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.

Andrew Jackson, Revenant. By Walter Russell Mead.

Andrew Jackson, Revenant. By Walter Russell Mead. The American Interest, January 17, 2016.

Mead:

The biggest story in America today is the roaring return of Andrew Jackson’s spirit into the political debate.

Not since he fought with Nicholas Biddle over the future of the Bank of the United States has Andrew Jackson been this controversial or this central in American political life. Jacksonian populism, the sense of honor-driven egalitarianism and fiery nationalism that drove American politics for many years, has never been hated and reviled as often as it is today, and many American academics and intellectuals (to say nothing of Hollywood icons) are close to demanding that Jacksonian sentiment be redefined as a hate crime.

For President Barack Obama and his political allies in particular, Jacksonian America is the father of all evils. Jacksonians are who the then Senator had in mind when, in the campaign of 2008, he spoke of the “bitter clingers” holding on to their guns and their Bibles. They are the source of the foreign policy instincts he most deplores, supporting Israel almost reflexively, demanding overwhelming response to terror attacks, agitating for tight immigration controls, resisting diplomacy with Iran and North Korea, supporting Guantanamo, cynical about the UN, skeptical of climate change, and willing to use “enhanced interrogation” against terrorists in arms against the United States.

He hates their instincts at home, too. It is Jacksonians who, as I wrote in Special Providence back in 2001, see the Second Amendment as the foundation of and security for American freedom. It is Jacksonians who most resent illegal immigration, don’t want to subsidize the urban poor, support aggressive policing and long prison sentences for violent offenders and who are the slowest to “evolve” on issues like gay marriage and transgender rights.

The hate and the disdain don’t spring from anything as trivial as pique. Historically, Jacksonian America has been the enemy of many of what President Obama, rightly, sees as some of America’s most important advances. Jacksonian sentiment embraces a concept of the United States as a folk community and, over time, that folk community was generally construed as whites only. Lynch law and Jim Crow were manifestations of Jacksonian communalism, and there are few examples of race, religious or ethnic prejudice in which Jacksonian America hasn’t indulged. Jacksonians have come a long way on race, but they will never move far enough and fast enough for liberal opinion; liberals are moving too, and are becoming angrier and more exacting regardless of Jacksonian progress.

Just as bad, in the view of the President and his allies, Jacksonians don’t have much respect for the educated and the credentialed. Like William F. Buckley, they would rather be governed by the first 100 names in the phonebook than by the Harvard faculty. They loathe the interfering busybodies of the progressive state, believe that government (except for the police and the military) is a necessary evil, think most “experts” and university professors are no smarter or wiser than other people, and feel only contempt for the gender theorists and the social justice warriors of the contemporary classroom.

Virtually everything about progressive politics today is about liquidating the Jacksonian influence in American life. From immigration policy, touted as ending the era when American whites were the population of the United States, to gun policy and to regulatory policy, President Obama and his coalition aim to crush what Jacksonians love, empower what they fear, and exalt what they hate.

Jacksonian America is many things; well organized isn’t one of them. Jacksonians are found in both political parties; most are habitually indifferent to national politics, seeing all politicians as equally corrupt, equally useless. Other than the NRA, there are not many national organizations organized around the promotion of a Jacksonian agenda. In the world of think tanks and elite media, the Jacksonian voice is seldom heard and never heeded.

It is hard for Jacksonians to mobilize politically. Neither party really embraces a Jacksonian agenda. Combining a suspicion of Wall Street, a hatred of the cultural left, a love of middle class entitlement programs, and a fear of free trade, Jacksonian America has problems with both Republican and Democratic agendas. Any Jacksonian political movement will start as a party insurgency, and the Jacksonians will on the whole be less well funded, less experienced and less institutionally powerful than their party opponents. Jacksonians are neither liberal nor conservative in the ways that political elites use those terms; they are radically egalitarian, radically pro-middle class, radically patriotic, radically pro-Social Security. They are not, under normal circumstances, joiners in politics; they are individualists who organize in response to threats, and their individualism goes to their stands on what outsiders sometimes think are the social issues that unite them.

Many Jacksonians, for example, are not evangelicals and not even Christian at all. While some are strongly anti-abortion, others believe that individual freedom makes abortion nobody’s business but their own. Some stand strongly behind the drug war; many indulge in recreational drugs and some Jacksonians grow or manufacture them, much like the moonshiners who have been evading ‘revenuers’ since the Washington administration.

