May 4, 2020 $5.

99
base_QXP-1127940387.qxp 4/14/2020 4:40 PM Page 2
Contents M AY 4 , 2 0 2 0 | VOLUME LXXII, NO. 8

The Leviathan Virus by Kevin D. Williamson

ARTICLES
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Going the Distance by Theodore Kupfer & Ramesh Ponnuru
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 Text

MAY 4 ISSUE; PRINTED APRIL 16

Letters
EDITOR IN CHIEF
Richard Lowry Hardly Literal
I enjoyed Bryan Garner’s article “Sex and the Singular Pronoun” (February 10). It
reminded me of the word hardly. I’ve always had trouble accepting that the word
Senior Editors
Richard Brookhiser / Jay Nordlinger

is used to mean “a very small amount,” or “to a very small degree,” or “not at all.”
Ramesh Ponnuru / David Pryce-Jones
Managing Editor Jason Lee Steorts

I’ve wondered if it has been used that way for so long that it is accepted. It seems
Literary Editor Katherine Howell

that it actually would mean the opposite—“a large amount or degree,” as if to mean
Vice President, Editorial Operations Christopher McEvoy
Roving Correspondent Kevin D. Williamson

“in a hard way.” I would guess that the proper thing to say would actually be “not
Washington Correspondent John McCormack

hardly” instead. An example would be “The weather will not hardly affect my
National Correspondent John J. Miller
Senior Political Correspondent Jim Geraghty

decision to drive,” meaning that the decision will not be affected in a hard way, or
Art Director Luba Kolomytseva
Deputy Managing Editors

“The weather will hardly affect my decision,” meaning that the weather will affect
Nicholas Frankovich / Fred Schwarz

the decision in a hard way. I think most would say it is a double negative in that
Production Editor Katie Hosmer
Research Assistant Justin D. Shapiro

example, but I’m not sure if it is historically accurate.

I would be interested in Mr. Garner’s opinion on the use of this word. Thanks.
Contributing Editors
Shannen Coffin / Matthew Continetti / Ross Douthat

James D. Edwards
Daniel Foster / Roman Genn / Jonah Goldberg
Arthur L. Herman / Mark R. Levin / Yuval Levin

Ledbetter, Texas
Rob Long / Jim Manzi / Andrew C. McCarthy
Reihan Salam /Andrew Stuttaford

BRYAN GARNER RESPONDS: The use of hardly in the sense “not quite” or “scarcely”
N AT I O N A L R E V I E W O N L I N E

has an interesting history. The word acquired this nonliteral meaning in the 1500s
Editor Charles C. W. Cooke
Managing Editors

and hasn’t shed it.

Theodore Kupfer / Mark A. Wright (on leave)
Senior Writers

Originally, in the 1200s, the word meant “with great force or exertion; vigorously”
Michael Brendan Dougherty / David Harsanyi / Dan McLaughlin

(as in to strike hardly). Today, in this sense, we use hard adverbially. During that
Staff Writer Alexandra DeSanctis
Critic-at-Large Kyle Smith

same century, the word began to be used in metaphorical senses, as an equivalent

Policy Writer Robert VerBruggen

of boldly or daringly (as in speak hardly thy mind ). By the early 1500s, the word
National-Affairs Columnist John Fund
Reporter Katherine Timpf

had taken on the meaning “with great hardship; uneasily” (as in money hardly
Associate Editors
Jack Butler / Molly Powell / Nick Tell

acquired ). From there it became almost synonymous with barely, and then, by the
Sarah Schutte / Jessica Hornik Evans

mid 1500s, it was extended to mean “not quite.” Today, the meaning is even more
Content Managers
Kelvin Morales / Kathy Shlychkov / Katie Yoder

extreme, verging on “not at all” (as in his artwork is hardly skillful ).

Web Producer Scott McKim

This progression in senses would have been hardly predictable. It just goes to
News Editor Jack Crowe
News Writers

show that the life of the language has not been logic; it has been experience.
Zachary Evans / Tobias Hoonhout / Mairead McArdle

As the Oxford English Dictionary notes, the expression not hardly is considered
E D I T O R S - AT- L A RG E
Kathryn Jean Lopez / John O’Sullivan

B U C K L E Y F E L L OW S I N P O L I T I C A L J O U R N A L I S M a vulgarism.
Madeleine Kearns / John Hirschauer

T H O M A S L . R H O D E S F E L L OW
Daniel Tenreiro
Meaningful Messages
I thoroughly enjoyed Graham Hillard’s article about messages, comments, and
Contributors

notes found in old books. One of the joys of acquiring a used book is finding these
Hadley Arkes / James Bowman / Eliot A. Cohen
Dinesh D’Souza / Chester E. Finn Jr. / Neal B. Freeman

messages. It is a connection with history and with the previous owner of the book.
James Gardner / David Gelernter / George Gilder

It is even more poignant depending on the age of the book—and the message.
Charles R. Kesler / David Klinghoffer
Alan Reynolds / Tracy Lee Simmons

It can also be somewhat sad. I’m currently reading a used, 1960s edition of
Terry Teachout / Vin Weber

William Shirer’s opus The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. There is a message
Vice President Jack Fowler

inside: “To Daddy, Father’s Day, June 18, 1961. Love, Judy.” With an additional
Chief Financial Officer Tom Kilkenny
Accounting Manager Galina Veygman

message below, “Happy, happy father’s day to my own personal, wonderful dic-
Accountant Vicky Angilella

tator! Love, Judy.”

Director of Circulation & Programs Danielle O’Connell
Audience Development Manager Philip H. DeVoe

No idea who Judy and her father were, but this is a very personal (and funny)
Manager, Office & Development Russell Jenkins

message. I assume this book was donated the same way many are, by many of us
Executive Assistant to the Publisher John Bush

getting rid of clutter, but it carried a very special message between a daughter and
Director, Sales Jim Fowler

a father almost 60 years ago.

PUBLISHER CHAIRMAN
E. Garrett Bewkes IV Dale R. Brott

Derek Douglas
Alexandria, Va.
FOUNDER
William F. Buckley Jr.

N AT I O N A L R E V I E W I N C . B OA R D
Dale R. Brott
John Hillen

Letters may be submitted by email to letters@nationalreview.com.

James X. Kilbridge
Rob Thomas

2 | w w w. n a t i o n a l r e v i e w. c o m M AY 4, 2020
base_QXP-1127940387.qxp 4/14/2020 4:42 PM Page 2

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 The Week Text

n What we have here is a classic WHO dunnit.

n Bernie Sanders suspended his presidential campaign and

endorsed Joe Biden. Friends and foes said that he had achieved
considerable success in moving the party in his “democratic
socialist” direction. In truth his political success was more a
product than a cause of the party’s leftward shift. His signature
proposal, a single-payer health-care system, has less support
among Democrats than it did before his latest campaign, pre-
cisely because the public came to understand it better. His
departure from the race is a concession to reality when it comes
to convention delegates—although not, of course, to history,
economics, or human nature.

n Sanders argues that the coronavirus epidemic shows why the

United States needs the precise flavor of snake oil he peddles.
Others agree. The evidence is not obvious. Set aside the actual
socialist countries (Venezuela, Cuba, etc.) and consider only
Europe. The United States has suffered, as of this writing, 72
coronavirus deaths per million of population. The United King-
dom, with its centralized government health-care monopoly, has
more than twice as many deaths per capita. Some European coun-
tries have radically higher death rates (386 per million in Spain,
172 per million in the Netherlands) and some have much lower
rates (38 per million in Germany, 26 per million in Norway), and
there is no clear correlation between the rates and the organiza-
tion of the health-care systems. As for the rest of the economy, the
dynamism of American capitalism looks pretty good, especially in
comparison with the uneven performance of American govern-
ment. In spite of dire predictions, there are no widespread deaths
from want of ventilators or pharmaceuticals, and big and small
firms alike have found productive ways to respond to the crisis.
The freshest political thinking from the 1930s is not exactly what
the world needs right now.
n Biden has still not been asked to respond personally to the
sexual-assault allegations made by Tara Reade, a former member
of his staff. The New York Times finally bestirred itself to report
on Reade’s charges, burying them on page A20 of its Easter
Sunday edition. The Washington Post reported on the story only
in response to the Times. Biden’s treatment and the Brett Kava -
naugh circus could not be more disparate. Reade was faulted for
having no corroboration from other Biden staffers, but unlike
Kavanaugh’s accuser, Christine Blasey Ford, she told friends at
the time. Ford, unlike Reade, never offered any corroborating
proof that she had ever even met the man she accused. The Times
and Post investigated the motives of Reade’s supporters, a stan-
dard they did not apply to Michael Avenatti back in 2018. The
Times avoided reporting that Ford’s own lawyer had admitted
that “part of what motivated Christine” was wanting to put “an
asterisk next to his name.” A lot of people who said they support
ROMAN GENN
See page 13.
n “I think what happened to him was one of the greatest travesties
in American history.” Attorney General Bill Barr rattled cages
with this assessment of the Obama Justice Department and FBI
investigation of candidate, then president, Donald Trump, on the
theory that he conspired with Russia to steal the 2016 election—
a theory that increasingly appears to have been bereft of a credi-
ble evidentiary predicate. Barr was responding to an inquiry
about the status of U.S. Attorney John Durham’s probe of that
investigation, which is likely to generate a damning report, and
very possibly criminal charges. Simultaneously, Barr unsealed
previously redacted footnotes from DOJ inspector general
Michael Horowitz’s blistering report on FBI surveillance abuses
in the Russia investigation. They indicate that the bureau should
have seen neon-flashing warnings that the Clinton-campaign-
sponsored Steele dossier it used to obtain court warrants might
have been tainted with disinformation planted by Russian
intelligence. News reports, meanwhile, have provided more
detail on how a top suspect, Trump campaign adviser George
Papadopoulos, vigorously denied the existence of any Russian
conspiracy to a bureau informant—credible, blatantly exculpatory
assertions that the FBI chose to conceal from the FISA court.
The investigation of the investigators is nearing a decision point.
n The debacle of Wisconsin’s April primary, carried out during
the coronavirus pandemic, involved a last-minute call for vot-

