To Attract Disillusioned Voters, the GOP Must Understand Their Concerns. By Henry Olsen.

To Attract Disillusioned Voters, the GOP Must Understand Their Concerns. By Henry Olsen. National Review Online, January 14, 2016. (From the January 25, 2016 issue of National Review.)

Olsen:

Thanks to Donald Trump, American elites are finally paying attention to blue-collar, white America. They do not like what they see.

Racist. Bigoted. Irrational. Angry. How many times have you read or heard one or more of these words used to describe Trump’s followers? Whether they are the academic, media, and entertainment elites of the Left or the political and business elites of the Right, America’s self-appointed best and brightest uniformly view the passions unleashed by Trump as the modern-day equivalent of a medieval peasants’ revolt. And, like their medieval forebears, they mean to crush it.

That effort is both a fool’s errand for the country and a poisoned chalice for conservatives and Republicans. It is foolish because the reasons the peasants are revolting will not fade easily. Ignoring and ridiculing their concerns, the way European elites have done with their own electorates for most of the last two decades, will simply intensify the masses’ rage and ensure that their political spokesmen become more intransigent and radical. If you want an American version of Marine Le Pen tomorrow, ignore the legitimate concerns of blue-collar Americans today.

And it is a poisoned chalice for the Right because such a strategy requires a permanent informal coalition with the Left. Keeping blue-collar white Americans out of political power will result in exactly what Washington elites have wanted for years: a series of grand bargains that keep the status quo largely intact and the Democratic party in power.

Conservative Republicans have fought for 60 years to build a coalition that not only will tell history to stop, but will also channel it in a new direction, a direction in which freedom flourishes and America and her values reign over a peaceful and prosperous globe. The constituency that is rallying to Trump is not fully conservative, but it shares more values with conservatives than do any of the other constituencies that could possibly be enticed to join our cause. It is thus imperative that conservatives understand what these fellow citizens want and find ways to make common cause with them where we can.

Blue-collar whites traditionally have been animated by the sense that government ought to be on the side of the little guy. They formed the backbone of the Democratic party during its New Deal/Great Society heyday, enthusiastically supporting a party that aided labor unions, created Social Security and Medicare, and expanded educational opportunities. While they no longer think of themselves as Democrats, they have not abandoned either these sentiments or the promises that these programs originally offered. Their openness to the Right is predicated on the Right’s guaranteeing that these advances will not be undone.

Patriotism has also been a blue-collar-white staple for decades. Blue-collar whites may not be particularly hawkish (their sons and daughters are often our “boots on the ground”), but they are not isolationist or pacifist, either. They are proud of America, favor effective measures to protect our security, and do not like to see America humiliated by her enemies.

Blue-collar whites remain more friendly to traditional religion than other, more educated groups but are not as motivated by social issues as they were 30 to 40 years ago. Whites without a college degree who remain motivated by these issues are already staunch Republicans. Those who remain independent tend to be open to candidates’ espousing traditional social values but do not prioritize those values highly when choosing whom to vote for.

Today these voters are most animated by a sense that they are being left behind by a changing America. They have good reason to think so: Americans with less than a college education have seen their incomes stagnate or decline for more than 15 years. Inflation-adjusted median incomes peaked for these men and women in 1999, during the Clinton administration (expect to hear a lot about that if Hillary is the Democratic nominee). Neither the Bush nor the Obama years have been good for them.

This has not made them want to overhaul America’s private sector. Polls show that blue-collar whites still believe in free enterprise and distrust government solutions. They do not believe, however, that the current economy is serving them well.

These developments have led them to be among the most pessimistic of all American voter groups. Pew Research broke the American electorate into eight groups in 2014, and the one that contains blue-collar white swing voters — “Hard-Pressed Skeptics” — was solidly down on their own future and on America’s. Sixty-one percent said America’s best years are behind us, and 65 percent said that hard work and determination are no guarantee of success.

These voters also do not trust either Wall Street or the American economy more generally to provide for their future. Seventy-four percent say that our economy unfairly favors powerful interests, and 54 percent say Wall Street hurts America’s economy. In each case, only “Solid Liberals” expressed more negative, anti-business views.

Trump’s opposition to immigration and suspicion of free trade have been his calling cards so far, so it should be no surprise to find that blue-collar white independent voters share his views. The Pew study found that 79 percent think immigrants are a burden on the country and 44 percent think free-trade agreements are bad for America. These voters have been hit hard by competition from foreigners, whether those foreigners live abroad (free trade) or at home (immigrants), and they want protection — now.

Blue-collar whites are also more open to government action than many movement conservatives. For example, 87 percent of “Steadfast Conservatives,” Pew’s term for movement conservatives, think government is doing too much that should be left to individuals and businesses; only 44 percent of Hard-Pressed Skeptics agree. Sixty percent of Hard-Pressed Skeptics think government aid to the poor does more good than harm; only 10 percent of Steadfast Conservatives agree. Seventy-nine percent of Hard-Pressed Skeptics say that cuts to Social Security benefits should be off the table. Clearly a campaign based on cutting food stamps and reforming entitlements will not resonate with blue-collar whites.

One might wonder whether meeting these voters halfway is worth it. But there is no alternative: All other voter groups who might be open to voting for a Republican nominee are farther to the left and oppose conservative consensus on key matters of principle.

Hispanics, for example, strongly favor government intervention in the economy. The Public Religion Research Institute has found that Hispanics favor raising taxes and increasing spending on education and infrastructure by a nearly two-to-one margin over cutting taxes and letting business grow. Upper-income young whites, whom Pew calls the “Next Generation Left,” favor free trade and low taxes but are highly secular and green, opposing the traditional definition of marriage and favoring greenhouse-gas-emission controls. These voters will vote for Republicans, but only for moderates such as former New York governor George Pataki or former California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. Building a working coalition by focusing on either of these groups, as many in the GOP establishment favor, would trigger a civil war within conservatism.

