The Arab Winter. By The Economist.

The Arab Winter. The Economist, January 9, 2016.

The Economist:

Five years after a wave of uprisings, the Arab world is worse off than ever. But its people understand their predicament better.

“I AM the free and fearless. I am secrets that never die. I am the voice of those who will not bow…” The voice in question, raised in song amid the crowds packing Avenue Bourguiba, a promenade in Tunis, at the beginning of 2011, was that of Emel Mathlouthi. For a moment of calm in a month of clamour, she gave voice to the aspirations of hundreds of thousands of her compatriots.

On January 14th those protesters forced Zein al Abidine Ben Ali, Tunisia’s dictator for the previous quarter-century, from office. What followed was not easy. Terrorism hindered both economic progress and deeper political reform. But in 2015 the country became the first Arab state ever to be judged fully “free” by Freedom House, an American monitor of civil liberties, and it moved up a record 32 places among countries vetted by the Vienna-based Democracy Ranking Association. In December Ms Mathlouthi sang before another spellbound audience—this time in Oslo, as part of celebrations surrounding the award of the Nobel peace prize to four civil-society groups that shepherded in the new constitution of 2014.  

Sadly, that outcome remains a stark anomaly. There were six Arab countries in which massive peaceful protests called for hated rulers to go in the spring of 2011. None of the other uprisings came to a happy end. Libya and Yemen have imploded, their central states replaced in whole or part by warring militias, some backed by foreign powers, some flying the flags of al-Qaeda or Islamic State. Egypt and the island kingdom of Bahrain are now yet more autocratic, in some ways, than when the protests began. And Syria has descended into an abyss. Half its cities lie in ruins, much of its fertile land has been abandoned; millions have been displaced within the country, millions more have fled beyond it; hundreds of thousands have died; there is no end in sight.

With the exception of its far east and west—the oil-rich Gulf and quietly prospering Morocco, aloof behind a border with Algeria that has been sealed for 21 years—the rest of the Arab world does not look much better. Iraq’s Shia south and Kurdish north and north-east are, in effect, separate countries, while in the war zone of its Sunni-dominated west the fearsomely brutal rule of the so-called Islamic State has taken root. The Algerians and Sudanese have emerged from civil wars to find themselves still beholden to opaque and predatory army-backed cliques. Palestinians, divided into rival cantons, are weaker and more isolated than ever. Jordan remains an island of calm preserved through fear: both the kingdom’s own people and the donor countries that prop it up are too spooked by the chaos buffeting its borders and flooding it with refugees to talk much of political reform.

Change it had to come

In short, Arabs have rarely lived in bleaker times. The hopes raised by the Arab spring—for more inclusive politics and more responsive government, for more jobs and fewer presidential cronies carving up the economy—have been dashed. The wells of despair are overflowing.

The wealthy Gulf states have seen their incomes slashed by collapsing oil prices. The tighter immigration rules they have set up to replace expatriate labour from other Arab states with natives, or Asians, have hit the remittance flows through which they subsidised their poorer brethren. Demographic pressures are unyielding. Some 60% of the region’s population is under 25. Figures from the International Labour Organisation show that youth unemployment in the Middle East and north Africa, already a terrible 25% in 2011, has risen to nearly 30%, more than double the average around the world. Rent-seeking remains rampant, and standards in both public education and the administration of justice are still dismal. Economic growth is slow or stagnant; the hand of the security forces weighs heavier than ever, more or less everywhere. Sectarian divisions and class rivalries have deepened, providing fertile ground for radicals who posit their own brutal vision of Islamic Utopia as the only solution.

The Arab spring seems therefore to have brought nothing but woe. It has become fashionable in some circles to ape Russia and Iran in blaming this failure on supposedly “naive” Western policymakers. Had Western powers not abandoned old allies such as Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak; had they not intervened in support of Libyan rebels; had they not presumed that the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad was just another domino waiting to topple; had they not turned a blind eye to the danger of Islamist fanatics: then all would be well.

This is tosh. To frame the uprisings of 2011 as a sequence of isolated events, each of which had a unique and optimal policy response, is to deny the historical reality of what happened. Such hindsight belies the actual experience of seeing an entire region—and the world’s most politically torpid region, at that—whirl into sudden, synchronised motion. It also denies agency to the actors themselves: to the crowds whose cries of “Enough!” reached critical mass; to the paranoid rulers whose responses exacerbated the protests.

This is not to say that the events of 2011 had no precursors. Algeria’s Islamist uprising in 1991, two intifadas in Palestine, the “Independence revolution” that ousted Lebanon’s government in 2005, even the short-lived “Green revolution” in non-Arab but nearby Iran, all signalled the region’s desire for change. But the world’s democracies were, by and large, correct in judging that what they were seeing in 2011 was something broader, more potent and more difficult to steer than a set of national crises that happened to coincide. Nor were they naive to think that an empowered “Arab street” would seek to move its countries closer to global norms of good governance. That was the demand the demonstrators made in protest after protest, from the Gulf to the Atlantic.

In judgment of all wrong

The West’s naivety, which was shared—and paid for—by those hopeful demonstrators, lay in underestimating two things. One was the fragility of many Arab states, too weak in their institutions to withstand such ructions in the way that, say, South Africa did when apartheid fell. The other was the vicious determination with which established regimes would seek to retain or recapture control. Who could believe that a soft-spoken leader such as Mr Assad would prefer to destroy his country rather than leave his palace? Those were the truths that brought hope to the ground.

Just as the spring itself was more than just a set of national events, so the current period of counter-revolution is an international matter. Conservatives across the region have received powerful backing from the Gulf. One early and stark example of this was Bahrain, where the ruling family called on fellow Sunni monarchs to help it crush a pro-democracy movement championed by its Shia majority. Last year’s intervention in Yemen by a Saudi-sponsored coalition can be seen in the same light. The Saudis are seeking not only to thwart Houthi rebels, whose Iranian backing they revile. They are trying to force a return to the status quo.

