mere detail. For the Québécois, it is no longer just a question of leaving a federation that marginalizes and anglicizes them, but breaking with a state that has been swept along in an ideological delirium. This resistance finds its reasons not only in the principles of a liberal society but in a substantial national identity, which cannot be reduced to the abstract categories of the “civic nation,” what Americans calls the “proposition nation” and what Europeans following Jurgen Habermas call the “contractual nation.” The nation is a historical reality, and while it is possible to assimilate into it without belonging to it by birth—that goes without saying—it cannot be reduced to its legal or administrative dimensions. It is this carnal, vital dimension of national identity that escapes contemporary political philosophy, which tends to conceal it when it does not deny it. The nation has greater powers of resistance than those philosophers recognize. History testifies to this. The Polish often lost their state and never stopped considering themselves a people in their own right, seeking to reconstitute themselves politically, which they succeeded in doing after the First World War. The Irish, though they were deprived of a state of their own, nevertheless had a very keen national consciousness. The breakup of Yugoslavia reminded those who doubted it that artificial countries, stitched together from above by an effort at nation-building, easily collapse when history is rekindled. The same might be said of the Balts, who recovered their lost independence with the fall of the USSR. The European Union may know a similar fate. The case of the Balts is especially interesting, insofar as the Russians, during the period of the USSR, went to great pains to submerge them demographically. The aim was to render the Estonians, Lithuanians, and Latvians minorities in their own homelands. One could legitimately call this a demographic coup d’état, like that imposed on the Québécois by Canada even if the method obviously differs. It is necessary to mentally and conceptually separate the historic people from the state to understand the great danger of our time, the reduction of Western peoples to minorities in their own countries. One might simply say their submersion, even if it is forbidden to mention this reality without being accused of peddling a racist conspiracy theory. The facts are nevertheless there. The South is heading North, and this massive population transfer is often driven by an unconscious desire for historical vengeance, which is accompanied by real territorial conquests, even if the media refuses to speak of them as such. This is truly revolutionary in its import. It has been known for some time now that parts of London have become Londonistan, that Seine Saint-Denis is no longer culturally French, that Belgium is the bridgehead for Islamism in Western Europe. For thirty years, sovereignty in the Western world has meant the defense of independent states against the pressure of the globalized technostructure. It also referred to the quest of peoples for political independence. Today, it is indissociable from the fight to ensure that the peoples not be submerged in their own countries. The formula had already been used in France: What would the point be of an independent French Republic if it was an Islamic Republic? Similarly, what is the point of an independent but Anglophone Québec? The question can be posed in many ways. It reminds us of the great error of the globalists, who prefer the interchangeability of populations to the diversity of peoples.  Québécois resistance in America, on a continent where the French fact should have long ago been engulfed, is altogether remarkable. It can serve as a magnifying glass for understanding the national question throughout the world. We are entitled to believe that, if the cause of Québec libre prevails in a few years, even between now and the end of the decade, the Québécois resistance will serve as an example to all other peoples who do not wish to see their history transformed into an obituary column. The post The Return of Free Québec appeared first on The American Conservative.

Culture ‘Megalopolis’ Is a Spectacular Failure  Francis Ford Coppola’s new film crumbles under its own absurd weight. Credit: image via Shutterstock The greatest sin an artist can commit is to allow time to pass them by unnoticed. Sadly, that is exactly what has happened to the legendary filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola. Somewhere along the way, the man who laid the groundwork for American cinema lost the plot and never got it back.  Coppola’s latest film, the $136 million, CGI-laden disasterwork Megalopolis is evidence of just how far Coppola has fallen. Megalopolis is a dizzying conundrum, a film that spirals from one green screen scene to the next as stilted dialogue and unsure acting awkwardly pace the blockbuster.  Coppola, who has worked on the project for decades, clearly sees the film as a warning. Set in an alternate version of the United States, the city of New Rome is plagued by corrupt politicians, patrician families, failing infrastructure, and moral degeneracy. The depravity and the cowardice from the ruling elite accurately parallels that of our time and so too does the futuristic precipice we as a civilization now find ourselves gazing out upon. The same palette that marks the film from start to finish (radiant gold, brawny silver, and Apple-store white) were also on display Thursday evening, in the real world, during Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s audacious presentation of his new fleet of Cybercars and Robovans and Optimus robots. Musk is not unlike the main character in Megalopolis, architect Cesar Catilina, whose visions of a utopian future clash against the harsh realities of power and currency.  In similar ways, the film is about Coppola, too. His well-documented disputes with the major film houses during the productions of Apocalypse Now and The Godfather prompted the filmmaker to create his own studio, Zoetrope. Instead of begging the big studios for their money and approval, Coppola’s production team purchased a 10-acre lot in Hollywood and set out on a utopian vision of studio filmmaking, in which a roster of top directors, screenwriters, cinematographers, and actors would mingle on location to produce the type of work that often struggles to reach fruition in the narrow creative band that now mostly produces Marvel spinoffs.  Zoetrope’s first film, Coppola’s One From the Heart, was a financial and critical flop. As he was known to do, Coppola blew through his budget, taking on loans with extremely high interest rates that would saddle the director with debts for years to come. Set workers, who adored Coppola, continued work on the film even though he couldn’t pay their wages. When the film was finally finished, it took an eccentric Canadian oil tycoon to furnish its distribution. After less than a month in theaters, One From the Heart only managed to make $800,000, a far cry from recouping its $28 million budget. Soon after, Coppola was forced to sell the Zoetrope lot and with it, his dreams of making big-budget pieces outside the purview of Old Hollywood.  Coppola would spend the next decade digging himself out of debt and, as a result, struggling to push his own pictures forward. Which brings us back to Megalopolis, a film that Coppola wrote while mired in debt.  As much as Megalopolis is a film about an America led astray and the wild scale of our future to come, the film is also a personal anecdote of ambition and setback which mirrors those that Coppola experienced himself. Coppola sets out to explore the limits of artistic freedom in the face of dogmatic bureaucracies, and what he conjures up is not unlike what he himself experienced battling against studios who refused to finance his greatest dreams.  Megalopolis is Coppola’s great dream, but the 81-year-old filmmaker simply can’t get out of the way of his best laid plans. The film is so self-serving and strained that I felt unsure at times whether it even wanted to be seen, a suspicion that was warranted as I entered a completely empty theater only days after its release. As the film slinks from one elaborate set piece to the next, one senses Coppola was so preoccupied with his own myth-making that he simply forgot to make a film worth mythologizing.  Much ado was made about Coppola’s decision to self-fund the sprawling project. To do so, Coppola sold off parts of his Sonoma County wineries and plowed more than $100 million into production and promotion. Critics couldn’t help but note the similarities to Coppola’s 1979 masterpiece Apocalypse Now, which was also a giant, self-funded gamble by Coppola, who piled his own fortune into its making when major American studios balked at the price tag associated with the sprawling war film. Although the creation of Megalopolis embodies the same independent ethos that drove the creation of Apocalypse Now, Coppola’s newest film fails to gin up the same ethereal qualities of his Vietnam-era fever dream. Where Marlon Brando and Martin Sheen succeeded in creating deep, soulful representations of war gone awry, the dry and bulky performances of Nathaniel Emmanuel and Giancarlo Esposito fail to find similar footing. Most of the star-studded cast in Megalopolis serve only as cameo bait. No one, from Dustin Hoffman to Jason Schwartzman, puts in a memorable showing outside Shia LeBeouf, who plays Cesar’s jealous cousin Clodio, a New Rome playboy who spends his nights partying and his days conniving. The film does have its moments. Is it beautiful? It is. In fact, in parts, the film holds its own as one of the most beautiful films to ever grace the silver screen. But beauty alone does not make a film, especially a two-hour narrative-driven blockbuster. While Megalopolis succeeds visually, it fails as a story.  The film director Quentin Tarantino has spoken at length about his fear of creating a late-career dud that colors his filmography unfavorably for audiences in the decades and centuries to come. Watching Megalopolis, I couldn’t help but think of Tarantino’s warning. Here was Coppola, the American auteur, whose The Godfather and Apocalypse Now and The Conversation stand among the greatest films ever made, wandering aimlessly through a gold-plated globe with only a few of his most ardent supporters to watch in horror.  Megalopolis is unlikely to recoup even a fraction of its massive budget. As of this writing, the film has only collected $10 million at box offices worldwide, and whispers of its inclusion in this year’s awards season have come because of its artistic design, not because of its story or famed director.  A month before the film hit theaters, Coppola found himself in hot water. The first trailer for the film opened with quotes from top critics who lambasted Coppola’s previous masterpieces before they rose to prominence. There was one problem—Coppola invented the quotes. Lionsgate, distributor of the film, pulled the trailer and apologized. Nothing so fittingly explains the problem with Megalopolis: Coppola and his inflated ego. Had he been able to sidestep desires to reclaim his status as the bad boy of American film, perhaps Megalopolis could’ve been a hit. Instead, it’s a garbled, bloated mess. Spectacular? In some ways, yes. A failure? More than anything he ever made before. The post ‘Megalopolis’ Is a Spectacular Failure  appeared first on The American Conservative.