#MeToo are now adding a silent #ButNotHer. ing by mail from the Democratic governor, a hard pushback
6 | w w w. n a t i o n a l r e v i e w. c o m M AY 4, 2020
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THE WEEK
from the Republican legislature, an appeal to the Supreme
Court, and voters waiting in long, undistanced lines at the
polls, sometimes in the rain. The mess heightened calls for vot-
ing by mail, which tracks longstanding Democratic goals of
simultaneously nationalizing and loosening election standards,
on the theory that larger, unmonitored turnouts will benefit
them. We favor one-day, in-person voting with a strict ID
requirement as a rule, as the best guarantee against monkey busi-
ness. Some disasters—pandemics, hurricanes, earthquakes, vio-
lent disorder—may necessitate voting by mail. Reasonable
access to the franchise is a right of citizenship, and right reason
takes account of extreme circumstances.
n Donald Trump has been saying since mid March that the
antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine “could be a game
changer” in fighting COVID-19. In typical Trump fashion, he
has overhyped and oversold what we know about an experi-
mental treatment. The desperate need to prove Trump wrong
has led his critics to wild extremes, from blaming him when a
Democratic donor’s husband died from drinking fish-tank
cleaner under piscine circumstances, to writing off modern
medicine as “a magic potion,” to calling for Trump to be tried
in The Hague for crimes against humanity (no, really). But
hope is not a bad thing, if taken in modest doses. As was true
during the AIDS crisis, what government needs to do is let
doctors and patients skip the red tape and accept the risks in
order to see what works. The White House task force and
Democratic governors such as Andrew Cuomo and Gretchen
Whitmer are acting with appropriately cautious optimism in
doing just that. It will work, or not, regardless of how one feels
about Donald Trump.
n “In the summer of 2005, Presi-
dent George W. Bush was on
vacation at his ranch in Crawford,
Texas, when he began flipping
through an advance reading
copy of a new book about the
1918 flu pandemic. He couldn’t
put it down.” Thus began a recent
report from ABC News. Bush was
semi-obsessed with the issue of
pandemics, and instructed mem-
bers of the government to come
up with a plan. “Look, this hap-
pens every 100 years,” he said.
“We need a national strategy.”
Members of the government worked on this intensely, accord-
ing to ABC, for the next three years. Bush said in a speech, “If
we wait for a pandemic to appear, it will be too late to prepare.
And one day many lives could be needlessly lost because we
failed to act today.” In a recent press conference, President
Trump was asked whether he had “any interest in reaching out”
to former presidents. He said, “I don’t think I’m going to learn
much.” He might be surprised.
JIM WATSON/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES
n On December 30, Dr. Li Wenliang warned colleagues about
the outbreak of a pneumonia-like illness in Wuhan, China.
Authorities promptly summoned Dr. Li on charges that he’d
spread disinformation. By then, physicians on the ground had
8 | w w w. n a t i o n a l r e v i e w. c o m
seen the disease spread between individuals, and from patients to
doctors. But two weeks later, the World Health Organization
announced that there was “no clear evidence of human-to-human
transmission of the novel coronavirus,” echoing the messaging of
Chinese authorities eager to suppress bad PR. Parroting Chinese
statements wasn’t enough for WHO head Tedros Adhanom
Ghebreyesus: He went on to praise China for “setting a new stan-
dard for outbreak control.” Later, Tedros overruled the objections
of WHO colleagues in delaying the declaration of a public-health
emergency, despite abundant evidence that the virus would likely
spread beyond China’s borders. Meanwhile, the WHO opposed
travel restrictions to prevent that possibility. Its performance cost
the world precious time in preparing for the pandemic, and casts
doubt on the competence and integrity of the WHO. President
Trump has suspended funding for the organization. It may be the
only way to force accountability on an institution corrupted by
the likes of Tedros and Chinese president Xi Jinping.
n From the start of the coronavirus outbreak, China-watchers
have raised doubts about medical data coming from the Chinese
Communist Party. By downplaying the severity of their domes-
tic outbreak, Chinese authorities hope to bolster their perceived
legitimacy. Recently, we’ve gotten a sense of the magnitude of
those lies. The American Enterprise Institute’s Derek Scissors
pegs the actual number of cases in China at 2.9 million—more
than 30 times the official figure.L American intelligence offi-
cials concluded in a classified report to the White House that
the Chinese had fabricated their numbers. It doesn’t take clas-
sified intelligence to note the infinitesimally low probability
that China’s 1.4 billion people have fewer infections than
Italy’s 60 million.
n On Saturday, April 11, President Trump tweeted that
“watching @FoxNews on weekend afternoons is a total waste
of time.” So will the leader of the free world stop wasting his
by watching it? “We now have some great alternatives, like
@OANN,” Trump continued. He is referring to One America
News Network, a relatively new, explicitly pro-Trump cable-
news outfit. OANN’s business model is slavish loyalty to a
man. It has followed this muse into some of the most fetid
fever swamps of American politics, attempting to discredit
those who accused failed Alabama Senate candidate Roy
Moore of sexual misconduct, promoting conspiracy theories
about the death of Democratic National Committee employee
Seth Rich, speculating that COVID-19 was created in a North
Carolina lab by the “Deep State” to “destroy the Trump econ-
omy,” and more. OANN’s chief utility to Trump lies in prod-
ding the far more influential Fox into giving more-favorable
coverage to the president. Though cable-news viewers can take
their business anywhere, they should not bother with OANN if
they want to be informed.
n President Trump is leading the effort to protect Americans
from low gasoline prices. Trump, a critic of OPEC, has infor-
mally joined the cartel, promising oil-production cuts he has no
authority to order. With the coronavirus epidemic shutting
down much of the world economy, demand for oil has plunged,
and with it oil prices. That is going to be hard on oil producers
around the world, including those at home. The United States
has grown into an oil-and-gas powerhouse, which means that
M AY 4, 2020
week - FINAL_QXP-1127940387.qxp 4/15/2020 3:25 PM Page 9
there are more corporate profits and more American jobs tied to
energy than there once were. On balance, that is an excellent
thing, but there are inevitable and obvious trade-offs. The gov-
ernment wisely sought to take advantage of low prices to stock
up on oil. But that is not enough to prop up the market, and so
Washington is reverting to Soviet-style central planning, which,
to no one’s surprise, is not working: Oil prices continued to
decline after the deal was announced, and industry insiders have
little confidence that the scheme will achieve its ends. Maybe a
bigger cartel is not the solution.
n When considering “Phase Four” of its coronavirus-relief
efforts, the federal government has two broad options. One, it can
improve what it has already created by boosting funding for its
forgivable small-business payroll loans, which are administered
by banks. Or, two, it can opt for the approach of Senator Josh
Hawley (R., Mo.), who would have the government take on the
responsibility of paying affected workers in a much more direct
fashion—and provide bonuses to businesses that rehire laid-off
workers. We see the attraction to Hawley’s proposal, as it is
crucial to fully support businesses and workers whom the gov-
ernment has deliberately idled. But the plan needs careful vetting
to ensure that it wouldn’t hit major administrative snags or prove
susceptible to fraud; if there are serious obstacles, it may be better
to smooth out the glitches in what we’ve already implemented.
Either way, the senator has done much to move the conversation
forward as Congress decides where to go next.
n Trump fired or demoted a couple of inspectors general. He
cashiered the intelligence-community IG, Michael Atkinson,
who revealed to Congress the whistleblower complaint that led
to Trump’s impeachment. There is a legitimate argument over
whether Atkinson followed the letter of the law, but Trump
clearly fired him as an act of vengeance. The president also
moved to keep Glenn Fine, a Democratic holdover, from lead-
ing the oversight of the government’s massive coronavirus
relief spending. Although Trump was fully within his rights to
oust Fine, he obviously is not keen on independent oversight as
a general matter. It’s up to Congress to make sure that the IGs
continue to fulfill their role, which is a valuable one.
n Apple and Google announced that they are working together
on a smartphone app that will enable people who are diagnosed
with COVID-19 to provide an anonymous alert to everyone
they have been near (more precisely, to everyone whose phone
their phones have been near). Such “contact-tracing” raises pri-
vacy concerns: Would this app be used for less virulent illnesses?
Could it be used to enforce isolation orders? Then again, some
of the alternatives—mass lockdowns, rampant disease, fre-
quent mandatory testing—might be worse. This is another case
where there isn’t a simple trade-off between public health and
other goods. The tech companies, and legislators, ought to keep
in mind that people are going to need privacy protections before
they will voluntarily use this app.
n Lawmakers and hospitals have unsurprisingly sought out
predictions of how bad the coronavirus epidemic could be-
come, resulting in a lot of attention being paid to assorted sta-
tistical models. One model in particular, from the University of
Washington, captured the attention of the White House and
offered separate predictions for each state. In early April, how-
ever, the model’s death and hospitalization forecasts were sig-
nificantly revised downward twice in a matter of days, leading
to no small amount of confusion and outrage. Some tried to play
off the improvements as the result of states’ lockdown policies,
but the model had always taken those policies into account. The
simple facts of the matter are these: No one has a crystal ball,
statistical models can at best give us informed guesses that
improve as new data come in, and the UW model has some very
real weaknesses. There’s no conspiracy to overstate the risk of
the pandemic, which at this writing has already killed nearly
30,000 Americans, but decision-makers need to consult numer-
ous sources of information rather than expect a single website
to predict the future accurately.
n Salus populi suprema lex, said the Romans. But Congress
shall make no law prohibiting the free exercise of religion, says
the Constitution. How do we worship in a time of corona? On
Fire Christian Church in Louisville, Ky., came up with a clever
solution for Easter: a drive-in service with congregants staying
in their cars. The mayor forbade it, even though drive-through
restaurants and liquor stores still operate in his city. District
judge Justin Walker sided with On Fire, likening the mayor’s
edict to “the pages of a dystopian novel, or perhaps the pages of
the Onion.” But other churches have met en masse, while in
Brooklyn and upstate New York scattered congregations of
Orthodox Jews have assembled for funerals. The Bible, which,
for the devout, is a higher law than the Romans or the
Constitution, says, Thou shalt not kill. Which in a time of pan-
demic means, Stay safe—for your own sake, and for that of your
family and your neighbors.
n A lot of Harvard Law School professors are dismissive of
originalism as a legal philosophy and would rather judges felt
entitled to conform the law to a higher understanding of
morality and secure their preferred policies. Many of them are
able to say so in glossy magazines. It is a little more notewor-
thy, however, when the higher morality specified is Catholic
social teaching and the favored policies are restrictions on
pornography. Professor Adrian Vermeule wrote an essay for
The Atlantic advocating a “common-good constitutionalism”
and achieved the intended result of provoking people. His
argument is facile, ignoring the abundant evidence that the
original understanding of the Constitution gave legislators
great scope to advance the common good while also creating
safeguards to protect the common good from legislators. His
essay will accomplish something useful, though, if it prompts
his colleagues to reflect on the full range of alternatives to
obeying the Constitution.
n Not so long ago, we could have printed an item in every issue
about campus “speech codes”—restrictions on so-called hate
speech that often amount to punishing any dissent from official-
ly established opinions (which were almost always established
by the Left). Lately, though, the tide has receded a bit, with col-
leges abandoning their restrictive codes, thanks in large part to
the efforts of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education
and other free-speech groups. The latest university to return to
freedom is a big one: Florida State. As revealed by The College
Fix, FSU’s rules had banned “derogatory or offensive language”
9
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THE WEEK
toward a person based on gender, “offensive, demeaning, or
degrading” behavior, any “pre-formed negative opinion or atti-
tude toward facets of another person(s)’ identity,” conduct that
is “severe, pervasive, or persistent,” and “irrelevant, inappro-
priate or unsolicited emails.” To be sure, genuine harassment
and threats to safety can and should be prohibited and punished,
but all those adjectives in FSU’s speech code contained much
more wiggle room than necessary, to the point where anyone
who considered saying something unpopular might legitimately
fear punishment, even expulsion, based on an ex post facto
judgment call. Even in Tallahassee, a chilling effect is not
always welcome.
n Captain Brett Crozier was relieved of his command of the air-
craft carrier U.S.S. Theodore Roosevelt, after a desperate email of
his describing a coronavirus outbreak aboard ship was leaked to
the San Francisco Chronicle. Acting secretary of the Navy
Thomas Modly blasted Crozier for his behavior, then was forced
to resign because lawmakers and aggrieved sailors in turn blast-
ed his comments as too harsh. Captain Crozier, who retains his
rank, was concerned for the health of his men. But he went out-
side the chain of command in airing his worries; his crew’s con-
gregating on deck and cheering him at his departure showed a
lack of discipline, for which he is responsible. Modly was right
to take action against Crozier, though his language (he called
Crozier “naïve” and “stupid”) sounded like a poor imitation of
George C. Scott as Patton. A bad show all around, especially
since it is the Navy that must be our chief monitor of the corona-
virus’s enablers’ attempts to colonize the South China Sea.
n Citing the pandemic, the Hungarian parliament passed an
emergency law, which grants to the government of Prime
Minister Viktor Orban the power to rule indefinitely by decree.
The law includes the additional troubling stipulation that those
who spread information that government authorities judge to
be false or misleading are subject to fines and jail sentences.
The law stands as a wide-open invitation to abuse. In a mea-
sured statement, the U.S. embassy in Hungary urges govern-
ments around the world “to avoid restrictions on essential
rights and fundamental freedoms, including the ability of the
free press to provide information to the public about the crisis
and the government’s response.” It adds that governments
should ensure that “such powers are restricted to the period of
time needed to address the current crisis and lifted as soon as
they are no longer needed.” Hungary’s friends should hope that
it errs on the side of sooner.
n Spare a thought for Rami Aman. He is a Gaza Palestinian, the
leader of a peace group, the Gaza Youth Committee. For five
years, the group has had video chats with Israeli counterparts.
The participants speak in English. Their chats have gone under
the playful name “Skype with Your Enemy.” But in these days
of social isolation, people are Zooming—using the teleconfer-
encing platform Zoom. On April 6, a Zoom chat between
DEAN MOUHTAROPOULOS/GETTY IMAGES
Palestinians and Israelis involved more than 200 people. It was
the biggest such chat ever. They asked questions about life on
the other side. “Do you have music festivals?” was one ques-
tion. They talked about coping in the time of corona. And they
talked about possibilities for peace. Some less peace-minded
Palestinians got wind of the conversation and reported it to the
10 | w w w. n a t i o n a l r e v i e w. c o m
authorities. Hamas then arrested Rami Aman and others for the
crime of “holding a normalization activity.” There are brave
and heroic souls among Palestinians, and their names ought to
be known in the wider world.
n Whether we like it or not, Britain’s Labour Party is a major
party in a major country. The health of it is of concern to all.
Under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour Party was
not healthy. Most problematically, it was rife with anti-Semitism.
Labour now has a new leader, Sir Keir Starmer, who made no
bones about the party’s problem. “We have to face the future with
honesty,” he said. “Anti-Semitism has been a stain on our party.
I have seen the grief that it’s brought to so many Jewish commu-
nities. On behalf of the Labour Party, I am sorry. I will tear out
this poison by its roots and judge success by the return of Jewish
members and those who felt that they could no longer support
us.” Well done, as Brits say.
n The dress: light green, high-necked, conservatively cut. A
matching green brooch, a triple string of pearls. The silver hair,
very pre-Sassoon. The room: furniture and tchotchkes of a state-
ly home of a generation past. The accent: clear, clipped, its class
markers softened by age and familiarity. “I hope in the years
to come everyone will take pride in how they have responded to
this challenge. And those who come after us will say . . . that
the attributes of self-discipline, of quiet good-humored
resolve, and of fellow-feeling still characterize this country.”
One of the attributes of leadership is to tell people that they are
doing what they ought; telling them so encourages them to do
it. So Elizabeth II told Britons in her coronavirus address, speak-
ing with the authority of her position, her persona, and a career
stretching back to her first address to the nation, as a teenage
princess in World War II, 70 years ago.
n Britain’s prime minister, Boris Johnson, has been
released from St. Thomas’ Hospital in London, where he
was being treated for a life-threatening case of coronavirus.
During his stay Johnson spent two nights in a critical-care
unit and, though he was not ventilated, was given oxygen
support. On the advice of his medical team, Johnson, 55,
will not immediately return to work but will continue to
recuperate at Chequers, a country res-
idence reserved for prime minis-
ters. In an emotional speech,
Johnson thanked the NHS
workers who saved his life, as
well as the British public for
their cooperation with social-
distancing measures. Johnson
gave reason for encourage-
ment, saying the U.K. was
“now making progress” in
the effort to contain the
epidemic, a “fight we
never picked against an
enemy we still don’t
entirely understand.”
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n In a 7–0 decision, the High Court of Australia acquitted
George Cardinal Pell, overturning his conviction on charges of
sexual abuse. He had been accused of molesting two 13-year-
old choirboys after Sunday Mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in
Melbourne in 1996. The circumstances in which he was
alleged to have committed the crimes meant that jurors would
have “entertained a doubt” had they acted “rationally,” as the
High Court explained. Don’t be misled by the dry understate-
ment: The scenarios put forward by the prosecution were
wildly improbable. The busy public setting that was the cathe-
dral, the logistics of the after-Mass routines of the partici-
pants, the nature of liturgical vestments, which are only
slightly less cumbersome than suits of armor—the account of
Pell’s alleged assaults and indecency was riddled with fea-
tures that screamed its implausibility, but the jury covered
their ears. Media pilloried him, spurring on a public ready to
believe the worst, disgusted by the Church’s long history of
sex-abuse scandals. The injustice to Pell will be borne in part
also by survivors of clerical sex abuse, who will now find it a
little harder to be believed.
n NBA star Stephen
Curry sat out four months
with a broken hand before
returning to the Golden
State Warriors in early
March—only to see the
season suspended after he
had played in just a single
game. How could Steph
maintain his shooting
touch during the long lay-
off without violating quar-
antine rules? As it turns out, the same way anyone else
would—he bought an outdoor hoop and mounted it on his
driveway, struggling with the instruction manual and taking
five hours to finish the job, like every suburban dad. Next he
painted a three-point line, and reports are that Steph has been
raining down the treys in his solo practice sessions.
n The Cannonball Run is the nickname for an informal, spo-
radic, not entirely legal competition in which drivers seek to
go from New York City to Redondo Beach, Calif., in as little
time as possible. Obviously, traffic is a major concern, and
planning a route that avoids snarls at peak hours can be quite
involved. But what if there were no traffic to speak of, and a
correspondingly modest police presence? The virus created
these exact conditions, and a three-man team driving an Audi
A8 sedan has taken advantage of them to set a new coast-to-
coast record of 27 hours and 25 minutes. The achievement
does seem a bit frivolous when so many people are dying, and
we hesitate to endorse the constant, extreme violation of
speed limits that such a drive must have required. Yet for bet-
ter or worse, there’s something truly American about it all
(including the subsequent controversy over whether the virus-
assisted record should count). Still, we’d recommend against
STREETER LECKA/GETTY IMAGES
a White House invitation.
n The Sixties left included mere criminals (the Black
Panthers) and terrorists (Bernardine Dohrn, Bill Ayers, and
12 | w w w. n a t i o n a l r e v i e w. c o m
friends). But it also included a fair share of randomly violent
psychopaths. Ira Einhorn, named “Philadelphia’s head hip-
pie” by the Village Voice, was a figure in the worlds of psyche-
delia, environmentalism, and the local establishment, whose
freak pet he became. He was also a beater of women. One of
them, Holly Maddux, he murdered after she ended their five-
year-long relationship. At his trial he was defended by future-
senator Arlen Specter; his bail was posted by a Canadian
socialite. He fled, and was tried and convicted in absentia.
Discovered years later living in France with a woman he had
not killed, he was brought home and, as a condition of his
extradition, tried again, which resulted in a second conviction.
He maintained that his victim’s body had been planted in his
apartment by the CIA. An evil man, patronized by willing
dupes. Dead at 79.
n Linda Tripp is a footnote in American political history, a
figure in the scandal that led to the impeachment of President
Clinton. She was the onetime White House aide who had a
friendship with Monica Lewinsky, and who taped some of
their phone conversations. Linda Tripp eventually handed
over those tapes to the independent counsel. To her enemies,
she was a snitch, a traitor, the villain of the piece. She was
subject to fierce, animal hatred, including many jibes at her
looks. These came, in particular, from female defenders of the
president. To her own defenders, she was one of the few truth-
seekers and -tellers in Washington, blowing the whistle on an
immoral and dishonest president. At every step, she handled
herself with dignity and even courage. In 2003, she said to an
interviewer, “I think history will see things through a prism
that will make it easier to understand that it wasn’t black and
white.” Linda Tripp has died at 70. R.I.P.
n In a long career like a slow-burning candle, Al Kaline won
a batting title, ten Gold Gloves, and a roster spot on 18
American League All-Star teams. In the 1968 World Series,
he hit .379 and drove in eight of the 34 runs scored by the
Detroit Tigers, the last world champions before MLB divided
the leagues into divisions and established postseason play-
offs. A high-school and rec-league superstar in Baltimore in
mid century, he caught the attention of Tigers scout Ed
Katalinas and signed as a bonus baby, skipping the minor
leagues and jumping straight to Detroit. In 1955, at age 20,
Kaline hit .340 and became the youngest batting champion in
major-league history. “There’s a hitter!” said Ted Williams,
who would know. A right fielder most of his career, Kaline
moved to first base toward the end and finished where he
began, in the Motor City. Lifetime batting average, .297, in
a pitcher’s era. He amassed more than 3,000 hits and was
inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1980. Off the field and in
retirement, he remained steady and quiet—a source of light
and warmth, minimal fireworks. Mr. Tiger, dead at 85. R.I.P.
n Master picture-book author and artist Tomie dePaola passed
away at the age of 85, due to surgery complications. With over
270 books to his name after decades of publishing, Tomie is
one of the most beloved children’s-literature figures of our
day. His stories touch the imagination and the soul, spanning
numerous genres and covering many cultures, as in the de-
lightful Strega Nona stories. Tomie also charmed readers by
M AY 4, 2020
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recounting his childhood in a series of chapter books. Accord-
ing to the New York Times obituary of Tomie, his favorite hol-
iday was Christmas, a fact made very apparent by one glance
at his bibliography. A cradle Catholic, Tomie made his faith
evident in many books illustrating the lives of the saints. Tomie
didn’t just tell stories, he made them come alive with his art-
work; his colors glow, giving off a sense of warmth and home
that in a quiet but powerful way brought light, humor, and joy
to generations of children. May his work continue to be a light
for generations to come. R.I.P.
n For decades Mort Drucker generated impish, extroverted
covers for Mad magazine—and once for NATIONAL REVIEW.
NR was running an article on the dire state of higher educa-
tion, a hardy perennial with us. Charles Bork, art director at
the time, wanted to do a cover showing Alfred E. Neuman,
Mad’s gap-toothed iconic doofus, wearing a mortarboard and
gown, and called up Mad for permission to copy the character.
Drucker volunteered to do the cover for us himself, gratis.
Thanks again for that, and thanks for so many other laughs.
Dead at 91, R.I.P.
n Abigail Thernstrom was one of the most remarkable thinkers,
writers, and activists of our time. She was brought up left-
wing—on a collective farm outside New York City. In the city
itself, she went to Elisabeth Irwin High School, also known as
the Little Red School House. Alumni include Angela Davis,
Mary Travers, and the sons of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.

