Trump’s Illiberal Liberalism

Scott McConnell has advised Donald Trump about which foreign policy experts he should bring into his administration. McConnell lists a series of international relations professors who opposed the Iraq War. They are all realists, skeptical of American interventionism. All of them are renowned within international relations circles. Richard Haass, for instance, edits Foreign Affiars and Jacob Heilbrunn edits The National Interest, both prestigious journals. By incorporating such people into his cabinet, writes McConnell, Trump can deliver on his promise to rely on the “best people” to compensate for his lack of government experience. Like Patrick Buchanan and the other editors of The American Conservative, McConnell exaggerates the influence of neoconservatives within the Republican Party. Opposition to Trump comes from the damage he has done to the conservative brand and from his opposition to free trade, as well as his dovish foreign policy views.

David Marcus writes that Donald Trump cannot withstand democratic scrutiny. His reluctance to appear before protesters in Chicago shows that he is unwilling to compete in the marketplace of ideas. Freedom of speech, writes Marcus, entails competition. In order to compete, speakers must rely on the moral authority and the persuasiveness of their ideas and not resort to violence when they fail to convert their opponents. Trump’s preference for fawning audiences and the violent suppression of dissent is lacking in this regard. (In an interview with MSNBC’s Chuck Todd, Trump noted that his campaign is looking into providing legal support to the man that sucker-punched a protester at a previous rally.) His appeals to national unity notwithstanding, Trump is only willing to speak to people that already adore him.

David French has criticized Jerry Falwell, Jr.’s comparison of Donald Trump to King David. Whereas David repented for his sins, writes French, Trump luxuriates in his serial adulteries. Trump has explicitly denied ever asking God for forgiveness. These shortcomings augment the oft-repeated reasons Evangelicals have to oppose Trump, his previous support for Planned Parenthood and his misidentification of Paul’s Second Letter to the Corinthians foremost among them. Conservative Christians continue to flock to him. Ben Carson recently endorsed Trump, joining former Arkansas governor and prominent Baptist Mike Huckabee. Pat Robertson has embraced Trump and declared the New York liberal an inspiration to Evangelicals. The paradox of Evangelicals widely supporting Trump is the most peculiar feature of this year’s primary.

Jeffrey A. Tucker has argued that the welfare state is incompatible with diversity. Studies reveal that ethnically heterogenous nations are less committed to redistribution than homogenous states, 19th-century Germany being the paradigmatic example. Tucker notes that this statistic makes sense: People are unwilling to part with their assets if they think they are being used to help people who are not like them. The upshot, The Economist has concluded, is that liberals and conservatives must choose between inclusiveness and a vibrant welfare state. Ethnic diversity tends to undermine the latter. The correct response, argues Tucker, is classical liberalism, an ideology that encourages free market capitalism and peaceful coexistence between diverse groups of people.

“Well, I moved back to Austin to try to make a livin’…”

Scrambling for Delegates

Super Tuesday has come and gone. Trump’s nomination has yet to become an inevitability.

William S. Lind scorns the prospect of American military intervention in Libya. The NATO mission that deposed Muammar Qaddafi, Lind writes, was a disaster. It replaced a state with a patchwork of militias. Now, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Jospeh F. Dunford is calling for air strikes and commando raids against ISIS in that country. It would be better, insists Lind, if Egypt were to annex Libya as a province. Egypt is a state. The United States, Lind writes, should make a policy out of buttressing states against “Fourth Generation” non-state actors. There are states and there are barbarians, and we should make common cause with the former. Elsewhere within the pages on The American Conservative, Noah Millman has crowned Donald Trump the winner of Super Tuesday. Kasich may win in Vermont, but he underperformed in Virginia and Minnesota. His reluctance to drop out of the race before the Ohio primary on March 15 will benefit Trump. Rubio almost won Virginia, but he lags behind Cruz in the race for second place in many states. Cruz won Texas as well as Oklahoma and Alaska, catapulting him into an undisputed second place in the delegate count. The convoluted field of non-Trump candidates, however, will detract from this achievement.