There’s another obstacle in the face of a Jacksonian rising: Jacksonians have been hard hit by the changes in the American economy. The secure working class wages that underpinned two generations of rising affluence for the white (and minority) industrial working class have disappeared. That isn’t just about money; the coherence of Jacksonian communities and family life has been seriously impaired. These are the points Charles Murray makes in his harrowing Coming Apart: The State of White America,1960-2010; they have been recently reinforced by studies documenting a holocaust of lower and lower middle class whites.

These devastating changes, utterly ignored by an upper middle class intellectual and cultural establishment that not so secretly hopes for a demographic change in America that will finally marginalize uncredentialed white people once and for all, make Jacksonians angry and frustrated, but they also make it harder to develop an organized political strategy in response to some of the worst and most dangerous conditions faced by any major American demographic group today. Strong in numbers (though not a majority), awakening to a new sense of anger and endangerment, Jacksonians are still groping for a movement and a program.

What we are seeing in American politics today is a Jacksonian surge. It is not yet a revolution on the scale of Old Hickory’s movement that transformed American politics for a generation. Such a revolution may not be possible in today’s America, and in any case the current wave of Jacksonian activism and consciousness is still in an early and somewhat incoherent phase. In the past, moderate leaders on the center left and center right alike have found ways to capture Jacksonian energy. FDR was able to steal the demagogic energy of Huey Long; Richard Nixon marginalized George Wallace even as he responded to some of Wallace’s concerns about bussing and crime. (He did not, however, give way to Wallace on the core issue of racial equality.)

Donald Trump, for now, is serving as a kind of blank screen on which Jacksonians project their hopes. Proposing himself as a strong leader who “gets” America but is above party, Trump appeals to Jacksonian ideas about leadership. Trump’s Jacksonian appeal has left the Republican Party in deep disarray, demonstrating the gulf between contemporary conservative ideology and Jacksonian nationalism. Indeed, one of the reasons that Trump hasn’t been hurt by attacks that highlight his lack of long term commitment to the boilerplate conservative agenda (either in the social or economic conservative variant) is that Jacksonian voters are less dogmatic and less conservative than some of their would-be political representatives care to acknowledge. Jacksonians like Social Security and Medicare much more than most Republican intellectuals, and they like immigration and free trade much less.

Whatever happens to the Trump candidacy, it now seems clear that Jacksonian America is rousing itself to fight for its identity, its culture and its primacy in a country that it believes it should own. Its cultural values have been traduced, its economic interests disregarded, and its future as the center of gravity of American political life is under attack. Overseas, it sees traditional rivals like Russia, China, North Korea and Iran making headway against a President that it distrusts; more troubling still, in ISIS and jihadi terror it sees the rapid spread of a movement aiming at the mass murder of Americans. Jacksonian America has lost all confidence in the will or the ability of the political establishment to fight the threats it sees abroad and at home. It wants what it has always wanted: to take its future into its own hands.

The biggest story in American politics today is this: Andrew Jackson is mad as hell, and he’s not going to take it anymore.

Ted Cruz and “New York Values.” By Kevin D. Williamson.

“New York Values.” By Kevin D. Williamson. National Review Online, January 17, 2016.

Williamson:

Eighty percent of voters live in cities, and Ted Cruz needs them.

What to make of Senator Ted Cruz? He is a very, very smart man who apparently believes that the median Republican presidential primary voter is very, very dumb. There’s some evidence for that proposition — Donald Trump still leads in the national polls — but Cruz’s strategy rests on the proposition that these voters will enjoy being condescended to. He may very well have chosen the most effective strategy.

Senator Cruz is very much hardwired into the current us-and-them mood of the electorate, Right and Left, and though he is a creature of Princeton and Harvard Law whose household long has been sustained by a Goldman Sachs paycheck, Cruz is keenly interested in giving the impression that there exists a vast cultural chasm between himself, the champion of what some populists like to call “the Real America” — as though Ronald Reagan of Hollywood, J. P. Morgan of Wall Street, and Bill Gates of Harvard weren’t real Americans — and the wicked Washington-based elite. Cruz is an outsider to the extent that a member of an Ivy League eating club (have someone explain it to you) who went on to be a member of the nation’s most prestigious lunch club, the Senate, can be an outsider. He is a Texan, albeit a Texan from the anodyne suburbs of Houston, which could be the suburbs of anywhere. He didn’t grow up baling hay in Muleshoe.

