New York Times
OPINION
THE CONVERSATION
The Mike Pence Saga Tells Us More Than We Want to Know
June 28, 2021
By Gail Collins and Bret Stephens
Ms. Collins and Mr. Stephens are Opinion columnists. They converse every week.
Bret Stephens: Hi, Gail. I was hoping to pick up where we left off last week, with the New York City mayoral primary and our new ranked-choice voting system. Assuming Eric Adams holds on to his lead, what do you think his win says about the state of the city — and of the Democratic Party?
Gail Collins: Bret, this is why I love conversing with you. I’ve been hearing Republicans howl about the negotiations with Joe Biden on spending, and I was dreading a discussion on that subject.
Bret: Biden gets out a little over his skis with a dumb remark, publicly admits he screwed up, pledges to keep his word on a bipartisan bill. Imagine that.
Gail: Well, the city election is definitely a more interesting topic, and I can see why Eric Adams intrigues you. He’s a Black former police officer who ran on his crime-fighting skills. Politically he’s a moderate — by New York standards, anyway. And talking with his supporters after the vote, I did get the impression that some were most concerned with blocking off Maya Wiley, the only real leftie with a chance of winning.
Of course, while the left was getting bad news in New York City, regular Buffalo Democrats were discovering their longtime mayor had lost the primary to a Black female socialist. Hoping to hear a lot more discussion about India Walton as we slowly make our way through this political year.
Nothing is for sure yet in New York City. Thanks to our new preferential voting system, we may not get the final word on who won the primary for ages. But if it’s Adams, it could send a cheerful message to people like Chuck Schumer, who’s up for re-election next year. There’s been speculation about whether Schumer might be challenged by a progressive.
Bret: New system or not, I still don’t understand why it should take forever to know the results of a municipal election. But I’ll be happy if Adams holds on to his lead, for lots of reasons.
One good reason to cheer an Adams victory is that it would demonstrate yet again that the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez left doesn’t represent the Democratic base. “Defund the police” is not a working-class interest.
Gail: Yeah, but having unarmed, trained mediators who could respond to complaints like family fighting might get a good response.
Bret: I used to think that was a good idea. Then several of our readers explained to me that family altercations are often violent and require more than a social worker.
Getting back to working-class interests: Blocking Amazon and the thousands of jobs it would have brought to Queens was not pro-worker. Nor does it help the working class to deny parents who can’t afford to send their kids to Dalton the school choice they need, when it comes to getting a better education for their children.
Gail: The public school issue is so important and so complicated. You want to make sure it’s always open to reform and improvement. Still, you don’t want to create a system that allows canny parents to get terrific options for their own kids while reducing public pressure for all-around quality education.
But go on.
Bret: My bottom line is that democratic socialism might be cool with pampered N.Y.U. undergrads, but it isn’t going to help people who aren’t partying in Washington Square Park. So hurray for Adams and all middle-of-the-road Democrats. In the meantime, our mutual friend Donald Trump is on the rally circuit again.
Gail: Wow, I watched his speech over the weekend. I guess it was a sort of return to national politics. Trump’s been off the trail since January, when his attempt to convince the world he didn’t lose the election led to a bloody riot.
No violence this time. In fact, the whole thing was one big snooze.
Hard to imagine him really making a comeback. But also hard to imagine who’d be coming next. Can’t really picture a President Mike Pence.
Bret: You know, I probably spend more time thinking about Mike Pence than I ought to, given my high blood pressure. He reminds me of Mr. Collins, the unctuous clergyman in “Pride and Prejudice” who’s always bowing and scraping to the overbearing, tasteless, talentless Lady Catherine de Bourgh while he lords it over the Bennet family because he stands to inherit their estate. Alternatively, Pence could be a character out of Dickens, with some ridiculous name like Wackford Squeers or Mr. Pumblechook.
Gail: Wow, great analogies. Plus, it is indeed possible you spend more time thinking about Pence than you ought to.
Bret: Here’s a guy who makes his career on the Moral Majority wing of the Republican Party, until he hitches his wagon to the most immoral man ever to win a big-ticket presidential nomination. Phyllis Schlafly deciding to elope with Larry Flynt would have made more sense. Then Pence spends four years as the most servile, toadying, obsequious, fawning, head-nodding, yes-sirring, anything-you-say-boss vice president in history. He’ll do anything for Trump’s love — but not, as the singer Meat Loaf might have said, attempt to steal the presidential election in broad daylight.
For this, Trump rewards Pence by throwing him to a mob, which tried to hunt him down and hang him. But even now, Pence can’t get crosswise with his dark lord, so the idea of him ever taking the party in an anti-Trump direction seems like a fantasy.
Gail: You have convinced me that Pence is too much of a wimp to rebel. But you can never tell — look what happened to Mitt Romney.
Bret: Unlike Pence, Romney is a true Christian, with actual principles. As for Nikki Haley, I just don’t see her winning the Republican nomination. She’s just not Trumpy enough. My bet is on the governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, with Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina as his vice-presidential nominee. Crazy?
Gail: Oh, God. What a combo. l hear there’s a Ron Be Gone movement in Florida. Maybe they can combine it with a Tim, Don’t Get In. Or just Not Scott.
Bret: DeSantis is a very shrewd guy. He’s made a point of staying close to Trump, personally, and he’s also been very good at baiting the media. His handling of the pandemic was better than most liberals will ever give him credit for, because, unlike Andrew “I’m still standing” Cuomo, he made a point of protecting nursing homes. With Scott on the ticket, he could also peel off some of the Black vote or at least make white suburban voters feel comfortable about voting for a G.O.P. ticket that progressives will inevitably attack as racist.
Of course, none of that will stop Trump from turning on DeSantis if he decides to run again in 2024, and I have to assume there are skeletons in the governor’s closet. In the words of the immortal Beatles song, “Everybody’s got something to hide except me and my monkey.”
Gail: Right now the only thing we’re thinking about in DeSantis’s state is the terrible condo collapse near Miami. There are going to be lots of questions about how that disaster came to be and the government’s role in ensuring public safety.
Bret: It’s so heartbreaking. I have my own memories of what it’s like, from having lived through the Mexico City earthquake in 1985, which killed thousands of people and flattened a lot of buildings in the vicinity of my dad’s office. It’s hard to think of a more awful way to go.
But I’d hate to see the issue politicized. Buildings collapse in cities and states run by Democrats, too, like the Hard Rock Hotel in New Orleans a couple of years ago.
Gail: Good point. But you will remember DeSantis is also the guy who’s been fighting against vaccine requirements on cruise ships.
Bret: Sounds like an unreasonable government restriction on private enterprise trying to make the rules for what’s allowed on their premises.
By the way, I’m increasingly of the view that Medicare and health insurance companies should refuse to underwrite treatment for any nonvaccinated people who wind up getting sick. People who take unreasonable private risks shouldn’t be allowed to socialize the cost of the consequences. What do you think?
Gail: When said unvaccinated people get sick, they’re going to need medical care. Which, if they’re uninsured and of low income, is going to have to be taken care of by the taxpayer unless the hospitals are directed to refuse to admit the unvaccinated critically ill.
Bret: True, though my scheme would only apply to anti-vaxxers who refused to get a vaccine, not those who just didn’t have access to it. It’s never going to happen, for the same reason that we’re probably not going to deny coverage for lung cancer patients because they happen to be ex-smokers. But I just wish we lived in a country where being willfully dumb was a little more costly.
Gail: Make being willfully dumb a little more costly — I think you’ve got a campaign slogan, Bret. Don’t let Mike Pence get his hands on it.
OPINION DEBATE
Will the Democrats face a midterm wipeout?
EZRA KLEIN writes that “midterms typically raze the governing party” and explores just how tough a road the Democrats have ahead.
JAMELLE BOUIE wonders whether voters will accept a party “that promises quite a bit but won’t work to make any of it a reality.”
MAUREEN DOWD writes that Biden has “a very narrow window to do great things” and shouldn’t squander it appeasing Republican opponents.
THOMAS B. EDSALL explores new research on whether the Democratic Party could find more success focusing on race or on class when trying to build support.
Showing posts with label Bret Stephens. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Bret Stephens. Show all posts
Monday, June 28, 2021
Thursday, June 3, 2021
Was the Covid pandemic caused by a leak from a lab in Wuhan, China? I think there is a very good chance this is what happened, and the the Chinese government, which is a fucktard dictatorship, is covering up the evidence. "Chinese officials continue to block the world’s ability to get answers about the coronavirus’s origin as the subject remains murky and politically volatile."
New York Times
OPINION
BRET STEPHENS
Media Groupthink and the Lab-Leak Theory
May 31, 2021
By Bret Stephens
Opinion Columnist
If it turns out that the Covid pandemic was caused by a leak from a lab in Wuhan, China, it will rank among the greatest scientific scandals in history: dangerous research, possibly involving ethically dubious techniques that make viruses more dangerous, carried out in a poorly safeguarded facility, thuggishly covered up by a regime more interested in propaganda than human life, catastrophic for the entire world.
But this possible scandal, which is as yet unproved, obscures an actual scandal, which remains to be digested.
I mean the long refusal by too many media gatekeepers (social as well as mainstream) to take the lab-leak theory seriously. The reasons for this — rank partisanship and credulous reporting — and the methods by which it was enforced — censorship and vilification — are reminders that sometimes the most destructive enemies of science can be those who claim to speak in its name.
Rewind the tape to February of last year, when people such as Senator Tom Cotton began pointing to a disturbing fact set: the odd coincidence of a pandemic originating in the same city where a Chinese lab was conducting high-end experiments on bat viruses; the troubling report that some of the original Covid patients had no contact with the food markets where the pandemic supposedly originated; the fact that the Chinese government lied and stonewalled its way through the crisis. Think what you will about the Arkansas Republican, but these were reasonable observations warranting impartial investigation.
The common reaction in elite liberal circles? A Washington Post reporter called it a “fringe theory” that “has been repeatedly disputed by experts.” The Atlantic Council accused Cotton of abetting an “infodemic” by “pushing debunked claim that the novel coronavirus may have been created in a Wuhan lab.” A writer for Vox said it was a “dangerous conspiracy theory” being advanced by conservatives “known to regularly spew nonsense (and bash China).”
There are many more such examples. But the overall shape of the media narrative was clear. On one side were experts at places like the World Health Organization: knowledgeable, incorruptible, authoritative, noble. On the other were a bunch of right-wing yahoos pushing a risible fantasy with xenophobic overtones in order to deflect attention from the Trump administration’s mishandling of the crisis.
Yet it was also a narrative with holes larger than Donald Trump’s mouth.
Was it outrageous to think that the virus might have escaped the Wuhan Institute? Not if you listened to evolutionary biologist Bret Weinstein’s patient, lucid, scientifically rich explanation of the lab-leak hypothesis — which he delivered almost a year ago on the decidedly non-mainstream Joe Rogan podcast.
Was it smart for science reporters to accept the authority of a February 2020 letter, signed by 27 scientists and published in The Lancet, feverishly insisting on the “natural origin” of Covid? Not if those reporters had probed the ties between the letter’s lead author and the Wuhan lab (a fact, as the science writer Nicholas Wade points out in a landmark essay in The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, that has been public knowledge for months).
Was it wise to suppose that the World Health Organization, which has served as a mouthpiece for Chinese regime propaganda, should be an authority on what counted as Covid “misinformation” by Facebook, which in February banned the lab-leak theory from its platform? Not if the aim of companies like Facebook is to bring the world closer together, as opposed to laundering Chinese government disinformation while modeling its illiberal methods.
To its credit, Facebook reversed itself last week. News organizations are quietly correcting (or stealth editing) last year’s dismissive reports, sometimes using the fig leaf of new information about Wuhan lab workers being infected in the fall of 2019 with a Covid-like illness. And the public-health community is taking a fresh look at its Covid origin story.
But even now one gets a distinct sense of the herd of independent minds hard at work. If the lab-leak theory is finally getting the respectful attention it always deserved, it’s mainly because Joe Biden authorized an inquiry and Anthony Fauci admitted to doubts about the natural-origin claim. In other words, the right president and the right public-health expert have blessed a certain line of inquiry.
Yet the lab-leak theory, whether or not it turns out to be right, was always credible. Even if Tom Cotton believed it. Even if the scientific “consensus” disputed it. Even if bigots — who rarely need a pretext — drew bigoted conclusions from it.
Good journalism, like good science, should follow evidence, not narratives. It should pay as much heed to intelligent gadflies as it does to eminent authorities. And it should never treat honest disagreement as moral heresy.
Anyone wondering why so many people have become so hostile to the pronouncements of public-health officials and science journalists should draw the appropriate conclusion from this story. When lecturing the public about the dangers of misinformation, it’s best not to peddle it yourself.
Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.
Bret L. Stephens has been an Opinion columnist with The Times since April 2017. He won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary at The Wall Street Journal in 2013 and was previously editor in chief of The Jerusalem Post. Facebook
A version of this article appears in print on June 1, 2021, Section A, Page 23 of the New York edition with the headline: The Lab-Leak Theory and The Media.
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OPINION
BRET STEPHENS
Media Groupthink and the Lab-Leak Theory
May 31, 2021
By Bret Stephens
Opinion Columnist
If it turns out that the Covid pandemic was caused by a leak from a lab in Wuhan, China, it will rank among the greatest scientific scandals in history: dangerous research, possibly involving ethically dubious techniques that make viruses more dangerous, carried out in a poorly safeguarded facility, thuggishly covered up by a regime more interested in propaganda than human life, catastrophic for the entire world.
But this possible scandal, which is as yet unproved, obscures an actual scandal, which remains to be digested.
I mean the long refusal by too many media gatekeepers (social as well as mainstream) to take the lab-leak theory seriously. The reasons for this — rank partisanship and credulous reporting — and the methods by which it was enforced — censorship and vilification — are reminders that sometimes the most destructive enemies of science can be those who claim to speak in its name.
Rewind the tape to February of last year, when people such as Senator Tom Cotton began pointing to a disturbing fact set: the odd coincidence of a pandemic originating in the same city where a Chinese lab was conducting high-end experiments on bat viruses; the troubling report that some of the original Covid patients had no contact with the food markets where the pandemic supposedly originated; the fact that the Chinese government lied and stonewalled its way through the crisis. Think what you will about the Arkansas Republican, but these were reasonable observations warranting impartial investigation.