Rachel Lu has sought the silver lining in Donald Trump’s ascendancy. His popularity, Lu writes, underscores the problem confronting millions of working-class traditionalists: the American economy is changing in a way that harms them at the same time as a more progressive culture undermines the institutions they depend on. The solution Lu proposes is federalism. Conservatives want to push power “down and out,” allowing for gradual change and the peaceful coexistence of overlapping subcultures. Rubio, she writes, is best positioned to complete this project. He has emphasized the importance of mediating institutions like the family. Lu juxtaposes this position with Trump’s turn to economic nationalism as a panacea for white working class grievances. Conservatives since Alexis de Tocqueville have measured freedom according to the distance between the state and the citizen and the strength of the cultural institutions that intervene between the two. Eliminating entitlements is unrealistic, Lu writes, but conservatives can and do offer practicable solutions to the nation’s fiscal conundrums like individual retirement accounts and the devolution of entitlements to state governments. The nomination of Rubio, she concludes, would best position us to capitalize on these suggestions.

Tim Alberta sees Donald Trump maintaining his lead until the Republican National Convention in Cleveland. The only hope for Trump’s opponents, Alberta writes, is to prevent him from accruing the 1,237 delegates he needs to win the nomination outright. Though the coalition opposing Trump is fractured, Cruz, Rubio, and Kasich can prevent him from arriving at a majority of delegates, thereby allowing for a brokered convention. However, it is unlikely that any of the three will surpass Trump with a plurality of delegates before Cleveland. The race now shifts to the conservative states of Kansas, Louisiana, and Kentucky. Those states hold their primaries on Saturday. Cruz’s victory in Oklahoma and the strength of evangelicals in Kansas bode well for the Texas senator there. Republicans have been reduced to simply diminishing Trump’s victories.

Have a good Wednesday.

The Fate of Republicanism

Matthew Sheffield has criticized the Republican Party’s reliance on Protestant Christianity. He examines 7 swing states in the 2012 election, showing that Mitt Romney won handily among Christians of both the Protestant and Catholic stripe but suffered overwhelming losses among the religiously unaffiliated and non-Christian believers. Romney’s failure to appeal to “Nones,” writes Sheffield, cost him the Electoral College. If they wish to remain viable as a national party, Republicans must reduce their dependence on politicized Christianity. This claim is defensible from a historical standpoint as well as a statistical one. Alexis de Tocuqeville located the proliferation of Christianity in early-19th-century America in the separation of church and state and organized Christianity’s reluctance to wade into politics. Leading scholars of American religion, Frank Lambert among them, have done the same. Sheffield echoes Rod Dreher’s call for an enhanced focus on the internal integrity of Christian communities and a detachment from the politics of an increasingly secular United States.

Varad Mehta corroborates Sheffield’s analysis. Donald Trump’s performance among college-educated voters, writes Mehta, is abysmal. Since there is a direct correlation between educational attainment and voter participation, the “hard ceiling” on Trump’s boisterous support is unlikely to disappear in the general election. Nominating Trump, Mehta concludes, would doom the Republican Party for the foreseeable future. Mehta echoes most commentators in stressing the cultural divide within the Republican Party. Trump’s supporters are overwhelmingly cultural traditionalists. His opponents, whether they fall in the Republican or Democratic column, are cosmopolitans. Simply stated, there are more cosmopolitans than traditionalists, and traditionalism is no longer tenable in national elections. Dreher, Sheffield, and Mehta all suggest traditionalists must look elsewhere than politics to regain their footing.

Kevin Williamson has suggested that we shoot the prisoners housed in Guantanamo Bay. With this suggestion Williamson underscores the complications that would follow an immediate closure of the facility. It is doubtful he is proposing summary execution as a legitimate option, though he provides theoretical justifications for the proposal. The inmates, writes Williamson, are not subject to the Geneva Conventions. They were not in uniform when they were captured and displayed little reluctance to persecute women and children. These considerations are important. However, Williamson is more serious when he notes that Gitmo’s closure is unlikely with legislators and foreign governments emphasizing their unwillingness to accept inmates from Cuba. Williamson ridicules President Obama’s oft-stated concern that the prison is a recruiting tool for extremist groups. Anything we do to combat terror, he writes, will perturb our enemies.

William Kristol has insisted that Trump’s nomination as the Republican presidential candidate is not inevitable. He has won 3 of the first 4 primaries and is favored in most of the Super Tuesday contests. However, the crucial winner-take-all primaries that occur on March 15 will be more competitive. Whether or not Trump’s sweep of the Republican nomination continues will depend on his opponents’ ability to unify behind a single candidate. With the animosity that his developed between Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, this event is unlikely.

Have a good Wednesday.