The most internationalised conflict is the bitter civil war in Syria, where powers from the region and beyond contend through proxies. The war has long since metastasised into a monumental free-for-all involving dozens of belligerents. But it remains at its core a fight between aggrieved citizens and a narrowly based—and in Syria’s case largely sectarian—elite intent on keeping its hold on power.

In Egypt, a nation-state of longer standing and greater stability, the ancien régime’s fight has—again with help from the Gulf—been won, for now. Egypt has long been seen as the region’s bellwether, and for good reason. Over the past five years it has provided the Arab spring’s most revealing story of failure; today it highlights the degree to which the tensions persist that brought about the uprisings.

The world looks just the same

In 2010, six months before the protests in Tahrir Square turned into the uprising (even Egyptian enthusiasts are now shy of calling it a revolution) that ousted Mr Mubarak, this newspaper warned of looming change in Egypt and suggested that there were three ways in which it might play out. The country might, like Iran in 1979, experience a popular revolution which would then be hijacked by Islamists. Like Turkey in the 2000s, it might become a genuine, if shaky and flawed, democracy, one with the power needed to tame the military-backed “deep state”. Or, like Russia, it might suffer a Putinist putsch, with the deep state reasserting control under a new strongman.

We were too parsimonious. Egypt has, in a jumbled fashion, experienced not just one but all three of these outcomes. Its revolutionaries did overcome, if briefly, the security forces that underpinned Mr Mubarak’s rule. Egyptians then voted in a government headed by the Muslim Brotherhood—a government which, rather than shrinking the deep state, tried instead to insert party loyalists into its depths. (As it happens, this is also what Turkey’s Islamist-leaning government has been doing since 2011, with rather more success.) Popular anger against the Islamists, stoked and nurtured by the deep state, then brought Egypt to the Russian option in a soft coup that saw Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi, a general and the minister of defence, installed as president in June 2013.

Two and a half years later, Mr Sisi’s counter-revolution appears all but complete. Mr Mubarak and his cronies, not to mention the police responsible for killing and maiming hundreds in the clashes of 2011, are out of jail. Tens of thousands of Muslim Brothers, along with hundreds of secular revolutionaries, are imprisoned, in exile, or dead. Nearly 1,000 Islamists were killed when anti-coup protests were crushed in 2013. The police have killed scores more since then; others have died from torture or neglect in prison.

Mr Sisi’s men have taken particular care to harass the technically adept young people whose social-media skills made the revolutionary experiment possible. And the state has made an unprecedented effort to control the courts, universities and media. A tailor-made constitution that grants sweeping powers to the president and the army, and electoral rules designed to produce a fragmented parliament, furnish it with the trappings of democracy. But it is a sham. The Mukhabarat (secret police) intervened in 2015’s elections to ensure supine legislative loyalty to the president. Not surprisingly, turnout was dismal, particularly among the young. Their disdain proved further justified when the government abruptly cancelled the results of December’s student-council elections in the country’s universities. Pro-revolution candidates had won across the board.

Many Egyptians praise Mr Sisi for delivering the country from both Islamists and revolutionary hotheads. Many more now shun politics altogether, which from the autocrats’ point of view is almost as happy a result. The Muslim Brotherhood remains in shattered abeyance and more radical Islamists, who have mounted terror attacks and grabbed a chunk of territory in north-east Sinai, have not made broader inroads among the general public. Another uprising on the scale of 2011 is unlikely in the near future.

But the effort to build a bigger, stronger “wall of fear” has further alienated Egypt’s people from a state that is not just cruel, arbitrary and unaccountable, but also both too incompetent and too broke to buy their acquiescence. Investors are put off by erratic policymaking, the overweening power of the army and Mukhabarat, and unpredictable, often vindictive courts. Egypt’s government debt remains colossal. The budget deficit has topped 10% every year since 2011; in mid-2015 Egypt’s combined domestic and foreign liabilities pushed past 100% of GDP. The currency is in decline—and so is tourism. Incidents such as the killing of a group of Mexican tourists mistaken for terrorists by the air force, or the government’s farcical handling of what appears to have been the bombing of a Russian civilian airliner on Egyptian territory in October, show the state to be inept. Mr Sisi’s benefactors in the Gulf, who have propped up his regime with perhaps $30 billion in cheap loans, central-bank deposits and fuel, are reputedly running out of patience and risk running out of money. Repeatedly bailed out in the past, Egypt has no more saviours-in-waiting.

Tip my hat to the new constitution

A recent tweet—“Has anyone tried switching Egypt off and turning it on again?”—sums up the despairing mood of this broken country’s people. For lack of an alternative, or an on-off switch, most have adopted a wait-and-see attitude, praying that Mr Sisi will lighten his grip or hoping for a palace coup to install a less military-minded ruler. “The cheapest option is internal change inside the regime,” says Abdel Moneim Abul Fotoh, a former Muslim Brother whose centrist platform captured 4m votes in the 2012 presidential election. “Revolutions are cumulative, and it will take time for pressure to accumulate.”

But if the uprising changed little in the way things work, it changed much in how they are perceived. Hani Shukrallah, an Egyptian commentator, likens memories of Tahrir Square to King Hamlet’s ghost, a presence that may be intangible yet remains the driving force of the drama, and which mutely insists that something is rotten in the state of Egypt.

What underlies the rot, in Egypt and elsewhere, is the failure of generations of Arab elites to create accountable and effective models of governance, and to promote education. After some 60 years of essentially fascistic rule—the forced rallying behind a bemedalled patriarch, pomp and parades and propaganda disguising the reality that the people have no voice—it was perhaps not surprising that the backlash, when it came, was inarticulate and lacked direction. The Arab revolutions produced few leaders, few credible programmes for action, and few ideas. But they did produce much-needed clarity about such things as what political Islam actually means in practice, where the Arabs stand in the world and with each other, and what the weaknesses and strengths of Arab states and societies are.