Winning the support of blue-collar voters means gaining their trust, and that means first affirming the core elements of their worldview. They have to believe that the GOP nominee understands that they have been the losers in the transition to a modern economy. They have to believe that the nominee will be on their side when the chips are down and that he is willing to take on the powerful. A nominee who appears ignorant of or callous toward these views, such as Mitt Romney, will be rejected as long as the Democratic nominee seems marginally acceptable.

This means that they will demand, at a minimum, some form of immigration restriction. America undoubtedly needs some immigrants to fuel its economic growth, especially since the native-born work force is aging. But “open borders” as an end goal of immigration reform will simply not fly with these voters.

The nominee should be guided by the principle “All the immigrants we need, but only the immigrants we need.” That means he or she should favor getting control of our borders and enforcing requirements to give American citizens priority for job openings. It may also mean reforms that help citizens move in search of work. Low-skilled, native-born Americans tend to stay in place when jobs leave their communities, a choice partially subsidized by a host of well-meaning government programs that allow them to get by without moving. Reforming these programs to encourage Americans to move where the jobs are will lower the demand for immigration and give blue-collar Americans of all races the help they need to get back on the ladder to self-sufficiency.

Addressing the downside of free trade is also key to winning these voters. Restricting trade itself is not a good idea, since trade creates jobs that these voters need. But free-trade competition places downward pressure on the wages and compensation of low-skilled workers. A GOP nominee who wants to attract these voters must embrace an economic policy that creates high-paying jobs that people with high-school educations can do.

This will require more than simply lowering corporate tax rates to encourage business investment, although it certainly does require that. It will require more than making it easier to produce oil, natural gas, and other natural resources that create good jobs for people with moderate levels of formal education. Ideally, it will involve enacting some policies that favor or subsidize high-paying jobs in America.

That could take many forms, but Wisconsin governor Scott Walker’s tax reforms give some idea of what one can do. He has not cut corporate tax rates in Wisconsin. Instead, he has enacted two tax credits that reward businesses for jobs they create and for in-state business activity. Federal corporate tax credits for companies that create jobs in America, and perhaps for companies that increase employee compensation beyond the rate of inflation, would show blue-collar Americans that the government is working for them.

Blue-collar voters also need to know that “playing by the rules” will be rewarded, not punished. Some of the major objections they have to immigration and trade arise from the fact that our government looks the other way at cheating when it comes to foreigners (e.g., Chinese currency manipulation and businesses’ hiring illegal immigrants) but rigorously enforces the rules when it comes to Americans. To blue-collar whites, “working hard and playing by the rules” is a core value; a government that doesn’t share it is one that earns scorn and merits disgust. A GOP nominee who wants to win these voters over will have to show he is serious about creating economic rules that don’t disfavor American workers and will be enforced.

It is also possible to find common ground with these voters on tax policy. They will support tax cuts for everyone, even the “top 1 percent,” but they will not support tax cuts that seem unduly to favor the already well-to-do. This is a problem for most Republican candidates, because they have already endorsed tax policies that embrace the supply-side view that the best way to grow the economy is to cut taxes for the highest earners.

A politically ideal tax policy would look less like what is on offer now and more like what has worked for Governors Walker and Kasich (Ohio). Both Walker and Kasich have cut tax rates for all, but their cuts are much smaller than those that the other major candidates have proposed. Each of their state tax-cut plans also includes elements that backload the cuts in favor of working-class households — in Kasich’s case, an increase in the earned-income tax credit, and larger rate cuts for lower income brackets in Walker’s. A politically ideal tax plan would adopt similar approaches.

A bold nominee might even want to propose exempting the first $20,000 in wages from the Medicaid payroll tax, which would lower the cost of hiring a new employee and nearly eliminate this tax for most households earning less than the median income. This exemption would apply to all workers, so higher-income taxpayers would see their taxes cut too; but it would apply equally to all rather than give a greater benefit to people who are already doing well. It would be a federal version of the across-the-board property-tax cuts that Scott Walker has enacted with great success, cuts that benefit all and give equal treatment to people in all income brackets.

The same basic approach extends to a host of other issues. Higher education, for example, costs so much because academic elites keep out competitors and prop up tenured faculty who teach and publish very little. Deregulation and tying federal student aid to keeping tuition increases at or below inflation will give blue-collar students the education they want at a price they can afford.

Obamacare should be repealed and replaced, but with an eye more on how its replacement will work in practice than on how it looks in theory. That means designing a plan that subsidizes private-sector coverage and deregulates health-insurance and health-care markets to incentivize the private sector to deliver care more efficiently.

Conservatives can achieve all this while advancing freedom and opportunity. Ronald Reagan built his career on that understanding. Writing in these pages in December 1964, he asserted that conservatives “represent the forgotten American — that simple soul who goes to work, bucks for a raise, takes out insurance, pays for his kids’ schooling, contributes to his church and charity and knows there just ‘ain’t no such thing as free lunch.’” Reagan spent the rest of his career representing that soul, and in so doing created the modern conservative movement and changed the world. We who stand on his shoulders would do well to readopt the sentiments that allowed him to attract the blue-collar Reagan Democrats and remake his coalition in our times.

Donald Trump Holds a Massive Rally in Pensacola, Florida.

Donald Trump Holds a Rally in Pensacola, FL (1-13-16). Video. Right Side Broadcasting Network, January 13, 2016. YouTube.

The Specter of Islam. By Robert Tracinski.

The Specter of Islam. By Robert Tracinski. The Federalist, January 11, 2016.

Tracinski:

A specter is haunting Europe. The specter of Islam.

George W. Bush used to say that we had to fight the terrorists over there, in the Middle East, so we wouldn’t have to fight them here at home. A long period of relative security made that claim seem overblown, like a lame justification for interventionism. But it just might turn out that he was right, and that it is even more true for Europe than it is for us.

I was reminded of this reading about the curtailed New Year’s Eve celebrations in Paris.

About 60,000 police officers and troops were deployed across the country, and revelers said that made them feel safer. “The same troops who used to be in Mali, Chad, French Guyana or the Central African Republic are now ensuring the protection of French people,” said Defense Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian.