 

 

Turkey, Iraq, and the White Working-Class

Philip Giraldi has harangued Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s consolidation of power in Turkey. The Turkish president, writes Giraldi, is more interested in suppressing Kurdish insurgents than fighting ISIS. He suggests that Erdogan may have orchestrated a recent bombing of Turkish soldiers to justify a crackdown on Kurds. A telephone recording in 2014 had the president planning a similar “false flag” attack at the shrine of an Ottoman sultan with his intelligence chief and foreign minister. Erdogan, argues Giraldi, is a lackluster ally in the war against the Islamic State. His fanatic suppression of Kurds and saber-rattling with Russia distract from the goal of reclaiming territory taken by Sunni extremists.

Rachel Lu has reflected on the plight of working-class Americans who support Donald Trump. On the one hand, she writes, their exploitation narratives differ little from Black Lives Matter and Occupy Wall Street. To question their grievances is to identify with the privileged “establishment” that is causing their demise. On the other hand, Lu writes that white working-class resentment is indicative of larger social defects. Trump’s fixation on immigration is misleading; automation and outsourcing both pose larger threats to working-class jobs, though low-skilled immigration does exert some downward pressure on wages. However, meaningful work is lacking. Moreover, families and religious institutions are decaying. Without these three props of human happiness, white working-class men are riven by alcohol-induced liver failure and opiate addiction, as chronicled by Kevin Williamson. Lu suggests expanding jobs in much needed sectors, such as police forces, as one potential remedy. Job training in expanding industries and a renewed commitment to religious institutions are also critical to revitalizing the working-class.

Victor Davis Hanson has criticized our collective amnesia regarding the Iraq War. The poor management of the U.S. occupation from 2003 to autumn 2007, Hanson writes, alienated much of the long-standing bipartisan support that had countenanced Saddam Hussein’s overthrow. President Bill Clinton and his Secretary of State Madeleine Albright both expressed concern about Hussein’s support for terrorism and his flaunting of U.N. sanctions, going so far as to bomb Iraq in December of 1998 without prior congressional approval. When George W. Bush inherited the problem from Clinton in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, he obtained overwhelming bipartisan support from Congress to remove Hussein from power. Not all of the 23 writs approved by the House at that time pertained to weapons of mass destruction, though congressmen received independent briefings from CIA officers about the “slam dunk” case for Iraq’s possession of WMD’s. Barack Obama organized his bid for the presidency around his opposition to the invasion of Iraq, but he tempered his rhetoric when it appeared as if the surge was working. Critics of the Iraq invasion, Davis insists, are quick to forget the role they played in developing consensus about the need to remove Hussein from power.

I have never served in the military, so I can’t support Hanson’s claim that we withdrew troops too soon without eliciting rightful accusations of chicken hawkishness. However, Hanson does remind us, as my high school cross-country coach was fond of saying, “Success has a million fathers. Failure is an orphan.”

Have a good Tuesday.

 

Iraq, the Crusades, and Christian Charity

Rod Dreher has applauded Donald Trump’s confrontation with Jeb Bush at the last GOP debate. The Republican Party, he writes, is loath to acknowledge its mistakes. When it does, the apology often sounds petulant. Though Trump overstepped when he alleged that George W. Bush and his administration lied to the American people before the invasion of Iraq, this transgression is venial. Exposing the GOP’s reluctance to admit fault for major foreign policy failures is important as the party gears up to confront a Democratic nominee with her own interventionist streak. Dreher has also diagnosed the unpopularity of traditional marriage. Our society values personal choice and individual autonomy above all other considerations. Demonstrating in our own lives why this model is unsustainable, writes Dreher, is incumbent on traditional conservatives.

Bruce Frohnen has argued against the abandonment of the Crusader as a school mascot. The Christian armies that assembled in Europe between the 11th and the 13th centuries, writes Frohnen, were composed of humans. Consequently, they perpetrated the crimes that humans have always perpetrated during wartime, including rape, pillaging, and the wholesale slaughter of innocent bystanders. However, the strategic goals underlying the Crusades were defensible within the context of organized warfare. The Byzantine Empire wanted to repel from its doorstep a rival bent on violent expansion. The Catholic Church wanted to retake pilgrimage sites it lost when Muslims conquered the Levant in the 7th century. One could argue that we have a tendency to glorify and sanitize warfare, and should abandon such mascots as the Crusader and the Spartan for that reason. Viewing the Crusaders as peculiarly violent, aggressive, or immoral, however, is historically inaccurate.