Courting the boob vote, Cruz is campaigning as a boob, a project complicated by the fact that there is a much bigger boob in the race: Donald Trump. Cruz, an affluent Ivy Leaguer, needed to distinguish himself from Trump, a very rich Ivy Leaguer, and what he came up with was: “New York values.” A Republican presidential candidate need not trouble himself too much about New York’s votes in the Electoral College, and Trump himself had used the phrase to characterize his many departures from the traditional conservatism of the Republican party, of which he is a freshly minted member. Cruz, canny politician that he is, never bothered to go into much detail about what is meant by “New York values.” Sneering at them was enough.

But sneering at New York values isn’t very smart for conservatives. Not in the long run.

It has been said that you cannot understand America without understanding New York City, and the first thing to understand about New York is that it isn’t very much like the rest of America. That is true, unquestionably. But New York’s traditional virtues — its brashness, its hustle and enterprise, its anything-is-possible attitude — are the traditional American virtues, just as the city’s vices — its materialism, its self-importance, its fascination with the transitory and the impermanent — are the American vices, too. Conservatives, of all people, should be more attuned to the virtues of the nation’s commercial center; let the nation’s art-school dropouts sneer at that great collision of money and culture. The city has been the incubator of our best minds — Buckley, Friedman, Podhoretz, Kristol — and is home to great conservative institutions from The New Criterion and the Manhattan Institute to this magazine. Ayn Rand, who didn’t understand people but had a great and admirable capacity to be arrested by the beauty of human achievements, loved New York as only an immigrant can.

To the extent that “New York values” is another way of saying “urban values” — and it is, to a great extent — conservatives would do well to develop a keener appreciation of them. (Never mind, for the moment, the notion that Donald Trump’s values are identical to the values of New York, in which he is a figure of fun rather than a figure of respect.) From a matter of pure self-interest, Republicans would be in much better shape if their presidential candidates did not start in an electoral hole, with California, New York, New Jersey, and Illinois wrapped up in a bow for the Democrats. It isn’t California ranchers and Illinois farmers who have handed those states to the Left, but city-dwelling people who believe with some reason — Ted Cruz has just given them another — that Republicans hate them.

Our cities are disproportionately black, but they are not disproportionately Martian. Our cities have many immigrants, but not immigrants from the Land of People Who Don’t Care About Their Kids and Really Like Paying High Taxes. Ask a black Democrat in the Bronx working to support a family whether he’d prefer to make more money or less, to keep more of his money or less, to have more economic security or less, for his children to have more educational opportunities or fewer, and he will give the same answers as any plaid-panted Brooks Brothers specimen haunting the Merion Cricket Club — or any white oilman running a fracking rig in the Eagle Ford shale. His values are New York values, too.

When Ronald Reagan was elected, 74 percent of the U.S. population lived in cities; today it is 82 percent. From 2000 to 2010, the nation’s population grew by 9.7 percent — but the city population grew by 12.1 percent. And those urbanites are not entirely pleased with the Democratic monopolies that govern most of them: In Flint, the Democrats are literally poisoning the children; in Atlanta, the schools are so corrupt that teachers and administrators had to be sent to prison; elsewhere, urban Americans are literally up in arms (Molotov cocktails, at least) over their treatment at the hands of the city powers they interact with most often: the police. New York City is sliding back into pre-Giuliani chaos.

And what are Republicans doing? Sneering at “New York values,” when they should be seeking to satisfy the best of those values, such as the entrepreneurial spirit and the hunger for advancement — which are, after all, the best of American values, too.

Europe Looks the Other Way on Mass Sexual Assault. By Emily Dyer.

Europe Looks the Other Way on Mass Sexual Assault. By Emily Dyer. National Review Online, January 16, 2016.

Dyer:

The chickens are coming home to roost on Europe’s unwillingness to offend.

The beginning of 2016 in Europe saw the collision of two problems that have long been left to run their course undisturbed. Making allowances for human-rights abusers in order to avoid causing offense is, after all, nothing new here in Europe. Neither is our often well-meaning refusal to question the potential impact of welcoming record levels of migrants to our societies.

On New Year’s Eve, more than 500 women out celebrating in Germany felt the impact of this collision: They were raped, sexually assaulted, and robbed by gangs of largely migrant men and then blamed for it by the authorities. Mayor Henriette Reker, of Cologne, released a “code of conduct” for women’s behavior in public, which included keeping strangers “an arm’s length away” and staying away from groups of people. Her words could have easily been mistaken for that of the U.K.’s Islamic Human Rights Commission (IHRC), a pressure group with a long history of campaigning on behalf of convicted terrorists that published “precautionary advice” to prevent Muslims from “becoming targets of harassment,” stating that women “have to take personal precautions when they go outside.”