In Belgium, the New Year’s Eve festivities were canceled entirely.

In Brussels, 2016 was rung in without the customary fireworks display and downtown street party…. Earlier this week, Belgian authorities announced they had arrested two men suspected of planning to stage attacks in Brussels over the holidays…. On Thursday morning, forklifts and trucks removed generators and other equipment from the Place de Brouckere, the broad square in central Brussels where the fireworks show was supposed to happen.

In Paris, they were significantly scaled down.

Paris canceled its usual fireworks display in favor of a five-minute video performance at the Arc de Triomphe just before midnight, relayed on screens along the Champs Elysee, where people chanted. Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo said the show was aimed at “sending the world the message that Paris is standing, proud of its lifestyle and living together.”

Well, no, if Paris were standing tall, it would have had its usual celebrations. Fireworks have an interesting symbolism, recalling the sights and sounds of war. Presumably that’s the problem this year: fireworks would be good cover for another shooting rampage. In the United States, legend has it that the reason we have fireworks on the Fourth of July is to remember the wars we fought to gain and keep our independence — the rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air. But you only want to remember that if you won the war. If you’re losing, I can see why you wouldn’t be so excited about the fireworks.

The most dispiriting thing said about Paris was from a Parisienne on the street: “It was a very strange year, and we just want 2016 to be different, simply a normal one. It does not need to be an excellent one, but just a normal one.” Way to aim high.

But I doubt 2016 is going to be a normal year for Europeans. German officials just admitted that a little more than half of a wave of attacks during New Year’s Eve celebrations in Cologne were by North African and Middle Eastern asylum seekers who have flooded into the country during the Syrian civil war and have been welcomed under a foolishly, sanctimoniously overgenerous refugee policy.

The most disturbing thing about the Cologne attacks was the prevalence of sexual assault as a weapon, complete with gangs of Muslim men stalking German women through the streets, yelling obscenities at them and threatening them with sexual violence. Note to Western feminists: we finally found real “rape culture” for you. Unfortunately, it is not found primarily among middle-class American college boys, which is what you were hoping for.

This is “normal” — if that word can be applied here — in the Arab and Muslim world. Wherever large crowds gather, unaccompanied women are in danger. (Remember the brutal attack on CBS reporter Lara Logan during the Egyptian revolution.) This is a measure of the extent to which the culture of Islam, as it is practiced in much of the world, deranges and brutalizes its believers, particularly when it comes to their attitudes toward women and sex. This is what has now arrived in the heart of a free, civilized, enlightened Europe.

But take heart, some people in Europe are really thinking ahead. The famed Italian fashion house Dolce & Gabbana in now offering high-end hijabs. So yes, it turns out that burqas do come in sizes.

This is an inauspicious start to 2016 — but it is exactly what we should expect after 2015, which was the year the Specter of Islam rose to loom high over the capitals of Europe.

Last year was bookended by parallel events in France and the United States. The year began with the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris, in which French jihadists with ties to ISIS wiped out the top staff of an irreverent magazine that had flouted Islamic restrictions — followed in March by the thwarted attack on Pamela Geller’s Draw Mohammed contest in Garland, Texas. The year drew to an end with a large, coordinated jihadist shooting attack on multiple targets across Paris, followed by the San Bernardino massacre in the US.

In these attacks, we can see three clear patterns.

First, radical Muslims attack the mind first, then the body. In a revealing statement, Secretary of State John Kerry blurted out that he found the Charlie Hebdo attacks understandable, with a “legitimacy” or at least a “rationale” about enforcing Islamic restrictions. But that’s an utterly false distinction. Yes, the jihadists’ first targets in the West are going to be those people who use words, ideas, and art to challenge Islam. But those are only the first targets, not the last. As the attacks at the end of the year demonstrated, the jihadists ultimately want to wipe out all the infidels, not just the outspoken few. And as the New Year’s Eve attacks demonstrate, their target isn’t just artists who draw provocative cartoons but women whose “provocation” is not to cover themselves in public from head to foot.

Second, the attacks in the US are smaller, less organized, and less successful than in Europe. This reflects the fact that Muslims in the US is a smaller percentage of the population and better assimilated to American values. Fewer are attracted to the cause of jihad, and they are less able to work with people around them to plan and organize. (And, as I noted after the Garland attack, America is generally a harder target.) But among the small number of violent radicals, the full murderous intent is there, even if the means are not as effective. Europe is the front line, but we’re not far behind.

This can be seen in the first Islam-inspired terror attack of the New Year: the shooting of a Philadelphia police officer by a man who pledged loyalty to ISIS and said he did it “in the name of Islam.” He will no doubt be dismissed as No True Muslim.

And that leads us to the third lesson: we have a president who is resolutely opposed to learning any of the other lessons. Instead, he is focusing all of his efforts on doing what little he can to disarm Americans. Unfortunately, judging from the presidential debates — in which the Democratic participants steadfastly refused to use the phrase “radical Islam” — we’re not going to get any better from the next round of Democratic candidates.

The rise of the Islamic State and its ability to inspire and organize terrorists attacks in the West, combined with the Democrats’ refusal to confront this threat, sets up one of the big questions for 2016, particularly as the Republican primaries actually go to a vote in the next two months. This must now be a national security election, and by that standard the only interesting debate is between Republican candidates Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz.

I don’t expect our current president to do much of anything about the threat of Islam, or to help the Europeans with it, during his remaining term in office. Instead, we have the rest of this year to decide how we would like the next president to deal with it.

Because the specter of Islam is haunting us all.

In Europe, Muslim Extremists Turn to Sexual Terrorism. By M.G. Opera.

In Europe, Muslim Extremists Turn to Sexual Terrorism. By M.G. Opera. The Federalist, January 11, 2016.

Opera:

In the wake of the New Year’s Eve mass sexual assaults in Cologne, it would be madness to ignore the persistent trend in the Muslim world of physical violence toward women.