Politics An Exceptionally Important Election The November/December 2024 editorial. What is the most important issue in this election? It almost doesn’t matter, because on every issue that might be of prime importance, Donald Trump is better than Kamala Harris by a mile. But we may consider the question as an exercise. Founding editor Scott McConnell thinks the fate of the global populist movement will be among the issues decided in November. Voters around the world are getting tired of the globalist policy platform, but, especially on the core issues of migration and endless wars, their politicians have been resistant to democratic correction. A Trump victory would boost the fortunes of anti-globalist politicians across Europe; the reverse would weaken them. William S. Lind believes free speech is the top issue. If you lose freedom of speech, it doesn’t really matter what other freedoms you temporarily enjoy. They will be lost eventually. Democratic politicians are becoming more and more open about their willingness to suppress dissent in the name of “misinformation.” Lind has some recommendations for what a second Trump administration could do to roll back their efforts. Yours truly, the print editor, doesn’t understand why we’re talking about anything except the fact that they tried to kill Donald Trump. It had been decades since the last near-miss assassination attempt against a presidential candidate. Now Trump has been the victim of not one but two. The circumstances of these crimes are still murky, and perhaps always will be, but surely it is enough to say that someone out there cares enough to want Donald Trump dead, and that’s a reason to vote for him. Backpage columnist Matthew Schmitz recognizes in Tim Walz a fellow native of the Midwest, and the catchphrase “Mind your own damn business” has a certain appeal to their shared demographic and indeed to all Americans. But Schmitz translates its subtext. The two parties care about different types of freedom, so we must ask ourselves who will mind what business under the new Democratic regime. Mathieu Bock-Côté will not be voting in this election. He lives in France and hails from Canada. But he has a clear sense of the stakes in November, because his own people, the Québécois, face the same threat: dispossession. If demographic trends continue, the Québécois will be a minority in their own province. This has led to an unexpected revival of nationalism and even separatism, a surprising turn of history with lessons for other countries. Election season can be relentlessly political, with exhausting side effects for those of us who prefer to think about other subjects from time to time. It is therefore with joy and indeed a sense of relief that we offer an Arts & Letters section featuring no politics at all. Christopher Caldwell presents his appreciation of eccentric historian Jackson Lears, Brad Pearce critiques a weak piece of true crime about his home region, and the stalwart Peter Tonguette finds a good word for Edna Ferber. The post An Exceptionally Important Election appeared first on The American Conservative.

Politics What’s at Stake in 2024 The election will have global consequences, and not just for foreign policy. Credit: image via Shutterstock Since 2016, the Democrats have become, to revisit a phrase from the Iraq War decade, America’s war party. Few anticipated this. Barack Obama’s retort to Mitt Romney’s anti-Russian hawkishness in the 2012 debate (“the 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back”) reinforced the longstanding view that Democrats were oriented more towards peace-making than the GOP. No one realized it then, but Obama’s words marked an end of an era that had begun with Eugene McCarthy and George McGovern.  Four years later, Donald Trump depicted the Iraq war as a big fat mistake and went on to win the South Carolina primary against rivals who refused to acknowledge the disaster. Eight years after that, Democrats have gone giddy over endorsements for Kamala Harris from former congresswoman Liz Cheney and her father Dick. The latter was the leading force in the Bush administration behind the Iraq war and a principal orchestrator of the lies to justify it. He has never expressed regret over his actions and the horrific carnage that resulted. Bill Kristol, who has evolved from conservative journalism’s most important Iraq war promoter to Never Trumper and Kamala backer, paved the way. Open letters endorsing Kamala from aging GOP foreign policy hawks have become a critical tool for the campaign to validate her foreign policy seriousness. It is not clear whether former members of the second Bush administration will secure roles under a President Harris. But they have reason to hope. Despite the obvious differences in background, W. and Kamala have much in common. Both are good looking and exceptionally photogenic. Neither developed the slightest reputation for political wisdom or gravitas. For alumni of Bush’s war disasters seeking a new political vessel, Kamala fits the bill more readily than Obama, who was ideologically opposed, or Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, with their decades of Washington experience and their own well-developed policy networks. And, obviously, more readily than Donald Trump.  As the Kristol circle and the Cheneys have moved to Harris, Donald Trump has tried to remake the GOP into the less warlike of the two parties. It is a work in progress; there are many prominent GOP hawks who hope to thwart him. But if you look at the Trump campaign now, its most visible and active surrogates are vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance, from the beginning the Senate’s most prominent Ukraine war skeptic, and Tulsi Gabbard, the former Democratic congresswoman whose hair began to turn prematurely gray during her first tour as a combat medic in Iraq. Add to them Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whose trenchant analysis of the Ukraine war and NATO expansion may have been the position that made him most unacceptable to the Democratic establishment. In September, Kennedy penned an op-ed with Donald Trump Jr. calling for negotiations with Russia. They noted the announcement of pending changes in Russia’s nuclear doctrine, which had previously stressed that weapons could only be used if the sovereignty of the Russian state was threatened. Kennedy may be the only prominent American political figure who actually reflects and talks about the Cuban missile crisis of 1962; his father and uncle, of course, played a critical role in walking the world back from Armageddon.  Tulsi and RFK Jr. for Kristol and the Cheneys is a trade most Trump supporters would embrace. The Democratic establishment seems to welcome it, too, though one would think there would be misgivings among Democratic voters beyond the Jill Stein set.  The political turnabout is not merely about a few dozen personalities shifting sides, and not merely about foreign policy. It is still not well understood. The red–blue electoral map of Obama–Romney 2012 is very much like today’s, which may lead one to conclude that the cultural battles and coalitions of that year continue in much the same way, intensified by social media. To some extent they do—Obama’s semi-privately expressed derision for those “clinging to their guns and religion” is probably shared by most leading Democrats today.  But the split has evolved and deepened since 2012. If a Democrat had blamed an election loss on Russian collusion in 2012, rather than 2016, the progressive world would have been more or less baffled. Now such charges are a predictable part of the Democrat rhetorical arsenal.  The Bush-Cheney administration followed up decisions by President Bill Clinton to push NATO eastward and in 2008 teed up Ukraine for future membership. There were warnings from inside the establishment, most notably from William Burns, then ambassador to Russia and currently CIA director, that extending NATO to Ukraine would be perceived by Russia as an existential threat, not merely by Putin and his circle but by everyone with any connection to the Russian security establishment. Obama’s joke about Romney’s Russia policy might have signaled that a progressive American administration would be prudent regarding Russia. However, with Hillary Clinton as secretary of state, several neoconservatives including Victoria Nuland were given important roles guiding his administration’s Russia policy. During Obama’s second term, Putin was transformed in the Beltway mind from a geopolitical rival with a large nuclear arsenal to a visceral cultural enemy.  In a perceptive essay published in early 2022, on the eve of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Richard Hanania suggested that the turning point occurred when Russia became openly culturally conservative at home, at the same time the United States was experiencing the early tremors of its woke revolution. In 2013, Russia passed legislation outlawing LGBTQ “propaganda” directed at minors, shortly after it handed down serious jail sentences to members of Pussy Riot, the over-the-top feminist performance art collective, for sacrilegious acts at the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow. The events transformed Russia’s image among progressive elites. Russia turned from a recondite subject for foreign policy types to a symbolic participant in the West’s internal cultural battles, though, as Hanania noted, its urban gay bar scene very much resembled that of the rest of Europe. Putin’s Russia became not only a threat to Ukraine or the Baltic states but to all progressive values in the West.  The transformation of Russia from rival to culture war foe was the leading edge in a sea change of how Democrats view foreign policy. The foreign affairs analyst Christopher Mott has coined the phrase “the woke imperium” to describe a new confluence of social justice ideology and neoconservative foreign policy. For Mott, social justice rhetoric thus far has served mostly to manufacture consent for what the foreign policy establishment would do anyway, though its universalist and culture-transforming rhetoric would justify almost unlimited United States interventions around the globe. “The Fight for Ukraine is also a fight for LGBTQ Rights,” proclaimed Vanity Fair in 2022, an early example. In Foreign Affairs, still the most establishment of American journals, a trio of authors this summer criticized progressives who were resistant to U.S. military spending and intervention. “Today’s progressives need to get comfortable with American power,” they intoned, outlining how progressive values required the United States to increase its military spending.  