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conservative commentary
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Learn more at NATIONALREVIEW.COM/PLUS
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indulge in an ad-minimal website experience,
At least three alumni became prominent conservatives, of the
classical-liberal persuasion: Ronald Radosh, Elliott Abrams,
and Abby Thernstrom. She was married to Stephan Thernstrom,
the Harvard historian, who survives her. She, too, was a
Harvardian, earning her Ph.D. in government in 1975. Her spe-
cialty was civil rights. She had an old-fashioned view of race
relations: equality under the law, equality of opportunity, E
pluribus unum. She wrote steadily and took part in any number
of forums—including forums with President Clinton. She also
served as vice chairman of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission.
Through everything, she was feisty, righteous, sparkling, brave,
and unforgettable. She has passed away at 83, having enriched
the world around her. R.I.P.
PUBLIC POLICY
Beating the Virus
F an American president has ever before considered a crisis a
way to increase his TV ratings, he at least had the good sense
I not to tell anyone in public.
Donald Trump has taken his routine unpresidential conduct
to the big stage of an unprecedented national crisis, and it hasn’t
played well. When he has been at the podium, his daily briefings
have often featured petty feuds with reporters (where, incredi-
bly enough, the president manages to seem smaller than his
journalistic tormentors), threats to withhold aid to governors
based on what they say about him, over-the-top pitches for
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THE WEEK
hydroxychloroquine, wildly gyrating and contradictory posi-
tions on public matters, and, at one point, the constitutionally
nonsensical claim that he has “total authority” to order states
to reopen.
Not all of leadership in a crisis involves public communica-
tion, but it’s an important part of it, and on this front Trump has
performed abysmally.
He is especially defensive about his administration being
late to the gun on the threat of the virus. There’s no doubt that
this is true. As the danger arose in China, impeachment still
dominated the national conversation and the administration
was consumed with completing a trade deal with Beijing.
China hawks and public-health experts within the administra-
tion began to sound warnings about a potential pandemic.
Trump thought they were exaggerating, and worried about the
effects on markets. This is a matter of public record, since he
openly pooh-poohed the threat of the virus into late February.
If he had not been so resistant, the administration might
have acted more quickly to prepare for the potential tsunami
of disease. His hesitation, coupled with the early CDC and
FDA debacle on testing, undoubtedly lost crucial time when,
soon enough, every day would matter.
All this said, there’s no doubt that this crisis would have test-
ed the capacity of the most prescient, best-organized adminis-
tration. The decisions that have mattered most in squelching
the spread of the virus—the various lockdowns—are hugely
momentous and costly. It’s understandable that almost every
authority around the world, with the exception of some Asian
countries and perhaps California and Washington State, hesi-
tated to act until the disease clearly forced their hand and it was
too late. Even Governor Andrew Cuomo, who has become a
media folk hero for his impressive daily briefings, was too late
to move in New York, which has been hit hardest by the disease
(more than 10,000 deaths and counting).
As we went to press, the numbers both in New York and
nationally suggested that the epidemic had hit a plateau and be-
gun to decline in intensity. If so, we have avoided the worst case
of hospitals getting completely overrun in hotspots and having
to ration care based on shortages of ventilators and other equip-
ment. Governors in affected states have added hospital capacity
and scrounged for necessary gear, while the administration and
other state governments have sent ventilators and masks where
most desperately needed. These efforts, together with the effect
of the lockdowns in diminishing new cases, have kept the
health-care system, strained as it has been in New York City and
New Orleans, from capsizing anywhere.
As we begin to emerge on the other side of the curve of the epi-
demic, voices are growing louder questioning whether the lock-
downs were necessary in the first place (over “only” tens of
thousands of deaths). There are a couple of things to say about
this. One, large parts of the economy were going to shut down
EDUARDO MUNOZ ALVAREZ/VIEWPRESS VIA GETTY IMAGES
regardless of what the government did. Fearful of the virus,
people were already beginning to vote with their feet by going
out less and keeping their kids out of school. Two, it’s not
right to assume a trade-off between the economic costs of the
lockdowns and the current number of deaths in the U.S. (clos-
ing in on 30,000 as we went to press). Absent the strictures
against social interaction, the number of cases and deaths
would obviously be significantly higher. If the virus had
spread unchecked, the economy would have ended up shut-
14 | w w w. n a t i o n a l r e v i e w. c o m
A man walks in Times Square, New York City, on April 13.
ting down anyway, just in even more desperate circumstances,
with more human suffering and death.
This is not to deny the nearly immeasurable economic and
social costs of the lockdowns. We pulled the brakes on our econ-
omy and brought it to nearly a full stop in a matter of days and
even hours, and we’ve seen the stark effect in 16 million unem-
ployment claims in just three weeks. Trump is right to want to
begin opening up as soon as feasible, but that isn’t a matter of
selecting a date. We have to come up with a strategy for return
to semi-normality as we live with a virus that, right now, has no
cure or vaccine.
Much thought has already gone into this challenge, with for-
mer FDA commissioner Scott Gottlieb making particularly
valuable contributions. We will need massive testing (which
will require an industrial-level mobilization to make the tests
and other materials), combined with robust contact tracing
aided by technology. This will involve considerable infringe-
ment on privacy, but anything looks mild compared to the large-
scale social controls we’ve adopted to check the virus now.
Hard-hit areas are going to have to adopt a new norm of people
wearing masks outside and of temperature checks in public
places. The government and private researchers must continue
to partner on promising therapies that can at least make the dis-
ease less severe, and prepare to start manufacturing them even
before we are sure they work (we want to have them available
in large quantities quickly if they do prove out).
We might get some respite in the summer, but what we
want to avoid is another severe outbreak in the fall, with spi-
raling deaths and yet more damaging lockdowns.
Make no mistake: Life is not going to completely snap back
to normal any time soon. As long as we lack a vaccine—and it
could take two years to get one—we are going to be less prone
to gather in crowds or in tight places with other people,
whether on airplanes or in restaurants. Epidemics have influ-
enced society throughout human history, and this one will
leave an imprint. But we are a resilient country. Our resource-
fulness and public-spiritedness have already been put in stark
relief by this crisis, and will see us through it.
M AY 4, 2020