Europe has a big problem on its hands. On Sunday, Germany’s justice minister said a series of attacks across the country on New Year’s Eve appear to have been pre-planned. In downtown Cologne, about a thousand men of Arab and North African descent entered a square full of celebrators and proceeded to surround women, robbing and in many cases sexually assaulting them.

Police describe a horrifying scene of women running terrified and attackers aggressively pushing back police. So far, 170 women have come forward with complaints, three-fourths of which involve sexual assaults. Similar attacks from that night have been reported in Hamburg, Stuttgart, Frankfurt, and Düsseldorf.

It now appears that officials tried to cover up the attacks lest they stoke anti-immigrant sentiment. On Friday, Cologne’s police chief was fired because of his poor handling of the attacks in the first few days of the new year. Rather than face the reality that they have a problem with their Muslim population, city officials tried to sweep it under the rug.

Hiding Sexual Assault In the Name of Tolerance

How they thought they could conceal an attack of this scale and nature is difficult to say. Then again, they’re just following a rising European trend. Consider the Rotherham rape scandal last year in Britain, which revealed that police and social workers had for years been hiding what amounted to 1,400 gang rapes of young women and girls by men of Pakistani descent. Social workers and others claimed they were afraid to come forward for fear some would accuse them of racism and “Islamaphobia.”

Something similar is happening in Cologne. Mayor Henriette Reker was quick to come out and claim “there are no indications that this involved people who have sought shelter in Cologne as refugees.” On Friday, news broke that 18 of 31 identified suspects were confirmed asylum-seekers. German’s leaders rushed to insist this couldn’t possibly have anything to do with the recent migrant crisis, before knowing the facts.

This isn’t just a European habit. Recall the U.S. media’s initial knee-jerk denial of the motivations of the San Bernardino terrorists. But Europe is especially afraid to acknowledge it has a problem with its Muslim population, and its leaders are giving the impression they don’t take the problem seriously.

To prevent similar attacks during Carnival celebrations next month, Reker awkwardly proposed that city officials would work to explain Carnival to people from other cultures so they won’t be “confused” about “celebratory behavior in Cologne,” as if the New Year’s Eve attackers merely didn’t understand that sexual assault is an inappropriate way to “celebrate” and all that’s needed to uproot deeply held cultural norms is a little bit more information.

The Muslim World Has a Violence Against Women Problem

To date, only 18 of the approximately 1,000 attackers have been confirmed as asylum seekers. But what about the rest of them? They may have been second- or third-generation immigrants from Muslim-majority countries, which suggests these communities are not assimilating sufficiently into European society and are not adopting its most important cultural norms.

This bodes ill for European countries that have seen massive migration from Muslim-majority countries in recent years because it’s often the second and third generation, not the first, that is most resistant to Western culture. Pew data shows that Muslims in Europe are having children at a faster rate than non-Muslim Europeans, so this ought to be a real concern.

Of course we should be careful not to portray all Muslim men as violent and repressive toward women. However, it would be madness to ignore the pervasive and persistent trend in the Muslim world of treating women as unequal to men and being physically violent toward them.

Until recently, women in Morocco (the most progressive Muslim state) couldn’t travel without permission from their father or a male relative, and courts often forced rape victims to marry their rapist. Women in Morocco (including many of my own personal acquaintances) are habitually chased, harassed, and groped. Groping and sexual assault tend to happen when large crowds gather, like in Tahir Square during the Egyptian Arab Spring—and what happened across Germany on New Year’s Eve.

Even a liberal Moroccan Muslim public intellectual, Fatima Sadiqi, once said in a lecture that men and women are equal, but women belong in the home sphere while men belong in the public one. This is the mildest way to interpret Muslim cultural attitudes toward women.

But let’s assume that it’s the correct one, for the sake of argument. Is this an acceptable future for Germany, or for any part of Europe? Given the continent’s rapidly changing demographics, where it’s predicted that by 2050 10.2 percent of the population will be Muslim, this is a question Europeans must answer.

Assimilation Is Now a Life or Death Project

It seems German officials are not worried enough about the potential problems a huge influx of mostly male emigrants from Muslim majority countries may bring. We live in an age where suggesting migrants need to assimilate is seen as colonialist and anti-multicultural. Yet not expecting them to accept some of the core values of the country they would call home—like treating women with respect—invites violent outbursts like those on New Year’s Eve, or worse, terrorist attacks like those in November in Paris.

Perhaps these mass sexual assaults will turn out to be more unsettling to Europeans even than terrorist attacks, because it isn’t just their security that’s being threatened, but their way of life. One police man reported he had never seen such a lack of regard for the police in 29 years on the job as among the assailants on New Year’s Eve in Cologne.

Yet it seems like no one in charge is really that concerned—or if they are, they’re too politically correct to come out and say it, much like some liberals in America are reluctant to put the words “Islam” and “terrorist” in the same sentence.

If Europe’s political leaders don’t adequately address these real and troubling concerns and convince voters they’re taking it seriously, they will have a rebellion on their hands. Ignoring these incidents in the name of “tolerance” will further fuel far-right nationalist movements and xenophobic rhetoric.

It’s easy to see how attacks like this one will become a useful talking point for the far right, a ready-made argument against immigration. It’s also easy to see how it could point back toward the kind of nationalism that Europe has tried so hard to leave behind.

Democrats and Republicans No Longer Speak the Same Language. By Julie Roginsky.

Obama calls for unity in last State of the Union address but we are farther apart than ever. By Julie Roginsky. FoxNews.com, January 13, 2016.

Is Obama’s agenda causing a split among Americans? Video. Outnumbered. Fox News, January 13, 2016. YouTube.





Roginsky:

It was at once a victory lap and a to-do list, an opportunity to shape a legacy in the midst of a legacy-making year.  It was a farewell address that provided a plan for the future even as the national conversation has already shifted to those auditioning to deliver next year’s speech.

Mostly, Barack Obama’s final State of the Union address was an enjoining of the 2016 campaign and a progressive vision from a president who wants to ensure the preservation of his legacy.