The common reaction in elite liberal circles? A Washington Post reporter called it a “fringe theory” that “has been repeatedly disputed by experts.” The Atlantic Council accused Cotton of abetting an “infodemic” by “pushing debunked claim that the novel coronavirus may have been created in a Wuhan lab.” A writer for Vox said it was a “dangerous conspiracy theory” being advanced by conservatives “known to regularly spew nonsense (and bash China).”
There are many more such examples. But the overall shape of the media narrative was clear. On one side were experts at places like the World Health Organization: knowledgeable, incorruptible, authoritative, noble. On the other were a bunch of right-wing yahoos pushing a risible fantasy with xenophobic overtones in order to deflect attention from the Trump administration’s mishandling of the crisis.
Yet it was also a narrative with holes larger than Donald Trump’s mouth.
Was it outrageous to think that the virus might have escaped the Wuhan Institute? Not if you listened to evolutionary biologist Bret Weinstein’s patient, lucid, scientifically rich explanation of the lab-leak hypothesis — which he delivered almost a year ago on the decidedly non-mainstream Joe Rogan podcast.
Was it smart for science reporters to accept the authority of a February 2020 letter, signed by 27 scientists and published in The Lancet, feverishly insisting on the “natural origin” of Covid? Not if those reporters had probed the ties between the letter’s lead author and the Wuhan lab (a fact, as the science writer Nicholas Wade points out in a landmark essay in The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, that has been public knowledge for months).
Was it wise to suppose that the World Health Organization, which has served as a mouthpiece for Chinese regime propaganda, should be an authority on what counted as Covid “misinformation” by Facebook, which in February banned the lab-leak theory from its platform? Not if the aim of companies like Facebook is to bring the world closer together, as opposed to laundering Chinese government disinformation while modeling its illiberal methods.
To its credit, Facebook reversed itself last week. News organizations are quietly correcting (or stealth editing) last year’s dismissive reports, sometimes using the fig leaf of new information about Wuhan lab workers being infected in the fall of 2019 with a Covid-like illness. And the public-health community is taking a fresh look at its Covid origin story.
But even now one gets a distinct sense of the herd of independent minds hard at work. If the lab-leak theory is finally getting the respectful attention it always deserved, it’s mainly because Joe Biden authorized an inquiry and Anthony Fauci admitted to doubts about the natural-origin claim. In other words, the right president and the right public-health expert have blessed a certain line of inquiry.
Yet the lab-leak theory, whether or not it turns out to be right, was always credible. Even if Tom Cotton believed it. Even if the scientific “consensus” disputed it. Even if bigots — who rarely need a pretext — drew bigoted conclusions from it.
Good journalism, like good science, should follow evidence, not narratives. It should pay as much heed to intelligent gadflies as it does to eminent authorities. And it should never treat honest disagreement as moral heresy.
Anyone wondering why so many people have become so hostile to the pronouncements of public-health officials and science journalists should draw the appropriate conclusion from this story. When lecturing the public about the dangers of misinformation, it’s best not to peddle it yourself.
Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.
Bret L. Stephens has been an Opinion columnist with The Times since April 2017. He won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary at The Wall Street Journal in 2013 and was previously editor in chief of The Jerusalem Post. Facebook
A version of this article appears in print on June 1, 2021, Section A, Page 23 of the New York edition with the headline: The Lab-Leak Theory and The Media.
Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
Monday, April 5, 2021
ARA in NJ
New JerseyApril 2
Times Pick
I am the child of two Holocaust survivors, both interred in Auschwitz as teenagers, while their parents and siblings were murdered in the gas chambers. They experienced increasing horror built upon prior horror, each iteration growing more horrifically unimaginable: loss of employment, property, education, progressing to confinement in a cramped ghetto with no food or privacy, then the 3-day cattle car train ride with no food, water, or bathroom, and finally to Auschwitz, the very definition of Hell on Earth. They didn't hold back with sharing their stories of survival and loss, and continually stressed that whatever we absorbed from their testimony was a mere fraction of the actual experience itself. Only those who were there could understand. I knew this, and the fear gnawing at me over the years is that the day will come when they will both be gone, and their stories will be left to my sisters and me to retell in a watered-down, second-person version. That day arrived for my father 40 years ago at his untimely passing, and now with finality five months ago with my mother's passing at age 96. The final victory for them both is the next generation of children, grandchildren, and 20 great-grandchildren so far. It remains our role to perpetuate their memories and stories. And by reading this column and these comments, you are helping to share that role and lighten our load.
Opinion
Can We Really Picture Auschwitz?
As memories of the Holocaust fade, one survivor’s images remain vivid.
By Bret Stephens
Opinion Columnist
April 2, 2021
When Buba Weisz Sajovits and her sister Icu arrived in Veracruz in 1946, their eldest sister, Bella, was waiting for them by the dock. Bella, who had been in Mexico with her husband from the 1930s, insisted that they were not to speak of what had happened to them in the war. Life was meant to be lived facing the future, not the past.
So Buba — her given name is Miriam but she has always gone by her nickname — lived life forward. She married a fellow émigré and concentration camp survivor, Luis Stillmann, whose story I wrote about last year. They had two daughters, then four grandchildren, then five great-grandchildren. She started a beauty salon, which thrived. They became pillars of the Jewish community in Mexico City. They prospered as they grew old.
Only one reminder of the past could not be erased, because it was etched permanently in ink on the inside of her left forearm: A-11147. What went with that alphanumeric was, as she would title her memoir, “Tattooed in My Memory.” Decades later, when she was well into her 60s, she decided to take up painting, and soon the past became more vivid.
How can we really comprehend an event like the Holocaust, or a place like Auschwitz? I have a shelf of books dedicated to the question, from Hannah Arendt’s “The Jew as Pariah” to Elie Wiesel’s “Night.” I’ve also made the trip to Auschwitz, walked along the infamous rail tracks, toured the crematory, peered at the vast piles of shoes, the sickening mounds of human hair.
But there’s invariably a gap between what we know and what we understand — a gap that becomes much wider when there’s no chance of bridging the two through personal experience. We know that 1.3 million people, an overwhelming majority of them Jewish, were enslaved by the Nazis at Auschwitz, and 1.1 million of them were murdered, mostly in gas chambers. We have thousands of testimonials from the camp’s survivors and liberators, masses of documentary and photographic evidence, the autobiography and signed affidavit of its commandant.
Yet as details accumulate, they numb as much as they inform. Information becomes statistical; statistics become abstractions. Personal memoirs, such as Primo Levi’s “Survival in Auschwitz,” restore the human dimension, but there’s always a zone of uncertainty between the written word and the reader’s imagination. Movies like “Schindler’s List” also bring to life the human element, but at the peril of semi-fictionalization. They can make Auschwitz seem less real, not more.
When Buba began to paint, “she couldn’t make a circle,” her daughter Monica recalled. “But whatever she did in life, she took to the limit and was good.”
In her Transylvanian hometown, Cluj-Napoca — or Kolozsvar to its Hungarian-speaking residents — she had been a champion sprinter at school. On May 31, 1944, she and Icu (pronounced Itzu), their parents, Bernard and Lotte, and the rest of the Jewish population of Cluj were deported in cattle cars to Auschwitz, a journey of degradation and hunger that lasted five days. Buba, then 18, last saw her parents on the night of their arrival in the camp, when her father jumped out of line to hand his daughters their baccalaureate diplomas.
Buba was given a factory job. It came with extra rations, which she shared with her bunkmates. One day, she was called into a cubicle of the block elder, a female prisoner who was in charge of barracks discipline. The elder tore off Buba’s clothes and shoved her toward a man who had been waiting for her.
“I gathered every last ounce of strength that I could muster,” she said, “and ran.”
How can we understand what it’s like to be a half-starved, naked Jewish girl running for her life from an Auschwitz rapist? We can’t. I can’t. But in 2002, Buba painted the scene, and through her painting I could catch a glimpse of what it means to be the most vulnerable person on earth.
“Needless to say,” she added dryly, “I lost my job and my ration.”
When she was 14, Buba joined a school protest to object to the German diktat that Romania hand Transylvania over to Hungary. A classmate shoved her aside. “What are you doing here, you dirty Jew? You’re not even Romanian.” In time, they were made to wear yellow stars, barred from public places, locked up at home and taken to the Cluj ghetto. Dehumanization was as much the precondition for Auschwitz as it was its outcome.
Fittingly, among the first German officers Buba remembers seeing at the camp was Josef Mengele. “With a posture more attuned to an opera,” she remembers, he hummed the melody of “The Blue Danube” while signaling for prisoners to file into one line or another.
Icu was put in line with their mother, but their mother sent her back to join Buba’s line. Almost certainly without Lotte Sajovits knowing it, her last deliberate act in life would save her daughter from the gas chamber.
In an interview Buba gave in 2017 for the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, she told of her other encounter with the infamous doctor. “We had to go to — I don’t know whether it was an office or a hospital — where Dr. Mengele worked. Cruel, like you have no idea. They lay us down, and I don’t have any idea what happened. It’s possible they put us to sleep. … What he got up to, I can’t say.”
Buba painted this, too, choosing, as she would say, “cold colors.” For all of its scale, the special evil of Auschwitz ultimately lay in the fact that the murder and torture was clinical, something I only really understood after seeing Buba’s painting. Notice the animals in the scene: They wear white coats.
Nine days before the Red Army liberated Auschwitz, Buba and her sister were among the 56,000 prisoners forced to march 35 miles in the dead of winter. As many as 15,000 of those who began the journey from Auschwitz died. The rest, along with Buba and Icu, were put on trains to Germany.
Even with the war all but lost, the Nazi determination to kill Jews didn’t stop.
“The SS had us form a single file,” Buba said of the march. “They eliminated one out of every 10 women. I ran toward Icu so that the same fate would befall us.”
It didn’t. She and Icu were liberated, from Bergen-Belsen, on April 15 by the British Army. No painting of Buba’s haunts me more than the one of her alone, her head in her emaciated arms, the barbed wire still in front, the chimney, still burning, not far behind.
“I wondered what to do with my newly granted freedom,” Buba thought. “My world had been demolished.” What better way than this image to help me understand how little life could mean to someone who had lost so much?
Buba put down her paint brushes a few years ago. She is now 95, one of only 2,000 or so Auschwitz survivors still living. Her husband, Luis, who survived Mauthausen, is 99. Both of them embody what, for me, it means to be Jewish: a member of a religion that cherishes life and memory alike, and believes that we live best, and understand best, when we remember well.
In this month of Holocaust remembrance, it’s worth pausing to consider how one brave woman’s memory, and art, help us to see what we must never forget.
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Bret L. Stephens has been an Opinion columnist with The Times since April 2017. He won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary at The Wall Street Journal in 2013 and was previously editor in chief of The Jerusalem Post. Facebook
A version of this article appears in print on April 4, 2021, Section SR, Page 8 of the New York edition with the headline: Can We Really Picture Auschwitz?.
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Monday, January 25, 2021
I'm adding this to my list of favorite quotes.
New York Times
Bret Stephens
"Trump needs to be convicted. If he isn’t, not only does it make Trump’s political resurrection possible, it also means the Congress won’t defend its institutional prerogatives to sanction an assault against it, making it more likely to happen in the future."
Bret Stephens
"Trump needs to be convicted. If he isn’t, not only does it make Trump’s political resurrection possible, it also means the Congress won’t defend its institutional prerogatives to sanction an assault against it, making it more likely to happen in the future."
Sunday, January 10, 2021
Bret Stephens is the best opinion columnist at the New York Times.
New York Times
Opinion
Impeach and Convict. Right Now.
Trump is too dangerous to leave in office for even another minute.
By Bret Stephens
Opinion Columnist
January 6, 2021
This column has been updated to reflect news events.
It wasn’t hard to see, when it began, that it would end exactly the way it has. Donald Trump is America’s willful arsonist, the man who lit the match under the fabric of our constitutional republic.
The duty of the House of Representatives and the Senate is to reconvene immediately to impeach the president and then remove him from office and bar him from ever holding office again.
To allow Trump to serve out his term, however brief it may be, puts the nation’s safety at risk, leaves our reputation as a democracy in tatters and evades the inescapable truth that the assault on Congress was an act of violent sedition aided and abetted by a lawless, immoral and terrifying president.
From the moment Trump became the G.O.P. front-runner in 2015, it was obvious who he was and where, if given the chance, he would take America. He was a malignant narcissist in his person. A fraudster in his businesses. A bully in his relationships. And a demagogue in his politics.
He did not have ideas. He had bigotries. He did not have a coalition. He had crowds. He did not have character. He had a quality of confident shamelessness, the kind that offered his followers permission to be shameless, too.
All this was obvious — but was not enough to stop him. America in 2015 had many problems, many of which had gone too long ignored and were ripe for populist exploitation. But by far the biggest problem of that year was that a major political party capitulated to a thug. And the biggest problem of every subsequent year has been that more and more of that party has excused, ignored, forgiven, colluded in and celebrated his thuggery.
Think of Mike Pompeo, our sycophantic secretary of state, who in March 2016 warned that Trump would be “an authoritarian president who ignored our Constitution,” and who, after the election had been called for Biden in November, promised “a smooth transition to a second Trump administration.”
The Republican Party is now walking to the edge of moral irredeemability. I say this as someone who, until 2016, had always voted the straight Republican ticket and who, until this week, had hoped that Republicans would hold the Senate as a way of tilting the Biden administration to the center. I say this also of the party generally, and not of the courageous individual Republicans — Brad Raffensperger, Mitt Romney, Denver Riggleman, Larry Hogan, Ben Sasse (the list is depressingly short) — who have preserved their principles, maintained their honor and kept their heads these past five years.
But there is no getting away from the extent to which leading party members and their cheerleaders in the right-wing media are complicit in creating the political atmosphere in which this Visigothic sacking of the Capitol took place.