The issues animating the woke imperium have been gestating for years. The blogger Steve Sailer began using the phrase “invade the world, invite the world” during the Bush presidency to describe the mindset of an administration relatively indifferent to policing its own borders but avid to play a military role in other people’s societies. The growing salience of immigration as a progressive issue illustrates the degree to which Europe’s political fault lines match our own.  Large majorities of Europe’s voters want limited or zero immigration, while Europe’s ruling parties resort to increasingly baroque political and parliamentary maneuvers to keep anti-immigration parties out of power. Until now, an informal alliance of establishment parties, supranational EU institutions, and social justice NGOs have collaborated to keep the migrants coming, almost at will. But votes for national populist parties keep rising, and a decisive reckoning between the two sides seems inevitable. Foreign policy, including the war in Ukraine, has remained a secondary issue for Europeans, but in almost every country those who prefer negotiations with Russia rather than a Ukraine “victory” and NATO expansion support a populist left-wing or right-wing anti-mass-immigration party.  If Russia is the woke imperium’s Great Satan, the Little Satan is Hungary, led by the repeatedly elected conservative, Viktor Orban. A tiny country, it is derided by both progressive and neoconservative American journalists to a seemingly obsessive degree. Hungary is both the first European country to actually close its borders to migrants claiming asylum and the NATO member most openly skeptical about pursuing proxy war with Russia to the point of victory. Other U.S. allies are genuinely undemocratic and often repressive, whether the issue is allowing gay bars or elections or press freedom, but Beltway progressives and neoconservatives who never question American ties to Morocco or Pakistan or Saudi Arabia become rabid on the subject of Orban.  As in the United States, the political battles over immigration and foreign policy have caused major European figures to retreat from their presumed commitments to centuries-old core Western liberties. After anti-immigration riots in England and Ireland the past two summers, set off by reports of migrant crime, there was at least a temporary wave to suppress and prosecute “hate speech.” In the United States, no less a liberal establishment figure than Hillary Clinton has openly called for the prosecution of those who spread what she called “misinformation,” which seemed to be nothing more than political speech she doesn’t like.  In the United States, the immigration debate has naturally fused into the general cultural battles over wokeness. If you want to abolish or radically defund the police, of course you want to abolish ICE and other agencies entrusted to enforce U.S. immigration law. Kamala Harris sought to do that as a U.S. senator, sponsoring a bill to transfer ICE enforcement funds to “refugee resettlement” NGOs. She has openly called for the end of deportations, which of course is the only meaningful sanction available to border enforcement agencies. The mainstream press, deeply supportive of Harris, has more or less refused to report on these past positions, and it is possible her September visit to the border will allow her to present herself as in line with what voters want.  America’s election is now being contested in seven battleground states. It is roughly tied according to the polls at this writing, though it is possible that Harris or Trump will open up a meaningful lead in the final weeks. The vast preponderance of American election coverage focuses on issues ancillary to those central ones discussed here. Abortion, regrettably for pro-lifers, may be a settled issue for the current generation of voters. The Biden Harris team has not done terribly with the post-Covid economy, and assuming it continues to bring inflation under control, it is not obvious that Trump would do better. Much of the November outcome will depend on undecided or marginal voter assessment of personality and character: Trump is an extraordinary if aging figure who has risen to the top of three or four different professions. He is also an egotistical man who comes across as an obnoxious loudmouth to many. Some who might support his positions are simply tired of him. Kamala seems clearly to be hiding something with her reluctance to speak to the media or off the cuff. With media assistance she has sought to keep her previous record of woke positions (particularly on immigration) from voters, but it is not clear how much she is also hiding a general lack of knowledge and competence in addressing a wide range of public policy issues. It is a problem she has been unable to solve with repetitive incantations of “I grew up a middle class kid” and other such phrases.  But the polls now taken most regularly on voter issue concerns—on abortion, whom do you trust more on the economy, on “protecting democracy”—don’t get at the more decisive policy differences between the candidates, particularly on foreign policy where presidents have more autonomy to make historic decisions.  The last time foreign affairs played heavily in American elections was the 1980s. Ronald Reagan’s famous bear ad in 1984 helped solidify the notion that Democrats might be too naïve or soft to deal effectively with Moscow. So far as I know, no one has tried to estimate whether Harris loses more “peace” voters to Trump than she gains with Cheney voters. The well-known election analyst Mark Halperin has suggested that the forever wars may be a kind of sleeper issue favoring Trump, though he stressed that this was more an intuition than an observation based on data. In a political demography sense, it is certain that non-college-educated whites, whose shift towards a Trumpian GOP has been pronounced since the Bush years, have paid a steeper price for the forever wars than any other group in terms of broken families and shattered lives. Military recruitment, unsurprisingly, is down, and one doubts that calls to fight for the values of the woke imperium will revive it. But at this moment, when the United States active duty military involvement in the Mideast is more or less veiled and there is heavy technological and training coordination with Ukraine but no U.S. casualties, it is not a foreign policy election. As Walter Kirn and Matt Taibbi point out, taking note of the press’s non-coverage of the menacing changes in Russia’s nuclear doctrine, the pro-Kamala press aims to keep it that way.  It is nonetheless an election with enormous foreign policy consequences. It is not very clear what a Kamala foreign policy would look like. Her rhetoric on Ukraine is indistinguishable from people in the Kristol-Cheney orbit. Would she empower them? Or would she veer nearer to her present national security advisor Philip Gordon, who reputedly has more moderate views and was a player in the Obama effort to reach a nuclear deal and détente with Iran? Does she agree with Joseph Biden’s very Silent Generation prudence, still evident despite the president’s belligerent Ukraine rhetoric, about the dangers of risking an open conflict with Russia over territories inhabited by Russian-speaking people on Russia’s border? Or does she believe, as she has said, not only that Putin is a Hitler-type tyrant bent on marching his troops into Poland and beyond but also that he is “bluffing” in his warnings to the West about the dangers of escalating the war, as much as the Beltway establishment now professes? Has she ever thought about such questions?  What is clearer is that Harris as a politician has drawn much inspiration from wokeness, which can be distilled into the notion that the European world and its progeny are more guilty and disreputable than any other civilization and must, uniquely among civilizations, be held accountable for its crimes. She has praised wokeness explicitly, without defining it; she has endorsed reparations; she has argued explicitly that the United States should not have the right to deport people who cross its borders illegally. This is part of the mentality of the contemporary left. What is new is that these views are now entirely consistent with a militarized and interventionist foreign policy. Russia, no longer a revolutionary power, has become a symbol in our own cultural battles, so anti-Russian sentiment is a key component in America’s own cultural civil war.  The same political fault lines run through every European state as well, even if the question of whether one wants mass Third World immigration is not logically connected to Ukraine’s NATO aspirations. A Harris victory would be a huge tonic for those parties in Europe who favor progressivism in all its forms and are anti-Russian hawks—and a damaging setback for those who think, on all of these issues, that Hungary might have a point. It would be premature to declare that a Trump victory would signal a triumph for realism and restraint in American foreign policy. The obvious complicating factor is the Middle East, and Israel under Netanyahu’s leadership is clearly risking wider war, most probably in hope of bringing America into its battles. Trump undoubtedly believes in a version of America First, but he is also, by temperament and life experience, genuinely sympathetic to Israel. It would be naïve to think those sensibilities could not come into conflict. On Ukraine, where the risks of wider war, including even nuclear war, are considerable and immediate, a Trump victory would have more obvious consequences. His second term would serve almost immediately as precursor to a peace settlement, where a free and independent Ukraine would be shorn of its NATO base aspirations, and much of its Russian identifying territories would remain in Russian hands. There would be peace and rebuilding. Russia’s newly created alliances of necessity with China and Iran would lose their reason for existence.  Trump has taken an enormous political risk to stake out that ground, initially unpopular, as was his Iraq view in his own party. His position is moral and strategically sound. A Trump victory would also be a tonic for all the forces in Europe, stretching ideologically from Giorgia Meloni to Sahra Wagenknecht, who believe that mass Third World immigration is a recipe not only for increased crime but for endless cultural conflict, leading eventually to the fracture and possible erasure of the never unified but always recognizable cultural entity that was the cradle of modern science and democracy. In this he stands with the vast majority of Europe’s citizens, if not most of the powers that govern the continent today. For Americans, the election result is likely to be less decisive, whoever wins. The post What’s at Stake in 2024 appeared first on The American Conservative.