Before it came to brief and inglorious power in Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood attracted believers with the simple but vague slogan “Islam is the solution”. Experience now prompts many more Arabs to ask, which Islam? If it is the arm-twisting, head-lopping version proclaimed by Islamic State (IS), which dismisses all Muslims but its own ardent followers as shirkers and sinners, there are few takers. If it means giving political power to more mainstream religious figures who cannot agree on points of doctrine, this does not look appetising either. Nor do the Muslim Brothers, who revealed themselves to be conservatives bent on capturing rather than reforming the state, hold much more of an appeal.

For decades Arab opinion-makers have ascribed a host of regional ills to Western—and particularly American—meddling, even as its leaders turned habitually to the West for aid or military protection. And the West is hardly innocent; the biggest regional debacle until recent years was America’s spectacularly inept occupation of Iraq. But the morass left by that unforced error, along with the West’s ineffectual response to the Arab spring, have convinced all but a conspiracy-addled fringe that there is not much substance to talk of Western omnipotence, American hegemony or even a Zionist conspiracy. The West’s capacities have been revealed as limited and seldom effectively exercised. It is the region’s own weakness, rather than malign Western intent, that keeps sucking in outside powers.

At the same time many Arabs have also seen, not for the first time but perhaps now more clearly than ever, how weak the links between Arab states actually are, despite decades of slogans proclaiming Arab unity. And they have seen how weak the states themselves are, and more sadly how weak many of their own societies are. Iraqis and Syrians are fond of saying that before the American invasion or the 2011 uprising there were no tensions between Sunnis and Shias. If this is true, though, such solidarity was very easily shattered.

History ain’t changed

If states’ weaknesses stand exposed, so do their workings. In Egypt and Tunisia, and even more so in Mr Assad’s Syria, no one used to know who in which of the many competing security agencies really controlled what, or how. They could not put their finger on the way that, say, a compliant judiciary fitted in to the overall shape of things. Now they can. In Egypt the current crop of thoughtful young revolutionaries shuns the street in favour of drawing up quiet plans for overhauling the police or reforming the judiciary. If another uprising starts, its demands will go beyond the removal of a figurehead and the election of a legislature kept well away from the levers of real power.

Sisi and Mubarak. Meet the new boss... AFP/Engy Imad.

And what else may be on the agenda for change? One place to look is to IS—which, in ghastly irony, is the only truly new model of government that the wave of revolutions has thrown up. The group is monstrous. Its “state” is in many ways a far nastier reproduction of previous autocratic regimes, overlaid with a brutal “Islamic” veneer that most Muslims find repulsive. Yet the fact that this ugly experiment survives at all, despite the world’s semi-united efforts to abort it, holds lessons for the region.

Although IS’s laws are grotesque, other Arab states should take note that its emphasis on quick and firm justice appeals not only to Syrians and Iraqis desperate for order amid chaos. It responds to a burning public need to right decades of perceived wrongs. So does IS’s intolerance of corruption within its own ranks and its focus, even with limited means, on providing services such as health, education and social welfare. Unlike other Arab states, which tend to be hyper-centralised, IS grants broad powers to local administrators. These officials seek to regulate and tax commerce rather than to control it. Instead of assuming ownership of the oil industry, as nearly all other Arab states do, it sells the crude oil in its territory at the wellhead, subsequently exacting taxes from the people who go on to refine and transport it.

The missing ingredients in this formula are obvious: a basic respect for human rights and for diversity, systems of accountability, a method of lawmaking that pays heed to the will and interest of the public and not simply religious texts or the whims of a so-called caliph. Such essential components of good governance are often lazily bundled together as part of a grab-bag labelled democracy. The Arab spring showed that it may be these constituent elements, more than such theatrics as toppling tyrants or holding noisy elections, that are the key to success.

In the tense calm that has settled over countries such as Tunisia and Egypt, in the brittle peace that will no doubt eventually prevail across Iraq, Syria and Yemen, and during the continuing, ever-expectant pause endured by other Arabs as they wait for change, it is these kinds of institutional building blocks that need attending to. Arabs may take heart from the fact that in Europe, the supposedly revolutionary years of 1848 and 1968 produced little forward motion; indeed their immediate effect was to prompt a conservative backlash. A.J.P. Taylor, a historian, described 1848, a year of continent-wide insurrection against autocracy, as a moment when “history reached a turning point but failed to turn.”

But in both cases revolutionary change did come, in protracted form, in the next generation. It was brought about less by street action than by quiet evolutions in culture, society and the economy, and by the building of new and stronger institutions. It is not as intoxicating as mass action in Tahrir Square. But if some future season of rebirth is to lead to a lasting summer, there needs to be some thoroughgoing climate change first.

Israel’s “Occupation” Keeps Palestinian Society Afloat. By Moshe Arens.

A Palestinian youth raises a knife during clashes with Israeli security forces (unseen) in the West Bank city of Tulkarem, on October 18, 2015. AFP/Jaafar Ashtiyeh.

Israel’s “Occupation” Keeps Palestinian Society Afloat. By Moshe Arens. Haaretz, Jan 24, 2016.

Arens:

Palestinian leaders have failed generations of Palestinians. Israel can help improve their conditions, but as long as ISIS is their idyllic example, no change seems to be in the offing.

“Five years after a wave of uprisings, the Arab world is worse off than ever…what underlies the rot is the failure of generations of Arab elites to create accountable and effective models of governance and to promote education,” writes the Economist.