It was a rebuttal to the negativity heard on the campaign trail – not just from Republicans, of whom that is expected, but even from Democratic candidates who are loathe to criticize the president directly while nevertheless promising to do better.

As a campaign speech, it was one of his finest.

A self-laudatory speech, it was also an acknowledgement that the gains the country has made under the Obama administration will necessarily have to be reinforced by a Democratic successor.

Yes, this administration has presided over 70 consecutive months of private sector job growth, including adding more net jobs in the last 12 weeks than were added in the last 12 years of Republican administrations.  Millions more have health coverage thanks to the Affordable Care Act – legislation so anathema to Republicans that they have voted to repeal it over five dozen times. Civil rights have been expanded, over the objections of many in Congress.

These accomplishments will not be easily undone but only a Democratic successor can build upon most of them, which is why this address resembled a political campaign speech in tenor as well as in tone.

It was not an accident that the speech dwelled largely on issues that resonate with the coalition of voters the next Democratic nominee hopes to capture: the focus on better-paying, sustainable jobs and economic security; better access to early-childhood, STEM and college education; entitlement protection; expanding health care treatments, including cancer research; combating climate change.

Democrats and Republicans have longed disagreed on what they consider to be the most pressing issues facing the nation and this speech reflected that rift.  Republicans consistently cite homeland security as their top concern; for Democrats, terrorism ranks far behind jobs and the economy.

And that is why the president’s words regarding the relative danger posed by terrorists will be heard so differently by Democrats, who consider it less of a threat than gun violence, and by Republicans, who are most anxious about terrorism.  As a political document, the president’s speech accomplished its goal, even if it did not reassure his critics.

But despite the president’s powerful appeal to a common citizenship, it was not only his emphasis on particular issues that belied his call for unity.  And the challenges facing the nation were not just outlined from the podium.

They were apparent in the theater that always surrounds the State of the Union – from the first lady’s guests, who included a Syrian refugee and the plaintiff in the case that enshrined marriage equality as the law of the land – to the presence of Kim Davis , elsewhere in the chamber, the controversial county clerk from Kentucky (invited by a member of Congress who wished to  remain anonymous), who refused to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples.

They were present in the Muslim constituents who accompanied many legislators to the speech and in the two nuns from a Catholic order challenging the Affordable Care Act’s contraception mandate.

And they were hauntingly reinforced by the empty chair in the first lady’s box, set aside in memory of the 30,000 victims who die every year from gun violence.

Each of these represented not just the divisions in Washington but served as a silent rebuttal to candidates running to deliver next year’s State of the Union speech.

Tellingly, they also underscored the divisions found in communities all across the country, where political disagreements have morphed into something more ominous and personal, where gerrymandering has largely ensured that politically minded people now rarely live among those with whom they substantially disagree.

As President Obama noted Tuesday night, the state of the union is strong. But it is also as divided today as it has ever been.  And, despite his call for common citizenship, the prognosis for a more unified government looks as bleak for the next administration as it has been under this one.

It is not that we are not on the same page as a nation. As the president said, that is to be expected in a country this large and diverse.

It is that we can no longer even agree on whether the words on the page are written in the same language.

What We Should Have Learned from the Iraq War. By John Daniel Davidson.

What We Should Have Learned from the Iraq War. By John Daniel Davidson. The Federalist, January 12, 2016.

Davidson:

There’s another way to understand the Iraq war and its aftermath: as a hard-won success that a single presidential election unraveled.

As we head into the next Republican presidential debate, we should take stock of how the previous one exposed a widening split in the GOP about what lessons we should take from the Iraq war. The key moment came during an exchange between senators Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio about how to deal with ISIS and the collapse of order in the Middle East. Rubio favors a more aggressive, interventionist foreign policy and Cruz a more restrained—albeit somewhat vague—approach that involves “carpet bombing” ISIS but not getting involved in Syria’s civil war.

The exchange reflected the stakes of a much larger question about America’s strategic foreign policy: should America actively promote democracy abroad and pursue regime change by toppling dictators, or should we tolerate dictatorships and instead focus more narrowly on American interests, less on world order?

Cruz, along with Donald Trump and Sen. Rand Paul, have criticized the Iraq war and President George W. Bush, while Rubio, Jeb Bush, and Gov. Chris Christie have talked about the need to form a close alliance with Sunni Arabs to defeat the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq.

This divide has been framed crudely—and unfairly—as “isolationist” versus “neocon” in much of the press, but neither of those terms on their own means much in this context. It’s more accurate to say that after the Iraq war, two camps emerged in the GOP: those who think toppling Saddam was the right decision and would’ve been a complete success if only President Obama hadn’t pulled our troops out prematurely, and those who think it was a terrible idea that cost us much more than we gained, destabilized the region, and enabled the rise of ISIS. (The latter view is more or less indistinguishable from that of the Obama administration and the Democratic Party.)

Beware the Ides of Politics

But there’s a third way to understand the war and its aftermath: as a hard-won success that was completely undone by a single presidential election. For various reasons, Americans in the twenty-first century are unwilling to endure military action abroad for as long as it takes to establish stable regimes. American political leaders can’t count on decades of domestic support for large-scale military deployments in the wake of a victorious war, as in the American occupation of Japan and West Germany after World War II, or South Korea after the Korean War.

The great lesson of the Iraq war, then, is not that we should withdraw from the world and never again try to overthrow dangerous dictatorships, but that we should be very selective about when and where we intervene because of how easily domestic politics can undermine intervention. Seen in this light, it’s not the rise of ISIS that should be a warning to future administrations, it’s that the Obama administration was able to erase all our gains in Iraq by pulling the troops out too soon, which destabilized the country and created the space ISIS needed to grow.