UK/Europe The Disguise of Dullness Keir Starmer’s presentable leftism is more radical than Jeremy Corbyn’s, not less. The most memorable moment at the recent convention of Britain’s governing Labour party was too absurd to report properly. It always will be. I feel it is slightly improper to mention it here. Yet, as you will see, it would be strange not to. In a sprawling, unmemorable speech setting out his dull, vague, and predictable policy priorities, our prime minister, Sir Keir Starmer, inexplicably called for “the release of the sausages” in Gaza when he was supposed to be calling for the release of the hostages. The slip was so ludicrous (his face remained throughout in “serious” mode, especially when he rapidly corrected himself), and the subject was so grave and painful that it felt wrong to laugh. Sir Keir has a strange, nasal voice which lowers the temperature of everything he says. Yet we did laugh. People all over the country were calling and messaging each other to share the comedy. And he will never fully recover from it, just as a former Labour leader, Neil Kinnock, has never fully recovered from tumbling into the surf in front of TV cameras while taking a walk with his wife on Brighton beach in 1983. It is odd that being ridiculous is so much more damaging to a public figure than being wicked. Yet it is so. Such slips strip away the grandeur and importance with which political figures seek to armour themselves. There was no doubt of what he had said. The recording is easily found and very clear. He really had spoken of “sausages.” The BBC did not know what to do about the inadvertent sausages on its TV and radio bulletins, and ended up skating past them at speed, noting swiftly that the event had taken place. Nor did any serious newspaper give them the prominence they had in fact attained in the national mind. It all had to be confined to humorous sketches and gossip items. One writer remarked that Sir Keir had made himself “a sausage to fortune.” Some recalled Otto von Bismarck’s remark that, if you like either politics or sausages, it is best not to watch them being made.   To me, it added to a worry I had already been feeling. Has Britain elected a bumbling nobody to the highest office in the land? Or does his dullness conceal a driving purpose? When I say “nobody,” I am not seeking to be snobbish about the humdrum origins of the King’s First Minister, Sir Keir Rodney Starmer. I am just amazed that somebody with so little apparent hinterland or character has sought and obtained a job which immerses him in history and drama. Yet when asked a few months ago which was his favorite book, he said he did not have one. It was the same when he was asked about his favorite poem. His only obvious enthusiasm is for soccer, though in his Sausage Speech he proclaimed an interest in music dating from his schoolboy years. When he found a portrait of Margaret Thatcher in a study in No. 10 Downing Street (which is his office, not his home, and where many former premiers are commemorated), he displayed a strange pettiness by having it moved, nobody knows where.  Sir Keir, who curiously prefers not to use his knighthood even though he accepted it, is high in the ranks of English chivalry.  He is a Knight Commander of the Most Honourable Order of the Bath, an honour usually given to civil servants and generals.  If anything, his beginnings are more elevated than he likes to let on. He prefers to stress (incessantly) that his late father was a toolmaker, a highly skilled occupation less proletarian than it sounds. Sir Keir, who has now been our prime minister since July, was a noted lawyer who was for some time the director of public prosecutions (DPP), a kind of national district attorney. He went to a first-rate fee-charging high school on a scholarship. He received a better-than-average college education. So far, so tedious. But there is more. He plainly has the Mandate of Heaven as far as Britain’s left-wing establishment is concerned. Back in 2014, he was selected for a highly desirable parliamentary district in North London, safe and convenient, after just a year as a member of the Labour Party. It was said at the time that he had rejoined the party after stepping down as DPP, a non-political post which required political neutrality. But when had he first joined it? As we shall see, this is an interesting question. In any case there was some resentment over the way he had been parachuted into the seat, blessed with high level support which overwhelmed others in the race. One of his rivals, a senior hospital doctor, complained, reasonably, that Labour already had quite enough lawyers in its senior ranks, saying, “There are more than 20 lawyers in the parliamentary Labour Party and not a single doctor.” Where had he come from? In his early professional years, he edited the unreadable magazine of a tiny but intense and adventurous Trotskyist sect, followers of the rather racy Greek revolutionary Michaelis Raptis. Raptis, as romantic a figure as Keir Starmer is a prosaic one, served prison time for running guns to the rebels in the French-Algerian war, and when he died in 1996 was given a state funeral in his native Greece by his lifelong comrade Andreas Papandreou. Raptis had many aliases but his best known nom de guerre was “Pablo.” So his followers, who support a clever mixture of cultural and sexual revolution and Green zealotry, are known as Pabloites. I know of no other head of government in any country who has actually been a Pabloite, or may even still be one. Sir Keir has not taken chances offered to him to disown his old enthusiasms. To his credit, he has not publicly betrayed his real beliefs or his long-time comrades. So when the left-wing New Statesman magazine asked him in 2020  if he was still a “red-green,” Sir Keir enthusiastically responded, “Yeah!” In a crucial exchange in the same interview, he made it impossible for himself to later claim that his political past was not relevant to his political present, saying, “I don’t think there are big issues on which I’ve changed my mind.” [BLOCKQUOTE]The big issue we were grappling with then was how the Labour Party, or the Left generally, bound together the wider movement and its strands of equality—feminist politics, green politics, LGBT—which I thought was incredibly exciting, incredibly important.[/BLOCKQUOTE] Sir Keir’s past is, even so, confusing if you are versed (as I, alas, am) in the theology of Trotskyism. Trotskyists are usually shaped by suspicion of the Soviet regime. Yet the young Starmer, aged 23, took part in a “work-camp” in Communist Czechoslovakia in 1986, when that country was vigorously and openly persecuting dissent, under the regime imposed on it by Warsaw Pact tanks in 1968. He was also secretary of a London lawyers’ society sharply to the pro-Soviet left of the Labour Party he now leads. He could equally well have joined Labour’s own rival lawyers’ club, as, for instance, Sir Anthony Blair did around the same time. But there is no record of this. What all this means it is hard to tell, since nobody in the British media apart from me thinks it is interesting, and so he is not asked about it. In his more recent years, he has shown a remarkable ability to alter his opinions on major policy issues, tacking and trimming most notably on Britain’s membership of the European Union. He also managed to serve the Labour Party in senior posts under its former leader Jeremy Corbyn. Corbyn is a man of the ancient, obvious, embarrassingly frank steam-powered left. This tendency is despised by the Labour Party’s glossy, computer-era, efficiently camouflaged modern left, to which Sir Keir belongs. But that is because the 21st-century left are more radical than the old veterans, not less so. One of Sir Anthony Blair’s closest aides and best speechwriters, Peter Hyman, has confessed that the modern Labour Party created by Blair’s faction in the 1990s was devised “to take and hold the levers of power… winning power and locking out the Tories to ensure that the 21st century was a Labour century with Labour values.” He said the scale of that ambition was “breathtaking” and far more radical than Jeremy Corbyn. He explained: “If Labour could be in power for a serious amount of time, then the country would, we believed, change for good; not a burst of socialism for one time (if that), but changed institutions and values that could shape the country for all time.” People like Corbyn are also useful to the Labour establishment. They can give the impression of moderation by attacking them. Sir Keir first supplanted Corbyn and then drove him from the Labour Party. If by any chance Sir Keir is still a revolutionary at bottom, this sort of thing would be no great surprise. Such people, as I should know from my own Marxist days, are taught to be wholly tactical about superficial and short-term matters, the better to attain the real long-term goals they seek.   But what are Sir Keir’s real goals? He became prime minister on July 5, and his premiership has more or less liquefied in the weeks since. There has been foolish, avoidable uproar because Sir Keir and many of his senior colleagues received embarrassing gifts from a multi-millionaire donor, a TV mogul called Waheed Alli who sits in the House of Lords and more or less embodies the Cultural Revolution. The Premier, who is not poor and has a pleasant London home, received suits and spectacles, plus the use of a lavish apartment, from Baron Alli. Alas, the modish eyewear was plainly not of the type that sharpens the vision. It took him rather a long time to come clean about these presents (British members of parliament must open up about such things in a public Register of Interests). Nobody, including Baron Alli and Sir Keir, has actually done anything wrong. It just looks wrong, in a simple, easily understood way. It has the blazing, unforgettable simplicity of a fairy tale, and in this case it also asks to be mocked Then there are the economics. Starmer and his finance minister pretended, on arrival at their desks, that they were shocked, deeply shocked, by the appalling state of the national finances (which they had known perfectly well, as it is visible from space). On this excuse they immediately began predicting harsh measures to come, with a kind of dismal glee. These included the abolition of an annual handout of money to the elderly, supposed to help them heat their homes. There are in fact many faults with this payment, one of them being that you receive it even if you are a multi-millionaire (Baron Alli, perhaps fortunately, is too young to qualify). It was as if the new Labour government had in fact been taken over by its enemies. Yet all this may turn out to be foam and froth. Sir Keir’s government still faces no serious opposition. The Conservative Party, prostrate after its worst election defeat for decades, is groping for a new leader. But none of those seeking the office has anything of interest to say. They have in reality all accepted the Blairite legacy: cultural, moral, sexual and social revolution, hard egalitarianism, especially in education, plus heated Greenery (Modern Toryism also seems to have had a brush with Pabloism). It was thanks to the Tories that Britain last week closed down its only remaining coal-fired power station, a futile dogmatic gesture even if you accept the ideology behind the decision. China, from which Britain now imports all the things we used to make, builds dozens of such establishments every year and is digging up much of Inner Mongolia to satisfy its huge appetite for coal. Nobody has any idea how Britain can reach its Green targets without more or less de-industrializing.  