The legal hucksters, from Rudy Giuliani to Mark Levin, who promoted demonstrably debunkable claims about electoral fraud, are complicit. All of those supposedly sober-minded conservatives who encouraged the president to “pursue his legal options” (knowing full well they were bunk, but with the assurance that they would settle doubts about the validity of the vote) are complicit. The 126 House Republicans who signed on to the preposterous brief supporting the Texas lawsuit to overturn the election — flicked away in a single paragraph by the Supreme Court — are complicit. Ted Cruz, whom I once described as a “serpent covered in Vaseline” but who turns out to be considerably worse, is complicit. Josh Hawley and the rest of the Senate cynics, who tried to obstruct Biden’s election certification in a transparent bid to corner the market on Trumpian craziness, are complicit. Mike Pence, who cravenly humored Trump’s fantasies right till the moment of constitutional truth, is complicit. (If there’s an argument against Trump’s removal from office, he alone is it.)
Some of these charlatans are now trying to disavow Wednesday’s violence in carefully phrased tweets. But Cruz, Hawley, Pence and the other Bitter-Enders have done far more lasting damage to Congress than the mob that — merely by following their lead — physically trashed it. Broken doors can be fixed. Broken parties cannot.
Above all there is the president, not complicit but wholly, undeniably and unforgivably responsible.
For five years, Republicans let him degrade political culture by normalizing his behavior. For five years, they let him wage war on democratic norms and institutions. For five years, they treated his nonstop mendacity as a quirk of character, not a disqualification for office. For five years, they treated his rallies as carnivals of democracy, not as training grounds for mob rule.
For five years, they thought this was costless. On Wednesday — forgive the cliché, but it’s apt here — their chickens came home to roost.
Every decent society depends for its survival on its ability to be shocked — and stay shocked — by genuinely shocking behavior. Donald Trump’s entire presidency has been an assault on that idea.
There is only one prescription for it now. Impeach the president and remove him from office now. Ban him forever from office now. Let every American know that, in the age of Trump, there are some things that can never be allowed to stand, most of all Trump himself.
Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.
Bret L. Stephens has been an Opinion columnist with The Times since April 2017. He won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary at The Wall Street Journal in 2013 and was previously editor in chief of The Jerusalem Post. Facebook
A version of this article appears in print on Jan. 9, 2021, Section A, Page 20 of the New York edition with the headline: Impeach and Convict. Right Now.
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Opinion
Impeach and Convict. Right Now.
Trump is too dangerous to leave in office for even another minute.
By Bret Stephens
Opinion Columnist
January 6, 2021
This column has been updated to reflect news events.
It wasn’t hard to see, when it began, that it would end exactly the way it has. Donald Trump is America’s willful arsonist, the man who lit the match under the fabric of our constitutional republic.
The duty of the House of Representatives and the Senate is to reconvene immediately to impeach the president and then remove him from office and bar him from ever holding office again.
To allow Trump to serve out his term, however brief it may be, puts the nation’s safety at risk, leaves our reputation as a democracy in tatters and evades the inescapable truth that the assault on Congress was an act of violent sedition aided and abetted by a lawless, immoral and terrifying president.
From the moment Trump became the G.O.P. front-runner in 2015, it was obvious who he was and where, if given the chance, he would take America. He was a malignant narcissist in his person. A fraudster in his businesses. A bully in his relationships. And a demagogue in his politics.
He did not have ideas. He had bigotries. He did not have a coalition. He had crowds. He did not have character. He had a quality of confident shamelessness, the kind that offered his followers permission to be shameless, too.
All this was obvious — but was not enough to stop him. America in 2015 had many problems, many of which had gone too long ignored and were ripe for populist exploitation. But by far the biggest problem of that year was that a major political party capitulated to a thug. And the biggest problem of every subsequent year has been that more and more of that party has excused, ignored, forgiven, colluded in and celebrated his thuggery.
Think of Mike Pompeo, our sycophantic secretary of state, who in March 2016 warned that Trump would be “an authoritarian president who ignored our Constitution,” and who, after the election had been called for Biden in November, promised “a smooth transition to a second Trump administration.”
The Republican Party is now walking to the edge of moral irredeemability. I say this as someone who, until 2016, had always voted the straight Republican ticket and who, until this week, had hoped that Republicans would hold the Senate as a way of tilting the Biden administration to the center. I say this also of the party generally, and not of the courageous individual Republicans — Brad Raffensperger, Mitt Romney, Denver Riggleman, Larry Hogan, Ben Sasse (the list is depressingly short) — who have preserved their principles, maintained their honor and kept their heads these past five years.
But there is no getting away from the extent to which leading party members and their cheerleaders in the right-wing media are complicit in creating the political atmosphere in which this Visigothic sacking of the Capitol took place.
The legal hucksters, from Rudy Giuliani to Mark Levin, who promoted demonstrably debunkable claims about electoral fraud, are complicit. All of those supposedly sober-minded conservatives who encouraged the president to “pursue his legal options” (knowing full well they were bunk, but with the assurance that they would settle doubts about the validity of the vote) are complicit. The 126 House Republicans who signed on to the preposterous brief supporting the Texas lawsuit to overturn the election — flicked away in a single paragraph by the Supreme Court — are complicit. Ted Cruz, whom I once described as a “serpent covered in Vaseline” but who turns out to be considerably worse, is complicit. Josh Hawley and the rest of the Senate cynics, who tried to obstruct Biden’s election certification in a transparent bid to corner the market on Trumpian craziness, are complicit. Mike Pence, who cravenly humored Trump’s fantasies right till the moment of constitutional truth, is complicit. (If there’s an argument against Trump’s removal from office, he alone is it.)
Some of these charlatans are now trying to disavow Wednesday’s violence in carefully phrased tweets. But Cruz, Hawley, Pence and the other Bitter-Enders have done far more lasting damage to Congress than the mob that — merely by following their lead — physically trashed it. Broken doors can be fixed. Broken parties cannot.
Above all there is the president, not complicit but wholly, undeniably and unforgivably responsible.
For five years, Republicans let him degrade political culture by normalizing his behavior. For five years, they let him wage war on democratic norms and institutions. For five years, they treated his nonstop mendacity as a quirk of character, not a disqualification for office. For five years, they treated his rallies as carnivals of democracy, not as training grounds for mob rule.
For five years, they thought this was costless. On Wednesday — forgive the cliché, but it’s apt here — their chickens came home to roost.
Every decent society depends for its survival on its ability to be shocked — and stay shocked — by genuinely shocking behavior. Donald Trump’s entire presidency has been an assault on that idea.
There is only one prescription for it now. Impeach the president and remove him from office now. Ban him forever from office now. Let every American know that, in the age of Trump, there are some things that can never be allowed to stand, most of all Trump himself.
Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.
Bret L. Stephens has been an Opinion columnist with The Times since April 2017. He won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary at The Wall Street Journal in 2013 and was previously editor in chief of The Jerusalem Post. Facebook
A version of this article appears in print on Jan. 9, 2021, Section A, Page 20 of the New York edition with the headline: Impeach and Convict. Right Now.
Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
Monday, November 16, 2020
Progressives, also known as liberal assholes.
New York Times
Opinion
Groupthink Has Left the Left Blind
A constricted view of the world leaves progressives surprised by the world as it is.
By Bret Stephens
Opinion Columnist
November 16, 2020
This year, several high-profile writers have left left-leaning publications after running afoul of what they describe as a pervasive culture of censoriousness, groupthink and intellectual-risk aversion. This month, Donald Trump once again stunned much of the liberal establishment by dramatically beating polling expectations to come within about 80,000 votes of another Electoral College victory.
It’s worth asking whether there’s a connection between the two — that is, between the left’s increasingly constricted view of the world and the increasing frequency with which leftists are surprised by the world as it is.
What, today, is leftism, at least when it comes to intellectual life? Not what it used to be. Once it was predominantly liberal, albeit with radical fringes. Now it is predominantly progressive, or woke, with centrist liberals in dissent. Once it was irreverent. Now it is pious. Once it believed that truth was best discovered by engaging opposing points of view. Now it believes that truth can be established by eliminating them. Once it cared about process. Now it is obsessed with outcomes. Once it understood, with Walt Whitman, that we contain multitudes. Now it is into dualities: We are privileged or powerless, white or of color, racist or anti-racist, oppressor or oppressed.
The list goes on. But the central difference is this: The old liberal left paid attention to complexity, ambiguity, the gray areas. A sense of complexity induced a measure of doubt, including self-doubt. The new left typically seeks to reduce things to elements such as race, class and gender, in ways that erase ambiguity and doubt. The new left is a factory of certitudes.
It’s from that factory that writers like Andrew Sullivan and Glenn Greenwald have fled, and from which many other independent-minded thinkers will, sooner or later, follow. For them, the loss isn’t devastating: They have large followings and can use new digital platforms like Substack to make a generous living.
For the new left — and the publications that champion it — the loss is much greater. It makes them predictable, smug and dull. It alienates readers. A current article on the New York magazine website is titled, “I Think About Björk’s Creativity Animal a Lot.” For gems such as this they got rid of Sullivan?
But worse than making it dull, the purge (or self-purge) of contrarians has made the new left blind.
According to the incessant pronouncements of much of the news media (including a few of my own), Donald Trump is the most anti-Black, anti-Hispanic and anti-woman president in modern memory. Yet the CNN exit poll found that Trump won a majority of the vote of white women against both Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden. He also improved his vote share over 2016 with both Latino and Black voters, while losing most of the advantage he previously had with college-educated white males — precisely the demographic his policies had supposedly done most to favor.
If the catechism of today’s left determined reality, none of this would have happened. Racial, ethnic or sexual identity would have trumped every other voting consideration. But as the Texas Democratic Representative Henry Cuellar recently told Axios: “Trump did a much better job at understanding Hispanics. Sometimes, Democrats see Hispanics as monolithic.” Latino voters in his South Texas district were particularly turned off by progressive rhetoric about defunding the police, opposition to fossil fuels and decriminalizing border crossings.
What is true of Cuellar’s constituency is true of everyone: People are rarely reducible to a single animating political consideration. Nor should they be subject to a simple moral judgment. Motives are complicated: It is perfectly possible to see Trump for the reprehensible man he is and still find something to like in his policies, just as it is possible to admire Biden’s character and reject his politics.
The apparent inability of many on the left to entertain the thought that decent human beings might have voted for Trump for sensible reasons — to take one example, the unemployment rate reached record lows before the pandemic hit — amounts to an epic failure to see their fellow Americans with understanding, much less with empathy. It repels the 73 million Trump voters who cannot see anything of themselves in media caricatures of them as fragile, bigoted, greedy and somewhat stupid white people.
It also motivates them. The surest way to fuel the politics of resentment — the politics that gave us the Tea Party, Brexit and Trump, and will continue to furnish more of the same — is to give people something to resent. Jeering moral condescension from entitled elites is among the things most people tend to resent.
Which brings me back to the flight of the contrarians. As the left (and the institutions that represent it) increasingly becomes an intellectual monoculture, it will do more than just drive away talent, as well as significant parts of its audience. It will become more self-certain, more obnoxious to those who don’t share its assumptions, more blinkered and more frequently wrong.
To the enemies of the left, the self-harm that left-leaning institutions do with their increasingly frequent excommunications is, ultimately, good news. The mystery is why liberals would do it to themselves.
Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.
Bret L. Stephens has been an Opinion columnist with The Times since April 2017. He won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary at The Wall Street Journal in 2013 and was previously editor in chief of The Jerusalem Post. Facebook
Opinion
Groupthink Has Left the Left Blind
A constricted view of the world leaves progressives surprised by the world as it is.
By Bret Stephens
Opinion Columnist
November 16, 2020
This year, several high-profile writers have left left-leaning publications after running afoul of what they describe as a pervasive culture of censoriousness, groupthink and intellectual-risk aversion. This month, Donald Trump once again stunned much of the liberal establishment by dramatically beating polling expectations to come within about 80,000 votes of another Electoral College victory.
It’s worth asking whether there’s a connection between the two — that is, between the left’s increasingly constricted view of the world and the increasing frequency with which leftists are surprised by the world as it is.
What, today, is leftism, at least when it comes to intellectual life? Not what it used to be. Once it was predominantly liberal, albeit with radical fringes. Now it is predominantly progressive, or woke, with centrist liberals in dissent. Once it was irreverent. Now it is pious. Once it believed that truth was best discovered by engaging opposing points of view. Now it believes that truth can be established by eliminating them. Once it cared about process. Now it is obsessed with outcomes. Once it understood, with Walt Whitman, that we contain multitudes. Now it is into dualities: We are privileged or powerless, white or of color, racist or anti-racist, oppressor or oppressed.
The list goes on. But the central difference is this: The old liberal left paid attention to complexity, ambiguity, the gray areas. A sense of complexity induced a measure of doubt, including self-doubt. The new left typically seeks to reduce things to elements such as race, class and gender, in ways that erase ambiguity and doubt. The new left is a factory of certitudes.
It’s from that factory that writers like Andrew Sullivan and Glenn Greenwald have fled, and from which many other independent-minded thinkers will, sooner or later, follow. For them, the loss isn’t devastating: They have large followings and can use new digital platforms like Substack to make a generous living.
For the new left — and the publications that champion it — the loss is much greater. It makes them predictable, smug and dull. It alienates readers. A current article on the New York magazine website is titled, “I Think About Björk’s Creativity Animal a Lot.” For gems such as this they got rid of Sullivan?
But worse than making it dull, the purge (or self-purge) of contrarians has made the new left blind.
According to the incessant pronouncements of much of the news media (including a few of my own), Donald Trump is the most anti-Black, anti-Hispanic and anti-woman president in modern memory. Yet the CNN exit poll found that Trump won a majority of the vote of white women against both Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden. He also improved his vote share over 2016 with both Latino and Black voters, while losing most of the advantage he previously had with college-educated white males — precisely the demographic his policies had supposedly done most to favor.
If the catechism of today’s left determined reality, none of this would have happened. Racial, ethnic or sexual identity would have trumped every other voting consideration. But as the Texas Democratic Representative Henry Cuellar recently told Axios: “Trump did a much better job at understanding Hispanics. Sometimes, Democrats see Hispanics as monolithic.” Latino voters in his South Texas district were particularly turned off by progressive rhetoric about defunding the police, opposition to fossil fuels and decriminalizing border crossings.