To understand the magnitude of what Obama threw away in Iraq, consider that by the time he inherited the war, the country was almost completely pacified. We had defeated all the warring factions inside the country, including Iranian-backed Shiite militias, and casualty counts reflect that. By the end of Obama’s first year in office, coalition military fatalities in Iraq stood at just 150, a dramatic decline from two years earlier, when that figure was nearly 1,000. In the summer and fall of 2009, monthly Iraqi civilian deaths were being counted in the hundreds, not the thousands as they had been in 2006 to 2007.

Obama turned his back on those gains. He used the failure of Iraq’s National Assembly to pass a law granting U.S. troops immunity from local criminal prosecution as a pretext for letting the status of forces agreement expire at the end of 2011—as if we had been forced to leave because of domestic political factors in Iraq, instead of those in the United States. What we lost, however, was far greater than just our gains in Iraq.

Prudence Demands Working with Democracy’s Effects

In a National Review Online article last year, Mario Loyola set our premature withdrawal in the broader historical context of U.S. involvement in the Middle East stretching back half a century:

The central position the U.S. had achieved in the Middle East by 2009 was not merely the result of victory in the Iraq War. It was a position carefully built up over decades. It started in the 1950s and 1960s with a de facto protectorate of the oil-producing Gulf Kingdoms. It was consolidated in the 1970s with Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s success in gaining Jordan’s trust and turning Egypt away from the Soviet Union and toward peace with Israel. And it was further built up by both of the wars with Iraq.

That’s now been erased, in part because Obama wanted to be the president who got us out of Iraq, but also because the president was responding to domestic political pressure. Obama’s election in 2008 was in part a rejection of the Iraq war by American voters, who had lost patience with our mission in the Middle East, even though by 2009 our strategy there was a demonstrable success.

This of course is a fundamental weakness in democratic governments, which tend not to be very good at avoiding wars because public opinion often prevents them from taking necessary, sometimes preemptive steps abroad. The reactive nature of democratic foreign policy also makes it difficult to pursue long-term strategic foreign policy of the sort that’s necessary to successfully topple a bad regime and replace it with a friendly one.

The foreign policy lesson for today’s GOP candidates, then, shouldn’t be an oversimplified preference for one of two extremes—intervention or isolation—but a heightened scrutiny about where and when to employ American military power in a way that will bring about lasting gains.

Henry Nau has argued for a kind of “conservative internationalism” in the tradition of presidents Truman and Reagan, which “prioritized the advance of freedom along the borders of existing free countries in Europe and Asia—not in every country in Latin America, the Middle East, and Africa.” Today, such a strategy would involve focusing our military and diplomatic resources on places like Ukraine and South Korea, rather than seeking to impose democracy in places that have never known it, like Syria.

That might prove a sound approach, but it won’t work if a future administration can’t convince the American people to support it long-term. If we’re going to intervene abroad, either by pressuring or toppling a regime, we must do so selectively, cognizant that we the people no longer have much patience for toppling dictators and occupying foreign countries—even if our strategy is working.

America Used to Know How to Assimilate Immigrants. By Mike Gonzalez.

America Used to Know How to Assimilate Immigrants. By Mike Gonzalez. The Federalist, January 12, 2016.

Obama’s Ethnic Divide-and-Conquer Strategy. By Mike Gonzalez. National Review Online, January 13, 2016.

Patriotic Assimilation Is an Indispensable Condition in a Land of Immigrants. By Mike Gonzalez. The Heritage Foundation, January 8, 2016. PDF.


Gonzalez [The Federalist]:

Why did Mussolini’s siren song of fascism fall on deaf ears with Italian immigrants, while the sadistic song of terror today finds a receptive audience among Arabs with long ties here?

Two refugees are now in federal custody, charged with terrorism-related activities. So much for all immigrants and their children being assimilated into Norman Rockwell’s America!

That level of assimilation is a tall order, you might say. Yes, but it’s a worthy goal. In fact, we had some success when we at least tried it. The best purveyor of that American archetype in Hollywood was a Sicilian-born immigrant known as Francesco Rosario Capra—whom you might know as Frank Capra.

Contrast Previous Immigrants with Today’s Immigrants

Benito Mussolini found out the hard way that assimilation worked for America. In 1929 he called on Italian-Americans to remain loyal to the motherland. They pretty much reacted by giving Il Duce the gesto dell’ombrello, which is not exactly a salute. Hundreds of thousands of them fought in World War II, many in Italy itself.

But things seem different today. On Thursday, federal authorities announced the arrest of two refugees on terrorism-related charges. One of the men allegedly had ties to terror groups even before entering the country three years ago. The other came to the United States in 2009 and apparently became radicalized here. He then tried to recruit people here to join terror groups overseas.

What’s going on? Italian-Americans spurned Mussolini when he said “my order is that an Italian citizen must remain an Italian citizen, no matter in what land he lives, even to the seventh generation.” Why did the siren song of fascism fall on deaf ears, while the sadistic song of terror today finds a receptive audience among people with long ties here?

Then, We Didn’t Apologize for Deliberate Assimilation

Obviously, there’s much at work, and it will require different disciplines to arrive at a holistic explanation and solution. But allow me to humbly take up one strand and suggest something that is never discussed, yet seems so self-evident.

At the turn of the last century, when Italian-Americans poured in large number through Ellis Island, they encountered what was then called—quaintly, and without irony or angst—an Americanization program. They were actually taught to love their new country.

One driver behind the assimilationist push was the fear that the Italians and other immigrants such as Slavs and Jews would bring in—and cling to—socialist and anarchist ideas ascendant in their native lands. By mid-century, the only traitors helping the Soviet cause were people with long American pedigrees like Alger Hiss.

The immigrants who experienced the Americanization program went on to become full-fledged members of the Greatest Generation. They endured the Depression, defeated Nazism and fascism in World War II, then Communism in the Cold War. To say the least, they met the existential questions of the day. No fewer than 14 Italian-Americans received the Congressional Medal of Honor for bravery in WWII.

Now We Encourage Newcomers to Hate Us

Today, our elites are far too “sophisticated” to promote Americanization. As immigrants, refugees, assylees and others come and settle here, they are actually taught that this is a racist, Islamophobic country and that they are victims. In fact, much about how they live—from social standing to actual tangible benefits—will depend on their status as members of an aggrieved, protected group.