The only opposition with any spirit and verve is currently England’s new Trumpoid movement (it is all but unknown in Scotland or Wales). This is a coalition of Thatcherite nostalgists (formerly Tory voters) and working-class opponents of mass immigration (formerly Labour voters), which can summon up quite a large number of votes and helped to destroy the Tory majority in July. In a severe crisis, it might become very strong. But what would it actually do if it attained office? Like the Tories, it has a very vague idea of the forces it faces, and so has very little chance of overcoming or reversing them. The worst mistake of political conservatives in the western world has been to refuse to understand and examine the length, breadth, depth, and height of the post-1968 left in Europe and North America. If you do not know what you are fighting, you will never find out why you are fighting, or how you should fight it. By becoming dull, and by speaking in code, the revolution has overwhelmed those who would have fought it with all their might if it had appeared in the guise of the Bolsheviks or the Jacobins. The post The Disguise of Dullness appeared first on The American Conservative.

Politics They Tried to Kill Him The fact that Donald Trump was targeted by assassins, twice, is something voters should consider even though all the facts are not yet in. In an interview with Donald Trump in August 2023, Tucker Carlson floated the possibility to the former president that someone might try to assassinate him. “They started with protests against you, massive protests, organized protests by the left, and then it moved to impeachment twice,” Carlson said. “And now indictment. I mean, the next stage is violence. Are you worried that they’re going to try and kill you? Why wouldn’t they try and kill you? Honestly.” Trump brushed off Carlson’s concerns, but less than a year later an assassination attempt was made at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, vindicating the former Fox News host’s worries. Two months after that, a second assassin was arrested in West Palm Beach, Florida, after a Secret Service agent spotted him aiming a rifle from the bushes at the golf course where the former president was playing. Let us grant that Tucker Carlson may be more primed than the average person to see dark forces lurking behind acts of political violence. He seems to have been immersing himself in 20th-century conspiracy lore recently, mentioning in podcasts and interviews everything from the revisionist theory of Watergate (that it was a deep-state set-up to take down Richard Nixon) to the claim that the Central Intelligence Agency was responsible for the John F. Kennedy assassination. But Trump himself is now apparently willing to entertain the possibility that “they,” whoever they may be, played a role in his attempted assassination. At his follow-up rally in Butler on October 5, when Trump returned to the site of his earlier near-death experience, he said, “Over the past eight years, those who want to stop up from achieving this future have slandered me, impeached me, indicted me, tried to throw me off the ballot, and, who knows, maybe even tried to kill me. But I never stopped fighting for you and I never will.” Investigations into both attempted assassinations are ongoing. At this point, the evidence does not support any conspiracy claim stronger than, as Trump put it, “who knows, maybe.” The responsible thing to do is to wait for all the facts to come in. But there is an election in November, so preliminary consideration of these dramatic events must be undertaken even with incomplete information. There is, after all, much we do know. There are three possible explanations for a near-miss assassination attempt: first, a fluke of bad luck; second, culpable negligence, where authorities starve a target of protection in the hope, conscious or unconscious, that a lone nut will take advantage of the opportunities thus left open; third, deliberate conspiracy to commit murder. If the attempts on Trump’s life were anything but the first option, then there quite simply are no other issues in this election. The party willing to use murder as a political tool must be defeated. The fact that options two and three are live possibilities months later is itself alarming.  The last time a president was wounded by an assassin’s bullet, it was easy to establish that the shooter was a lone nut. Within hours of John Hinckley’s attempt on Ronald Reagan’s life on March 30, 1981, the picture of what had happened was clear. Hinckley left a note in his hotel room explaining his Jodie Foster obsession; he learned that Ronald Reagan would be at the Hilton Hotel that afternoon from reading the newspaper. Few mysteries remained. The fact that so many questions remain unanswered about Thomas Matthew Crooks and Ryan Wesley Routh is enough to make an election issue of these back-to-back assassination attempts, even if the explanations for how the attempts came to pass eventually turn out to be benign. The eight days between July 13 and July 21, 2024, were among the most eventful in American political history. They began with an assassination attempt that came within centimeters of exploding one candidate’s brain on live television and ended with the other candidate announcing—not on video, as one would have expected, but via a signed letter posted to his personal Twitter account while the candidate was in isolation after testing positive for Covid four days earlier—that he was withdrawing from the race. At 6:11 p.m. on July 13, Thomas Matthew Crooks fired eight shots at the stage of a Trump rally, hitting the former president and three audience members, one of whom died, namely the former volunteer fire chief Corey Comperatore. Trump was wounded in his ear. A minute after dropping to the ground as Secret Service agents surrounded him, Trump stood up and pumped his fist in the air, mouthing, “Fight! Fight! Fight!” Crooks was killed by a counter-sniper within 30 seconds of his first shot. Crooks, 20, lived with his parents in the nearby town of Bethel Park. He worked as a dietary aide at a nursing home and was scheduled to enroll at Robert Morris University in Pittsburgh in the fall. He scored over 1500 on his SAT, according to the FBI. The day before the shooting, he told his boss that he would not be able to work his scheduled Saturday shift because he had “something to do.” A receipt in his pocket showed that he purchased a ladder at Home Depot at around 9:30 on Saturday morning. At 5:38 p.m., local law enforcement officers shared with each other a photograph of Crooks, whom officers had observed acting suspiciously. One officer’s text message noted that the young male had been seen “with a range finder [sic] looking towards the stage.” This photo was circulated to the Secret Service within 10 to 15 minutes, along with the information that officers had “lost sight of him.” Crooks was spotted again at 6:02 by a local police sniper walking into a dead end between two buildings. At 6:08, a different officer spotted Crooks on the roof of one of the buildings and radioed, “Someone’s on the roof.” The head of the local command post clarified by radio, “We do not have assets on the roof. . . That is not us.” A Butler Township police officer was boosted by a colleague to roof height, where he saw Crooks with a gun, but the officer fell to the ground and seconds later Crooks started firing. Three questions leap to mind about the events just described. First, how do the facts square with the theory that this was a crime of opportunity? If Crooks was a lone nut who got very, very lucky, then presumably he wandered the rally site for a few hours looking for a hole in the president’s security and just happened to find a truly incredible one: an unguarded roof with a clear line of sight to the stage 130 yards away, a distance that, as Trump later said, “is like sinking a one-foot putt, it’s considered really close.” Would it have been evident to Crooks from just walking around the site that the roof was unguarded? He could have seen that no one was on the roof, but how could he have known that no one was observing it from a hidden vantage point? He bought a ladder at Home Depot that morning, which suggests a man with a plan. If he had wanted to be prepared for any eventuality, depending on what opportunities presented themselves, he might have purchased several different items. Second, why did Crooks have no social media presence? The vast majority of kids his age have at least one profile, upwards of 80 percent, and Crooks both owned a smartphone and planned to enroll in college, making it unlikely he was part of the luddite remnant. It is possible he had no social media profile on any platform. It seems more plausible that he was active on social media but his activity was scrubbed either before the shooting or soon after, which would imply intervention by a third party. Third, why did no one prevent Crooks from climbing onto the roof with a gun, and why did no one prevent Trump from taking the stage at 6:05? The Secret Service preliminary investigative report, released in late September, blamed poor communication: The failure of personnel to broadcast via radio the description of the assailant, or vital information received from local law enforcement regarding a suspicious individual on the roof of the AGR complex, to all federal personnel at the Butler site inhibited the collective awareness of all Secret Service personnel. But a description of the suspicious individual was broadcast by both radio and text message on local law enforcement channels. Admittedly the Secret Service was not part of those channels, but by 5:51 all the key information had been passed to their command post: suspicious white male, rangefinder, the specific building complex where the suspect was lurking—plus the photo.   