And Palestinian society is no exception. Palestinian children knifing people while yelling “Allah Akbar” are a sign that Palestinian society is plumbing new depths. Years ago, it was Palestinian terrorists who hijacked and blew up planes, then there were the suicide bombers who blew themselves up in buses and hotels, and now it is the turn of the children with kitchen knives and scissors, attacking rabbis and pregnant women.

Those who tend to ascribe this to the Israeli “occupation” are offering no more than lame excuses for a culture that glorifies death and killing, a culture that can bring no succor to its people. Copying the example of ISIS, with its brutal executions, is doing incalculable damage to Palestinian society and the Palestinian cause.

The Palestinian leadership – from Haj Amin el-Husseini to Yasser Arafat, Ismail Haniye, and Mahmoud Abbas – has failed generations of Palestinians. They have educated Palestinian children to dedicate themselves to terror and death. The murder of innocents has been held up to them as an example, and paradise is claimed to lie in wait for the murderers.

If the situation in Judea and Samaria has not reached the level of that in Iraq and Syria it is because the population there lives in proximity to Israel, and daily sees the advantages of a functioning democracy which provides for the welfare of its citizens. It is the presence of the IDF and its cooperation with the security services of the Palestinian Authority that prevent a descent of Palestinian society into complete anarchy.

Had it not been for the Israeli “occupation” in Judea and Samaria, ISIS or Hamas would be running the show and the Palestinians there would be longing for a return of the Israeli “occupation.”

The Palestinians in Judea and Samaria have a right to participate in the decisions that determine their fate. The fact that the Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip, under nominally Palestinian sovereignty, are denied that right, and that their fellow Arabs in the Middle East have never been given that opportunity is no comfort to them.

There is little reason to believe that an Israeli withdrawal would provide them with that opportunity, and good reason to believe that it would lead the area into anarchy. The “benefits” to the local population of an Israeli withdrawal were demonstrated by the IDF’s disengagement from the Gaza Strip and the subsequent takeover by Hamas. Just compare the situation of the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip to that of the Palestinians in Judea and Samaria.

Israel is not in control of Judea and Samaria for the benefit of the Palestinian population there. It is there because it was from that area, conquered by the Jordanian army in 1948, that Israel was attacked by Jordan in 1967, because of the legitimate rights of the Jewish people to settle in the area recognized by the international community after World War I and out of concern for the safety of the State of Israel. In the absence of a Palestinian partner capable of negotiating an agreement, implementing the agreement and surviving such an agreement, no change seems to be in the offing.

There is a great deal that Israel can and should do in the meantime to improve the living conditions of the Palestinian population in Judea and Samaria. But the education of Palestinian children is a job for Palestinian parents and Palestinian schools. If ISIS continues to serve as an example for Palestinian children, then Palestinian society is in a bad way.

The latest wave of violence, conducted by individuals and primarily by children, creates a new challenge for Israel’s security forces. But they are assisted by an alert public, many of whom are armed. Together they will overcome it.

Trump and the Conservative Intelligentsia. By Rod Dreher.

Standing athwart the conservative intelligentsia saying, “I don't THINK so.” (John Locher/AP)

Trump and the Conservative Intelligentsia. By Rod Dreher. The American Conservative, January 23, 2016.

National Review’s Jihad Against Trump. By Roger L. Simon. PJ Media, January 22, 2016.

Trump Voters Remind Us We’ve Forgotten Fishtown. By Robert Pondiscio. The Federalist, January 25, 2016.


Dreher:

Matt Welch of Reason says something interesting about National Review’s bull of excommunication of Donald Trump:

There’s one thing this dispute symbolizes, aside from the ongoing (and long-running) battle for the soul of the modern Republican Party. And that is this: Many or even most of the people who make a living working in politics and political commentary—even those who think of themselves as outsiders, such as nonpartisan libertarians—inevitably begin to view their field as one dedicated primarily to ideas, ideology, philosophy, policy, and so forth, and NOT to the emotional, ideologically unmoored cultural passions of a given (and perhaps fleeting) moment. Donald Trump—and more importantly, his supporters, who go all but unmentioned here (Ben Domenech is an exception)—illustrate that that gap is, well, yuuge.

Yes, Trump is nobody’s conservative, but it’s not at all clear that many voters really care about such things. His rise is a rebuke to the stories that political commentators have long told themselves, and to the mores they have long shared even while otherwise disagreeing ideologically with one another. You can despise Donald Trump (and oh Lord I do), and appreciate National Review’s efforts here, while simultaneously wondering whether his forcible removal of a certain journalistic mask might also have some benefit.

I think this is true. As someone who lived and worked in that NY-DC world for years, and who has been in its orbit for longer even than I lived there — for example, I exchange more e-mail with, say, Ross Douthat in a given week than words with my next-door neighbor — I know exactly what Welch means. When I worked at National Review in 2002, I took pride at being part of the team of conservative standard-bearers, and believed that we were articulating what American conservatives felt. This continued after I left NR, but kept up my work as a conservative opinion journalist.

But a funny thing kept happening. When I would go back to south Louisiana to visit my family, I often got into (friendly) arguments with people about conservative principles and policies. I noticed that we were at loggerheads over many things. It frustrated me to no end that reason was useless; “ideologically unmoored cultural passions” weren’t just something, they were the only thing. This was a tribal conservatism, one that had very little to do with ideas, and everything to do with nationalism and a sense of us-versus-them. To be a conservative is to agree with Us; to disagree with us means you must be a liberal.

I remember getting into it with my dad once after I moved home. I was driving him to the VA clinic for a check-up. This was during the Obamacare debate, and he started complaining about welfare spongers who expected the government to pay for their medical care. I pointed out that he was an avid user of Medicare and of veterans’ medical benefits, and that if not for those government programs, he would have died a long time ago.

“That’s different,” he said.

“How?” I asked.

He just got mad, and changed the subject.