What is true of Cuellar’s constituency is true of everyone: People are rarely reducible to a single animating political consideration. Nor should they be subject to a simple moral judgment. Motives are complicated: It is perfectly possible to see Trump for the reprehensible man he is and still find something to like in his policies, just as it is possible to admire Biden’s character and reject his politics.
The apparent inability of many on the left to entertain the thought that decent human beings might have voted for Trump for sensible reasons — to take one example, the unemployment rate reached record lows before the pandemic hit — amounts to an epic failure to see their fellow Americans with understanding, much less with empathy. It repels the 73 million Trump voters who cannot see anything of themselves in media caricatures of them as fragile, bigoted, greedy and somewhat stupid white people.
It also motivates them. The surest way to fuel the politics of resentment — the politics that gave us the Tea Party, Brexit and Trump, and will continue to furnish more of the same — is to give people something to resent. Jeering moral condescension from entitled elites is among the things most people tend to resent.
Which brings me back to the flight of the contrarians. As the left (and the institutions that represent it) increasingly becomes an intellectual monoculture, it will do more than just drive away talent, as well as significant parts of its audience. It will become more self-certain, more obnoxious to those who don’t share its assumptions, more blinkered and more frequently wrong.
To the enemies of the left, the self-harm that left-leaning institutions do with their increasingly frequent excommunications is, ultimately, good news. The mystery is why liberals would do it to themselves.
Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.
Bret L. Stephens has been an Opinion columnist with The Times since April 2017. He won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary at The Wall Street Journal in 2013 and was previously editor in chief of The Jerusalem Post. Facebook
Saturday, November 14, 2020
Bret Stephens is the best opinion columnist at the New York Times. He explained why Fucktard Trump lost the election. One more thing: Cut & paste jobs are my best posts because I didn't write them.
New York Times
Opinion
The Conservative Movement Needs a Reckoning
Just as ignorance was strength in George Orwell’s “1984,” shamelessness is a virtue in Trump’s G.O.P.
By Bret Stephens
Opinion Columnist
November 9, 2020
There will be more than a few conservatives who will spend the next 30 years trying to prove the election was stolen. Others will insist Donald Trump would have won save for a deep state, the liberal media and disloyal Never Trumpers. And many will argue that Trump was a successful conservative president who scored important policy victories and broadened the G.O.P. base, only to run aground on a once-in-a-century pandemic that would have wrecked any presidency.
Reality is otherwise. Trump’s loss is entirely on him — albeit in ways that roundly indict the conservative movement that made him its hero.
About the loss: It was narrow when seen narrowly in the vote tallies of battleground states. It was broad when seen broadly.
He lost the Midwestern states that gave him his victory four years ago. He appears to have lost Georgia, which he carried easily four years ago, as well as Arizona, which no sitting Republican president has lost since 1932. What ground he gained among Latino and Black voters, according to early exit poll data, he more than lost among white men, particularly those with college degrees, not to mention seniors.
Certain half-clever conservative commentators have noted that Trump improved on his 2016 vote total by several million votes. But Joe Biden improved on Hillary Clinton’s total by even more.
Most remarkable: Trump lost despite 56 percent of Americans saying they were better off now than they were four years ago, according to a Gallup survey from September. He lost despite Republicans gaining seats in the House, doing well at the state level and having reasonable hopes of holding the Senate. He lost despite the damage that progressive rhetoric about defunding the police and banning fracking did to some Democrats. He lost despite all the usual advantages of incumbency.
Trump lost for two main and mutually reinforcing reasons. The first is that he’s immoral — manifestly, comprehensively and unrepentantly.
The immorality didn’t just repel his political opponents. It enraged them, inspired them, drove them to the polls and gave Biden exactly the opening he needed to run on a winning message of unity and decency.
Trump’s immorality also blinded him to his opportunities. He could have mended fences with his opponents. Instead, he consistently sought to humiliate them in ways that proved self-defeating: Think of John McCain and the Obamacare repeal vote. He could have spent the past eight months as the nation’s consoler in chief, a role nearly every past president has gracefully played. Instead, he went from denier in chief, to quack doctor in chief, to false promise maker in chief — everything, that is, except the steady and compassionate figure the country desperately needed in the White House.
The second reason Trump lost is that conservatives never tried to check his immorality. They rationalized, excused, enabled and ultimately celebrated it. For Trump’s presidency to have had even a faint chance of succeeding, he needed his allies and fellow travelers to provide reality checks and expressions of disapproval, including occasions of outright revolt. What he mainly got was an echo chamber.
The process began before Trump’s election, when conservative pundits thrilled to the idea that Trump’s serial violations of moral and ethical norms were signs of strength and authenticity, as opposed to simple depravity. Just as ignorance was strength in George Orwell’s “1984,” shamelessness became virtue in Trump’s G.O.P. The strategy of moral inversion appeared to be vindicated four years ago, since none of Trump’s successive scandals prevented his victory.
In Trump’s conservative universe, nearly everyone became a lickspittle. Among his fervent supporters, or those who drew better ratings or poll numbers from his presidency, this was at least understandable. They had TV careers to preserve, political jobs to fill, a cult leader to worship.
Less forgivable was the political Manichaeism turned into moral nihilism: When the left is always, definitionally, “worse than the right,” then the right feels entitled to permit itself everything, no matter how badly it trashes conservative policies (outreach to North Korea), betrays conservative principles (trade tariffs), debases the office (arms-for-dirt with Ukraine) or shames the nation (child separation). Stalinists used to justify their crimes in much the same way.
The historic irony here is that these permission slips for Trump served the master ill. Who in the White House had the clout of someone like James Baker to set the president straight and serve as something more than a yes-man? And who in the broader conservative world — someone Trump might have seen on Fox, for instance — could explain that attempting to fool all of the people all of the time was a losing strategy? Did Rupert Murdoch or Mitch McConnell ever put in an admonitory word?
For America, this failure to do much more than flatter, defend and delude Trump these past four years is a blessing. For conservatives, it calls for a reckoning.
Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.
Bret L. Stephens has been an Opinion columnist with The Times since April 2017. He won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary at The Wall Street Journal in 2013 and was previously editor in chief of The Jerusalem Post. Facebook
A version of this article appears in print on Nov. 10, 2020, Section A, Page 22 of the New York edition with the headline: The Conservative Movement Needs a Reckoning.
Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
Opinion
The Conservative Movement Needs a Reckoning
Just as ignorance was strength in George Orwell’s “1984,” shamelessness is a virtue in Trump’s G.O.P.
By Bret Stephens
Opinion Columnist
November 9, 2020
There will be more than a few conservatives who will spend the next 30 years trying to prove the election was stolen. Others will insist Donald Trump would have won save for a deep state, the liberal media and disloyal Never Trumpers. And many will argue that Trump was a successful conservative president who scored important policy victories and broadened the G.O.P. base, only to run aground on a once-in-a-century pandemic that would have wrecked any presidency.
Reality is otherwise. Trump’s loss is entirely on him — albeit in ways that roundly indict the conservative movement that made him its hero.
About the loss: It was narrow when seen narrowly in the vote tallies of battleground states. It was broad when seen broadly.
He lost the Midwestern states that gave him his victory four years ago. He appears to have lost Georgia, which he carried easily four years ago, as well as Arizona, which no sitting Republican president has lost since 1932. What ground he gained among Latino and Black voters, according to early exit poll data, he more than lost among white men, particularly those with college degrees, not to mention seniors.
Certain half-clever conservative commentators have noted that Trump improved on his 2016 vote total by several million votes. But Joe Biden improved on Hillary Clinton’s total by even more.
Most remarkable: Trump lost despite 56 percent of Americans saying they were better off now than they were four years ago, according to a Gallup survey from September. He lost despite Republicans gaining seats in the House, doing well at the state level and having reasonable hopes of holding the Senate. He lost despite the damage that progressive rhetoric about defunding the police and banning fracking did to some Democrats. He lost despite all the usual advantages of incumbency.
Trump lost for two main and mutually reinforcing reasons. The first is that he’s immoral — manifestly, comprehensively and unrepentantly.
The immorality didn’t just repel his political opponents. It enraged them, inspired them, drove them to the polls and gave Biden exactly the opening he needed to run on a winning message of unity and decency.
Trump’s immorality also blinded him to his opportunities. He could have mended fences with his opponents. Instead, he consistently sought to humiliate them in ways that proved self-defeating: Think of John McCain and the Obamacare repeal vote. He could have spent the past eight months as the nation’s consoler in chief, a role nearly every past president has gracefully played. Instead, he went from denier in chief, to quack doctor in chief, to false promise maker in chief — everything, that is, except the steady and compassionate figure the country desperately needed in the White House.
The second reason Trump lost is that conservatives never tried to check his immorality. They rationalized, excused, enabled and ultimately celebrated it. For Trump’s presidency to have had even a faint chance of succeeding, he needed his allies and fellow travelers to provide reality checks and expressions of disapproval, including occasions of outright revolt. What he mainly got was an echo chamber.
The process began before Trump’s election, when conservative pundits thrilled to the idea that Trump’s serial violations of moral and ethical norms were signs of strength and authenticity, as opposed to simple depravity. Just as ignorance was strength in George Orwell’s “1984,” shamelessness became virtue in Trump’s G.O.P. The strategy of moral inversion appeared to be vindicated four years ago, since none of Trump’s successive scandals prevented his victory.
In Trump’s conservative universe, nearly everyone became a lickspittle. Among his fervent supporters, or those who drew better ratings or poll numbers from his presidency, this was at least understandable. They had TV careers to preserve, political jobs to fill, a cult leader to worship.
Less forgivable was the political Manichaeism turned into moral nihilism: When the left is always, definitionally, “worse than the right,” then the right feels entitled to permit itself everything, no matter how badly it trashes conservative policies (outreach to North Korea), betrays conservative principles (trade tariffs), debases the office (arms-for-dirt with Ukraine) or shames the nation (child separation). Stalinists used to justify their crimes in much the same way.
The historic irony here is that these permission slips for Trump served the master ill. Who in the White House had the clout of someone like James Baker to set the president straight and serve as something more than a yes-man? And who in the broader conservative world — someone Trump might have seen on Fox, for instance — could explain that attempting to fool all of the people all of the time was a losing strategy? Did Rupert Murdoch or Mitch McConnell ever put in an admonitory word?
For America, this failure to do much more than flatter, defend and delude Trump these past four years is a blessing. For conservatives, it calls for a reckoning.
Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.
Bret L. Stephens has been an Opinion columnist with The Times since April 2017. He won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary at The Wall Street Journal in 2013 and was previously editor in chief of The Jerusalem Post. Facebook
A version of this article appears in print on Nov. 10, 2020, Section A, Page 22 of the New York edition with the headline: The Conservative Movement Needs a Reckoning.
Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
Friday, October 16, 2020
New York Times: "Where would we be now if we had a truly politically incorrect president? Donald Trump is supposed to be politically incorrect, but, for the most part, he isn’t. He’s mainly just a jerk."
New York Times
Opinion
Imagining the Trump Presidency That Wasn’t
A politically incorrect administration might have succeeded where this one failed.
By Bret Stephens
Opinion Columnist
October 12, 2020
Where would we be now if we had a truly politically incorrect president? Donald Trump is supposed to be politically incorrect, but, for the most part, he isn’t. He’s mainly just a jerk.
Jerkishness is often mistaken for political incorrectness, in the way that blind luck is easily mistaken for great skill. They’re fundamentally different. Political incorrectness is an expression of intellectual independence. Jerkishness is a personality defect. The former requires a sense of inner rectitude. The latter reveals an absence of inner boundaries.
Politically incorrect people are prepared to deviate from their own party, ideology or personal interest for the sake of a moral principle. Jerks are always in it for themselves alone.
Andrei Sakharov and Liu Xiaobo were politically incorrect: honest men in dishonest systems. Trump is a dishonest man in a country with an increasingly tenuous grip on the concept of honesty itself.
With this in mind, let’s imagine an alternative history for a (politically incorrect) Trump presidency.
January 2017: Shortly after his inauguration as president, Trump fulfills a campaign promise by releasing his full tax returns. In a statement, the president says he’s releasing them for two reasons:
“First of all, if our dishonest media ever gets a hold of them, and they will, they’ll lie about what’s in them! And second, they show just what’s wrong with our tax code. As a real estate developer, I make no apologies for taking advantage of every loophole. As president, I will close these crazy holes for the sake of the American people. #IAloneCanFixIt. #MAGA.”
February 2017: Infuriating movement conservatives, Trump resubmits 64-year-old Merrick Garland’s nomination to the Supreme Court, saying he wants to uphold the principle — denied to his predecessor — that a president has the right to nominate a candidate to fill a vacant judgeship at any point in his administration.
But he does so as part of a deal in which one of the court’s older conservative justices steps down from the bench in favor of Neil Gorsuch, 49. The subsequent retirement of Anthony Kennedy and the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg mean the court regains its conservative majority, with three younger justices, by the end of Trump’s first term.
October 2017: Following the massacre of some 60 people (and the injury of more than 800) by a lone gunman in Las Vegas, Trump delivers a prime-time address on the subject of gun control. He observes that, at the time the Second Amendment was written, a skilled marksman could fire, at most, three or four rounds a minute.
“The right to bear arms cannot become a license for American carnage,” he says, borrowing a line from his inaugural address. “We’re either going to get serious about regulating the ability of just about anyone to get access to high-powered, rapid-firing weapons, or we’re going to start requiring every gun owner to spend every other Sunday doing drills in their local ‘well-regulated militia’ — just like it says in the Constitution.”
May 2018: In the face of a migration crisis on the U.S.-Mexico border, Trump proposes a grand-immigration bargain with congressional Democrats: full funding for a border wall, in exchange for a path to citizenship for Dreamers. Later, he expands the proposal to a $2 trillion infrastructure bill with “Buy American” provisions, in exchange for expedited environmental reviews for federal projects and a repeal of the Jim Crow-era Davis-Bacon Act, which has long inflated the labor costs of public works.