One local sniper told ABC News that, after he forwarded his report of a suspicious character to his command post, he assumed the Secret Service would send someone to check it out right away: “I assumed that there would be somebody coming out to, you know, to speak with this individual or, you know, find out what’s going on.” When he noticed rallygoers pointing to the roof, he thought, “Oh, they must have found this guy we were looking for out there, and everybody’s watching the police deal with him.” Why did the Secret Service let Trump go on stage before the suspicious individual with the rangefinder had been located? Delaying Trump’s speech by five or 10 minutes would not have been an outrageous imposition. Why was Crooks allowed to move around freely on the roof for at least three minutes before he fired his first shot? That roof was one of the most obvious vantage points for a sniper at the entire rally site. The Secret Service should have had someone on the roof, or, if not on it, then observing it and covering it. The question of why no one was on that roof was the number one question everyone was asking in the days after the shooting. The head of the Secret Service made things worse by offering an explanation so lame that it was literally unbelievable. “That building in particular has a sloped roof at its highest point, and so, you know, there’s a safety factor that would be considered there that we wouldn’t want to put somebody up on a sloped roof,” Director Kimberly Cheatle told ABC News. “And so, you know, the decision was made to secure the building, from inside.” The roof was no steeper than a wheelchair ramp. Cheatle resigned as Secret Service director a week after offering that excuse. If Thomas Matthew Crooks is a cipher, Ryan Wesley Routh is almost too perfect, an assassin out of central casting. He is a liberal baby boomer who is obsessed with the war in Ukraine. He also has a lengthy criminal history, including convictions for illegally carrying a concealed weapon and possession of stolen property, though he does not seem to have spent any time in prison. Routh, 58, was spotted by a Secret Service agent who saw a rifle barrel sticking out of a bush at the sixth hole at Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, just ahead of the fifth hole where Trump was playing. The agent fired at Routh, who dropped the gun and fled in a black Nissan, which was later stopped by county sheriffs who arrested him. Discovered at the scene near the gun were a scope, two backpacks filled with ceramic tiles hung on a fence as makeshift shields, and a GoPro camera.  It is easy to determine that this was an assassination attempt on Donald Trump, even though Routh never got off a shot, because Routh left a note stating, “Dear world, This was an assassination attempt on Donald Trump.” The note was left in a box with a friend, who opened the box after Routh’s arrest. The letter continues: “Everyone across the globe from the youngest to the oldest knows that Trump is unfit to be anything, much less U.S. president.” Routh’s paper trail is extensive. He self-published a non-fiction book, Ukraine’s Unwinnable War, describing the war and his efforts to aid the Ukrainian side. Chapter 18 is titled, “Why Has Putin Not Been Assassinated?” It states, “We all ponder as to why our great minds did not simply kill Hitler early on, and now why have we not taken steps to kill Putin at all costs.” Routh’s commitment to Ukraine was apparently more than rhetorical. He spent several months in Ukraine in 2023. His name appears in a New York Times article from March of that year, where he is described as “a former construction worker from Greensboro, N.C.” seeking to recruit Afghan soldiers to fight in Ukraine’s foreign legion. His attempts along those lines were later corroborated by David M. Edwards Jr., a former U.S. Army Ranger who heads a charity for American-trained Afghan veterans. Edwards confirmed that he put Routh in touch with some of his contacts in Afghanistan, though he also told the Times that something seemed “off” about Routh. There is no evidence that Routh’s recruitment drive was successful. “I spent 5 months in Ukraine last year and 3 months there this year, and 2 weeks in DC and 2 weeks in Taiwan this year volunteering and trying to supply thousands of Afghan soldiers to help win the war,” Routh wrote in an email to a neighbor, who provided the email to the Times. The most interesting words in that email are “2 weeks in DC.”  Did he meet with hundreds of congressmen, as he told online news outlet Semafor? Did he meet with the Helsinki Commission for “two hours,” as he told the Times? Why is there a photo of Routh posing with José Andrés, the well-connected Washington restaurateur who has a side line in providing food to combat and disaster zones? Perhaps Routh was written off as a kook by everyone he met with, but his efforts would have been enough to put him on the radar of some who might see in him an opportunity. The assassination attempts against Donald Trump have vanished from the news as we enter the final month before the election. They were momentous events, especially the one in Butler, which really did come close to succeeding. If Trump had not turned his head at the last second, it would have. Obviously we should be talking about these attempted murders more than we are. But what should we say? We can give the last word to an unlikely person: Melania Trump. The former first lady, usually quote-shy, released a video on social media on September 10 saying: “The attempt to end my husband’s life was a horrible, distressing experience. Now the silence around it feels heavy. I can’t help but wonder, why didn’t law enforcement officials arrest the shooter before the speech? There is definitely more to this story. We need to uncover the truth.” (The first lady has a memoir coming out in October.) Melania can’t be sure that a conspiracy was behind either one of the assassination attempts against the former president, but she can’t rule it out either. Neither can voters. That alone raises the stakes of the upcoming election and should make undecided voters more inclined to pull the lever for the assassins’ would-be victim, who is apparently enough of a threat to be worth killing. The post They Tried to Kill Him appeared first on The American Conservative.

Politics The Freedom Party Which presidential ticket really wants you to mind your own damn business? Credit: lev radin via Shutterstock Nine years after Donald Trump expressed the emerging ethos of the American right in a single imperative statement—“Make America great again”—the Democratic Party has found its rejoinder. Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota and Kamala Harris’s running mate, has popularized a similarly direct command: “Mind your own damn business.” More than a mere campaign slogan, it sums up an entire political vision. It suggests exactly what kinds of freedom Americans can expect to enjoy in a blue America—and what forms they can’t.  At the most immediate level, the statement expresses the Democratic Party’s uncompromising defense of abortion rights. Kamala Harris has refused to endorse any limits on the procedure. As governor of Minnesota, Walz signed a bill that repealed a ban on coercing a woman into having an abortion. When Democrats say they oppose limits on abortion, they really do mean it.  But Walz’s statement has a broader application, as the candidate himself has made clear. At a recent campaign stop in Bethlehem, PA, Walz presented the Democratic Party as the true heir of some of the more libertarian impulses of yesterday’s GOP.  “There was a time when Republicans talked about freedom, they actually meant it. In the long-ago time it feels like,” he told the crowd. “Because right now when they talk about freedom, the freedom of government to be able to invade your bedroom, the freedom of government to invade your exam room, the freedom of government to invade your school libraries.” Along with this strange celebration of yesterday’s GOP—a move symbolized by the Harris campaign’s loving embrace of the Cheney family—Walz’s statement is notable for its bizarre warning that Republicans want the government to “invade your school libraries.” Given that these libraries exist in governmental institutions—namely, public schools—the government can hardly be said to be invading them. It’s a statement as jarring as the old Tea Party slogan, “Keep your government hands off my Medicare.”  In both cases, the seemingly incoherent statement expresses a consistent political view. The Tea Party protester’s cry can be understood as a claim that entitlements are not so much government programs funded by current revenues as a kind of national pension system. As a budgetary matter, this idea is simply false. But it has always been at the heart of the program’s popular appeal. As FDR told one of his advisers, “We put those payroll contributions there so as to give the contributors a legal, moral, and political right to collect their … benefits. With those taxes there, no damn politician can ever scrap my social security program.” Similarly, the idea that voters have no right to say what books should appear in the libraries of the schools they pay for seems, at first glance, utterly confused. But it reflects a belief that public schools should conform to the will of trained experts, rather than that of local constituencies. In this sense, keeping government out of schools really means keeping the popular will out of schools. It is a statement of opposition to democratic accountability. One can object to this view as inconsistent with our political traditions, but it has its own internal logic. Indeed, the Democratic Party’s thoroughgoing embrace of rights language tends to take a whole range of contentious subjects out of the realm of political contestation. A right can’t be subject to political horse-trading. It can’t be debated by the local school board. It must be recognized no matter what the people say. This may be justified in any given case. But modern liberalism’s reliance on what the legal scholar Mary Ann Glendon has called “rights talk” is one element of its anti-democratic tendency. This dynamic should affect how we understand the Democratic Party’s claim to be the “party of government.” It’s certainly true that the Democrats are more likely to support public programs and public institutions than Republicans are. But there is a lingering question about who these institutions are actually serving. When children are graduating without the ability to read books, is it more accurate to say that the purpose of these institutions is education, or that their purpose is to serve as a jobs program for teachers and administrators?  Republican politicians point to these problems as a reason to slash government services, abolish federal departments, and lean on private alternatives. In education, this approach has met with some real success, as the rise of homeschooling (detailed in a recent report from the Johns Hopkins School of Education) has shown. In other areas, however, starving the beast is likely to prove a less appealing solution. In the face of a national crisis like Hurricane Helene, citizens want a vigorous response from the executive. That requires funding FEMA, not abolishing it, and making sure it actually serves the interests of Americans. Whichever party manages to assume the mantle of efficient government—of public services that actually benefit the public—will have a chance to build a true governing majority. Such a party will have to embrace democratic accountability, even when it’s tempting to say “mind your own damn business.” The post The Freedom Party appeared first on The American Conservative.