This kind of thing happened more than a few times. Moving back to Louisiana to live really did reveal to me the gap between the conservative punditocracy and those for whom they — for whom we — presume to speak. Ideas and reason matter far less to most people than they do to people like us (this is true of the left as well), not because most people are stupid, but because their mode of experiencing life is not nearly as abstract as ours.

I made fun of myself for this in my book The Little Way of Ruthie Leming, contrasting myself unfavorably with my late sister. If you had given us both an ice cream cone, I would have been standing there looking at it from all different angles, analyzing the flavors and the texture, while the thing melt down my hand. Ruthie would have just eaten it and gotten on with her business, and thought me a fool for making such a big to-do over ice cream. There’s a lot of value in that approach, but it also blinded my sister to some big-picture realities that had a lot to do with the shape of everyday life, but which were only apparent if you took the time to look more deeply into abstract principles, instead of just going with your gut.

The point I want to make is not that one way is better than the other way — though I do believe as a general matter it’s better to stand on reason and principle than on instinct — but that conservative theoreticians (like me) get so caught up in our ideas that we fail to see some important things, even as many of us tell ourselves, as we have for a generation now, that we are the spokesmen for “real” America.

It’s a narrative that is irresistible to intellectuals. The Left, of course, always loves to think of itself on the side of the People, never mind what actual people think. Trouble is, the Right is the same way. It’s hard to overestimate the power of this narrative. Here’s an excerpt from a Washington Post interview with NR editor Rich Lowry, about the magazine’s anti-Trump issue:

FIX: So if Trump paints you as part of the establishment, you would resist that label?

LOWRY: We’re not the Republican establishment; we’re conservative. We’re coming at it from a perspective of conservatism. We’re not a business interest. We’re not a donor. We exist outside the system, in that sense, and always have and always will.

I have no doubt in my mind that Rich, who is a very good guy, is being completely sincere here. But come on. Of course National Review is part of the Republican establishment! I don’t say that as a criticism. The American Conservative is not part of that establishment, but I hope one day the ideas we stand for become so popular that they do find champions within the conservative Republican establishment. It’s how you get things done. It’s how you make change happen. If you want to know how the Republican and conservative establishments (a distinction without a lot of difference) think, you read National Review and the Weekly Standard. Again, I underline that this is not a criticism of those magazines, but rather a tribute to their influence in senior circles of the GOP and its constellation of conservative activists.

The problem with this is that you come to think of the interests of your own leadership class — lawmakers, lawyers, think-tankers, journalists, academics — as completely consonant with the interests of American conservatives at the grassroots. In historian Barbara Tuchman’s popular historical study The March of Folly, she writes that the Renaissance popes provoked the Reformation because they couldn’t see how alien they had become to Catholics on the ground:

Their three outstanding attitudes — obliviousness to the growing disaffection of constituents, primacy of self-aggrandizement, illusion of invulnerable status — are persistent aspects of folly. While in the case of the Renaissance popes, these were bred in and exaggerated by the surrounding culture, all are independent of time and recurrent in governorship.

Conservative elites — GOP leaders, donors, journalists and others — are in the heat of battle now. I certainly understand why they feel that they don’t have the luxury of going all introspective at this moment. But at some point very soon they (again, we) should all ask ourselves why none of us saw Trump coming, and what that says about how out of touch we are with the conservative-leaning people of this country.

Last summer, as my father lay dying, I sat by his hospital bed watching a Trump rally in Mobile with him and my mother. I listened to the things Trump was saying, and thought it was absurd, and surely the American people would wake up to the demagoguery. But my parents liked what he had to say. Trump’s words resonated with their own thoughts and experiences.

You know what? They might have been wrong in their political judgment. I believe they were. The point here is not that my parents were wrong and I was right. The point is that I could not grasp how anybody could believe what Trump was saying. Nobody I knew from my circle of intellectual conservatives could grasp it either. We assumed it would evaporate. And here we are, on the verge of the Iowa caucuses, with Trump poised to sweep to the nomination.

Trump voters may be blind, but so are we who did not see him coming, or foresee the political, economic, and cultural conditions that produced him.

This wouldn’t be the first time the GOP/conservative establishment, with its NY/DC focus, haughtily disdained a populist Republican for veering from orthodoxy. Remember what they did to Mike Huckabee in the ’08 cycle over taxes? Remember “Go Back To Dogpatch, You Stupid Hillbilly”? Again, it wasn’t that they were necessarily wrong about Huckabee, it was the attitude.

I’ll leave you with this memento of the last time National Review excommunicated folks on the Right for being disloyal to Conservatism™: David Frum’s infamous “Unpatriotic Conservatives” cover story for the magazine, published on the brink of the Iraq War in 2003. Excerpts:

From the very beginning of the War on Terror, there has been dissent, and as the war has proceeded to Iraq, the dissent has grown more radical and more vociferous. Perhaps that was to be expected. But here is what never could have been: Some of the leading figures in this antiwar movement call themselves “conservatives.” These conservatives are relatively few in number, but their ambitions are large. They aspire to reinvent conservative ideology: to junk the 50-year-old conservative commitment to defend American interests and values throughout the world — the commitment that inspired the founding of this magazine — in favor of a fearful policy of ignoring threats and appeasing enemies.

More:

And here is Patrick Buchanan that same day gloomily asserting that the United States would be as baffled by Osama bin Laden as the British Empire was by George Washington: “We remain unrivaled in material wealth and military dominance, but these are no longer the components of might. . . . Our instinct is the strongman’s impulse: hit back, harder. But like British Lobsterbacks dropped in a colonial wilderness, we don’t know this battle, and the weapons within our reach are blunt.”

From the perspective of 2016, who was more correct, Frum or Buchanan?