June 2018: Invoking Gerald Ford’s congressional testimony regarding his presidential pardon of Richard Nixon, Trump agrees to sit before the House Intelligence Committee on the subject of his campaign’s links to Russia. He expresses regret for hiring Paul Manafort as campaign chairman and for his praise for WikiLeaks, which he concedes interfered in the 2016 election. But he challenges the factual basis of the Steele dossier and the legal basis for the F.B.I.’s investigation of his campaign.
July 2019: In a telephone call with Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, Trump makes no mention of the Biden family.
February 2020: Warning Americans that the novel coronavirus risks becoming the greatest global health emergency of the century, Trump tells Americans that we can beat this, and keep the economy strong, by adopting common-sense social-distancing measures: avoiding crowded public transportation, sports arenas, concerts and bars. Going further than even his own health experts recommended, he talks up his well-known germophobia and insists that everyone in the White House wear a face mask. But he also warns state governors that attempts to lock down entire communities in an effort to contain the spread is a futile cure that will impose ruinous economic costs.
June 2020: After the killing of George Floyd, Trump convenes a conference of law enforcement officials and others to develop a set of national police standards. He asks the Democratic Representative Val Demings of Florida to lead the conference.
For many conservatives (including me), some of these proposals would have been hard to accept. Liberals would have their own objections to some of this ideological jujitsu. Then again, what an interesting and fruitful administration it might have been. America still awaits a politically incorrect president — while it waits out the jerk.
Bret L. Stephens has been an Opinion columnist with The Times since April 2017. He won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary at The Wall Street Journal in 2013 and was previously editor in chief of The Jerusalem Post. Facebook
A version of this article appears in print on Oct. 14, 2020, Section A, Page 23 of the New York edition with the headline: The Trump Presidency That Wasn’t.
Opinion
Imagining the Trump Presidency That Wasn’t
A politically incorrect administration might have succeeded where this one failed.
By Bret Stephens
Opinion Columnist
October 12, 2020
Where would we be now if we had a truly politically incorrect president? Donald Trump is supposed to be politically incorrect, but, for the most part, he isn’t. He’s mainly just a jerk.
Jerkishness is often mistaken for political incorrectness, in the way that blind luck is easily mistaken for great skill. They’re fundamentally different. Political incorrectness is an expression of intellectual independence. Jerkishness is a personality defect. The former requires a sense of inner rectitude. The latter reveals an absence of inner boundaries.
Politically incorrect people are prepared to deviate from their own party, ideology or personal interest for the sake of a moral principle. Jerks are always in it for themselves alone.
Andrei Sakharov and Liu Xiaobo were politically incorrect: honest men in dishonest systems. Trump is a dishonest man in a country with an increasingly tenuous grip on the concept of honesty itself.
With this in mind, let’s imagine an alternative history for a (politically incorrect) Trump presidency.
January 2017: Shortly after his inauguration as president, Trump fulfills a campaign promise by releasing his full tax returns. In a statement, the president says he’s releasing them for two reasons:
“First of all, if our dishonest media ever gets a hold of them, and they will, they’ll lie about what’s in them! And second, they show just what’s wrong with our tax code. As a real estate developer, I make no apologies for taking advantage of every loophole. As president, I will close these crazy holes for the sake of the American people. #IAloneCanFixIt. #MAGA.”
February 2017: Infuriating movement conservatives, Trump resubmits 64-year-old Merrick Garland’s nomination to the Supreme Court, saying he wants to uphold the principle — denied to his predecessor — that a president has the right to nominate a candidate to fill a vacant judgeship at any point in his administration.
But he does so as part of a deal in which one of the court’s older conservative justices steps down from the bench in favor of Neil Gorsuch, 49. The subsequent retirement of Anthony Kennedy and the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg mean the court regains its conservative majority, with three younger justices, by the end of Trump’s first term.
October 2017: Following the massacre of some 60 people (and the injury of more than 800) by a lone gunman in Las Vegas, Trump delivers a prime-time address on the subject of gun control. He observes that, at the time the Second Amendment was written, a skilled marksman could fire, at most, three or four rounds a minute.
“The right to bear arms cannot become a license for American carnage,” he says, borrowing a line from his inaugural address. “We’re either going to get serious about regulating the ability of just about anyone to get access to high-powered, rapid-firing weapons, or we’re going to start requiring every gun owner to spend every other Sunday doing drills in their local ‘well-regulated militia’ — just like it says in the Constitution.”
May 2018: In the face of a migration crisis on the U.S.-Mexico border, Trump proposes a grand-immigration bargain with congressional Democrats: full funding for a border wall, in exchange for a path to citizenship for Dreamers. Later, he expands the proposal to a $2 trillion infrastructure bill with “Buy American” provisions, in exchange for expedited environmental reviews for federal projects and a repeal of the Jim Crow-era Davis-Bacon Act, which has long inflated the labor costs of public works.
June 2018: Invoking Gerald Ford’s congressional testimony regarding his presidential pardon of Richard Nixon, Trump agrees to sit before the House Intelligence Committee on the subject of his campaign’s links to Russia. He expresses regret for hiring Paul Manafort as campaign chairman and for his praise for WikiLeaks, which he concedes interfered in the 2016 election. But he challenges the factual basis of the Steele dossier and the legal basis for the F.B.I.’s investigation of his campaign.
July 2019: In a telephone call with Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, Trump makes no mention of the Biden family.
February 2020: Warning Americans that the novel coronavirus risks becoming the greatest global health emergency of the century, Trump tells Americans that we can beat this, and keep the economy strong, by adopting common-sense social-distancing measures: avoiding crowded public transportation, sports arenas, concerts and bars. Going further than even his own health experts recommended, he talks up his well-known germophobia and insists that everyone in the White House wear a face mask. But he also warns state governors that attempts to lock down entire communities in an effort to contain the spread is a futile cure that will impose ruinous economic costs.
June 2020: After the killing of George Floyd, Trump convenes a conference of law enforcement officials and others to develop a set of national police standards. He asks the Democratic Representative Val Demings of Florida to lead the conference.
For many conservatives (including me), some of these proposals would have been hard to accept. Liberals would have their own objections to some of this ideological jujitsu. Then again, what an interesting and fruitful administration it might have been. America still awaits a politically incorrect president — while it waits out the jerk.
Bret L. Stephens has been an Opinion columnist with The Times since April 2017. He won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary at The Wall Street Journal in 2013 and was previously editor in chief of The Jerusalem Post. Facebook
A version of this article appears in print on Oct. 14, 2020, Section A, Page 23 of the New York edition with the headline: The Trump Presidency That Wasn’t.
Friday, September 18, 2020
New York Times - Bret Stephens - "A Rare Middle East Triumph And — yes — a triumph for Trump, too."
Bret Stephens is my favorite New York Times columnist. I read this whole thing and I agree with everything he wrote.
New York Times
Opinion
A Rare Middle East Triumph
And — yes — a triumph for Trump, too.
By Bret Stephens
Opinion Columnist
September 14, 2020
For years, the Trump administration’s peacemaking efforts in the Middle East have been the object of relentless derision in elite foreign-policy circles, some of it justified. Yet with Friday’s announcement that Bahrain would join the United Arab Emirates as the second Arab state in 30 days to normalize ties with Israel, the administration has done more for regional peace than most of its predecessors, including an Obama administration that tried hard and failed badly.
There are lessons in this, at least for anyone prepared to consider just how wrong a half-century’s worth of conventional wisdom has been.
At the heart of that conventional wisdom is the view, succinctly put by U.N. Secretary General António Guterres in February, that “resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict remains key to sustainable peace in the Middle East.” Untie that Gordian knot, so the thinking goes, and the region’s many problems become easier to solve, whether it’s other regional conflicts or the anti-Americanism that feeds international terrorism.
That thinking was always dubious — what, for instance, did the Iran-Iraq War, in which a million people or more died, have to do with Israelis and Palestinians? — though it had the convenience of giving Arab regimes a good way of deflecting blame for their own bad governance. But since the (misnamed) Arab Spring began nearly a decade ago, the view has become absurd.
The rise and fall of ISIS, civil war in Syria and anarchy in Libya, Turkey’s aggression against Kurds, proxy battles and hunger in Yemen, political turmoil and repression in Egypt and Iran, the bankruptcy of the Lebanese state, the plight of Middle Eastern refugees — if any of these catastrophes have something in common, it’s that they have next to nothing to do with the Jewish state or its policies. One may still hope for a Palestinian state, but it won’t save the region from itself.
What would? The best option is an alliance of moderates and modernizers — anyone in power (or seeking power) who wants to move his country in the direction of greater religious and social tolerance, broader (that is, beyond energy) economic development, less preoccupation with ancient disputes, more interest in future opportunities. Such an alliance is the only hope for a region being sucked into the maw of religious fanaticism, economic stagnation, environmental degradation and perpetual misrule.
Now this alliance may finally be coming into being. Unlike Israel’s peace with Egypt and Jordan — both based on strategic necessity and geographic proximity — the peace with the Emirates and Bahrain has no obvious rationale, even if a shared fear of Iran played a role.
The larger factor is shared aspiration. Israel is the most advanced country in the region because for seven decades it invested in human, not mineral, potential, and because it didn’t let its wounds (whether with respect to Germany in the 1950s or Egypt in the 1970s) get the better of its judgment.
The choice for the Arab world is stark. It can follow a similar path as Israel; be swallowed by Iran, China, Russia, Turkey or some other outsider; or otherwise continue as before until, Libya-like, it implodes.
As consequential as the peace deals themselves is the Arab League’s refusal to condemn them, eliciting a furious Palestinian reaction. That’s not surprising: It means the Palestinian grip over the league’s diplomatic agenda may finally be loosening.
Perhaps it also means that the grievance-driven politics that have dominated the Palestinian issue for decades are finally over, too. If so, it’s bad news for those Palestinian leaders and activists who think that, with unflagging obstinacy, they can somehow restore the status quo ante 1948, when Israel didn’t exist.
What’s bad news for some Palestinian leaders may be good news for ordinary Palestinians. Peace between Israelis and Arabs will not come from the inside out — that is, from a deal between Jerusalem and Ramallah that wins over the rest of the Arab world. Decades of diplomatic failure, culminating in John Kerry’s failed mediation efforts in 2014, should put an end to that fantasy.
Yet it isn’t crazy to think that peace might come from the outside in: from an Arab world that encircles Israel with recognition and partnership rather than enmity, and which thereby shores up Israel’s security while moderating Palestinian behavior. If that’s right — and if states like Oman, Morocco, Kuwait, Sudan and especially Saudi Arabia follow suit — then this summer’s peace deals might finally create the conditions of viable Palestinian statehood.
A final point about these deals: This wasn’t supposed to happen. Not under the leadership of Israel’s supposedly bellicose Benjamin Netanyahu; certainly not through the diplomatic offices of the usually crazy/amateurish/perverse Trump administration. Luck and timing played a part, as they always do.
But it behooves those of us who are so frequently hostile to Netanyahu and Trump to maintain the capacity to be pleasantly surprised — that is, to be honest. What’s happened between Israel and two former enemies is an honest triumph in a region, and a year, that’s known precious few.
Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.
Bret L. Stephens has been an Opinion columnist with The Times since April 2017. He won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary at The Wall Street Journal in 2013 and was previously editor in chief of The Jerusalem Post. Facebook
A version of this article appears in print on Sept. 15, 2020, Section A, Page 27 of the New York edition with the headline: Rare Triumph In the Mideast.
Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
New York Times
Opinion
A Rare Middle East Triumph
And — yes — a triumph for Trump, too.
By Bret Stephens
Opinion Columnist
September 14, 2020
For years, the Trump administration’s peacemaking efforts in the Middle East have been the object of relentless derision in elite foreign-policy circles, some of it justified. Yet with Friday’s announcement that Bahrain would join the United Arab Emirates as the second Arab state in 30 days to normalize ties with Israel, the administration has done more for regional peace than most of its predecessors, including an Obama administration that tried hard and failed badly.
There are lessons in this, at least for anyone prepared to consider just how wrong a half-century’s worth of conventional wisdom has been.
At the heart of that conventional wisdom is the view, succinctly put by U.N. Secretary General António Guterres in February, that “resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict remains key to sustainable peace in the Middle East.” Untie that Gordian knot, so the thinking goes, and the region’s many problems become easier to solve, whether it’s other regional conflicts or the anti-Americanism that feeds international terrorism.
That thinking was always dubious — what, for instance, did the Iran-Iraq War, in which a million people or more died, have to do with Israelis and Palestinians? — though it had the convenience of giving Arab regimes a good way of deflecting blame for their own bad governance. But since the (misnamed) Arab Spring began nearly a decade ago, the view has become absurd.
The rise and fall of ISIS, civil war in Syria and anarchy in Libya, Turkey’s aggression against Kurds, proxy battles and hunger in Yemen, political turmoil and repression in Egypt and Iran, the bankruptcy of the Lebanese state, the plight of Middle Eastern refugees — if any of these catastrophes have something in common, it’s that they have next to nothing to do with the Jewish state or its policies. One may still hope for a Palestinian state, but it won’t save the region from itself.
What would? The best option is an alliance of moderates and modernizers — anyone in power (or seeking power) who wants to move his country in the direction of greater religious and social tolerance, broader (that is, beyond energy) economic development, less preoccupation with ancient disputes, more interest in future opportunities. Such an alliance is the only hope for a region being sucked into the maw of religious fanaticism, economic stagnation, environmental degradation and perpetual misrule.
Now this alliance may finally be coming into being. Unlike Israel’s peace with Egypt and Jordan — both based on strategic necessity and geographic proximity — the peace with the Emirates and Bahrain has no obvious rationale, even if a shared fear of Iran played a role.
The larger factor is shared aspiration. Israel is the most advanced country in the region because for seven decades it invested in human, not mineral, potential, and because it didn’t let its wounds (whether with respect to Germany in the 1950s or Egypt in the 1970s) get the better of its judgment.
The choice for the Arab world is stark. It can follow a similar path as Israel; be swallowed by Iran, China, Russia, Turkey or some other outsider; or otherwise continue as before until, Libya-like, it implodes.