Douglas E. Baker has argued that a belief in American exceptionalism is incompatible with acceptance of the Christian Gospel. Franklin Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln, among others, tried to yoke the authority of divine Scripture to the policies they pursued in office. Likewise, John Kasich responds to conservatives who critique his expansion of Medicaid as governor of Ohio with Matthew 25’s injunction to care for the less privileged. Baker’s focus is on how this tendency to reach for divine sanction leads to the idolization of the state. It is important to note that this has implications for the tone of our political discourse, too.

As we saw in the debate over Syrian refugees, liberals make much of conservatives’ purported hypocrisy in championing Christianity but not formulating policies that reflect its precepts. However, as Arthur Brooks of Syracuse University has found, conservative families are likely to give 30 percent more of their income to charity than liberal families, even though they are on average 6 percent less wealthy. Conservatives, on average, also give more blood. I refer to these metrics not as categorical proof that liberals are less charitable than conservatives. The important point is that conservatives don’t see government as a legitimate mediator for their generosity. They trust their own ability to shepherd resources charitably more than that of the government. Acknowledging this fact would make disagreements over public policy much more productive.

 

 

 

 

The Rundown, 02/18/2016

Here’s where moderate conservatism stands today:

Kelley Vlahos has questioned the Department of Energy’s decision to increase production of nuclear weapons. The president’s newest budget, writes Vlahos, provides for the modernization of America’s nuclear arsenal. This project will cost $1 trillion over 30 years. More troubling than the price tag, Vlahos argues, is Congress’ bipartisan commitment to making new plutonium fissile cores even though the “pits” we have in storage are numerous enough to service our existing arsenal for the foreseeable future. This revamped production, Vlahos concludes, represents a boon for contractors and a reversion to a Cold War mindset in the wake of Russian aggression in Eastern Europe.

Christopher Nelson has defended the value of a liberal arts education. As the adjective “liberal” suggests, such an education is suited for free people living in a democracy. Though higher education is becoming more specialized, argues Nelson, the need for informed citizens to absorb information, make connections, and formulate arguments is perennial. Furthermore, the capacity to transcend the methodological restrictions of a discipline and see its connections with another drives innovation. As one History professor told my undergraduate class on the Meiji Restoration, the purpose of a liberal education is to make students “critical consumers of information,” an essential trait in a society that incessantly bombards its citizens with disjointed facts.

Emily Ekins and Joy Pullmann trace Bernie Sanders’ popularity among millennials to their economic and political illiteracy and their lack of life experiences. They cite a CBS/New York Times poll revealing only 16 percent of millennials could accurately define socialism, compared to 56 percent of avowed Tea Partiers. Furthermore, they cite a Rupe-Reason poll that suggests millennials become more wary of the redistribution of wealth once they begin making more than $40,000 a year. The oft-cited example of Scandinavia as a socialistic paradise, they write, is disingenuous; free market reforms bolstered Scandinavian economies in the 1990s and the inferior service provided by nationalized healthcare systems is absent from our political discussions. Finally, millennials are less perturbed about socialism’s history of marginizalizing religious institutions, both because they are less religious than their elders and because they weren’t alive for the Cold War. Though Sanders defines himself as a “democratic socialist” and Ekins’ article has the proximate effect of bolstering the Republican nominee in a hypothetical general election against Sanders, the authors reveal a more profound, nonpartisan concern: millennials’ ignorance of the political, economic, and religious institutions that have created American prosperity may make the electorate more amenable to their destruction.

Kevin Williamson has chronicled the burgeoning heroin epidemic in Alabama and other parts of the South. Junkies, Williamson writes, tend to be white males without a college education and wealthier children from broken homes. He cites two economists who found that the most potent killer of what used to be the white working class is opiate overdoses, suicide, and alcohol-induced liver damage. Williamson’s piece is a helpful corrective in an ongoing national debate about socioeconomic privilege that fixates on race and gender to the exclusion of other factors.

“The Union, the Constitution, and enforcement of the laws.”

 

The Rundown, 02/15/2016

Here’s where moderate conservatism stands today:

William S. Lind has composed a diatribe about the “serial failures” of Washington’s political establishment. Political and military elites, Lind claims, are more invested in self-promotion than pragmatic problem solving. He sees disdain for or adherence to the establishment as the dominant fault line in American politics, alluding to the popularity of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. Like other contributors to The American Conservative, namely Pat Buchanan and Rod Dreher, just who Lind comprehends in the term “establishment” is unclear. However, his general impression of widespread exhaustion with military adventurism and a bloated procurement process is apt.