The entire NR article was a slashing rebuke of the paleoconservatives, including those at this magazine. It ended like this:

There is, however, a fringe attached to the conservative world that cannot overcome its despair and alienation. The resentments are too intense, the bitterness too unappeasable. Only the boldest of them as yet explicitly acknowledge their wish to see the United States defeated in the War on Terror.

But they are thinking about defeat, and wishing for it, and they will take pleasure in it if it should happen. They began by hating the neoconservatives. They came to hate their party and this president. They have finished by hating their country.

War is a great clarifier. It forces people to take sides. The paleoconservatives have chosen — and the rest of us must choose too. In a time of danger, they have turned their backs on their country. Now we turn our backs on them.

You know, I re-read that piece this morning, and I agree with a lot of Frum’s criticism of the paleocons. But the paleos got one big thing right: the catastrophic foolishness of the Iraq War. It would be have been nice in the ensuing fallout to have observed some humility among the conservative elites, a sense that they may actually have no idea at all what’s going on, or what to do about it. It would be nice to see a realization that they (one more time: we, because I too favored the Iraq War) have lost a lot of credibility with ordinary people, whose intense resentment and unappeasable bitterness grows to no small degree from the soil fertilized by the bullsh*t of us conservative elites.

To be clear, I think NR is mostly right about Trump, but I question the prudence of its frontal attack. If I were Trump, I would go to rallies asking out loud just why the magisterial magazine that once dramatically excommunicated conservatives who opposed the Iraq War believes it has standing to excommunicate Donald Trump.

UPDATE: I think reader Borachio has it about right:

As an intellectually serious conservative who supports Trump, I’ll tell you the problem with “intellectually serious conservatism” as practiced on K Street, Wall Street, and the various precincts of power and money:

It’s a pack of lies.

Establishment conservatism is just an ideological smokescreen to camouflage the pauperization and dispossession of the American middle class for the benefit of a kakistocracy at the top and various special-interest client classes at the bottom.

My support for Trump is not based on his being an intellectually serious conservative, which he obviously isn’t.

I’m not sure if Trump can help our country. However, I DO know for sure that none of the establishment-approved candidates will do anything but enrich themselves and their friends at the expense of what is still the American majority.

Trump is our Hail Mary pass, our last desperate attempt to salvage something of what America was before the whirlwind destroys the last of it.

He’s right that Trump is not an intellectually serious conservative. But I have to concede that that might actually be to his benefit. George W. Bush surrounded himself with the wisest Wise Men the Republican Party had to offer … and they got us into Iraq. A well-known Beltway conservative e-mailed today, about Trump, “He’s destroying the GOP and the conservative movement? OK. Who, exactly, was benefitting from them? Not many people.”

What if Borachio is right? What if the anti-intellectual Trump is actually revealing that Conservatism, Inc., is run by sophists? You have to read this Byron York report from deep inside the New Hampshire GOP bubble. An excerpt:

After that conversation, I began to ask everyone I met: Do you know anyone who supports Donald Trump? In more cases than not — actually, in nearly all the cases — the answer was no. I asked one woman Friday night, and she said she hadn’t thought about it. I ran into her the next morning at breakfast, and she said, “That was a good question you asked me last night, and I’ve given it some thought.” And no, she didn’t know any Trump supporters.

Given Trump’s big lead in the polls, if so many politically active Republicans don’t know even one Trump supporter, either the polls are wrong or there is some serious GOP Pauline Kaelism at work in the nation’s first primary state.

That’s a reference to the apocryphal legend that the New Yorker film critic said, unironically, “How did Nixon win? I don’t know a soul who voted for him.”

The Real Immigration Debate America Needs. By Mike Gonzalez.

The Real Immigration Debate America Needs. By Mike Gonzalez. The National Interest, January 22, 2016.

Gonzalez:

Assimilation has finally become a part of the national debate about immigration. This is to be welcomed, as the subject has too often been swept under the rug, where it lies unsettling all that is above.

There are, however, a few myths floating around the discussion of assimilation. Let me enumerate—then dispel—three of them.

One is that immigrants today are ethnic or racial “minorities,” who are such unique victims of discrimination and ill treatment that they require remedial benefits to overcome these hardships.

A second is that today’s immigrants are assimilating in the same manner as immigrants before them. Curiously, immigration enthusiasts who make argument number one often make this argument, too. The irony is that, while many immigrants have, indeed, achieved economic integration, patriotic assimilation has been inhibited by government actions taken as a result of Myth #1.

The third is that the nation-state, and all the freedoms and individual rights associated with it, can survive the end of assimilation into one national culture tied by bonds of affection and shared experience. Curiously again, this argument is made by some of the people who make arguments one and two.

It’s always best not to assume moral turpitude among our opponents. Their glaring logical inconsistency is, however, a legitimate target. In a recent special report for the Heritage Foundation, I take aim at all these shibboleths.

Myth #1

It would be hard to find a time when immigrants—here or in any other country—didn’t find they had a very high mountain to climb to get to those “streets of gold.” Certainly it was the case during the first two major surges of immigration in the colonial era. The Germans who fled religious persecution and the Ulstermen who came to find a better living seldom found a welcome wagon parked outside their doors.

Benjamin Franklin echoed the sentiment of many “native” colonists as he worried about both the Germans’ refusal to speak the native tongue (English) and their impact on politics. In a 1753 letter to the botanist Peter Collinson, Franklin wrote:

I remember when they modestly declined intermeddling in our Elections, but now they come in droves, and carry all before them, except in one or two Counties; Few of their children in the Country learn English; they import many Books from Germany; and of the six printing houses in the Province, two are entirely German, two half German half English, and but two entirely English; They have one German News-paper, and one half German. Advertisements intended to be general are now printed in Dutch and English; the Signs in our Streets have inscriptions in both languages, and in some places only German: They begin of late to make all their Bonds and other legal Writings in their own Language, which (though I think it ought not to be) are allowed good in our Courts, where the German Business so encreases that there is continual need of Interpreters; and I suppose in a few years they will be also necessary in the Assembly, to tell one half of our Legislators what the other half say.