The Leviathan Virus
Text Larger grows the monster of coercion
BY KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON
HE fiscal history of the U.S. gov-
ernment is the history of the
T ratchet effect described by Robert
Higgs in Crisis and Leviathan:
The federal fiscal footprint grows dra-
matically during periods of national
emergency, and then it never declines to
its pre-emergency levels—if it declines
at all. What was extraordinary last year
becomes ordinary next year, or closer to
ordinary. That is why before the corona-
virus epidemic struck and the economy
was, by most measures, doing pretty well,
the U.S. government already was planning
to spend more money in 2020 than it was
spending in, say, 2007, with the Iraq War
“surge,” or in 1968, at the height of the
Vietnam War, or in 1969, when Americans
landed on the moon for the first time.
In 1930, federal spending amounted to
3.4 percent of GDP, while taxes came in at
4.1 percent of GDP, producing a small
budget surplus. That was not to last. The
Great Depression sent GDP crashing
from $98.4 billion in 1930 to $58.3 billion
in 1933. Spending had ramped up to 10.6
percent of GDP by 1934, with a budget
deficit of 5.8 percent of GDP. Then
things tapered off a bit, both spending
and deficits mostly declining through
1940, but with the economy still strug-
ROMAN GENN
gling and war looming, neither returned
to pre-Depression levels. And then, both
increased dramatically: Spending leapt
from 11.7 percent of GDP in 1941 to 23.8
in 1942 to 42.6 in 1943, while the deficit
went from 4.3 percent of GDP to 13.9
percent to 29.6 percent in the same years.
When the twin emergencies of the Great
Depression and World War II concluded,
spending ticked down—but, again, not to
pre-war levels. In 1948, spending was
11.4 percent of GDP, with a sizeable bud-
get surplus of 4.5 percent of GDP. But
federal spending would never be that low
again. It began to climb, and by 1983 it
had doubled, to 22.9 percent of GDP, with
a deficit of 5.9 percent of GDP, the largest
budget shortfall since 1946. In the post-
Reagan era, spending hit its low point in
2000 and 2001, 17.7 percent of GDP (with
small surpluses) both years. The high
point was 2009, with the federal govern-
ment running a 9.8 percent–of–GDP sur-
plus and spending 24.4 percent of GDP.
That was an emergency period, too—the
financial crisis. During the decade before
the financial crisis, federal spending never
hit 20 percent of GDP; since then, it has
never been below 20 percent of GDP.
Spending tends to increase during wars,
but the U.S. government is not spending
that money on the military: In 1957,
Washington spent 9.8 percent of GDP on
the military, and by 2015 the government
had cut that by more than two-thirds, to
3.3 percent. Wartime emergency spend-
ing quickly was diverted into a larger
peacetime welfare state.
The evolution of Leviathan is easiest to
follow in financial terms, because those
are quantifiable and published. But the
growth of state power—here at home and
abroad—is more complex than that, and
more invasive—and it is in very many
cases popular, even when it is nakedly
self-interested. The Alliance for American
Manufacturing, a union-backed lobbying
group that advocates “buy American”
mandates in practically all government
purchases and other forms of trade protec-
tionism, argues that the epidemic shows
the immediate need for such mandates in
practically all government purchases and
for other forms of trade protectionism. In
the most recent Gallup poll, nearly 80
percent of respondents endorsed anti-
outsourcing measures. Elizabeth Warren,
who has long advocated laws mandating
higher wages, says the epidemic shows
the need for such laws, which generally
enjoy broad support. The same goes for
other tangential issues opportunistically
attached to the epidemic response.
There is an emotional payoff to crisis
solidarity—and a big political payoff, too,
which is why Donald Trump has taken to
calling himself a “wartime president,”
why Emmanuel Macron has declared
“We are at war!” while Queen Elizabeth II
does the same. Even Angela Merkel is
invoking that unpleasantness from 1939
to 1945: “Since the Second World War,
there has been no challenge to our nation
that has demanded such a degree of com-
mon and united action,” she said. So the
epidemic is, from that point of view, a lot
like World War II, except the Germans
are on our side. Perhaps most important
from the politicians’ point of view, the
“wartime” rallying effect seems to be in
evidence: Merkel’s numbers are up and,
as of this writing, so are Trump’s.
A critical difference is that the eco-
nomic challenge of World War II was
mobilizing resources and maximizing
output for the war effort. The challenge in
our time is trying to minimize the dam-
age that will be done by forcibly idling
businesses, industries, and much of the
nation in the service of social isolation,
the hygienic deep freeze in which the
epidemic, it is hoped, will die down. And
so the predictable opportunism of the
15

political caste is, in a sense, more nefari-
ous: Businesses and individuals find
themselves in the position of needing aid
not because of normal organic economic
changes or unwise investments (I guess
the Fortune 500 shouldn’t have spent all
that money on avocado toast) but because
they are (to varying degrees voluntarily)
being co-opted to serve a different social
end—an important one. Forcing people
into the position of needing assistance
and then conditioning that assistance in
self-serving political ways is corrupt, and
it should be understood as corruption.
For example: There might have been
some pretty good “loose lips sink ships”
reasons to restrict the communications of
certain businesses receiving military con-
tracts during the war against Germany
and Japan (oh, all right: You, too, Italy,
you, too!), but there is not much good rea-
son for restricting the First Amendment
rights of U.S. business owners and exec-
utives during this epidemic. Nonethe-
less, Washington is doing precisely that,
for example by forbidding recipients of
Today, the federal government is faced
with a genuine emergency. Eventually,
it will be the emergency.
federal business aid to speak against
unionization in their firms. Aid is normally
conditional, and there is not anything
wrong with that where the conditions
serve some legitimate purpose related to
the intended use of the aid. This is not that.
This is rank political opportunism and
the diminution of basic political rights.
Progressives tempted to justify this restric-
tion of political speech on the grounds
that he who pays the piper calls the tune
should think very carefully about the prin-
ciple they are forwarding and the ways in
which it might be applied to people re-
ceiving other kinds of government aid.
There are dozens of other abusive inter-
ventions of that sort written into aid pack-
ages and other coronavirus emergency
measures. The temptation to maintain
these abuses even after the coronavirus
emergency has passed will be very pow-
erful. And, in many cases, such proposals
will be popular, though there already
are pockets of resistance to the heavy-
handedness of the response (e.g., police
arresting a man for playing T-ball with his
16 | w w w. n a t i o n a l r e v i e w. c o m
daughter in an otherwise empty park,
prohibiting the sale of vegetable seeds
at stores that are open for selling
“essential” goods, prohibiting “drive-in”
Easter services and other innovations in
social-distancing worship, etc.), most
prominently from conservative religious
communities and in rural areas. But in the
main, these measures have support and are
widely defended in the press on “wartime”
grounds. The natural inclinations of the
American people are considerably more
authoritarian than is the American Consti-
tution, which is one of the things that
make it so handy to have a constitution
that is written down in English words and
sentences that are generally understood to
be binding on the government.
There are measures appropriate to
wartime (this is not a war) and to other
national emergencies that are not appro-
priate to ordinary times. That is one of the
reasons why populist politicians, includ-
ing Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders,
always strive so hard to convince us that
we are in the midst of an emergency,
that every scraped knee calls for the
moral equivalent of war. Everyone who
follows public policy can think of an
“emergency” measure that proved eter-
nal: Those of you dinosaurs with landline
telephones are still paying part of a small
tax instituted to help offset the costs of the
Spanish–American War of 1898.
The United States has changed since the
end of World War I, when efforts to retain
Woodrow Wilson’s authoritarian “war
socialism” were swept away in Warren G.
Harding’s “return to normalcy.” Returning
to normalcy after the coronavirus epi-
demic is going to take a concerted and
programmatic effort—it is going to be a
political project of some consequence.
And it will be resisted.
In 1930, the federal government was
spending less (in GDP terms) in total than
today it spends on Social Security alone—
and it was a good deal less presumptuous.
Today, the federal government is faced
with a genuine emergency. Eventually, it
will be the emergency, unless we see to
it that it isn’t.
Going the
Distance
Text
Why the lockdowns
were necessary, and still are
BY THEODORE KUPFER
& RAMESH PONNURU
T is reasonable to wonder whether we
have been overreacting to the pan-
I demic. The basic rationale for social
distancing—reducing the rate at
which people come into contact, to arrest
the spread of the coronavirus contagion—
is easy to explain. But the inconstant
and sometimes dishonest advice from
experts, and the fuzziness of the models
that seem to be influencing government
decisions, has eroded confidence in the
wisdom of current policies. Following
the recommendations of public-health
authorities, Americans have made huge
sacrifices for an indefinite period of time.
While a majority agrees that the current
measures are necessary, there is under-
standable impatience. That impatience
has fed demand for heterodox theories
that would permit a rapid reopening of
the economy.
It is true that shutting down the econ-
omy is a bad strategy. But given the
alternatives, it was the least bad strate-
gy available at the time it was imple-
mented. In many places, and especially
in New York City, it was adopted later
than it should have been. The prema-
ture abandonment of that strategy
could be catastrophic—not least in its
economic effects.
The debate over shutdowns has been
bogged down by some conceptual errors.
On April 8, the Institute for Health
Metrics and Evaluation model used by
the White House revised its average pro-
jection of the death toll in the U.S. down
to approximately 60,000. Opponents of
shutdowns asked: If the death toll of this
virus turns out to be that of a bad flu sea-
son, will draconian measures really have
been justified? But comparing the costs
of shutdowns with the toll the virus has
taken on public health is fallacious, since
the shutdowns are extremely likely to
have reduced that toll substantially.
When considering marginal costs, it is
M AY 4, 2020
3col_QXP-1127940387.qxp 4/15/2020 1:33 AM Page 17
the cost per death averted that matters.
And unlike the case with flu, there is no
vaccine for COVID-19, which, the evi-
dence suggests, is more of a burden for
hospitals and more likely to inflict seri-
ous harm or death. The experiences of
New York and northern Italy show that
COVID-19 can overwhelm medical sys-
tems in a way the flu does not.
The debate has also foundered on
questions about whether it is morally
acceptable to trade lives for dollars, and
about the details of cost–benefit analyses.
These analyses often go awry. Excluding
serious but nonfatal health effects from
the calculation biases us toward greater
complacency about the pandemic. Ex-
cluding lost option rights, on the other
hand, biases us toward complacency
about the costs of lockdown.
It is also important to remember that
social distancing was adopted in a
decentralized fashion. Before governors
ordered residents to stay home, many
school districts had already closed down,
restaurant patronage had plummeted, and
major sports leagues had postponed their
seasons. Air traffic, though allowed as
an essential service, has collapsed. A
working paper from the National Bureau
of Economic Research suggests that
the economy began contracting before
the first shelter-in-place order was
issued. It follows that neither the econom-
ic costs of social distancing nor its health
benefits can all be attributed to govern-
ment orders. It follows as well that the
public-health problem itself, not just
the reaction to it, is an economic problem.
Which is the main practical objection
to easing the shutdown to help the econ-
omy: The much-debated tradeoff does
not always exist. A public-health crisis
entails economic costs. (There are also,
of course, public-health costs to the eco-
nomic crisis, such as the increased risk
of suicides. But research tends to find,
perhaps counterintuitively, that mortality
is pro-cyclical: that it rises and falls with
the economy.)
By mid March, when the first stay-at-
home orders were issued and the White
House adopted its “slow the spread”
message, few alternatives were avail-
able for us other than widespread social
distancing. This is in no small part the
fault of the Chinese government, which
in December suppressed information on
the virus, and of the obedient World
Health Organization, which ignored a
December 31 query from Taiwan about
human-to-human transmission and publi-
cized Chinese denials of its occurrence.
Only on January 20 did a government sci-
entist admit that the virus could spread in
that way; only on January 23 did it lock
down Wuhan. Had Chinese authorities
intervened three weeks earlier, a Uni-
versity of Southampton study finds, cases
in the country would have been reduced
by 95 percent—and so it might well not
have become a global threat.
The U.S. made mistakes that fore-
closed alternatives, too, the anemic pro-
duction and rollout of tests chief among
them. A defect in CDC test kits slowed
their manufacture and rendered many of
them unusable while FDA regulations
prevented private actors from offsetting
the shortfall. By the time outbreaks
began in March, there were far too few
tests for the “test and trace” strategy that
some East Asian countries have success-
fully implemented to be feasible here.
There is plenty of blame to go around
for this embarrassing failure of Ameri-
can state capacity.
The Trump administration has received
some of that blame. Yet some criticisms
of it don’t withstand scrutiny. It is a myth
that the National Security Council direc-
torate responsible for handling pan-
demics was eliminated: It was folded
into a new directorate that oversaw
biodefense, global health, and arms con-
trol, as part of an ordinary reorganization
of the NSC, and the New York Times
reports that it was gathering intelligence
on the virus by early January. It is also a
myth that the CDC’s funding was cut:
Congress increased it.
Other criticisms President Trump has
earned. From the beginning of the out-
break to well after the culminating
point, he was more focused on denying
the threat of the virus than on counter-
ing it. His insistence through much of
February that the virus would magically
disappear almost certainly discouraged
some people from social distancing,
undermining the strategy he eventually
implemented. His January 31 decision
to restrict travel from China has not been
as helpful as advertised, both because of
loopholes and because any time it
bought was squandered by his denial.
His capriciousness may have contributed
to the coordination problems in the
administration. It is difficult to say pre-
cisely how much of a difference he has
made—any president would have made
mistakes in responding to such an
unusual danger—but it is clear that the
difference has been negative.
In any case, we were left with little
besides the strategy that our society
eventually adopted. The common sug-
gestion that we simply isolate the elderly
and immunocompromised while en-
couraging younger low-risk people to
behave normally in hopes they will
develop herd immunity falls apart under
scrutiny. As columnist Megan McArdle
points out, millions of young Americans
live in multigenerational households
and millions of older people depend on
help from younger ones. These consid-
erations may explain why the U.K.,
which briefly considered this strategy,
quickly abandoned it. The Chinese
alternative of dystopian surveillance
and domestic-travel restrictions, mean-
while, could not have been implemented
in the U.S. even if we had desired it.
Sweden has not imposed quarantines,
but even its government is ratcheting up
restrictions as the growth of cases and
deaths continues to outpace that in its
Scandinavian neighbors.
Our response has involved underreac-
tion and overreaction. The virus won’t
simply “go away,” but park closures may
not have been necessary, and banning
drive-in church services certainly wasn’t.
In broad outline, however, from late
February onward our society has made
the right call, given the situation we found
ourselves in.
The question on everyone’s mind is
when we can ease, or outright end, the
restrictions. A premature reopening
would have substantial costs. It could
lead to more outbreaks, forcing us to
impose longer additional lockdowns,
and therefore even more economic pain,
than otherwise necessary. The tail risks
of jumping the gun are sobering: Run-
away infections among public officials
could jeopardize law enforcement and
the maintenance of necessary infra-
structure. And the benefits are uncer-
tain, as there are several obstacles to a
“V-shaped” economic recovery besides
domestic restrictions. Consumers, fear-
ful of future outbreaks, won’t be as con-
fident as they were during the cyclical
peak. Falling global demand is a head-
wind that won’t abate simply because
the U.S. decides restaurants can reopen.
Notwithstanding its comparatively lax
17