Is it any wonder we have the current situation? It is an economic axiom that the more you tax or deter something, the less of it you get, while the more you subsidize another thing, the more of it there will be. American elites’ decision to turn away from patriotic assimilation and pursue a multicultural model that perpetuates group differences—in effect, culturally and functionally segregating them—has created societal problems we will be dealing with for years.

Discussion of this issue has nearly become taboo, because the Left pounces on anyone who will take it up. One can surmise, of course, that the Left pounces as hard as it does because it realizes that an internally riven society is an essential ingredient of regime change—or “fundamentally transforming the United States of America” as some call it.

The Time to Debate This Was Yesterday

Monday, The Heritage Foundation published my special report detailing how we used to assimilate immigrants, then how and why we stopped. The word “assimilation” itself was used by President Washington and embraced by all the Founders on down to Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Ronald Reagan. Most importantly, the report calls for presidential candidates of both parties to debate this existential matter.

This is a debate we haven’t really had. Elites in the academy and the arts, the bureaucracy and politics, decided on their own to stop assimilating newcomers and move to the multi-group model.

Undoing the damage of multiculturalism, affirmative action, and the entire culture of victimhood won’t be easy, and working only toward cultural and economic integration will not be enough. After all, 2013 Boston bomber Dzhokar Tsarnaev and last year’s San Bernardino’s Syed Farook were “culturally integrated.” Patriotic assimilation is key. But first, we need to be able to talk about it—without being shouted down.

The West and Islamism: Testing the “War of Ideas.” By Adam Garfinkle.

The West and Islamism: Testing the “War of Ideas.” By Adam Garfinkle. The American Interest, January 11, 2016.

Garfinkle:

I argued late last month that, after Paris, Bamako, and San Bernardino, a clutch of mainly well-intentioned observers were exaggerating the role of ideology in the Islamist threat, calling (again) for a “war of ideas,” as though the desultory post-9/11 era experience on this score had never happened. I noted, as have many others both recently and more than a dozen years ago, that any consequential “war of ideas” has to go on within Muslim-majority countries. And it is going on, with signs pointing to the eventual rejection and marginalization of salafi extremism, and the emergence of something still inchoate that is neither Islamist nor entirely traditional. Of course we could help the anti-salafis in the region more than we have been, and we could be wiser about our methods. We could also go about this foolishly and counterproductively, as we have in some cases in the past and as certain presidential contenders are urging us to repeat (and worse).

Between the Western worldview and terror-prone Islamism, on the other hand, there is little intellectual or ideological conflict of significance that can be remedied by a “war of ideas.” There is a conflict, of course, and it is one between two universalisms: Western Enlightenment liberalism and Islamist supremacism. But this conflict is not the proximate source of our problem. There is rather a sociological problem in the region having mainly to do with the stresses of modernization on traditional and, in many cases, still largely tribally structured societies, and this agonizing civilizational churning happens to spatter blood beyond as well as within its borders. Regrettably, we in the West cannot master this problem, only manage it until those who truly own it work their way to some new and improved social equipoise.

I know this argument will be unpopular in some circles, for the “war of ideas” mantra has become a kind of abstract rallying cry that supposedly complements the military/security instrumentalities Western governments must use to protect their citizens. Many people are uncomfortable or unsatisfied with an exclusively military-security response to salafi extremism and long to believe that something more philosophically elevated must be involved here. There is, no doubt, but I stand by my argument that the “war of ideas” notion, as commonly understood and promulgated, is not that something. Here I elaborate and complement that argument, in two parts.

First, I want to be more specific about the non-centrality of ideological conflict between the West and Islamism. What we Western observers often identity as ideological is really theological; but then we would do that, wouldn’t we, since most Western observers do not take theology as a social force very seriously anymore. The two are not the same, and thanks to a good deal of natural blurring between the understanding of ideology and theology among Muslims—because they do not take the category of the secular very seriously—rationalist arguments on an ideological plain made directly by non-Muslims to Muslims will get us absolutely nowhere.

Second, in part two, I visit the proverbial other side of the coin, for when our chatterati propose a “war of ideas” turning on the presumed centrality of jihadi ideology, they rarely leave off adjuring us here in the West to revivify and pump new energy into the liberal project that defines us both historically and prospectively. It follows that if we are warring on someone else’s ideas, we must have superior ideas in which we genuinely believe with which to win that war. Such adjuration makes for a terrific applause line, but it never comes with assembly instructions. There’s a reason for that.

To argue that there is no ideological conflict of significance between Western liberalism and Islamism is not to say that Islamists have no explicit beliefs about their relations with non-Muslims, including those of the West, or that they do not draw political implications and inspiration from those beliefs. The leaders of Islamist organizations do both, and some mid-echelon followers do as well. But the rank-and-file of Islamist organizations, notably those disposed to participate in violence and terrorism, tend to be not particularly interested in the esoterica of Islamist political theology, are neither well-versed in it nor educated sufficiently to parse it, and are not mainly motivated by whatever intellectually suasive power it may have. They join for other reasons of a run-of the-mill social-psychological sort that I (and many others) have discussed before. The Arabs native to the region and those who are attracted to the caliphate from Europe, Russia, Turkey, and America do not display precisely the same social-psychological profile, and their ability to direct their intellects to salafi thinking differs as well. Still, the point stands: What we think of as a rational, intellectual process of becoming persuaded by an argument plays a minor role, if any, for most jihadi warriors and supporters.

This matters, and here is why: What if there were an Osama bin Laden and an Ayman al-Zawahiri, and what if there is an Abu-Bakr al-Baghdadi and his close circle of premillenarian fanatics, but with hardly anyone willing to follow them? How much danger would these marginally charismatic hysterics pose? Not much, or at any rate far less danger than the distinctly non-existential threat they pose today. What motivates the cadres matters for practical reasons, and that motivation is usually idiosyncratic and highly emotional. It is not well described as intellectual or ideological.