And that was Franklin being nice! Two years earlier, he went even further: “Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a Colony of Aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them….”

The Scots-Irish of Ulster fared no better. In 1720 the city of Boston passed an ordinance that directed “certain families recently arriving from Ireland to move off.” When they did just that, and moved off to Worcester, a mob torched their church. Bostonians become no more “open-minded” or “politically correct” as the decade wore on. In 1729, they rioted to prevent ships carrying Scots-Irish immigrants from docking in Boston Harbor.

The “pacifist” Quakers of Pennsylvania didn’t like them any better. As Former Sen. Jim Webb described in his very good book on his ancestral people, Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America, Provincial Secretary James Logan griped that “a settlement of five families from the North of Ireland gives me more trouble than fifty of any other people!” Eventually, most of the Northern Irish headed south and west toward the mountains of Appalachia, where their descendants live to this day.

Succeeding surges of immigrants—the Catholic Irish and Germany’s “economic” immigrants of the mid-1800s, and the Jewish, southern and eastern European and Middle Eastern immigrants who came through Ellis Island after 1890—also received a rough welcome.

The Founders, and the leaders who followed them, never considered intervening to “remedy” prejudicial behavior by giving the newcomers special privileges or benefits, by attempting to apportion their participation in society through quotas or by creating a culture of victimhood that rewarded victim status. The Scots-Irish of Andrew Jackson’s day likely would have shot anyone who called them “victims.” It should still not be tried today.

Myth # 2

Many good people interpret complaints that immigrants are not assimilating as a knock on immigrants. (It’s not always. Here, it’s a knock against the elites who have set up the present ethno-racial, multicultural structure and enforce it.) Dumbfoundingly, they then go to great lengths to prove that assimilation is taking place.

Thus, a long study by the National Academy of Sciences affirms that employment, earnings, occupational and residential “integration” is proceeding apace, though in fits and starts and unequally for different groups. This may well be true. Still, it misses the point.

Immigrants today find it harder to assimilate the same way their forerunners did, because today we put them into boxes and reward them with racial preferences if they don’t try to break free. Elites in the 1970s created five ethnicities, which some have referred to as the “ethno-racial pentagon,” comprising whites, African Americans, Native Americans, Hispanics and Asians.

The last two groups were made up mostly of immigrants. As they entered the United States in greater numbers following the Immigration Act of 1965, they were told—by the schools, the movies, the television shows and the “community organizers” who started wandering into the neighborhoods where they lived—that they were victims of a history of discrimination.

Of course, they couldn’t have been, because of their very status as immigrants. These individuals had immigrated into this country on their own volition and had no history here at all. That they faced hardship there is no doubt. But so did all the other waves that came before them (point number one).

Immigrants from China and Japan in the late nineteenth century and in the first half of the twentieth century faced incredible hardship. The Chinese Exclusion Act of the late nineteenth century actually prevented the immigration of people from those countries.

Likewise, the descendants of Mexican Americans who were in the Southwest when the United States took over those territories after the Mexican War in 1848 faced discrimination, though not on the same par as Asians or black Americans. Indeed, Mexican Americans were elected to statewide office in western states.

Today, the vast majority of Asians and Hispanics are not descendants of those earlier immigrants or settlers, however. But because we have set up bureaucratic boxes labeled “Asians” and “Hispanics,” we toss many of today’s immigrants and their children into those boxes, even though the former group lacks a single, unifying language, and the latter a single race or culture. More importantly, the nationalities inside these two bureaucratic groups evince very different cultural indicators. But once immigrants are placed in those boxes, we all but ensure that they stay there in the way they are seen by others and the way they see themselves—if not permanently, at least longer than past immigrants cleaved to their national groups.

The National Academy of Sciences report itself acknowledges this point by recognizing that “the well-being of immigrants and their descendants is highly dependent on immigrant starting points and on the segment of American society ... into which they integrate.” Indeed, among the “causes for concern” identified by the panel that compiled the report are “racial patterns in immigration integration and the resulting racial stratification in the U.S. population.”

No kidding. Set up a stratified, racialized group system, and these problems are bound to develop.

The report also judges “integration” rather than “assimilation” (the first term is found on 443 pages, the second on just forty-eight)—a dog whistle to those attuned to these matters. Occupational, residential and earnings wealth integration are all economic markers that say little about joining a single patriotic national culture.

Again, if the message is to constantly hew to their ethnic group rather than to a single shared culture, how can we expect otherwise? Yes, we can expect that ethnic attrition (intermarriage) will, over time, blur these distinctions. That would show the Census folks! But that could take a long time, and there are signs that members of the largest group of immigrants, those with Mexican ancestry, are marrying outside their groups at lower rates.

To take examples from overseas, Catalonians and Scots, too, have very similar economic markers as the rest of the peoples of Spain and the United Kingdom, respectively. And yet we find very strong separatist tendencies in both regions because elites, for political reasons, have worked assiduously for years to create separate identities.

Myth #3

Which brings us to the last myth: the notion that a democratic nation-state can continue to exist without the cultural, patriotic and affectional accoutrements that we have come to expect of a single national culture; that a “multicultural” society where differences are celebrated and perpetuated can coexist with equal rights for all individuals. Are we sure?

Those who think long and hard on the subject believe two things: the first is that, for all its imperfections, the nation-state is still the best polity man has ever devised to defend individual liberty and representative government. The second is that such a formula cannot long survive in a country made up of separate groups having different conversations and dispersed experiences.