response, Sweden projects that its GDP
will contract by 3.4 percent this year.
All of this means that reopening should
be the goal of our next steps, not the next
step itself. The best attempt to set forth the
conditions under which we can reopen
and to think through the contingencies
of reopening was made by former FDA
commissioner Scott Gottlieb and other
experts, in a paper released by the
American Enterprise Institute (where
one of us is a fellow). Social distancing
can be relaxed, they conclude, if there is
a sustained, two-week-plus decline in
cases, hospitals are prepared to deal with
future outbreaks, and the capacity exists
to rapidly test everyone on demand.
As social-distancing measures are
relaxed, the chance of new outbreaks
rises. Officials will need to learn as much
as possible about the virus to prevent
these outbreaks from overwhelming
hospitals. In the absence of on-demand
testing—which, as Gottlieb noted recent-
ly, remains an aspiration—data from
serology tests can provide information on
the rates of exposure and immunity in a
given area. Such tests will also yield
more data about the share of cases that
are asymptomatic and have gone unde-
tected, allowing researchers to make
inferences about the virus’s infectious-
ness and severity. Answers to these and
other questions (how do climate, air qual-
ity, and population density affect its
spread?) have been frustratingly elusive.
Regional disparities in the severity of
outbreaks mean that the transition from
widespread social distancing should hap-
pen at different times in different places.
Containing future outbreaks without
lapsing back into mass closures will
require people who have come into con-
tact with positive cases to self-isolate. As
Brent Skorup points out in a Mercatus
Center report, the use of anonymized,
aggregated cellphone data to distin-
guish between high- and low-risk areas
could be useful to public-health author-
ities. More-granular information would
be more useful, but at a greater risk to
privacy. Apple and Google are collabo-
rating on a program to trace the physi-
cal contacts of participants. Exceptions
should be granted to any possible
antitrust rules implicated by the part-
nership, but the privacy issues it raises
are serious.
Production, privacy, and coordina-
tion issues would hinder the implemen-
18 | w w w. n a t i o n a l r e v i e w. c o m
tation of a test-and-trace strategy such
as Gottlieb’s. Even if it is successfully
implemented, it will not forestall all
future outbreaks of the virus, as South
Korea and Singapore are currently dis-
covering. States and cities may need to
shift back and forth between limited
openings and mass closures in the com-
ing months. Of course, that possibility
creates tremendous uncertainty, which
the government should mitigate by pro-
viding reliable backstops for business-
es and workers. Senator Josh Hawley
(R., Mo.) has a plan to issue tax rebates
to businesses to cover a substantial por-
tion of payroll. The proposal deserves
serious consideration. Another round of
direct cash transfers to individuals
might also prevent hardship while indi-
rectly aiding those businesses that can
resume operations. Given that the gov-
ernment is crushing economic activity
in the first place, its intervention is jus-
tified in a way it wouldn’t be in ordinary
times. There is no moral hazard during
a pandemic.
All of these, Gottlieb says, will be
temporary measures. Innovations in the
drug industry—therapeutic treatments
and, hopefully, a vaccine—are the per-
manent way out. Therapeutics can help
alleviate the burden on hospitals, and
there are several different treatments,
from antiviral drugs to old-fashioned
plasma therapy, undergoing study. Not
all of these will work, and not all are
scalable. Every effort should be made to
discover whether a drug is effective.
But lifting social-distancing restrictions
on the untested assumption that a drug
will work, only to find after further test-
ing that it doesn’t work or has unaccept-
able side effects, would be an entirely
avoidable mistake. A vaccine, of course,
would spell the end of the pandemic, but
candidates will not become available for
several months. Here too there is likely
to be pressure to rush promising candi-
dates, but speed and efficacy need not be
at odds.
Our country has enormous strengths in
dealing with the challenge of the corona-
virus, but it is one that poses distinctive
difficulties for us. We are an individual-
istic, government-skeptical country that
doesn’t meekly obey expert edicts. Those
instincts often serve us well but cannot
all the time. We have to figure out a way
to get out of this situation, rather than
trying to wish it away.
Getting the
Groceries
Supermarkets appreciated, Text
corner stores remembered
BY JOSEPH EPSTEIN
HE neighborhood grocery
store, like the independent
T bookstore and the small phar-
macist-owned drugstore, is
now all but gone. Once an anchor in
every neighborhood in which it existed,
the neighborhood grocery has every-
where been replaced by the larger,
more impersonal supermarket. Family-
owned, never corporate, the neighbor-
hood grocery store is sometimes, with a
contemporary trace of mild contempt,
known as a “Mom and Pop” store, this
chiefly because husband and wife fre-
quently worked together in them. In
every way more efficient—offering a
vastly wider range of goods at generally
lower prices—the supermarket exhibits
a supremacy over the smaller, simpler
grocery store that is beyond argument.
Yet for those of us who remember
them, something nonetheless has been
lost with the disappearance of the tradi-
tional grocery store.
Supermarkets existed in this country
as early as 1915, with the founding of the
Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company,
or the A&P, as it was known, which at its
peak in the 1930s had more than 15,000
locations across the United States. There
was an A&P on Devon Avenue, the shop-
ping hub of the neighborhood where I
grew up in Chicago in the 1940s and
’50s, but it had not yet replaced the tradi-
tional neighborhood grocery store. But,
then, I am old enough to have a dim rec-
ollection of the scarcity of groceries dur-
ing World War II, when butter and meat
were strictly rationed; and, what inter-
ested me more at the time, so was bubble
gum, which came back on the market
only after the war.
For decades after the war, America
was still dominated by the family-
owned grocery store. These stores
entailed personal relations. In them one
Mr. Epstein is the author, most recently, of Charm:
The Elusive Enchantment.
M AY 4, 2020
3col - p19 and p26_QXP-1127940387.qxp 4/15/2020 11:31 AM Page 19
knew by name—not by nametag—and
by personality the people one was deal-
ing with. In an age before ubiquitous
credit cards, many of these stores
offered credit to regular customers,
running monthly tabs. Their owners
joked with you, noted your absence
from the shop, put you onto items cur-
rently on sale. I’m not sure if it quali-
fied for “meaningful,” but one had a
genuine relationship with one’s neigh-
borhood grocer.
One of the distinctions among gro-
cery stores was between those that had
their own butcher shop and those that
didn’t. Sometimes a butcher would take
a concession within a grocery shop.
And of course there were, and still are,
many independent butcher shops. I used
to go to an extraordinary one owned by
a Mr. William Schmidt, who considered
himself, quite rightly, a true artisan, and
this before “artisanal” became among
the most pretentious adjectives in the
land. Mr. Schmidt did everything by
H. ARMSTRONG ROBERTS/CLASSICSTOCK/GETTY IMAGES
hand, including making his own root
beer. He would occasionally call to
inform me that he had just acquired a
4-H cow and wondered if I wanted him
to set aside any portions for me. He felt
that his was a disappearing craft. When I
once asked him about all the butchers in
the supermarkets, he replied: “They’re
not butchers. They’re mechanics”—a
reference, this, I gather, to their using
power saws to cut meat. I’ve not before
nor since heard the word “butcher” used
as a proud honorific.
Since Mr. Schmidt’s long-ago retire-
ment, I have taken much of my carnivo-
rous custom to the butcher shop called
the “Paulina Market”—an old-fashioned
shop, with what must be 30 or so yards
of meat on display in glass cases, and
where just about every sort of animal
flesh is on sale, with the exception of
elephant roast and ground chihuahua.
The Paulina Market is not, distinctly
not, where you would want to take a
vegan girlfriend on a first date. The
shop’s old-fashioned hot dogs are espe-
cially good, and when I eat one I do my
best to forget H. L. Mencken’s descrip-
tion of hot dogs as being composed of
“the sweepings of abattoirs.”
A certain playfulness, a jokiness
even, between employees and cus-
tomers prevailed during the old grocery-
store era, at least among those where I
shopped. At a nearby grocery store
called “Wulf’s,” I one day noticed Mrs.
Wulf, in the produce section, juggling
limes, and out of emulative envy
promptly taught myself to juggle. Mr.
Wulf, tall and taciturn, was not a man
with whom one joked. Unlike the crowd
at Bernsten’s, another neighborhood
grocery store, where, I recall, one morn-
ing after the Chicago Cubs lost a deci-
sive playoff game owing to the crucial
error of Leon Durham, the team’s first
baseman, the son of the owner, while
checking me out, asked if I had heard
about Durham’s attempted suicide. When
I said I hadn’t, he replied: “Oh, yes, he
stepped out in front of a bus, but it went
right through his legs.” At the same store,
whenever I ordered, as I not infrequently
did, two large boneless chicken breasts,
one of the two butchers there invariably
called out, “Two Dolly Partons.” In the
fall, on Monday mornings, when I usual-
ly shopped, I used to discuss the previous
day’s Chicago Bears game with these
two gents.
Supermarkets, possibly sensing the
role grocery stores once played, have
attempted to make themselves friendlier.
A supermarket chain called “Mariano’s,”
a branch of Kroger operating in Illinois
and Wisconsin, will cook the meat or
fish you buy from them. The staff at
Trader Joe’s supermarket go about their
work with an unrelenting exuberance
and slightly suspect friendliness. Does
one, do you suppose, have to go to smile
school to work there? A Jewel-Osco
store, one of a chain operating through-
out Illinois, Iowa, and Indiana, makes an
effort to stock specialty foods for the
neighborhoods out of which it operates,
so that, near an ultra-orthodox-Jewish
19