The cadres get a highly simplified narrative line from their elders—so simple, in fact, that a single sentence suffices to state it: The non-believers are conspiring against Islam, and it is your duty as a Muslim to uphold the superiority and ensure the victory of Islam. Put in slightly more elaborate form, as it might be pitched to a young would-be adept, it gathers up the ambient elements of the region’s deep-seated grievance culture and conspiracy-theory tendencies and says, in effect, “All the problems in our society, all the humiliations and lack of dignity and justice, are the fault of non-believers and their lackeys within our midst. If we vanquish them, we will restore the Muslim umma to its rightful place as global leaders in both faith and power. If you do not join the struggle, you dishonor your family and spite God and His Prophet.”

Now, is this an ideology? It seems a bit sparse to qualify. As that term is commonly used in the West, an ideology at a minimum needs to specify: some ideal political economy; some ideal relationship between society, state, and authority; and some ideal relationship between a given society and the world outside it. There is nothing very special in these regards about current Islamist thinking. There are some innovations, yes: the very strict segregation of the sexes in public spaces; the insistence that non-Muslims cannot hold any public office; the re-merging of religious and temporal authority in the caliphate. But even these innovations do not differ much from the standard traditional Muslim understanding of these matters, and that traditional understanding is too well known to require extensive review here. Simply put, it divides the world into believers and non-believers, and proclaims the superiority of the former and the inevitable transformation of the world into a single Muslim community and state through various forms of struggle. It creates special conditions for the protection of precursors to Islam (Jews and Christians, mainly) and it bans compulsion in religion. But the precepts of Islamic supremacism and the inevitability of struggle until victory are otherwise not constrained.

That said, over the centuries this traditional understanding has been authoritatively conditionalized in practical ways so as to enable Muslim polities to live normal lives, so to speak, both within and among other polities. That process began as early as the Umayyad Empire, developed appreciably in Abbasid times, and developed even more finely during some five centuries of Ottoman rule into a synthesis, or practical compromise, between a bare-bones traditional understanding and the practical adjustments required as time passed. Some of these adjustments became necessary because the unity of Islam deteriorated early on, and the original theory made no provision for either divisions among believers or the de facto separation of religion and temporal authority. Others became necessary because the power of Islam was insufficient to promulgate successful struggle at all times and places, and theories of truces with non-believers and the conditions of commercial exchange and diplomacy with non-Muslim entities had to be elaborated—and, of course, they were, in detail.

It is these adjustments, those that have concerned internal order and those that have concerned relations with non-Muslims, that the al-Qaeda and Islamic State leaderships wish to jettison in order to “return” to the supposedly purer Islam of the Prophet’s time. The problem is, first, that the Prophet himself did not idealize his own time (quite the contrary), and second, that there is not nearly enough “there” there in the Quran and other early, Rushidun-era sources to construct a workable system of governance and foreign relations for contemporary times. It turns out that the accumulated accretions born of experience over the centuries remain necessary.

That means that the leadership of the Islamic State, and of al-Qaeda before it and now in addition to it, already needs to authoritatively interpret scripture—in other words, it needs to do exactly what it wishes others had not done over all these centuries: adumbrate the pure and simple paradigm of Islamic thinking to cover practical necessity. The result has been a good deal of intellection and no shortage of disagreement.

. . . .

We Westerners tend to turn everything into the political and hence into ideology, while our universalist Islamist competitors tend to turn everything into the religious and hence into theology. In the Muslim world, let us remember, there has never arisen a stable secular space comparable to that of the West, so the conceptual preconditions for Islamists distinguishing ideology from theology barely exist. Ultimately, this is why our having a calm debate about ideological ideas with them is damned nigh impossible.

The upshot of all this for practical policy purposes is that we cannot make war in the realm of ideas against Islamist ideology per se because there isn’t very much of it to fight. What there is of it is simple but implacable: Islam is superior to all other faiths, and it should by rights and God’s will be acknowledged as superior on earth. A basic implication follows: We get to dominate you, not the other way around.

We cannot fight that belief with a countervailing idea and not also implicate mainstream Islam, which, of course, would just make the problem worse. And if we try to fight directly, as opposed to encouraging Muslims already mobilized for that struggle, we find that what is rational and ideological to us is heard as emotional and theological to them. In their eyes we turn from liberals into Christians, and talk about, say, democracy or gender equality willy-nilly translates into a most unwelcome invitation to apostasy. This is exactly the perverse dynamic that the Bush Administration’s “forward strategy for freedom” created, and this realization in turn helps to explain why the original, post-9/11 “war of ideas” never got very far as a government exercise (although other reasons intruded as well—like lawyers warning policymakers that the First Amendment supposedly prohibits government officials from dicking around in anything even remotely religious).

Meanwhile, reform-minded Muslims who hope to dispel the precept of supremacism from Islamic thinking are hoping against hope. “A campaign to reject the dogma of Islamic supremacism would find many supporters among Muslims tired of the zealotry and self-righteousness of the Islamists,” claimed my friend Husain Haqqani in these pages not long ago. Maybe he’s right, and bless him for trying—but any attempt to displace this dogma has a very long row to hoe. You might as well ask a believing mainstream Christian to set aside the notion of the divinity of Jesus, or an Orthodox Jew to set aside the idea of “the chosen people.”

In sum, there isn’t much Islamist ideology per se, and what there is cannot be displaced by argument. Whatever ideology there is constitutes, by our conceptual reckoning, a lesser-included case of a theological system whose intrinsic nature cannot be readily distinguished in method, logic, or tone from Islamic exegesis generally; and what motivates violence and terrorism in most members of extremist Islamist organizations has little to do with any of this in the first place.

Now if, while that problem is being “worked” among Muslims, fanatical Islamists come looking to kill us in our own part of the world, the proper first response is not to argue with them over ideas but to kill them first. That in itself won’t solve the larger, longer-term problem of course, but it will have to do for the moment.