Politics Run, Writer, Run! Once upon a time, American political campaigns were literary. Once upon a time, American writers enlivened—even conducted—political campaigns with wit and flair and acute diagnoses of national ills. Perhaps J.D. Vance, freed of the constraints of second-bananadom, will do so atop the GOP ticket in 2028. Till then, the acme of auctorial office-seeking remains that achieved by the trio of brio consisting of Norman Mailer, William F. Buckley Jr., and Gore Vidal, whose relationships with each were often rancorous, even fistic.  Buckley’s finest political moment was his 1965 candidacy for mayor of New York City on the Conservative Party line. His platform was higgledy-piggledy, veering from libertarian (legalize gambling) to authoritarian (“quarantine all [drug] addicts”) to the wise and humane (anti-urban renewal and pro-neighborhood schools). Buckley’s twitting of the handsomely hollow limousine-liberal Republican (and eventual winner) John Lindsay—who “rises from banality, if only to arrive at fatuity,” and whose outstanding attribute was “the brilliance of his teeth”—was the primary delight of his campaign. His supercilious disdain for grubby politics, affected or not, was also amusing. “Do you want to be mayor, sir?” queried a reporter upon Buckley’s declaration of candidacy, to which the candidate replied, “I have never considered it.” He launched his staff into apoplectic orbit when, asked what he would do if he won, he answered, “Demand a recount.” Murray Kempton said that Buckley addressed a crowd “in a tone [like] that of an Edwardian resident commissioner reading aloud the 39 articles of the Anglican establishment to a conscript assemblage of Zulus.” When Lindsay said that Buckley’s claim that the two had known each other at Yale was a “delusion of grandeur,” Buckley remarked, “Grandeur was not defined, while I was at Yale, as having the knowledge of John Lindsay.” Four years later, the Democratic primary for New York City mayor was immeasurably enriched by the combative presence of Norman Mailer, who ran the most thoughtfully decentralist campaign this side of Vermont’s John McClaughry. “The left has been absolutely right on some critical problems of our time,” said Mailer, “and the conservatives have been altogether correct about one enormous matter—which is that the federal government has no business whatever in local affairs.” Mailer’s signature 51st state proposal called not only for the secession of New York City from the state (to which we hicks cried “good riddance!”) but a radical devolution of municipal duties. “Power to the neighborhoods!” was Mailer’s cry, by which he meant that “any neighborhood could constitute itself on any principle, whether spiritual, emotional, economical, ideological, or idealistic.” Education, social welfare, police and fire, sanitation, moral regulation: the city-state of New York would transfer these functions to the most local unit of government possible.  “An Instrument for the City,” Mailer’s manifesto, is one of the great documents of practical political philosophy in American history—far more understanding of human nature than, say, the Federalist Papers, whose wooly abstractions asserting the superiority of a centralizing Constitution over the decentralized republic favored by the Anti-Federalists have had all the predictive accuracy of Nostradamus. Mailer’s and Buckley’s sparring partner Gore Vidal, who grew up reading the Congressional Record to his beloved blind grandfather, the anti-FDR Oklahoma Democratic Senator Thomas P. Gore, sought his own place in the Senate when in 1982 he challenged Jerry Brown for the Democratic nomination for the California seat ultimately won by Pete Wilson. (Vidal had also run for Congress in 1960 in a Hudson Valley, New York, district. He lost but was proud ever after that he had outpolled ticket-topper JFK in Dutchess County.) Vidal made the uni-party system—two wings on one bird of prey—a central theme of his Senate candidacy. George Wallace, he said, “was on to something” with his crack that “there’s not a dime’s worth of difference between the Democrats and the Republicans.” He proposed a 25 percent reduction in defense spending (“the budget of the Pentagon will continue to expand because of whatever enemy the enemy-of-the-month club has selected for us”), cutting taxes on the middle class (“which is the country”), and renunciation of the role of world policeman. “We have neither the intelligence nor the wealth to govern the world,” said candidate Vidal. If America traded in the empire for a revived republic, “We could repair and perfect our own country and be what we were intended to be, a great commercial power in the world.” Ideas may have consequences but they sure don’t attract votes. Buckley won 10 percent of the ballots in his race, Mailer took 5 percent, and Vidal earned 15 percent. To borrow from 1960s prankster Dick Tuck, the people had spoken—the bastards. J.D. Vance has four years to come up with a theme, a platform, and a collection of quips worthy of Vidal, Mailer, and Buckley. As for attracting votes—well, that’s someone else’s department. The post Run, Writer, Run! appeared first on The American Conservative.