As consequential as the peace deals themselves is the Arab League’s refusal to condemn them, eliciting a furious Palestinian reaction. That’s not surprising: It means the Palestinian grip over the league’s diplomatic agenda may finally be loosening.
Perhaps it also means that the grievance-driven politics that have dominated the Palestinian issue for decades are finally over, too. If so, it’s bad news for those Palestinian leaders and activists who think that, with unflagging obstinacy, they can somehow restore the status quo ante 1948, when Israel didn’t exist.
What’s bad news for some Palestinian leaders may be good news for ordinary Palestinians. Peace between Israelis and Arabs will not come from the inside out — that is, from a deal between Jerusalem and Ramallah that wins over the rest of the Arab world. Decades of diplomatic failure, culminating in John Kerry’s failed mediation efforts in 2014, should put an end to that fantasy.
Yet it isn’t crazy to think that peace might come from the outside in: from an Arab world that encircles Israel with recognition and partnership rather than enmity, and which thereby shores up Israel’s security while moderating Palestinian behavior. If that’s right — and if states like Oman, Morocco, Kuwait, Sudan and especially Saudi Arabia follow suit — then this summer’s peace deals might finally create the conditions of viable Palestinian statehood.
A final point about these deals: This wasn’t supposed to happen. Not under the leadership of Israel’s supposedly bellicose Benjamin Netanyahu; certainly not through the diplomatic offices of the usually crazy/amateurish/perverse Trump administration. Luck and timing played a part, as they always do.
But it behooves those of us who are so frequently hostile to Netanyahu and Trump to maintain the capacity to be pleasantly surprised — that is, to be honest. What’s happened between Israel and two former enemies is an honest triumph in a region, and a year, that’s known precious few.
Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.
Bret L. Stephens has been an Opinion columnist with The Times since April 2017. He won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary at The Wall Street Journal in 2013 and was previously editor in chief of The Jerusalem Post. Facebook
A version of this article appears in print on Sept. 15, 2020, Section A, Page 27 of the New York edition with the headline: Rare Triumph In the Mideast.
Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
Friday, September 4, 2020
This is why Trump is going to win: Nearly 12 percent of Republicans and 11 percent of independents say they’re unlikely to give telephone pollsters their true opinion on how they’ll vote in November because they think it’s dangerous to express an opinion outside of the current liberal viewpoint.”
Trump is a fucktard but liberal scum, aka Democrats, are equally stupid.
New York Times
Opinion
Unwitting Progressives for Trump
Does Joe Biden have the nerve to stand up to the far left?
By Bret Stephens
Opinion Columnist
August 31, 2020
On Thursday, as Donald Trump was about to accept the Republican nomination from the South Lawn of the White House with warnings that “No one will be safe in Biden’s America,” National Public Radio was doing its small part to make sure the president would be re-elected.
NPR’s assistance in this matter was surely unwitting. But that doesn’t make it any less effective.
The assist came in the form of a lengthy interview by NPR’s Natalie Escobar with Vicky Osterweil, author of “In Defense of Looting.” The book makes the case for looting because it “attacks some of the core beliefs and structures of cisheteropatriarchal racial capitalist society”; “rejects the legitimacy of ownership rights and property”; and “reveals all these for what they are: not natural facts, but social constructs benefiting a few at the expense of the many, upheld by ideology, economy and state violence.”
To judge by the NPR interview, “In Defense of Looting” is not an interesting book. It speaks for almost nobody beyond the fringe left — and certainly not for looters who hadn’t thought about “cisheteropatriarchalism.” The fact that the publisher is an imprint of the international conglomerate Hachette (2018 revenues, approximately $2.7 billion) compounds foolishness with hypocrisy.
Nonetheless, the book is symbolically important. I became aware of it when several friends separately forwarded to me the NPR interview. Many of these friends, I suspect, will reluctantly vote for Trump — not out of sympathy for him, but out of disgust with defenses of looting and other things they see too often on the left.
What else are they seeing? A CNN chyron from a burning Kenosha: “Fiery but mostly peaceful protests after police shooting.” A video of an outdoor diner at a Washington, D.C., restaurant being yelled at by Black Lives Matter protesters because she won’t raise a fist in solidarity. Republican Senator Rand Paul and his wife getting harassed by a swarm of protesters as they left the White House.
And more: Trump being mocked in 2017 for warning that if statues of Robert E. Lee come down, then George Washington and Thomas Jefferson statues will be next — and then radical demonstrators doing exactly that three years later. Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York scolding Orthodox Jews in April for appearing to flout social distancing rules at a Brooklyn funeral, but then making an exception for Black Lives Matter demonstrations a few months later. Seattle’s mayor, Jenny Durkan, celebrating a “summer of love” in the “Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone,” and then watching the area descend, with depressing predictability, into violent anarchy.
The list could be longer, but the question it leaves in the minds of wavering voters is exactly the question Trump most wants asked: Can the left be trusted with power?
Let me ask that question more specifically. Can the left be honest that the tragedies unfolding today in American cities are as much the story of insufficient policing as they are of abusive policing? Does it get that “law and order” is a precondition to civil liberty, not an impediment to it? Is it willing to say that the American founders who bequeathed us the institutions of liberal democracy should be honored, not despised? And does Joe Biden have the nerve to stand up to the extremes in his own party, or does he just mean to appease them?
Is he Bill Clinton, or George McGovern?
I’ve been fairly enthusiastic about Biden’s candidacy, largely because I think he represents the best chance for the moderate Democratic wing to prevail over its left one. But his wan and sometimes unsteady speech in Pittsburgh, with its brief defense of the police and its anodyne call for healing, isn’t going to assuage the voters he needs in swing states.
And need them he does. It’s always possible that Trump will overplay his hand on law and order. And Biden may still have a commanding lead in national polls. But he’s up by an average of just 2.7 points in battleground states, according to the RealClearPolitics average of polls. And the phenomenon of the “shy voter” is coming into sharper focus: Nearly 12 percent of Republicans and 11 percent of independents say they’re unlikely to give telephone pollsters their true opinion on how they’ll vote in November because they think “it’s dangerous to express an opinion outside of the current liberal viewpoint,” according to a study cited by Bloomberg. When did we hear that before?
Biden can do something about this. He can publicly call out far-left ugliness (not just violence) the next time he sees it. He can pay a visit to the people who’ve had their businesses burned to the ground in Kenosha and tell them that their grievances will be heard, and their property protected, in a Biden administration. He can even call the family of the right-wing activist killed on Saturday in Portland. What better way to prove that a Biden presidency stands for unity than to express sympathy for the victims of violence, regardless of their politics.
Too many progressives are unthinkingly helping Trump. Biden helps himself when he tells them, publicly, that their sort of help isn’t needed.
Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.
Bret L. Stephens has been an Opinion columnist with The Times since April 2017. He won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary at The Wall Street Journal in 2013 and was previously editor in chief of The Jerusalem Post. Facebook
A version of this article appears in print on Sept. 1, 2020, Section A, Page 23 of the New York edition with the headline: Unwitting Progressives For Trump.
Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
New York Times
Opinion
Unwitting Progressives for Trump
Does Joe Biden have the nerve to stand up to the far left?
By Bret Stephens
Opinion Columnist
August 31, 2020
On Thursday, as Donald Trump was about to accept the Republican nomination from the South Lawn of the White House with warnings that “No one will be safe in Biden’s America,” National Public Radio was doing its small part to make sure the president would be re-elected.
NPR’s assistance in this matter was surely unwitting. But that doesn’t make it any less effective.
The assist came in the form of a lengthy interview by NPR’s Natalie Escobar with Vicky Osterweil, author of “In Defense of Looting.” The book makes the case for looting because it “attacks some of the core beliefs and structures of cisheteropatriarchal racial capitalist society”; “rejects the legitimacy of ownership rights and property”; and “reveals all these for what they are: not natural facts, but social constructs benefiting a few at the expense of the many, upheld by ideology, economy and state violence.”
To judge by the NPR interview, “In Defense of Looting” is not an interesting book. It speaks for almost nobody beyond the fringe left — and certainly not for looters who hadn’t thought about “cisheteropatriarchalism.” The fact that the publisher is an imprint of the international conglomerate Hachette (2018 revenues, approximately $2.7 billion) compounds foolishness with hypocrisy.
Nonetheless, the book is symbolically important. I became aware of it when several friends separately forwarded to me the NPR interview. Many of these friends, I suspect, will reluctantly vote for Trump — not out of sympathy for him, but out of disgust with defenses of looting and other things they see too often on the left.
What else are they seeing? A CNN chyron from a burning Kenosha: “Fiery but mostly peaceful protests after police shooting.” A video of an outdoor diner at a Washington, D.C., restaurant being yelled at by Black Lives Matter protesters because she won’t raise a fist in solidarity. Republican Senator Rand Paul and his wife getting harassed by a swarm of protesters as they left the White House.
And more: Trump being mocked in 2017 for warning that if statues of Robert E. Lee come down, then George Washington and Thomas Jefferson statues will be next — and then radical demonstrators doing exactly that three years later. Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York scolding Orthodox Jews in April for appearing to flout social distancing rules at a Brooklyn funeral, but then making an exception for Black Lives Matter demonstrations a few months later. Seattle’s mayor, Jenny Durkan, celebrating a “summer of love” in the “Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone,” and then watching the area descend, with depressing predictability, into violent anarchy.
The list could be longer, but the question it leaves in the minds of wavering voters is exactly the question Trump most wants asked: Can the left be trusted with power?
Let me ask that question more specifically. Can the left be honest that the tragedies unfolding today in American cities are as much the story of insufficient policing as they are of abusive policing? Does it get that “law and order” is a precondition to civil liberty, not an impediment to it? Is it willing to say that the American founders who bequeathed us the institutions of liberal democracy should be honored, not despised? And does Joe Biden have the nerve to stand up to the extremes in his own party, or does he just mean to appease them?
Is he Bill Clinton, or George McGovern?
I’ve been fairly enthusiastic about Biden’s candidacy, largely because I think he represents the best chance for the moderate Democratic wing to prevail over its left one. But his wan and sometimes unsteady speech in Pittsburgh, with its brief defense of the police and its anodyne call for healing, isn’t going to assuage the voters he needs in swing states.
And need them he does. It’s always possible that Trump will overplay his hand on law and order. And Biden may still have a commanding lead in national polls. But he’s up by an average of just 2.7 points in battleground states, according to the RealClearPolitics average of polls. And the phenomenon of the “shy voter” is coming into sharper focus: Nearly 12 percent of Republicans and 11 percent of independents say they’re unlikely to give telephone pollsters their true opinion on how they’ll vote in November because they think “it’s dangerous to express an opinion outside of the current liberal viewpoint,” according to a study cited by Bloomberg. When did we hear that before?
Biden can do something about this. He can publicly call out far-left ugliness (not just violence) the next time he sees it. He can pay a visit to the people who’ve had their businesses burned to the ground in Kenosha and tell them that their grievances will be heard, and their property protected, in a Biden administration. He can even call the family of the right-wing activist killed on Saturday in Portland. What better way to prove that a Biden presidency stands for unity than to express sympathy for the victims of violence, regardless of their politics.
Too many progressives are unthinkingly helping Trump. Biden helps himself when he tells them, publicly, that their sort of help isn’t needed.
Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.
Bret L. Stephens has been an Opinion columnist with The Times since April 2017. He won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary at The Wall Street Journal in 2013 and was previously editor in chief of The Jerusalem Post. Facebook
A version of this article appears in print on Sept. 1, 2020, Section A, Page 23 of the New York edition with the headline: Unwitting Progressives For Trump.
Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
Wednesday, August 26, 2020
Bret Stephens at the New York Times thinks Biden is fucking up his chance to get rid of Trump.
Opinion
Biden’s Loose Lips Could Sink His Chances
We elect presidents to lead, not defer.
By Bret Stephens
Opinion Columnist
August 24, 2020
If Joe Biden isn’t careful, Donald Trump might have a new nickname for him: “Shutdown Joe.” Or maybe, “Shut Down Joe.” Those monikers came to mind after the former vice president’s biggest blunder in the campaign thus far.
I’m referring to Biden’s comment, in his interview last week with ABC’s David Muir, that if scientists advised him to shut down the country again to contain a winter surge of Covid-19 and the flu, “I would shut it down; I would listen to the scientists.” It’s the sort of remark that surely plays well with voters who already support him. It might even have notional majority support.
But it doesn’t help with the voters Biden needs to avoid antagonizing in swing districts.
Few stories bring that reality into sharper focus than Simon Romero’s report in Monday’s Times on New Mexico’s neck-and-neck congressional race between first-term Democratic incumbent, Rep. Xochitl Torres Small, and Yvette Herrell, her Republican challenger. New Mexico has trended Democratic in recent years, and a June poll had Biden with a comfortable lead in the state.
But Romero reports red-hot anger in the district over the restrictive coronavirus policies of the Democratic governor, Michelle Lujan Grisham, that have helped keep case counts low at a painful economic price. There is “open defiance by sheriffs, business owners and many others of Ms. Lujan Grisham’s policies.” Turnout in the G.O.P. primary surged by more than 40 percent over 2016, as against a Democratic increase of 5 percent.
“The strategy of running hard to the right by avowing loyalty to Mr. Trump while blasting Democrats for problems associated with the pandemic,” Romero adds, “could be working for Ms. Herrell, who lost the 2018 race by fewer than 4,000 votes.”
What’s happening in Torres Small’s district, which in 2016 went for Trump by a 10-point margin, isn’t going to decide the presidential race, even in New Mexico. But it offers a taste of a powerful current of anxiety and resentment that Trump has positioned himself to exploit, and that — to judge by his shutdown remark — Biden doesn’t seem to grasp.
The anxiety is from people hanging on by their fingernails (if they’re still hanging on at all) to jobs, businesses, livelihoods and homes on account of a pandemic whose toll in lives and health can be weighed against the costs of fighting it. In the hierarchy of fears, what is Covid-19 to a healthy 35-year-old restaurateur next to the prospect of losing everything except a meager government check?