Bruce Frohnen has offered a more trenchant analysis of the Republican Party’s disintegration. Republicans, writes Frohnen, traditionally have balanced a commitment to maintaining the stability of national markets with a deference for provincial autonomy, the traditional family, and other vestiges of Protestant American culture. These two commitments are now in conflict with one another, particularly when it comes to free trade agreements like the Transpacific Partnership. Democrats, on the other hand, have become more coherent in their commitment to the federal government as a guarantor of “fairness” and a facilitator of economic grievances. The ascendancy of the economic nationalist Donald Trump and the staunchly conservative Ted Cruz embodies the ideological division within Republican ranks.

David Harsanyi has characterized Republican opposition to President Obama’s impending Supreme Court nomination as a moral imperative. Modern progressives’ failure to articulate any limiting principle for what the federal government may do in order to facilitate “progress” perturbs Harsanyi. In this regard Democrats depart from the example of their intellectual forebears. Wilsonian Progressives, writes Harsanyi, were explicit about their disdain for constitutional checks and balances. In the wake of Antonin Scalia’s death, however, progressive luminaries like Senator Elizabeth Warren are championing the president’s constitutional responsibility to appoint a successor. Harsanyi emphasizes that no one is arguing President Obama’s reelection does not entitle him to appoint a nominee. He simply notes that Republicans should exercise their own constitutional responsibility to “advise and consent” to a nominee whose approach to the Constitution they find troubling, thereby following the advice of Senator Barack Obama after George Bush’s nomination of Samuel Alito.

John Yoo argues that Senate Republicans may keep Scalia’s seat open indefinitely. As Bre Payton has noted within the pages of The Federalist, there are ample precedents from the 19th-century of Supreme Court vacancies lasting more than a year. On the one hand, Yoo writes, some of the Court’s upcoming decisions are unlikely to be affected by Scalia’s absence. As liberal Justice Elena Kagan has recused herself from a case dealing with affirmative action, the 5-4 conservative majority becomes in that particular case a 4-3 majority. (As solicitor general under President Obama, Kagan argued several current cases before the Supreme Court.) On the other hand, Yoo continues, the politicization of the Court and the expansion of liberals’ constitutional encroachments ensure Scalia’s replacement will determine whether a burgeoning conservative backlash to violations such as the individual mandate and President Obama’s non-enforcement of the laws continues unabated. That battle is too important to lose.

“The Union, the Constitution, and  enforcement of the law.”

 

 

The Rundown, 02/12/2016

Here’s where moderate conservatism stands today:

Pat Buchanan has warned his readers of the threat perpetual warfare poses to republican liberty. Upon his departure, the commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan insisted an American military presence in that country was necessary to forestall a return of the Taliban, 15 years after our invasion. Defense Secretary Ashton Carter has called for the deployment of American soldiers to Iraq, augmenting the 4,000 who are already fighting ISIS. Finally, saber rattling from Republican presidential candidates has elicited the claim that Russia is an existential threat to the United States. There is no end in sight for America’s military commitments, Buchanan writes. Furthermore, policymakers are toying with the idea of starting new wars over Eastern European countries who want to unify with Russia anyway and worthless piles of rocks in the Pacific Ocean.

Ralph Ancil has reflected on the economic theories of Wilhelm Roepke. Roepke, Ancil writes, chartered a path between socialism and 19th-century laissez-faire capitalism. He believed firmly in the touchstones of libertarianism: property rights, economic competition, and limited government. He rejected the modern welfare state. However, Roepke was also uncomfortable with the urban sprawl that accompanied industrial development and its effect on the human psyche. Consequently, he envisioned a republic of thriving towns in which land ownership was widely distributed in small- to medium-sized plots and agricultural labor venerated. Modern economists’ criticisms of this vision as utopian, Ancil insists, only affirms how far the professions have fallen from Roepke’s humanistic standard into the moral abyss of scientism.