neighborhood on the far North Side of
Chicago, it stocks a large section of
kosher foods. The Jewel, in which I often
shop in Evanston, the first suburb north
of Chicago, has made a special effort to
hire people with serious hearing prob-
lems as baggers and shelf-stockers.
Social class, I long ago discovered,
enters into the placement and quality of
supermarket grocery shopping. Several
decades ago I lived in a lower-middle-
class suburb outside Chicago called
Berwyn, which had a Jewel supermar-
ket that seemed adequate, until I hap-
pened one day to shop in the same
chain’s store in the adjoining upper-
middle-class suburb of Riverside,
where I discovered the produce to be of
an obviously better quality. Then there
is the sad phenomenon of “food
deserts,” or neighborhoods, many of
them African American, so ridden by
crime and hopeless poverty that super-
markets and old-fashioned neighbor-
hood grocers are reluctant to set up shop
in them.
I currently live across the street from
Whole Foods—a chain that, as is fairly
well known, has its own special charac-
ter, even Weltanschauung. Some un-
identified wit once said that if one
wished to begin a Tea Party of the Left,
all one would need do is troll the park-
ing lot at any Whole Foods. One could
also hold a convention of food nutters
at nearly any hour at Whole Foods. I
have myself been looking for some
while for a chance to use the simile
“rarer than an inorganic pear at Whole
Foods.” Known also as “Whole Pay-
check,” the store can sometimes shock
with its expensiveness.
The staff at Whole Foods seems
rather more genial than the store’s
clientele. Occasionally I see one or
another of them outside the store smok-
ing; once I saw one eating what I took
to be a Big Mac and restrained myself
from congratulating him for his hereti-
cal gastronomic habits. Many among
the staff are young, working at Whole
Foods as a stopgap job. The clientele at
Whole Foods seems a touch or two less
mannerly than the people one runs into
in other supermarkets. Perhaps they are
too intent on finding the perfect arugu-
la, or searching out a persimmon that
will remove wrinkles or a raw manuka
honey that will extend life. When I go
there, shoppers in the aisles seem to say
20 | w w w. n a t i o n a l r e v i e w. c o m
“Excuse me” or “Pardon me” less than
those elsewhere, nor do they seem to
recognize one’s own excuse-me’s or
pardon-me’s. But, then, because of its
costliness, I tend to treat my local Whole
Foods rather like a Seven-Eleven, stop-
ping in to pick up the odd item or two
out of convenience but doing my main
shopping elsewhere.
While the contemporary supermarket
cannot hope to replace the old neigh-
borhood grocery store for friendliness,
one cannot but admire what it achieves,
and marvel at its management. Some
years ago Philip Roth, in rather a bor-
ingly standard criticism of George W.
Bush, said that he wasn’t smart enough
to run a hardware store, let alone a
country. I recall thinking at the time
what an inept simile that was. Running
a hardware store calls for both detailed
knowledge and vast competence. Ask a
clerk in a hardware store for a rope one
wants to use to hang one’s wife, and
while escorting you to the rope section
of the store, he is likely to ask you how
much she weighs.
Running a supermarket takes a wider
competence and even greater managerial
skills. Think on it. Dealing with that
wide variety of foods, cleaning products,
items of personal hygiene, plants, booze,
and whatall else. Hiring and running a
staff of a hundred or more people, upon
whom one calls for both efficiency and
courtesy while able to pay most of them
not much above the minimum wage.
And keeping the show running, as an
increasing number of big-city supermar-
kets do, 24/7 (unlike the Hasidic detec-
tive, who stays on the case only 24/6).
Does it seem wrong to say that being
responsible for running a supermarket
calls for greater skills and more intricate
knowledge than running a think tank or a
university? Not to me it doesn’t.
The value of having supermarkets
has of course been revealed in excelsis
during the coronavirus crisis. Without
the flow of food and other products
that supermarkets have continued to
supply us, the country would truly be
out of business. The supermarkets,
their suppliers, their workers, have
made it possible for the rest of us to keep
going. When the pantheon of heroes
during the current crisis is constructed,
they, alongside first responders, physi-
cians, and nurses, must have a promi-
nent place.
Want Toilet
Paper? Text
The free market will supply
it faster than any government could
BY DAN MCLAUGHLIN
OCIALIST economies have long
been rightly notorious for
S empty shelves. As the saying
goes, in Communism, people
wait for bread; in capitalism, bread waits
for people. The more the government
controls the production and sale of con-
sumer goods, and the more it interferes
with business investment, the emptier
the shelves get. With shortages of toilet
paper and other essentials striking the
U.S. economy in the opening weeks of
the coronavirus outbreak, some critics
of free-market economies are striking
back: “See,” they say, “now capitalism
has empty shelves!”
“Capitalism during a pandemic is the
same as socialism in normal times” is
not the killer argument for socialism that
you may think it is. It’s also revealing of
the true socialist mindset. “Democratic
socialism,” we’re told, is just free health
care and education and better wages. But
a better system for stocking the shelves,
even in theory, would entail something
much more like a command economy of
the old Soviet stripe.
Of course, the coronavirus pandemic
has strained private-sector supply
chains, and that’s why we have seen
empty shelves in some places and for
some products. The wonder is that there
haven’t been more of them. Customers
started hoarding just at the time when
manufacturers and shippers were
shutting down operations. And it’s not
just hoarding, but rapid changes in
customer behavior. The toilet-paper
market, for example, is usually divided
between residential and commercial
production and distribution. Lots of
large, industrial-sized rolls are usually
sold to workplaces, restaurants, hotels,
schools, rest stops, and other public-
bathroom facilities. When all the people
disappear from those places, they don’t
stop using toilets. The paper needs to be
packaged, shipped, and sold differently
M AY 4, 2020

to meet increased residential demand.
Something similar is true of all sorts of
products: coffee, bacon, napkins, hand
soap, beer, newspapers, magazines,
even pizza crust. A $21 trillion economy
is bound to face some disruptions when
it stops on a dime. Even Amazon, the
800-pound gorilla of American retail in
2020, announced in March that it would
temporarily deprioritize the restocking
of inessential items in its warehouses
to ensure that the things most needed
and in demand could be shipped
quickly to customers.
Moreover, empty shelves are not
even a good criticism of free-market
capitalism, either in general or in the
specific case of the response to
COVID-19. Free markets are, in theory,
at a disadvantage in emergencies, be -
cause a single, central authority can
decide more quickly and uniformly
what to allocate, how, and where. But
even so, deciding what to send where
is neither the beginning nor the end of
the supply chain.
Free markets run on two things:
information and incentives.
Free markets run on two things: infor-
mation and incentives. Prices transmit
both. Information travels in a loop: The
start of a supply chain, in a free-market
system, is fed by the end. Knowing what
people want to buy tells you what to sell
them. Before a central authority can
decide what people need, it must have
that information, or it will just ship large
quantities of whatever is easiest to
produce in bulk. There is still no substi -
tute for the collective decisions of con -
sumers if you need to know what sells.
Today’s empty shelf is tomorrow’s
supply priority, because that’s where
there is money to be made. It’s why
Amazon is stocking toilet paper, hand
soap, and children’s books.
Who is well situated to manufacture
what is needed? Ingenuity in expanding
supply to meet demand can be local when
there is a buck to be made. Manufacturers
are often better situated than government
bureaucrats to know how easily they can
enter a new line of business. An under-
secretary in Washington, D.C., might not
have imagined that two companies as
different as MyPillow and Brooks
Brothers could become suppliers of
particle masks and hospital gowns, but
they came forward because the people
who run them understand their own capa-
bilities, know how to meet a demand,
and grasp the public-relations value of
stepping up in a crisis.
The incentives of private companies to
turn a short-term profit and build long-
term customer goodwill often make them
more effective in difficult situations.
Waffle House is famous for its ability
to get its restaurants open in natural
disasters faster than FEMA can get set up
on the ground. If you’ve watched much
television the past month—and who
hasn’t?—you may have noted how
quickly ad campaigns refocused on sell-
ing things people want at home, from
online classes to beefed-up bandwidth.
It is hard to say that government—
federal or state, American or foreign—
performed better than business in
reacting to the unique supply problems of
the pandemic. A private company in
Germany developed a coronavirus test-
ing kit on its own and, by working round
the clock seven days a week, shipped
over a million tests by the end of
February. Meanwhile, in the U.S., the
CDC bungled the production of testing
kits while it and the FDA kept private
industry and state government sidelined
with red tape. New York City planned as
far back as 2006 to build an emergency
stockpile of ventilators but bought only a
fraction of the number intended, and
Mayor Bill de Blasio auctioned them off
early in his term to save maintenance
costs. The federal stockpile of ventilators
was poorly maintained, leaving many
devices inoperable. In each case, the
government had a central plan on paper
to do the right thing but lacked the in-
centives to deliver. If you managed a
Waffle House this way, you’d get fired.
Government will, and should, always
get bigger in a time of national peril. But
even in the worst of times, your best bet
to find what you want on the shelves is to
get it from someone who can make a
buck selling it.
The Current
Plague
Considered
As a
Deregulatory
Text
Opportunity
COVID-19 has exposed the
weakness of central planning
BY CASEY B. MULLIGAN
HE ongoing war with the co -
ronavirus has not only exposed
T the pitfalls of regulation but
also provided a rare opportuni-
ty to multilaterally disarm in the battle
for special-interest favors.
Effective central planning is impossi-
ble. No one is capable of appreciating
the myriad circumstances that people
find themselves in, let alone of keeping
up with changes. As Friedrich Hayek put
it, the limited information available to
regulators “by its nature cannot take
direct account of these circumstances of
time and place,” and so “the central plan-
ner will have to find some way or other in
which the decisions depending on them
can be left to the ‘man on the spot.’”
The pandemic has exposed the
weaknesses of central planning. Take
the federal government’s regulatory
activity, which included 637 new and
economically significant regulatory
actions during the years 2009–19.
Although regulators are required to
explain to the public how they assess
costs and benefits, not a single one of
the 637 mentions how households and
businesses might find adhering to the
new regulations especially costly during
a pandemic.
Mr. Mulligan, a professor of economics at the
University of Chicago, served as the chief economist
of the White House Council of Economic Advisers
in 2018–19. His book You’re Hired! Untold
Successes and Failures of a Populist
President, which details conflicts between President
Trump and special interests, is forthcoming in July.
21
3col_QXP-1127940387.qxp 4/15/2020 1:33 AM Page 22
Pandemics are not that rare (each year
there is about a 4 percent chance of one
involving the flu), but I do not blame reg-
ulators for failing to anticipate this one.
They do, however, deserve blame for fail-
ing to yield more autonomy to households
and businesses, which are keenly aware
of their changing individual situations.
When President Trump signed the new
deregulatory Right to Try Act, allowing
eligible patients access to investigational
drugs (drugs shown to be safe but not
yet FDA-approved because of their un-
known effectiveness), many commenta-
tors scoffed that few patients would
receive such drugs who could not already
do so by applying to one of the Food and
Drug Administration’s special programs.
Less than two years later, Right to Try
would make it possible to sweep away
regulatory delays in developing treat-
ments for COVID-19. The FDA can do a
lot more to get out of the way of medical
innovation, which could create trillions
of dollars of value each year.
When the Obama administration put
FANATIC STUDIO/GARY WATERS/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY/GETTY IMAGES
“net neutrality” price controls on Internet
service providers, it never anticipated
that the entire country would be simulta-
neously stuck at home, requiring that var-
ious types of Internet traffic be prioritized
in ways that the regulation prohibited.
Thankfully, net neutrality was overturned
in the U.S. not long before the pandemic.
European regulators had to beg Netflix to
voluntarily cut the quality of the video it
delivers to customers in Europe, where
net-neutrality rules still apply.
22 | w w w. n a t i o n a l r e v i e w. c o m
With the massive 2010 Dodd–Frank law,
regulators attempted to prevent large banks
from putting the entire financial system
at risk. But in doing so, they also piled a
multitude of restrictions on small banks,
which ten years later would (together with
large banks) be prevented from serving
desperate small-business applicants reel-
ing from coronavirus lockdowns.
Eager to artificially prop up demand for
the new—and expensive—“Obamacare”
health-insurance plans, federal regulators
in 2016 outlawed short-term health-
insurance plans lasting more than three
months. Several states recently imple-
mented their own prohibitions. Such plans
are inexpensive because they allow con-
sumers to forgo various types of cover-
age (such as that for childbirth or mental
health) that they would not need during
their brief participation. Regulators con-
fidently asserted that few people would
need such plans. Yet less than four years
later, tens of millions of people would be
thrown out of work, with no guarantee
of being back in less than three months.
In 2012, regulators finalized the re-
quirements for health plans (especially
taxpayer-subsidized plans) to cover
“benzos”—prescription tranquilizers
such as Valium and Xanax. Benzos are
the other half of the risky opioid-benzo
cocktail, favored by many opioid
abusers because they enhance the feel-
ings connected to opioid consumption.
Regulators failed to anticipate, or failed
to mention, that when you subsidize
something, you get more of it. Soon,
benzos would be found in almost 10,000
annual drug-overdose fatalities, includ-
ing those involving heroin and fentanyl. I
am unaware of any action by Congress or
regulators to overturn the 2012 regulation.
This is not to say that government has
no role in helping people make deci-
sions. But this role should emphasize
the provision of aggregate information,
such as information about health risks
and important product attributes.
Individuals should then be free to decide
by combining that information with their
own extensive knowledge of their person-
al circumstances.
Instead, paternalism has become the
norm among regulators, who show little
humility about the now-obvious limits of
their own knowledge. Take the Obama
administration’s regulation of automo-
bile manufacturing. The media have
portrayed the regulations as combating
climate change, but the Obama adminis-
tration admitted that greenhouse-gas
emissions were not an important part of
the calculus. Rather, it asserted that con-
sumers are unable to understand their fuel
budgets and how vehicle choice affects
those budgets. Paternalism, not environ-
mentalism, was its leading justification for
pushing consumers to fuel-efficient cars.
We cannot expect regulators to self-
correct. Indeed, they benefit from their
myopia, because when new situations
arise, we desperate citizens must beg
them for relief. But now is an opportunity
to slap some restraints on the regulators,
so that the rest of us have the freedom to
minimize the damage from the virus. The
Club for Growth proposes to temporarily
“suspend all regulations when doing so
reduces costs, assists in economic recov-
ery or increases private sector opportuni-
ties in the U.S.” It would also require that
regulators seek public comment before
ending the regulatory holiday.
As I have found in my research, special
interests have proven to be effective sup-
porters of regulations, with low-income
households disproportionately paying the
costs. Many of us benefit from a regula-
tion protecting our own industry or occu-
pation but pay far greater costs owing to
the thousands of regulations protecting
others. Nobody wants to disarm unilater-
ally in the battle for government favors.
But a silver lining to the pandemic is an
opportunity for multilateral disarma-
ment, giving us all more liberty, income,
and happiness.
M AY 4, 2020
Against Socialism book AD_2_books ad from mrs nicks letter.qxd 12/3/2019 12:49 PM Page 1