Politics Why No One Pays for the Bus The D.C. City Council said the bus should be free, so riders preemptively stopped paying. Credit: image via Shutterstock I ride the bus in Washington, D.C. often enough to know that I am cheating myself by paying. Every time it’s the same ordeal. When the bus rolls up to the stop—usually a few minutes late—I pull out my wallet and get ready to swipe my card. But it’s never so simple: Sometimes the machine is broken. Other times my card is defective and the machine won’t take cash. But most often, the driver, already harried by other more pressing worries at the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, simply doesn’t have time for some guy attempting to pay for his ride—and lurches on, leaving me to figure it out in medias res or give up.   Most people give up, or don’t even bother to try. I am in a distinct minority of paying bus users in the nation’s capital. In the last few years, fare evasion on D.C. buses has become one of the great unsung failures of city governance. Even as Mayor Muriel Bowser’s administration has largely solved the same problem on the trains—after Metro authorities erected unhoppable gates at nearly every station turnstile, fare evasion dropped to 3 percent—the bus has only gotten worse. And few people in the city seem to have the will or the imagination to do anything about it.    In WMATA’s telling, bus fare evasion has “steadily increased” in the past few years. That’s a modest way of phrasing the problem. But here are the numbers. In 2019, fare evasion was estimated to be at about 14 percent. In 2020, it rose to 17 percent. Then came those unregulated few years wherein officials waved their hands vaguely at the pandemic as fare evasion skyrocketed. Here’s where things stand in 2024: “a very high rate,” a Metro board member admitted last week, “approaching 70 percent.” It is admittedly difficult to confront this problem effectively. The bus is not cordoned off like the Metro. Drivers cannot crack down on fare evasion. They are already locked behind bullet-proof glass anyway. And the police can’t really do anything about it either, except at the busiest stops (such as train station transfer points).  And yet neither the Metro nor the transit police can afford to do nothing. Since the pandemic, bus ridership has risen dramatically. WMATA clocked over 100 million bus trips in the last fiscal year alone. In that same time period, Metro buses made about $50 million in revenue—far less than the $300 million the train pulled in, a disparity made even more embarrassing by the fact that the train logged five million fewer passengers than the bus.  There’s also the question of crime. After the new fare gates were installed on the Metro, fare evasion decreased, and with it other criminal incidents within the system. Crime on the Metro is down 30 percent from this time last year, according to the Metro Transit Police’s general manager. The same could not be said of the bus. Most of the crime is petty, stupid stuff—things that were not even considered criminal until fairly recently—like drinking a beer or smoking a cigarette in the back seat. But every now and then, there’s something of a higher caliber, enough to make you get off a stop early. I’ve written elsewhere that fare evasion does not necessarily make one a criminal of any other sort, but the practice, especially when widespread, certainly contributes to relaxed attitudes towards other rules. So far, the only solution the city government has proposed is giving up, just like everyone else. Making the bus “free” is one of the most popular ideas in the D.C. Council right now, likely because it’s the most convenient method of wishing a real problem away. In late 2022, the council voted in favor of removing bus fares some time in the near future. (Bowser all but shot down the measure last year, citing cost concerns.) The council’s theory is pretty simple: Since no one wants to pay for the bus, why bother forcing the issue? Better to raise taxes, move some items around in the city budget, and call it a day. Besides, if D.C. chose to remove fares, it would be the largest city in the country to do so—giving officials the perfect opportunity to rebrand a failure of governance as an “historic first.” It’s exactly this attitude that encourages people to despair of the system. By declaring intention to make the bus “free” without outlining a plan, let alone finding the cash, to fund it some other way, the city council put the transit system in a position similar to that of marijuana legality. Federal law deems marijuana a Schedule I substance, though many state laws consider it permissible for medical and recreational use. On paper there is a conflict, but in practice there isn’t: Pot is effectively—though often very messily—legal. Similar logic can be applied to the Metro bus. It technically costs $2 per ride, but because the city council has said it should cost $0, most riders have decided that they may as well stop paying now. It is unsurprising that the spike in fare evasion coincided with the council’s vote. Of course, the system does actually need those $2 per ride to function (or at least to defray other costs), and without them, it will only get worse. Which only encourages fewer people to pay into it. It’s a vicious cycle. About 70 percent of bus riders have already given up, and I suspect that unless something is done in the coming year, that number will only rise. The post Why No One Pays for the Bus appeared first on The American Conservative.

Politics Can Schedule F Save America? Trump has a plan for the deep state. Is it enough? Credit: Evan El-Amin What is Schedule F, and can Trump use it to declare war on the Federal bureaucracy, maybe parts of the deep state itself? In October 2020, during the first administration, Trump issued an executive order that would have stripped firing protections from many civil servants. This effort is referred to as “Schedule F” because that was the name of the new employment category the executive order created (Schedules A–E already existed.) The administration created Schedule F based on language exempting certain positions “of a confidential, policy-determining, policy-making, or policy-advocating character” from employment protections. Previous administrations and Congress always understood the language in a gentlemanly way to apply only to a smaller number of positions traditionally filled by political appointees, Schedule C, not civil servants. It all makes more sense if you understand what the civil service is in practical terms. Simply put, there are basically three categories of federal government employees. There are political appointees, 7,000 of them, all listed in the “Plum Book,” who serve at the pleasure of the president (“at will”) and change with each administration. These might include the Secretary of State as well as the head of an obscure water board connected to some forgotten federal dam project. They are handed out as patronage or to ensure the president has his own people in “key” jobs, people who will loyally support his agenda and initiatives—his team, serving until he fires them or a new president is elected. Next up are employees who are not appointed and are not civil servants but who hold their ranks and positions from administration to administration. The most obvious bunch are the uniformed military; the president does not appoint new generals and corporals when he assumes office. This category also includes the State Department’s Foreign Service, the career diplomats. The largest category of Federal employees are the civil servants, the so-called rank and file of the government, literally 2 million million of them, 60 percent of whom work for the Departments of Defense, Veterans Affairs, and Homeland Security. Civil servants were created by the 150-year-old merit-based civil service system, first established by the Pendleton Act of 1883, which ended the well-developed spoils and patronage system that proceeded it. Earlier formats of government were all appointees, leading to massive corruption in the hiring process and incompetent partisans being appointed to what should have been key jobs. As a result, the mail did not get sorted properly and the tariffs were not collected correctly, except if by chance a competent person squeezed through the system. There was no way a president and his team could monitor employees at the day-to-day level, either to ensure their minimal competence or to protect them from arbitrary firing to clear the way for the nephew of someone more important. Creating the civil service was a good idea in theory—protect the workers from politics, and make sure the mail gets sorted and the tariffs get collected. But fast forward to today and all sorts of employees, including many in organs like the National Security Council and the State Department, are now civil servants. Their protections against political interference have only grown stronger over the years, to the point where it is near impossible to fire one of them, even for cause. This leads to the legendary “lifetime jobs” most civil servants enjoy. The problem is that some of those civil servants are in positions “of a confidential, policy-determining, policy-making, or policy-advocating character” which might see them oppose the president’s plans and initiatives (think civilian Alexander Vindman types.) They can block action relatively safely, protected as they are from being fired. Nobody voted for them; most people cannot name one of them. This is what Trump wants to change. He wants to be able to fire some of these servants (perhaps part of the deep state) at will. They would be “excepted service” employees under the new Schedule F. In addition to Trump’s first term nascent attempt, this has been tried before; an effort by President Nixon to exert “political control” over the federal bureaucracy failed. Schedule F proponents seek to implement the proposal through legal means. “Here’s my plan to dismantle the deep state and reclaim our democracy from Washington corruption once and for all, and corruption it is,” Trump said last year. “First, I will immediately re-issue my 2020 executive order restoring the president’s authority to remove rogue bureaucrats. And I will wield that power very aggressively. Second, we will clean out all the corrupt actors in our national security and intelligence apparatus, and there are plenty of them.” The Republican party’s platform makes similar claims toward removing civil servants deemed resistant of the president’s policies: “We will hold accountable those who have misused the power of government to unjustly prosecute their political opponents. We will declassify government records, root out wrongdoers, and fire corrupt employees.” Independent of the Party and Trump, the now disavowed Project 2025 advocates for much of the same things, backed up by a database of some 20,000 people whom it feels might fill the newly-opened former civil service jobs. The Project is not kidding around as to its goal with Schedule F—the aim is “to bend or break the bureaucracy to the presidential will.” How many employees are we talking about out of the 2 million civil servants? A drop in the bucket. One Trump official who worked on Schedule F estimated it could apply to some 50,000 federal workers. Some Trump allies think it would not be necessary to fire anywhere near that many workers because firing a few would produce the desired “behavior change.” But other former Trump officials’ comments and actions led one professor to conclude that the 50,000 figure “is probably a floor rather than a ceiling.” One can imagine what opponents of Schedule F are saying. The plan would completely transform the way in which “accountability works in the federal government, but to be able to do it with the full consent of law in a way that the Nixon administration never had,” said Don Kettl of the University of Maryland School of Public Policy, a co-founder of a group opposed to Schedule F. “It would remove all of the political, constitutional, and legal checks that the system current has. It’s worth thinking about how we might try to improve the responsiveness and accountability of the federal government, but is the fix an effort to try to politicize it?” The fear is that Trump unleashed could scramble the federal government, opening needed positions and not filling them, or filling them with patrons and returning the system to its bad old days when the government’s business was just not getting done properly. Former federal executives warn Schedule F and conversion of tens of thousands of federal employees into at-will political appointees could harm the nation’s security posture. Others say it will hurt Federal recruiting efforts. “This change would not just hinder government efficiency, it would also be disastrous for the American people, draining the federal government of institutional knowledge, expertise, and continuity. It would slow down services, make us less prepared for when disaster strikes, and erode public trust in government,” said Sen. Gary Peters (D-MI), chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. The Biden administration took steps to try to make it harder for a future administration to reinstate Schedule F, including publishing new regulations barring federal employees from losing their civil service protections due to an involuntary job reclassification. These regulations will have to be rescinded, which eliminates any chance of implementing Schedule F on Day One. The change would also be challenged in court, although it is unlikely to be blocked. “It would probably take at least two years to resolve the constitutional questions, which at that point, even if Schedule F loses, it would provide two years for the administration to establish a new pattern of practice,” said Kettl. But with a few breaks and given enough time, Schedule F is difficult but doable. And badly needed. The post Can Schedule F Save America? appeared first on The American Conservative.