Britain’s John Stuart Mill spent a good chunk of the nineteenth century pondering the question. His conclusion, in Considerations on Representative Government, was that “free institutions are next to impossible in a country made up of different nationalities.” As Mill explained:

Among a people without fellow-feeling, especially if they read and speak different languages, the united public opinion, necessary to the working of representative government, cannot exist. ... A portion of mankind may be said to constitute a Nationality if they are united by common sympathies which do not exist between them and other others — which make them cooperate with each other more willingly than with other people.

It is good that we’re finally debating assimilation, national identity and what they mean for representative government. But a serious discussion requires that we first clear the myths out of the way. We don’t have to go down the multicultural path of the past three decades.

Sarah Palin, Donald Trump, and Jacksonian Identity Politics. By David Frum.

Sarah Palin announced her endorsement of Republican candidate Donald Trump for president in a rally Tuesday at Iowa State University in Ames.

The Alliance of the Aggrieved. By David Frum. The Atlantic, January 19, 2016.

Donald Trump Rally in Ames, IA with Sarah Palin (1-19-16). Right Side Network, January 19, 2016. YouTube, YouTube, YouTube, YouTube. Transcript of Sarah Palin’s speech at BuzzFeed.


Frum:

Sarah Palin’s endorsement of Donald Trump is a bet on the triumph of identity over ideology.

Sarah Palin’s star may have dimmed since 2008. Republican pundits and donors may have wearied of her. But Republican pundits and donors don’t typically vote in the Iowa caucuses. To many, many of the people who do vote there, Palin remains a heroine and a martyr. Endorsements are usually said not to matter much in today’s politics—but if any endorsement in any contest ever can matter, Palin’s endorsement in the Republican Iowa caucuses will.

In 2012, Romney and Santorum finished only 34 votes apart in Iowa. If Palin tips a few hundred votes toward Trump in 2016’s neck-and-neck Trump-Cruz contest, she could set in motion a dynamic where Trump may win both Iowa and New Hampshire—a stunning and once-unimagined result.

But Cruz has vocal friends, too. Radio talkers Rush Limbaugh, circumspectly, and Mark Levin, more explicitly, have made clear that although they like Trump, they prefer Cruz. The Texas senator has collected endorsements from Glenn Beck, James Dobson, Brent Bozell, and Ginni Thomas, among many other conservative luminaries. In the contrast between Cruz’s support and Trump’s, one sees something truly new and disrupting—a battle between those for whom conservatism is an ideology, and those for whom conservatism is an identity.

Since Donald Trump entered the race, one opponent after another has attacked him as not a real conservative. They’ve been right, too! And the same could have been said about Sarah Palin in 2008. Palin knew little and cared less about most of the issues that excited conservative activists and media. She owed her then-sky-high poll numbers in Alaska to an increase in taxes on oil production that she used to fund a $1,200 per person one-time cash payout—a pretty radical deviation from the economic ideology of the Wall Street Journal and the American Enterprise Institute. What defined her was an identity as a “real American”—and her conviction that she was slighted and insulted and persecuted because of this identity.

That’s exactly the same feeling to which Donald Trump speaks, and which has buoyed his campaign. When he’s president, he tells voters, department stores will say “Merry Christmas” again in their advertisements. Probably most of his listeners would know, if they considered it, that the president of the United States does not determine the ad copy for Walmart and Nordstrom’s. They still appreciate the thought: He’s one of us—and he’s standing up for us against all of them—at a time when we feel weak and poor and beleaguered, and they seem more numerous, more dangerous, and more aggressive.

Talk radio uses those feelings, too, of course, and has used them for years. But the more ideological stars of conservative talk—the Limbaughs, the Levins—try to use those feelings in service of a more-or-less coherent set of political ideas. Speaking to the feelings of persecution is only a means; some vision of a revitalized free-enterprise system is the end. For Palin, though, her personal grievances were always what the whole commotion was all about. She was effective, to the extent she was, because millions of people agreed that her personal grievances sometimes also represented theirs.

Although Palin did finish college, her life story resembled the lives of non-college white America in a way that the personal lives of the Bushes, of John McCain, of Mitt Romney, or of Paul Ryan never did or could. The themes and commitments that define Movement Conservatism—free-market ideology, organized religiosity—are increasingly upmarket themes … and increasingly remote from downmarket America. Sarah Palin did get rich in the end, but like Donald Trump, she didn’t get wealth or enjoy wealth in the way that the hated elite got and enjoyed wealth.

Meanwhile, Trump is battling against Ted Cruz of Princeton and Harvard Law School, a Supreme Court practitioner married to an investment banker, who insists that the dividing line between “us” and “them” is not life story, not personal experience, but ideas and values. His conservatism is defined not by personal wrongs but by a complicated set of principles, that connect opposition to abortion to support for the gold standard; missile defense to cuts in the budget of the Environmental Protection Agency; and gun rights to a lower corporate tax rate.

Ideology versus identity: That’s going to be the ballot question in Iowa on the first of February. A lot more than the Republican presidential nomination may depend on the answer.

Transcript excerpt, starts at 36:18 [Real Clear Politics]:

PALIN: Telling us we’re not red enough? Coming from the establishment. Well, he being the only one who’s been willing, he’s got the guts to wear the issues that need to be spoken about and debated on his sleeve. Where the rest of some of these establishment candidates, they just wanted to duck and hide. They didn’t want to talk about these issues, until he brought them up. In fact, they’ve been wearing this political correctness kind of like a suicide vest.

Enough is enough. These issues that Donald Trump talks about had to be debated. And he brought them to the forefront. And that’s why we are where we are today, with good discussion, a good, heated, and very competitive primary is where we are. And now, though, to be lectured, that, well, you guys are all sounding kind of angry, is what we’re hearing from the establishment. Doggone right, we’re angry! Justifiably so! Yes. You know, they stomp on our neck and then they tell us, just chill, okay? Yeah, just relax. Well, look, we are mad and we’ve been had. They need to get used to it.