Bre Payton reports that a former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency sees Hillary Clinton’s misuse of classified material as Secretary of State as grounds for disqualification for the presidency. Michael Flynn, writes Payton, insists that Clinton’s handling of the email scandal betrays an arrogance toward the American people unworthy of a presidential candidate. Contrary to Clinton’s initial claim that the material conveyed through her private, unsecured email accounts was classified retroactively, an FBI investigation into the scandal has forced the State Department to admit that at least 22 emails were classified at the time of their transmission, and contained such sensitive information as the names of CIA operatives. Contra Bernie Sanders, people are not tired of hearing about Clinton’s emails. This burgeoning scandal and her inability to parry Sanders’ disdain for her public speaking career will handicap her in the general election.

John Fund writes that New Hampshire’s voter registration law is flawed. James O’Keefe, a conservative activist, documented many cases of Sanders campaign officials encouraging journalists posing as non-residents to enter fraudulent addresses on voter registration forms in order to cast their vote in the primary. Though Republican calls for stronger voter identification requirements elicit accusations of racial bias, Fund notes that majorities of both African-Americans and Hispanics support stronger voter registration laws. Using a false name and address, someone could have cast their vote in the New Hampshire primary, to have it discarded only after final vote tallies had been determined. Democrats must do more to convince their opponents that stronger voter ID laws create more problems than they solve.

“The Union, the Constitution, and enforcement of the laws.”

The Rundown, 02/09/2016

Here’s where moderate conservativism stands today:

Philip Giraldi has complained of President Obama’s fecklessness toward Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. According to an investigative piece by Seymour Hersh, writes Giraldi, officials within the upper echelons of the Defense Department are bridling under the Obama administration’s emphasis on America’s responsibility to protect civilians. Assad, intelligence officers feel, does not represent a threat to American interests. By contrast, Obama and his national security adviser Susan Rice take the 1994 Rwandan genocide as their lodestar. They have, therefore, made the removal of Assad from power an objective of their Middle East policy, notwithstanding intelligence officials’ concerns that this would create a power vacuum similar to the one that followed the deposition of Muammar al-Qaddafi. Then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is reported to have blithely supported that policy.

John Horvat has used the metaphor of a cookie jar to explain the vacuity of promises made during this election cycle. Candidates of both parties are, understandably, concerned with augmenting America’s material prosperity. Lost in the debates over the minimum wage and marginal tax rates, however, is a discussion about what Russell Kirk called the “permanent things.” The family, Horvat insists, is a wavering institution in the United States. The national culture is increasingly given over to vulgarity. Horvat perceives this moral decline as a threat to the values the United States once promoted, namely charity, decency, and humility. His is a polarizing piece. Readers who share his opposition to gay marriage and abortion will second his conclusions, while those who don’t are unlikely to take him seriously.

Dominic Lynch has examined the expansion of microbreweries throughout the United States. The craft beer market is characterized by two traits that will ensure its longevity: high demand and the localized ambitions of its producers. Consumers yearn for the high quality porters, stouts, and IPAs that dedicated microbrewers concoct. Maintaining the integrity of their recipes will encourage many brewery operators to forego alliances with larger chains that would increase their distribution and marginalize national competitors. Furthermore, most brewers are satisfied with capturing their local market, not saturating the nation with their product. Most neighborhoods, Lynch writes, are within a 5-mile radius of a microbrewery. If a brewer can achieve local market saturation under these circumstances, serving those populations becomes a sustainable business model.

Victor Davis Hanson has lamented the racialization of America. The determination of which kinds of racial grievances are legitimate, Hanson observes, has become a progressive political project. On a superficial level, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio confront accusations that their Hispanic identity is exaggerated, whereas Julian Castro is considered a Latino champion. (Hanson notes that Castro’s Spanish-speaking ability is less than fluent.) Clarence Thomas and Thomas Sowell, who rose from poverty to assume a seat on the Supreme Court and to become a renowned economist respectively, are identified as ungrateful turncoats for their conservatism, but half-white Barack Obama, who was educated at a Hawaii prep-school and raised by upper-middle-class white parents, is a legitimate avatar for the African-American experience. More worrisomely, when it comes to Ivy League admissions, de facto quotas on meritocratic Asian Americans do not perturb progressives, because Asian Americans do not possess much demographic clout vis-a-vis other members of the Democratic coalition. That is not to say that those racial grievances liberals do decide to champion are without basis in American history. But poor white Appalachians who confront economic disenfranchisement can be forgiven for questioning the sincerity of the upper-middle-class gatekeepers of progressive victimization.

“The Union, the Constitution, and enforcement of the laws.”