Mayor Reker’s comments have rightly sparked an outcry from many activists and women’s-rights groups. But her words form part of a much darker picture, one that ends with women off the streets.

Now, I am sure that Mayor Reker does not actually want women banished from public places. But her “guidelines” mirrored those of Islamists and many totalitarian regimes around the world that do want women banished. From violent groups such as ISIS and al-Qaeda to the ostensibly nonviolent Hizb ut-Tahrir and Muslim Brotherhood, those who want the establishment of an Islamic caliphate governed by sharia law want every woman to remain inside the house as wife and mother, unless she is accompanied by a male guardian, or mahram. Islamist ideology teaches that men should be shielded from women in public spaces in order to protect both sexes from what is seen to be inevitable: uncontrollable sexual desire and social disorder. Enforced wearing of the hijab, gender segregation, and prescribed gender roles are therefore used to help avoid chaos and vice.

Those who challenge these codes are often held responsible for what ensues. Women who take to the streets in protest among men, for example, are blamed if this should lead to sexual violence. In Egypt, victims of sexual harassment have been repeatedly denounced and blamed for the actions of their attackers. During the Muslim Brotherhood’s time in power in 2013, one of its ministers, Reda al-Hefnawy, told me that there were “so many reasons” why the victim is at fault, including her attire and the time of the attack. According to al-Hefnawy, as reported in Daily News Egypt, “women should not mingle with men during protests,” and he asked how the Ministry of the Interior could be expected to protect “a lady who stands among a group of men.” Salah Abdel Salam, a member of one of the most prominent Salafist parties, al-Nour, echoed this mindset, declaring that “the woman bears the offence when she chooses to protest in places filled with thugs.” A prominent member of another Salafist party, al-Asala, said something similar, claiming that women “sometimes cause rape upon themselves through putting themselves in a position which makes them subject to rape.”

In fact, women around the world face brutal punishment — often sexualized — for having been victims of sexual violence. In Saudi Arabia, victims of gang rape face hundreds of lashes. In India, gang rape has been used to punish women for the crimes of men.

All of this fits a pattern, whereby those in power use sexual violence as a political tool to control the movements of those whom they see as the true source of chaos in society: women. Blaming victims of sexual assault sends a clear message to women that they do not have a place in the public sphere and creates a culture of acceptability around the abusers’ actions by implying that the responsibility lies with the victim rather than the attacker.

Europe has fallen into this trap, not out of hatred for the victim, but out of fear of confronting the perpetrator, particularly when the latter belongs to a minority religion or culture. It took days for police to confront the mass attacks in Germany, and weeks for the left-wing media to do so. The Guardian, for example, a British newspaper that is often vocal about “rape culture” in Western institutions such as university campuses, took almost two weeks to publish any opinion pieces on the matter. The Swedish media were even worse, accusing those who pointed out that the majority of attackers had described by victims as Arab or North African of racism. In doing so, the European left-wing media has abandoned its usual take on sexual violence and its duty to report the facts in favor of manufacturing public opinion.

In the U.K., turning a blind eye to — and in some cases actively covering up — crimes against women, all in the name of protecting supposed cultural sensitivities, is completely normal. One of the most devastating cases was in Rotherham, where public officials deliberately covered up thousands of cases of brutal sexual violence and abuse against young girls because most of the perpetrators were of Pakistani origin, according to a subsequent independent inquiry in 2014.

It is not only women and girls who suffer victim-blaming in the name of not causing offense. Just over a year ago, large swathes of European media blamed the murder of Charlie Hebdo’s cartoonists on their drawings, not on those who pulled the triggers. In the months that followed, the surviving top publisher and editor, Laurent Sourisseau, said that the publication would no longer draw cartoons of the prophet Mohammed.

Denying the facts about Cologne does a huge disservice to cultural and ethnic minorities in Europe. It implies that all migrants and refugees are part of one homogeneous group — a gross generalization that has been jumped on by the far right. In fact, the far Right has benefited greatly from the confusion following the Cologne attacks, using it to stoke up fears about asylum seekers in general. Protests by groups such as HoGeSa and Pegida have taken center stage in Germany over the last month, and angry mobs have taken to the streets threatening to “clean up” Cologne.

In going to any lengths to avoid offending minorities, we become complicit in the broader, deliberate attacks on individual rights. The result is a genuine threat to hard-won freedoms in the West. Unless the sensible among us are honest about the issues facing Europe, we will leave a large void within the debate to be filled inevitably by those who want to strengthen rather than break down the divides among us.