THE ACCLAIMED SPECIAL ISSUES

AGAINST SOCIALISM IN DEFENSE OF MARKETS

NOW COLLECTED IN ONE MUST-HAVE

VOLUME FEATURING DOZENS
OF ESSAYS DEFENDING
CORE CONSERVATIVE
PRINCIPLES BY

RICH LOWRY
C H A R L E S C . W. C O O K E
KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON
J O H N O ’ S U L L I VA N
Y U VA L L E V I N
D AV I D L . B A H N S E N
T I M O T H Y P. C A R N E Y
RAMESH PONNURU
SCOTT LINCICOME
DEIRDRE NANSEN MCCLOSKEY
PA S C A L - E M M A N U E L G O B RY
J O S H U A M U R AV C H I K
JEFFREY TUCKER
A N D R E W S T U T TA F O R D
SHAWN REGAN
AV I K R O Y
THEODORE DALRYMPLE
JONAH GOLDBERG
MARIAN L. TUPY
R O B E R T AT K I N S O N
SAMUEL GREGG
JIMMY QUINN
HELEN RALEIGH

AVA I L A B L E AT A M A Z O N I N Q U A L I T Y S O F T C O V E R A N D K I N D L E E D I T I O N S
 Covid
Spring
Text
A million little renaissances
BY KYLE SMITH
OOKIE is back, have you
heard? Death may be stalking
N the land, but Cupid is on the
move in the bedroom. Char -
lottesville, Va., resident Denise, no last
name given, informs the New York Post
that she and her husband hadn’t had sex
for more than two years. She cited the
stresses attendant on having three teen-
age boys, disjointed work schedules,
and the taedium vitae of nonstop joint
strategic household management. Denise
and Hubby’s bedsprings were not getting
much of a workout until “the lockdown
of lust started on March 20,” the Post
tells us. Oh, behave. Now Denise reports
Toilet paper may be scarce but I had no problem locating
Angostura bitters in our ‘essential’ liquor store.
her bedroom’s temperature has gone
from tepid to flaming: “We’ve rebuilt
our marriage to a whole other level
because of the quarantine.”
The Post story is a little light on data,
although it cites a March 30 YouGov
poll that says 13 percent of adults report
more lovemaking since the lockdown
began. Still, it makes sense, doesn’t it?
Shuttling kids to their tuba lessons,
work projects that bleed into the
evening, spreadsheets getting more
attention than bedsheets . . . ordinary
career-and-family-centric life can be
pretty tough on romance. Today our
lives have slowed down. We’re spend-
ing more time with our spouses and our
families. As for our single friends, the
ground has shifted. My bachelor pal
Don Juan (not his real name), whose
second-favorite pastime it is to irritate
me with his kid-meets-candy-shop tales
of conquering the lady landscape via the
dating apps, tells me that the (sad,
pathetic) thing now among singletons is
“virtual dating” via FaceTime or what-
not. That sounds about as satisfying as
24 | w w w. n a t i o n a l r e v i e w. c o m
communicating via Pony Express. Who’s
got the upper hand now, smug singles?
The coronavirus may or may not create a
baby boom, what with economic uncer-
tainty and all, but it sure seems likely to
lead to a marriage boom. No one can be
relishing the prospect of going through
the next crisis alone. Meanwhile, those
of us who wisely tied our knots glance
at each other over the dinner table, raise
an eyebrow, and say, “Darling, Netflix
and chill tonight?” It turns out marriage
beats Tinder after all.
Denise, quoted above, credits another
element with jump-starting her love life:
“One night, we started sipping on
adult beverages and one thing led to
another,” she told the Post. Alcoholic-
beverage sales shot up 55 percent in the
third week of March compared with the
previous year, according to a Nielsen
survey, with jumbo packs of beer seeing
a 90 percent sales spike. Beverage sales
in restaurants and bars collapsed, of
course, so it’s hard to say whether people
are drinking more, but we’re certainly
doing more of our imbibing at home,
which probably helps keep us out of
trouble. Devising my own cocktails is a
new skill I’m happily picking up. Toilet
paper may be scarce but I had no prob-
lem locating Angostura bitters in our
“essential” liquor store. Okay, you have
to phone ahead, and a guy in hazmat
getup brings your purchase out to your
car, but the national liquor-supply sys-
tem is functioning.
Another old-new habit people are
relearning is playing games around a
table. Last Thursday I dealt out a few
hands of the card game I Doubt It for the
first time since about 1979, and rarely has
the family had so much fun together. My
older daughter, eleven, burst into giggles
the first time she had to bluff, indicating
poor prospects in the fields of used-car
sales and politics but confirming that she
is just as delightfully honest a soul as we
suspected. Item: “The nation’s largest
puzzle distributor, Puzzle Warehouse,
said its business is up 2000 percent com-
pared to last year,” reports CBS News
Boston. Jigsaw puzzles! My family has
gone through three of them in the past
few weeks. These are the big mamas,
thousand-piecers. How long has it been
since anyone had the time or patience to
complete a huge, complicated jigsaw
puzzle? In our family, at least, we’re
doing more kinds of things together than
ever. And we’re laughing instead of
trembling. Tonight we’re going to get
out the Jenga (searches for which are up
14,888 percent on Amazon, according to
Women’s Wear Daily).
And what are we munching while we
rediscover the worth of non-electronic
entertainment? The bounty of our very
own oven. Who knew that mixing up the
ingredients for a succulent loaf of bread
could be done in a couple of minutes?
Then you just cover the bowl with a cloth
and leave it out overnight. In the morn-
ing, pop it in the oven and you’ve got
yourself a fantastic treat, as tasty as the
product of the finest boulanger in Paris,
that cost you pennies. Item: “Home bak-
ing is on the rise due to coronavirus lock-
downs,” reports The Economist. Google
searches for flour have tripled in recent
months. Instagram posts tagged “#home-
bake” are up 40 percent.
To protect this precious material
against interlopers, naturally, we’re all
buying more guns. Item: “Coronavirus
triggers massive spike in firearms and
ammunition sales” (FoxNews.com). A
curious statistic: As recently as the
1990s, far more gun owners said they
were armed for the purpose of hunting
than said they were for self-protection.
Today it’s the reverse. And we all know
how people tend to vote once they’ve
bought firearms for self-defense, don’t
we? Item: “Gun Shops Can Sell Fire-
arms from Parking Lots and Offer
Drive-Thru Services During COVID-19
Pandemic: Justice Department” (Time
magazine). Drive-through gun shops?
Who says we can’t innovate in this coun-
try anymore?
Which reminds me of another won-
derful covid innovation: Have you heard
of these wonders known as single-use
plastic bags? Massachusetts and San
Francisco, among other states and
M AY 4, 2020

municipalities, have wisely discarded
the circa-three-months-ago conventional
wisdom about the ecological superiority
of loading up your groceries in reusable
cloth tote bags, which are now recog-
nized as the germ bombs they are, and
have switched back to cheap, hygienic,
one-use-only plastic bags. This time it’s
the cloth bags that are being forbidden.
Topsy-turvy! Turns out “Does not trans-
mit lethal virus” is pretty good as a plastic-
bag fan’s riposte to “Occasionally gets
stuck in a tree branch.”
In Covid Spring, we’re making our
own food, mixing our own drinks, cut-
ting our own hair (my wife did mine
admirably well, then bragged, “It looks
like a real haircut!”), and defending our
own homesteads. My Manhattan-reared
straphanger kids are now sudden-onset
homeschoolers, 21st-century Laura
Ingalls Wilders in our little house on
Long Island, albeit with some nifty
technological updates. The kids can inter-
act with their classmates and their teach-
ers on Zoom, and far from having cabin
fever they show no interest in going
outdoors anyway. My older daughter
says she actually prefers virtual school
to the real thing: “I can bring a Fresca to
class and no one knows,” she tells me.
All savings on haircuts are being redi-
rected to Fresca purchases, at least in
the Smith household.
It’s not all good news these days, of
course. Item, highly disturbing item:
“Walmart Sees a Surge in Top Sales,
Not Bottoms as America Sits Home in
Its Underwear” (RedState). The pundits
are asking whether the economy will
ever recover; I’d like to know whether
we’ll ever properly dress again. A wor-
risome new retronym—like “landline”
or “analog clock”—has just emerged
on Twitter: “hard pants” for what used
to be known as “pants.” It turns out that
the I Am Legend/Road Warrior model
of what life would be like after a world-
wide catastrophic event was pretty far
off the mark. We don’t seem to be turn-
ing into roaming bands of marauders,
and if we’re buying lots of weapons it
isn’t to go out stealing gasoline from
each other but only to defend our
nightly round of Jenga. Still, you never
get the catastrophe you planned for.
Are we ready for the nightmare sce-
nario of a post-covid America in which
people carry on wearing pajama bot-
toms in public?
Federalism in
Text
An Epidemic
As ever, it is the best arrangement
B Y C H A R L E S C . W. C O O K E
HATEVER mistakes Presi-
dent Trump has made in
W his handling of the corona -
virus outbreak—and he has
indeed made mistakes—we should not
count among them his being bound by
the American constitutional order.
It has been hard to keep up with the
narrative of late. Is the key political
threat before us that Trump may use this
moment of national crisis to consolidate
his power and become a dictator? Or is
it that he may act as a feckless and indif-
ferent buck-passer who refuses to take
the tough decisions that the country
needs? And how about the response to
the virus specifically? Should we be
worried that the presidency represents a
single point of failure, and that its
incumbent could therefore get us all
killed with just one false move? Or
should we be alarmed by the myriad
approaches that the White House has
permitted the nation’s governors to take?
Nobody seems quite sure.
Predictably, President Trump himself
seems not to know the answer to these
questions, which is why he has flitted so
erratically between insisting on the one
hand that the states must make their own
decisions about quarantine and every-
thing else, and, on the other, declaring
that these adjudications are the preserve
of the federal government. In this schiz-
ophrenia, Trump has been joined by the
political class, the press, and the com-
mentariat, many of whose members
have switched seamlessly between call-
ing for vigorous national intervention
and fretting aloud that such intervention
would be un-American. For nearly two
months, this indecision has infected our
national conversation.
Some of the yo-yoing on display has
been the product of mindless, gainsaying
partisanship. Some has been the result of
our modern tendency to transmute all
political questions into referenda on the
fortunes of the incumbent president. And
some has been the consequence of
Donald Trump’s penchant for flatly con-
tradictory opinions, which are often
issued without note within the same sen-
tence. Most of it, however, has been the
upshot of our having forgotten how the
country is supposed to work. By design,
the federal government plays a specific
and limited role in the American consti-
tutional structure, with the remaining
functions having been left quite deliber-
ately to the states, the counties, the
cities, and so forth. President Trump
can—and should—be judged on how he
has fulfilled his responsibilities as the
head of the executive branch. But, in
order to make that judgment, we will
need to remember what those responsi-
bilities are and what they are not. “I
alone can fix it” may have been an effec-
tive campaign vow—and, it seems, an
ongoing rhetorical temptation—but it is
not how the United States works in prac-
tice. Here, authority is fragmented. So,
too, must be praise and blame.
That the highest law in the land out-
lines this arrangement is, by itself, rea-
son enough to demand it be followed to
the letter. The Constitution is a contract,
not a suggestion box. And yet, even in the
age of coronavirus, federalism has more
than the legal status quo to recommend
it. Now, as ever before, the federal sys-
tem is the best way of arranging power,
responsibility, accountability, and infor-
mation in our boisterous, diverse, conti-
nental republic.
This, I accept, is not a fashionable con-
ceit. In recent years, outlets such as Vox
and The New Republic, along with many
writers from the opinion pages of the
New York Times and the Washington
Post, have taken to presenting our fed-
eral system as an anachronism, and to
casting the existence of semi-sovereign
states as an irrationality at best and an
obstacle to progress at worst. In this,
they have been joined by a growing
coterie on the political right that has
come to believe that fealty to the consti-
tutional order is a luxury that the country
simply cannot afford. As one might ex-
pect, our current predicament has in-
creased the volume of these critiques.
“There are no federalists in a pandemic,”
I have been told recently. But this is
incorrect, for I am one. And, if you’re
not, you should be, too.
Why? Well, because the insights that
led to the establishment of a federal
25