The resentment goes just as deep among those who feel talked down to by people whose own track record as experts leaves something to be desired. Remember when (on Feb. 29) the surgeon general tweeted, “Seriously people — STOP BUYING MASKS”? Remember when the most urgent national need was for more ventilators — until those fears proved largely unfounded? Remember the scientists who hypocritically failed to abide by the sort of strictures they demanded of the public?
None of this is a failure of science per se, or an excuse for reckless personal behavior. It is certainly no justification for Trump’s appalling management of the crisis, particularly his failure to promote and provide for adequate testing. But it is a failure by people who claim to speak, with unassailable authority, in the name of science. And loose talk of nationwide shutdowns plays into the fears of voters who feel they have been both impoverished and patronized.
The danger Biden now courts is twofold. He is promising to hand over his decision-making authority to unelected people who, whatever their education, expertise or virtues, haven’t gained the trust of fence-sitting voters.
And he is proposing to resort to a strategy that, as Wall Street Journal reporter Greg Ip reported on Monday, is now being viewed by some economists and even health experts as “an overly blunt and economically costly tool” that could have been avoided in favor of “alternative strategies that could slow the spread of the epidemic at much less cost.”
All of this creates a dangerous opening for Trump. Voters won’t necessarily turn to Biden if they feel he will merely rubber-stamp the same set of policies that they wanted to avoid in the first place. Democracies elect leaders to lead, not defer; to occasionally buck conventional wisdom, not parrot it.
Biden and his advisers may suppose they’re on a glide path to election against a manifestly flawed and failed incumbent. But they face an opponent who fights best when he’s cornered, and who will take the same ruthless political advantage of Biden’s line that George W. Bush’s campaign did of John Kerry’s calamitous classic about the Iraq war, “I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it.” The Hippocratic oath for the Biden campaign should be, “First, do no self-harm.”
The next time Biden is asked about lockdowns, he might cite a line from John F. Kennedy: “Scientists alone can establish the objectives of their research, but society, in extending support to science, must take into account its own needs.” That’s a line to win over a wavering voter.
Bret L. Stephens has been an Opinion columnist with The Times since April 2017. He won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary at The Wall Street Journal in 2013 and was previously editor in chief of The Jerusalem Post. Facebook
A version of this article appears in print on Aug. 25, 2020, Section A, Page 23 of the New York edition with the headline: Biden’s Loose Lips Could Sink Him.
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Biden’s Loose Lips Could Sink His Chances
We elect presidents to lead, not defer.
By Bret Stephens
Opinion Columnist
August 24, 2020
If Joe Biden isn’t careful, Donald Trump might have a new nickname for him: “Shutdown Joe.” Or maybe, “Shut Down Joe.” Those monikers came to mind after the former vice president’s biggest blunder in the campaign thus far.
I’m referring to Biden’s comment, in his interview last week with ABC’s David Muir, that if scientists advised him to shut down the country again to contain a winter surge of Covid-19 and the flu, “I would shut it down; I would listen to the scientists.” It’s the sort of remark that surely plays well with voters who already support him. It might even have notional majority support.
But it doesn’t help with the voters Biden needs to avoid antagonizing in swing districts.
Few stories bring that reality into sharper focus than Simon Romero’s report in Monday’s Times on New Mexico’s neck-and-neck congressional race between first-term Democratic incumbent, Rep. Xochitl Torres Small, and Yvette Herrell, her Republican challenger. New Mexico has trended Democratic in recent years, and a June poll had Biden with a comfortable lead in the state.
But Romero reports red-hot anger in the district over the restrictive coronavirus policies of the Democratic governor, Michelle Lujan Grisham, that have helped keep case counts low at a painful economic price. There is “open defiance by sheriffs, business owners and many others of Ms. Lujan Grisham’s policies.” Turnout in the G.O.P. primary surged by more than 40 percent over 2016, as against a Democratic increase of 5 percent.
“The strategy of running hard to the right by avowing loyalty to Mr. Trump while blasting Democrats for problems associated with the pandemic,” Romero adds, “could be working for Ms. Herrell, who lost the 2018 race by fewer than 4,000 votes.”
What’s happening in Torres Small’s district, which in 2016 went for Trump by a 10-point margin, isn’t going to decide the presidential race, even in New Mexico. But it offers a taste of a powerful current of anxiety and resentment that Trump has positioned himself to exploit, and that — to judge by his shutdown remark — Biden doesn’t seem to grasp.
The anxiety is from people hanging on by their fingernails (if they’re still hanging on at all) to jobs, businesses, livelihoods and homes on account of a pandemic whose toll in lives and health can be weighed against the costs of fighting it. In the hierarchy of fears, what is Covid-19 to a healthy 35-year-old restaurateur next to the prospect of losing everything except a meager government check?
The resentment goes just as deep among those who feel talked down to by people whose own track record as experts leaves something to be desired. Remember when (on Feb. 29) the surgeon general tweeted, “Seriously people — STOP BUYING MASKS”? Remember when the most urgent national need was for more ventilators — until those fears proved largely unfounded? Remember the scientists who hypocritically failed to abide by the sort of strictures they demanded of the public?
None of this is a failure of science per se, or an excuse for reckless personal behavior. It is certainly no justification for Trump’s appalling management of the crisis, particularly his failure to promote and provide for adequate testing. But it is a failure by people who claim to speak, with unassailable authority, in the name of science. And loose talk of nationwide shutdowns plays into the fears of voters who feel they have been both impoverished and patronized.
The danger Biden now courts is twofold. He is promising to hand over his decision-making authority to unelected people who, whatever their education, expertise or virtues, haven’t gained the trust of fence-sitting voters.
And he is proposing to resort to a strategy that, as Wall Street Journal reporter Greg Ip reported on Monday, is now being viewed by some economists and even health experts as “an overly blunt and economically costly tool” that could have been avoided in favor of “alternative strategies that could slow the spread of the epidemic at much less cost.”
All of this creates a dangerous opening for Trump. Voters won’t necessarily turn to Biden if they feel he will merely rubber-stamp the same set of policies that they wanted to avoid in the first place. Democracies elect leaders to lead, not defer; to occasionally buck conventional wisdom, not parrot it.
Biden and his advisers may suppose they’re on a glide path to election against a manifestly flawed and failed incumbent. But they face an opponent who fights best when he’s cornered, and who will take the same ruthless political advantage of Biden’s line that George W. Bush’s campaign did of John Kerry’s calamitous classic about the Iraq war, “I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it.” The Hippocratic oath for the Biden campaign should be, “First, do no self-harm.”
The next time Biden is asked about lockdowns, he might cite a line from John F. Kennedy: “Scientists alone can establish the objectives of their research, but society, in extending support to science, must take into account its own needs.” That’s a line to win over a wavering voter.
Bret L. Stephens has been an Opinion columnist with The Times since April 2017. He won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary at The Wall Street Journal in 2013 and was previously editor in chief of The Jerusalem Post. Facebook
A version of this article appears in print on Aug. 25, 2020, Section A, Page 23 of the New York edition with the headline: Biden’s Loose Lips Could Sink Him.
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Saturday, July 18, 2020
Bret Stephens is the only opinion columnist at the New York Times who isn't a liberal fucktard. This article is about the out of control violence in Idiot America.
Opinion
American Crime and the Baltimore Model
Cities across the country are in danger of making the same mistakes.
By Bret Stephens
Opinion Columnist
July 17, 2020
In 2014, there were 211 homicides in the city of Baltimore. The following year, there were 342, an astonishing increase of 62 percent. The murder rate has barely budged since.
What happened? On April 12, 2015, Freddie Gray sustained a fatal injury in the back of a police van. Peaceful protests and then violence ensued. A demoralized, under-resourced and sometimes corrupt police force stopped doing its job properly. Nearly 30,000 residents have since fled the city, whose population is now the lowest it’s been in a century.
The story of Baltimore’s unraveling was best told by the journalist Alec MacGillis in a searing account last year in The Times Magazine. It should be read again today, against a backdrop of sudden surges in crime that are mainly devastating minority communities. In New York, shootings during the first three weeks in June more than doubled over the same period last year. In Minneapolis, the homicide rate is double what it was this time last year.
Murder rates are similarly rising in some of America’s largest cities. Why is it all happening now? Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez had an idea: Out-of-work parents, reeling from the recession, are shoplifting to feed their kids. The New York congresswoman later defended her remarks by insisting on the link between poverty and violent crime.
The theory, however, is doubtful — not to mention insulting to poor people. As the social scientist James Q. Wilson pointed out, crime rose dramatically in the 1960s, an era of steady employment and strong economic growth. But it dropped across the board during the Great Recession (including in rates of property theft) when the unemployment rate abruptly doubled. The causes of crime may be reasonably debated, but the Jean Valjean theory belongs to the pages of Victor Hugo.
More instructive is the Baltimore example. “The national progressive story of Baltimore during this era of criminal-justice reform has been the story of the police excesses that led to Gray’s death and the uprising, not the surge of violence that has overtaken the city ever since,” MacGillis writes. “As a result, Baltimore has been left mostly on its own to contend with what has been happening, which has amounted to nothing less than a failure of order and governance the likes of which few American cities have seen in years.”
The causes of this are several, racism among them. But MacGillis leaves no doubt that the quality of policing is at the center. Until 2011, Baltimore had become safer thanks to smart policing that targeted criminal hot spots while making fewer arrests, albeit with a rise in police-involved shootings.
That changed after a new commissioner arrived touting the virtues of police restraint and improved community relations. In the protests and violence that followed Gray’s death, the police were urged to hold back until they came under attack: 130 officers were injured and the National Guard was called in.
Toxic relations between the police and the city’s political leadership made matters worse. A federal consent decree showed little understanding of how effective policing works, further hamstringing law enforcement. Expanded definitions of “use of force” made cops especially reluctant to intervene in situations where there was a chance of a physical altercation. The police force shrank. A new mayor touted the benefits of after-school programs and social mediators to treat the root causes of crime. But, as MacGillis acidly notes, the mayor’s plan “risked overlooking the most immediate dilemma: People inclined toward lawbreaking increasingly thought they could do so with impunity.”
The result is a comprehensive urban tragedy that can’t be blamed on long lockdowns, hot summer weather, the coronavirus or the state of the economy.
It’s also a cautionary tale. With all the usual good intentions, cities across America risk emulating the same catastrophic mistakes made in Baltimore. New York has disbanded its plainclothes crime-fighting unit and may criminalize the use of holds that, while prone to abuse, many cops consider essential for dealing with violent suspects. Milwaukee is looking at a 10 percent cut in police funding. Minneapolis may disband its police force entirely, at least if its City Council gets its way.
Idealists may hope these changes will eliminate police brutality as communities find better ways to prevent crime than deterrence and force. But on the hunch that human nature hasn’t changed, that isn’t going to happen. Criminals, fearing less, will continue to prey on others. Police, fearing more, will hold back from doing their jobs. Those with means to leave their neighborhoods, will. Those without the means will suffer.
For those under the age of, say, 35, who fail to appreciate what it means to live in places where cops are more fearful than robbers, there’s no need to look at the historical crime data. Just put Baltimore on your itinerary to see where certain progressive fantasies lead.
Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.
Bret L. Stephens has been an Opinion columnist with The Times since April 2017. He won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary at The Wall Street Journal in 2013 and was previously editor in chief of The Jerusalem Post. Facebook
A version of this article appears in print on July 18, 2020, Section A, Page 21 of the New York edition with the headline: Crime and The Baltimore Model.
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American Crime and the Baltimore Model
Cities across the country are in danger of making the same mistakes.
By Bret Stephens
Opinion Columnist
July 17, 2020
In 2014, there were 211 homicides in the city of Baltimore. The following year, there were 342, an astonishing increase of 62 percent. The murder rate has barely budged since.
What happened? On April 12, 2015, Freddie Gray sustained a fatal injury in the back of a police van. Peaceful protests and then violence ensued. A demoralized, under-resourced and sometimes corrupt police force stopped doing its job properly. Nearly 30,000 residents have since fled the city, whose population is now the lowest it’s been in a century.
The story of Baltimore’s unraveling was best told by the journalist Alec MacGillis in a searing account last year in The Times Magazine. It should be read again today, against a backdrop of sudden surges in crime that are mainly devastating minority communities. In New York, shootings during the first three weeks in June more than doubled over the same period last year. In Minneapolis, the homicide rate is double what it was this time last year.
Murder rates are similarly rising in some of America’s largest cities. Why is it all happening now? Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez had an idea: Out-of-work parents, reeling from the recession, are shoplifting to feed their kids. The New York congresswoman later defended her remarks by insisting on the link between poverty and violent crime.
The theory, however, is doubtful — not to mention insulting to poor people. As the social scientist James Q. Wilson pointed out, crime rose dramatically in the 1960s, an era of steady employment and strong economic growth. But it dropped across the board during the Great Recession (including in rates of property theft) when the unemployment rate abruptly doubled. The causes of crime may be reasonably debated, but the Jean Valjean theory belongs to the pages of Victor Hugo.
More instructive is the Baltimore example. “The national progressive story of Baltimore during this era of criminal-justice reform has been the story of the police excesses that led to Gray’s death and the uprising, not the surge of violence that has overtaken the city ever since,” MacGillis writes. “As a result, Baltimore has been left mostly on its own to contend with what has been happening, which has amounted to nothing less than a failure of order and governance the likes of which few American cities have seen in years.”
The causes of this are several, racism among them. But MacGillis leaves no doubt that the quality of policing is at the center. Until 2011, Baltimore had become safer thanks to smart policing that targeted criminal hot spots while making fewer arrests, albeit with a rise in police-involved shootings.
That changed after a new commissioner arrived touting the virtues of police restraint and improved community relations. In the protests and violence that followed Gray’s death, the police were urged to hold back until they came under attack: 130 officers were injured and the National Guard was called in.
Toxic relations between the police and the city’s political leadership made matters worse. A federal consent decree showed little understanding of how effective policing works, further hamstringing law enforcement. Expanded definitions of “use of force” made cops especially reluctant to intervene in situations where there was a chance of a physical altercation. The police force shrank. A new mayor touted the benefits of after-school programs and social mediators to treat the root causes of crime. But, as MacGillis acidly notes, the mayor’s plan “risked overlooking the most immediate dilemma: People inclined toward lawbreaking increasingly thought they could do so with impunity.”
The result is a comprehensive urban tragedy that can’t be blamed on long lockdowns, hot summer weather, the coronavirus or the state of the economy.
It’s also a cautionary tale. With all the usual good intentions, cities across America risk emulating the same catastrophic mistakes made in Baltimore. New York has disbanded its plainclothes crime-fighting unit and may criminalize the use of holds that, while prone to abuse, many cops consider essential for dealing with violent suspects. Milwaukee is looking at a 10 percent cut in police funding. Minneapolis may disband its police force entirely, at least if its City Council gets its way.
Idealists may hope these changes will eliminate police brutality as communities find better ways to prevent crime than deterrence and force. But on the hunch that human nature hasn’t changed, that isn’t going to happen. Criminals, fearing less, will continue to prey on others. Police, fearing more, will hold back from doing their jobs. Those with means to leave their neighborhoods, will. Those without the means will suffer.
For those under the age of, say, 35, who fail to appreciate what it means to live in places where cops are more fearful than robbers, there’s no need to look at the historical crime data. Just put Baltimore on your itinerary to see where certain progressive fantasies lead.
Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.
Bret L. Stephens has been an Opinion columnist with The Times since April 2017. He won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary at The Wall Street Journal in 2013 and was previously editor in chief of The Jerusalem Post. Facebook
A version of this article appears in print on July 18, 2020, Section A, Page 21 of the New York edition with the headline: Crime and The Baltimore Model.
Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
Tuesday, June 23, 2020
My favorite New York Times opinion columnists are Gail Collins and Bret Stephens. They frequently have conversations with each other. Here is the most recent conversation. It's about two morons, Trump and Biden. One of these idiots will win the November 3, 2020 election.
Opinion
THE CONVERSATION
Joe Biden Is Wondering Why John Bolton Suddenly Likes Him
Definitely won’t be the vice-presidential pick, though.
By Gail Collins and Bret Stephens
Ms. Collins and Mr. Stephens are opinion columnists. They converse every week.
June 23, 2020
Bret Stephens: Gail, the good news is that the last few days have been filled with bad news for Donald Trump. His Tulsa rally was a total fizzle. A judge ruled that the publication of John Bolton’s tell-all memoir can proceed this week. Joe Biden is ahead of him by 12 percentage points — and that’s in the Fox News poll.
Is it safe to assume that our long national nightmare may soon be at an end?
Gail Collins: Have to admit that last weekend when Trump told his rally he wanted less testing for coronavirus so the statistics wouldn’t look so bad — I thought, wow, it’s only June and it’s so disastrous. Things can’t possibly stay this bad until November. This must be a plot to put us off our guard.
Think I’m getting paranoid?
Bret: I wish Hillary Clinton’s campaign managers had been a little more paranoid.
It really is a low point for Trump. The country is indignant, anxious, angry, untethered and unled. The president has met his moment of crisis and failed. His handling of the coronavirus was incompetent. His handling of the aftermath of George Floyd’s killing was atrocious. (Or is it the other way around?)
Gail: I think you’ve got it right — coronavirus incompetence, handling racial issues atrocious. Unless you want a worse word.
Bret: What’s the antonym of supercalifragilisticexpialidocious?
Yet for all of this, it reminds me of where the Trump campaign was this time four years ago — way behind in the polls and all-but written off by the pundits — and I fear he’s going to stage a comeback. Biden has basically been in hiding but will almost certainly have his own major stumbles. The economy could stage a V-shaped recovery and be in much better condition by November. The radicalism coming from the far left, especially the Abolish-the-Police faction, is going to turn off a lot of middle-of-the-road voters.
In short, this is going to be one of those horror movies when the villain you think is dead, isn’t. Tell me how Democrats prevent a redo of 2016?
Gail: Well I don’t think you’re going to have to worry about Biden failing to campaign in Wisconsin. And all Trump’s “Sleepy Joe” jibes may boomerang. What this country really wants now may be a president who stays out of their face and takes lots of naps.
Bret: Warren Harding campaigned from his front porch. Maybe Joe Biden can campaign from his hammock.
Gail: That said, it’s hard to get overconfident when you have a Democratic nominee with this bad a history in trying to get elected president.
Anything you’d advise Biden to do?
Bret: His campaign needs to work hard to avoid unscripted moments. Give him a teleprompter whenever possible. Center the campaign around a handful of well-prepared events where he can deliver well-written speeches centered on the themes of a return to human decency and democratic dignity.
Gail: Hey, we’ve been talking for … minutes without mentioning the veepstakes.
Bret: As for a running mate, I know much of the betting money is on Kamala Harris, because she ticks the boxes as a woman, a person of color, a senior legislator. But someone needs to recall that she ran a dismal campaign, didn’t seem to know what policies she stood for, attacked Biden as an apologist for segregation, and fell as quickly as she rose. I think she’s a potentially disastrous pick.
Gail: I share some of the same worries. I found her personally pleasant whenever I met her but her campaign was really disappointing, both organizationally and message-wise.
I guess the question is whether after Trump, America just wants some people who won’t make you cringe whenever they show up on TV.
Bret: For my money, the best choice is Michelle Obama. If I were Biden, I’d crawl a mile on my knees to beg her to say yes in the name of rescuing the country from its downward spiral.
Gail: I think you’d have to crawl more than a mile. I remember interviewing her back at the very beginning of the Obama presidential run. I have never seen anybody in politics so uncomfortable with the whole scene.
Obviously she’s used to being a public person now. But still very hard for me to imagine her giving up her life of family, writing and promoting her own causes to go back on the trail campaigning for another guy.
Bret: Isn’t that precisely what recommends her? It’s proverbial that those most fit to rule are those who least wish to do so.
Gail: We’ve seen a lot of other very impressive women suddenly pop up in the Mentioning Machine. The governor of Michigan, the mayor of Atlanta, the governor of New Mexico. Val Demings, the congresswoman who used to be a police chief. Of course none of them have a whole lot of national experience.
Any of them on your mind at this moment? Have to sadly admit that I think it’s time for us to bid a fond (at least for me) farewell to Elizabeth Warren as a potential veep.
Bret: Last I heard, Warren hadn’t ruled herself out, though you know I wouldn’t be sorry if she did. Of the others you mentioned, Demings strikes me as the best choice. Her law-enforcement background and record of publicly defending police will blunt the inevitable G.O.P. attack that Democrats are soft on crime. She did well as an impeachment manager and has national stature. Her story of rising from deep poverty in the segregated south is inspiring. And she can help deliver Florida — a state that, unlike Warren’s Massachusetts or Harris’s California, is still up for grabs, and without whose electoral votes Trump probably can’t win.
Gail: Yeah, those of us who live in super-Democratic states are used to being ignored and taken for granted. If I’d wanted anyone to actually campaign for my vote, I should never have left Ohio.
Bret: But I know we’ll get to pick over the veepstakes in coming weeks. I’m curious to know if you watched the Bolton interview the other night? Anything in particular surprise you?
Gail: Well, we’re certainly living through a new minute of history when the former national security adviser to a sitting president describes him in terms you’d use for a delinquent toddler. But no, I just wanted to yell: “A little late to be taking a principled stand here, John.”
How about you?
Bret: The cliché about a day late and a dollar short never seemed more apropos. Had he testified late last year, he might have swung at least a couple more Republicans, besides Mitt Romney, to vote to convict. And the whole notion of a former adviser writing a tell-all while the president is still in office just seems utterly distasteful.
Then again, it says something when arguably the most conservative member of the Trump White House goes on national TV to denounce the president and sounds a lot like … Nancy Pelosi. The world seems to be made these days for strange bedfellows, Gail.
Gail Collins is an Op-Ed columnist and a former member of the editorial board, and was the first woman to serve as the Times editorial page editor, from 2001 to 2007. @GailCollins • Facebook
Bret L. Stephens has been an Opinion columnist with The Times since April 2017. He won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary at The Wall Street Journal in 2013 and was previously editor in chief of The Jerusalem Post. Facebook
THE CONVERSATION
Joe Biden Is Wondering Why John Bolton Suddenly Likes Him
Definitely won’t be the vice-presidential pick, though.
By Gail Collins and Bret Stephens
Ms. Collins and Mr. Stephens are opinion columnists. They converse every week.
June 23, 2020
Bret Stephens: Gail, the good news is that the last few days have been filled with bad news for Donald Trump. His Tulsa rally was a total fizzle. A judge ruled that the publication of John Bolton’s tell-all memoir can proceed this week. Joe Biden is ahead of him by 12 percentage points — and that’s in the Fox News poll.
Is it safe to assume that our long national nightmare may soon be at an end?
Gail Collins: Have to admit that last weekend when Trump told his rally he wanted less testing for coronavirus so the statistics wouldn’t look so bad — I thought, wow, it’s only June and it’s so disastrous. Things can’t possibly stay this bad until November. This must be a plot to put us off our guard.
Think I’m getting paranoid?
Bret: I wish Hillary Clinton’s campaign managers had been a little more paranoid.
It really is a low point for Trump. The country is indignant, anxious, angry, untethered and unled. The president has met his moment of crisis and failed. His handling of the coronavirus was incompetent. His handling of the aftermath of George Floyd’s killing was atrocious. (Or is it the other way around?)
Gail: I think you’ve got it right — coronavirus incompetence, handling racial issues atrocious. Unless you want a worse word.
Bret: What’s the antonym of supercalifragilisticexpialidocious?
Yet for all of this, it reminds me of where the Trump campaign was this time four years ago — way behind in the polls and all-but written off by the pundits — and I fear he’s going to stage a comeback. Biden has basically been in hiding but will almost certainly have his own major stumbles. The economy could stage a V-shaped recovery and be in much better condition by November. The radicalism coming from the far left, especially the Abolish-the-Police faction, is going to turn off a lot of middle-of-the-road voters.
In short, this is going to be one of those horror movies when the villain you think is dead, isn’t. Tell me how Democrats prevent a redo of 2016?
Gail: Well I don’t think you’re going to have to worry about Biden failing to campaign in Wisconsin. And all Trump’s “Sleepy Joe” jibes may boomerang. What this country really wants now may be a president who stays out of their face and takes lots of naps.
Bret: Warren Harding campaigned from his front porch. Maybe Joe Biden can campaign from his hammock.
Gail: That said, it’s hard to get overconfident when you have a Democratic nominee with this bad a history in trying to get elected president.
Anything you’d advise Biden to do?
Bret: His campaign needs to work hard to avoid unscripted moments. Give him a teleprompter whenever possible. Center the campaign around a handful of well-prepared events where he can deliver well-written speeches centered on the themes of a return to human decency and democratic dignity.
Gail: Hey, we’ve been talking for … minutes without mentioning the veepstakes.
Bret: As for a running mate, I know much of the betting money is on Kamala Harris, because she ticks the boxes as a woman, a person of color, a senior legislator. But someone needs to recall that she ran a dismal campaign, didn’t seem to know what policies she stood for, attacked Biden as an apologist for segregation, and fell as quickly as she rose. I think she’s a potentially disastrous pick.
Gail: I share some of the same worries. I found her personally pleasant whenever I met her but her campaign was really disappointing, both organizationally and message-wise.
I guess the question is whether after Trump, America just wants some people who won’t make you cringe whenever they show up on TV.
Bret: For my money, the best choice is Michelle Obama. If I were Biden, I’d crawl a mile on my knees to beg her to say yes in the name of rescuing the country from its downward spiral.
Gail: I think you’d have to crawl more than a mile. I remember interviewing her back at the very beginning of the Obama presidential run. I have never seen anybody in politics so uncomfortable with the whole scene.
Obviously she’s used to being a public person now. But still very hard for me to imagine her giving up her life of family, writing and promoting her own causes to go back on the trail campaigning for another guy.
Bret: Isn’t that precisely what recommends her? It’s proverbial that those most fit to rule are those who least wish to do so.
Gail: We’ve seen a lot of other very impressive women suddenly pop up in the Mentioning Machine. The governor of Michigan, the mayor of Atlanta, the governor of New Mexico. Val Demings, the congresswoman who used to be a police chief. Of course none of them have a whole lot of national experience.
Any of them on your mind at this moment? Have to sadly admit that I think it’s time for us to bid a fond (at least for me) farewell to Elizabeth Warren as a potential veep.
Bret: Last I heard, Warren hadn’t ruled herself out, though you know I wouldn’t be sorry if she did. Of the others you mentioned, Demings strikes me as the best choice. Her law-enforcement background and record of publicly defending police will blunt the inevitable G.O.P. attack that Democrats are soft on crime. She did well as an impeachment manager and has national stature. Her story of rising from deep poverty in the segregated south is inspiring. And she can help deliver Florida — a state that, unlike Warren’s Massachusetts or Harris’s California, is still up for grabs, and without whose electoral votes Trump probably can’t win.
Gail: Yeah, those of us who live in super-Democratic states are used to being ignored and taken for granted. If I’d wanted anyone to actually campaign for my vote, I should never have left Ohio.
Bret: But I know we’ll get to pick over the veepstakes in coming weeks. I’m curious to know if you watched the Bolton interview the other night? Anything in particular surprise you?
Gail: Well, we’re certainly living through a new minute of history when the former national security adviser to a sitting president describes him in terms you’d use for a delinquent toddler. But no, I just wanted to yell: “A little late to be taking a principled stand here, John.”
How about you?
Bret: The cliché about a day late and a dollar short never seemed more apropos. Had he testified late last year, he might have swung at least a couple more Republicans, besides Mitt Romney, to vote to convict. And the whole notion of a former adviser writing a tell-all while the president is still in office just seems utterly distasteful.
Then again, it says something when arguably the most conservative member of the Trump White House goes on national TV to denounce the president and sounds a lot like … Nancy Pelosi. The world seems to be made these days for strange bedfellows, Gail.
Gail Collins is an Op-Ed columnist and a former member of the editorial board, and was the first woman to serve as the Times editorial page editor, from 2001 to 2007. @GailCollins • Facebook
Bret L. Stephens has been an Opinion columnist with The Times since April 2017. He won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary at The Wall Street Journal in 2013 and was previously editor in chief of The Jerusalem Post. Facebook
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