system of government in this country
remain wholly relevant—yes, “even” dur-
ing a pandemic. It is as true today as it was
three months ago that the United States is
home to an extraordinary patchwork of
people and places, and that these people
and places require different governance.
It is as true today as it was three months
ago that the most efficient way to glean
political information is to place oneself as
close to the source as is possible. And it is
as true today as it was three months ago
that our trust in our institutions is linked
inextricably to their proximity to us.
These are extraordinary times, yes, and we
We have largely ignored just how
much spontaneous self-organizing has
taken place over the last month.
are witnessing the government take extra-
ordinary measures. But it is a blessing that
these measures are being taken by people
who are of our communities. The best way
to learn a language is to immerse yourself
in it, not to read a book about it. So it is with
politics. As a rule, local officials compre-
hend the language and tone of their locali-
ties in a way that faraway experts simply
cannot. “I need you to stay inside for a
while” sounds a lot less threatening from a
guy with an accent similar to your own.
And it sounds even less threatening
when coming from the guy who lives
down the road. So relentless has been the
focus on whether this official or that offi-
cial has given this order or that order that
we have largely ignored just how much
spontaneous self-organizing has taken
place over the last month. I have watched
with mild irritation as the governor of
Florida has been criticized in the national
press for waiting until April to issue a
stay-at-home order, the apparent assump-
tion of his critics being that until the order
was finalized we Floridians were living it
up with abandon. Rest assured that we
weren’t. Where I live, the restaurants
closed a month ago, the beaches and the
malls closed three weeks ago, and the
liquor store has had a “Don’t panic-buy”
warning in its window since the end of
March. By the time that Governor
DeSantis made it official that we are
expected to stay in our houses, I wanted
to ask him, “Sure, as opposed to what?”
26 | w w w. n a t i o n a l r e v i e w. c o m
I have never been fond of Louis
Brandeis’s famous suggestion that fed-
eralism allows the states to serve as
“laboratories of experimentation”
because I have always recoiled at the
implication that there is a “correct”
answer that might be divined by one
polity and then applied equally to all the
others. The purpose of federalism is not
to allow the arbiters of taste to tinker
until they find a solution and then to
export that solution universally, but to
allow citizens who have differing con-
ceptions of the good life to live peace-
fully together under the same flag. And
yet, I have thought of late that the coro-
navirus outbreak represents a happy
exception to that objection. Indeed, here
the word “laboratory” applies quite liter-
ally. All of us, irrespective of back-
ground, wish to see the end of the
pandemic. Where we may differ is in how
we aim to do that, and in what measures
we deem appropriate given our circum-
stances. New York City, by its nature,
will require different rules than will rural
Wyoming. States with beaches will in-
spire different behavior than will states
with landlocked plains. Texas, as ever, is
a different place from California.
The federal government has a real role
to play in this crisis. It must remain firm-
ly in charge of our immigration policy, of
our foreign policy, of interstate air travel,
and of all the other areas that cannot
practically be divided by 50. It can bor-
row money, which makes it an ideal pur-
veyor of monetary relief measures. It can
serve as a central coordinator between
the states, in such cases as they wish to
act in concert with one another. And it
can get out of the way by lifting many of
the restrictions that, little by little, its
agencies have inflicted upon the country
over the last century or so. It should not,
however, be regarded as a panacea or a
scapegoat. It has a job to do, and it must
do that job well. Beyond that, it must be
seen as what it is: one cog, in a larger
machine, with a flawed human being at its
control panel.
Who Should
Lead Us? Text
The crisis should make us
question our assumptions on that
BY JOHN HILLEN
S a leadership professor who
has served as a senior govern-
A ment official or CEO through
several crises, I’ve been asked a
number of times recently to “grade” our
leaders during the coronavirus pandemic.
I sometimes run through principles of
good leadership in a crisis and try to match
them to the conduct of our leaders (over-
communicate, be realistically optimistic,
bring order to chaos, lead from the front,
represent all stakeholders on their terms,
plan for both the short and the long term,
demonstrate grit, pivot when needed,
etc.). The general verdict? A mixed bag.
After a few rounds of this, I realized
that this parlor game misses the bigger
leadership lesson for our nation. What the
coronavirus crisis reveals is that popular
elections will always deliver a random
sampling of leadership competence in our
top officials. We hope that politicians
elected for one set of reasons turn out to
be good at a different job in a crisis, but
it’s really a lottery.
Regardless of their personal qualities or
backgrounds, elected political leaders are
often uniquely ill suited to lead in a cri-
sis—they always feel the pull of political
temptation, they have limited tools at their
disposal, and their temperament and train-
ing may be a poor match for the moment.
Politics is their craft, and the ultimate
political measurement, almost the sole
standard for judging their success or fail-
ure, is Were you reelected?
The temptation to “never let a crisis go
to waste” is overwhelming. On both the
right and the left, everyone with a theory
of government is maintaining that the
coronavirus crisis proves his point. Those
with seniority or power take the opportu-
nity to commit spending or policy to their
Mr. Hillen is the incoming Wheat Professor of
Leadership and Ethics at Hampden-Sydney College
and is a co-author of What Happens Now:
Reinvent Yourself as a Leader Before Your
Business Outruns You.
M AY 4, 2020
3col_QXP-1127940387.qxp 4/15/2020 1:33 AM Page 27
goals. They have few other tools to use. As
Trump’s wrestling with private industry
over producing ventilators and masks has
shown, the governmental tools available
to politicians are limited in a country that
is still largely private and commercial.
Political temptation will color any
president’s crisis management. Even our
most sainted presidents made profoundly
political decisions during national crises.
In 1942, President Franklin Delano
Roosevelt pleaded with a skeptical
General George C. Marshall about his
controversial decision to invade North
Africa. “Please make it before Election
Day!” Roosevelt instructed Marshall.
When the military failed to meet that
goal, for logistical and operational rea-
sons, Roosevelt’s press secretary lashed
out at the Army chief of staff, telling him,
“You almost lost us control of Congress
by the delay.”
So, too, with some of Lincoln’s war-
time decisions, and where does one even
start with Lyndon Baines Johnson and
the Vietnam War?
Temperament is also an inherent issue.
The successful crisis leader is magnani-
mous in outlook and broad-minded and
nondiscriminatory in his stakeholder
management, accepts responsibility, and
doesn’t play or tolerate the blame game.
The best ones are composed—even serene
in their disposition—and in their decision-
making find a balance between decisive-
ness and measurement. At times our most
visible leaders in this crisis—President
Trump, Governors Andrew Cuomo and
Gavin Newsom—have struck these chords.
At other times, often within the same
press conference, these officials and oth-
ers have descended to petty political
bickering, finger-pointing, and naked
political positioning. It is not clear to me
that they fully know when they depart
from one realm of leadership style and
go into the other.
There is nothing inherently wrong with
politicians as a class or as individuals,
and they tend to be skilled at their craft.
Some have extraordinary backgrounds.
At question for us is not their personal
character but rather whether their craft
and the way it is practiced is a good train-
ing ground for the executive competen-
cies and temperament that one needs to
be a good leader in a crisis. In the Army
we said, “You will fight as you train.”
There is, of course, a chance that lead-
ers elected for a certain job in a certain
setting will turn out to be effective at an
entirely different job in a different setting
entirely. It is also possible to reduce the
element of chance. What if we as a nation
were able to do what most institutions do
to have the right leaders in the right place
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For their part, the American Founders
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over the problem he raised, seeing a bad
track record for popularly elected leaders
through history. James Madison made
strong appeals to the people to virtuously
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The effect of a republic, as opposed to
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Other Founders were more overtly dis-
missive of direct democracy—perhaps
foreseeing the situation that Luke Wilson
portrays in the 2006 satiric film Idiocracy.
The worry over the passions of the mob
and the vices of the people, and the ability
of politicians to play on them, led to a
design for the federal government that
subjected only about half of the new fed-
eral government to popular election. In
the end, the Founders sought to limit—
through federalism, the Constitution, and
republicanism—the power of popularly
elected leaders.
But we’re not going back in history to a
Senate elected by state legislatures or to
changing our system, which has become
increasingly democratic, even if popular
election has only a random chance of
putting the right executive in the right job
during a crisis. So what can be done to
help better align the tasks at hand in a
national crisis with the executive skills
and experiences of those who lead during
it? How can we find nonpartisan and
experienced executives with the right
competencies not just to advise but to
have the two kinds of power that matter
most in public governance—budget
authority and legal authority? Senator
Chuck Schumer wants a military czar.
New York Times columnist Thomas Fried-
man has suggested a national-unity cabi-
net, which would really be nothing more
than an exercise in political balancing that
would not meet the lack of executive fit
and talent.
A better model might be something like
the example of Bill Knudsen in World
War II. In 1940, there was hardly an elect-
ed politician in America at any level who
knew how to wage a world war against
multiple enemies, with new technology
and methods, and to supply the Allies
with most of their materials. But they
knew where to find that talent. FDR
recruited Knudsen, the head of General
Motors, to direct war production for the
U.S. He was made an instant three-star
general and given full authority to create
what became known as the “arsenal of
democracy.” He was one of many leaders
who had that experience during the war.
An executive-talent model could
work today if we were to be creative in
taking advantage of the leadership talent
and executive experience in the country.
And to remind all our political leaders
that we don’t need politics from them
right now, we need leadership.
28 | w w w. n a t i o n a l r e v i e w. c o m
What Is the
Text
Value of
Public
Education?
Now seems like a good time to ask
BY FREDERICK M. HESS
WEEK after COVID-19
prompted the closure of
A Virginia’s schools, my five-
year-old’s Montessori teacher
started doing 30 minutes of Zoom with
the class on Monday, Wednesday, and
Friday mornings. The content is nothing
to write home about. The teacher reads a
story, talks a bit about daffodils or frogs,
and might celebrate a kid’s birthday.
But, you know what? The first morn-
ing, Grayson was utterly transfixed. He
shyly extended his hand to touch his
teacher’s face on the iPad. He giggled
when she said good morning to him. He
bounced as he pointed out each classmate
in his or her little Zoom box. Watching
this, I found myself choking back tears.
Humans are social creatures. A pri-
mary task for schools is to help ensure
that socialization takes a productive,
healthy direction. That’s been widely
recognized at least since Plato first
sketched his fascist fantasy of schooling
in The Republic. Even before the
coronavirus, schools have been taking
on more and more of this burden as civil
society has atrophied, with schools
asked to play the role once more widely
shouldered by churches, Boy Scout
troops, and 4-H clubs.
But socialization is hardly the only
purpose of schooling: Schools are also, of
course, the places where we expect
youth to learn the knowledge, skills, and
habits needed to be responsible, autono -
mous citizens. Lots of adults in a
community—from cousins to coaches—
may be able to mentor a kid or provide a
shoulder to cry on. Few, outside of edu-
cators, are prepared to coherently teach
algebra, biology, or Spanish.
Mr. Hess is the director of education-policy studies at
the American Enterprise Institute.
Schools have always struggled to
balance these two missions. Indeed, one
can read the story of American education
as one of tension between the social and
the academic.
Benjamin Rush, signatory of the
Declaration of Independence and founder
of Dickinson College, may be the poster
boy for this distinction. In his “Plan for
the Establishment of Public Schools and
the Diffusion of Knowledge in Pennsyl-
vania,” Rush called for a free school to
be established in every Pennsylvania
township and for universal education to
be provided at public expense.
But Rush’s aim was not universal
learning—which he feared would breed
dissatisfaction among the lower classes.
Rush cautioned, “Should [learning] be-
come universal it would be as destructive
to civilization as universal barbarism.”
He insisted that basic literacy and
numeracy was enough; his primary
concern was “to convert men into
republican machines” programmed for
the demands of commerce and self-
government. In other words, his primary
interest was to socialize citizens, not
educate them.
Now, from the vantage point of 2020,
it’s clear that Rush was wrong about
universal learning. In the information
economy, education and knowledge are
the handmaidens of opportunity—even
if it’s also true that this state of affairs
has been transformed by employment
law, corporate hiring departments, and
colleges into a protection racket requiring
would-be workers to purchase expensive
pieces of (now-virtual) parchment. But
don’t let all of this distract from the larger
point—which is that schools are social as
well as academic institutions.
In recent years, the socializing mission
of schools has faced a two-pronged
assault. First, over the decades, attacks by
the Left on norms and the American
project have yielded school systems
disinclined to set forth a muscular vision
of personal or civic responsibility. Law-
suits have left schools leery of exerting
firm discipline. Disputes over everything
from Christmas to parenting have left
educators defensive and prone to political
correctness. And critiques of America’s
“racist” past have left schools loath to
teach history or civics in ways that might
appear unduly prideful or patriotic.
And then came 21st-century school
reformers, who got so enamored of their
M AY 4, 2020
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push to improve reading and math scores

that they often turned neglectful when it
came to the social mission of schools.
Indeed, after the advent of No Child Left
Behind (NCLB) in 2001, math and
reading scores often served as the
definitive measure of good schools or
good teaching.
Bush secretary of education Margaret
Spellings memorably defended NCLB as
“99.9 percent pure.” This was so even as
NCLB’s myopic focus on reading and
math scores meant that more than half of
the nation’s schools were labeled as
“failing”—at a time when most parents
continued to give their local schools an
“A” or a “B.” Obama secretary of edu-
cation Arne Duncan similarly insisted, “If
we know how much students are gaining
each year . . . we will know which teachers
and principals are succeeding.” This
became so familiar that it was easy to stop
noticing how bizarre it was to see public
officials labeling schools as “successful” An empty classroom at Kent Middle School, in Kentfield, Calif., on April 1
or “failing” without regard to what parents
thought, the status of civics or citizenship to counseling to meal service. Just take learning for all students, concepts that
instruction, or anything other than reading food: America’s schools are a primary students would have normally learned
and math scores. source of food for millions of students during the fourth quarter will be intro-
Fast-forward to today: The striking in the free- and reduced-price lunch duced in September.” In other words,
thing about the pandemic-induced school program. As the massive national data- since it couldn’t be confident that
shutdown is how little of the response to it base compiled by my American Enter- instruction would be evenly distributed or
had to do with the way we’ve talked about prise Institute colleague Nat Malkus that every child would have access,
schools for most of the past two decades. shows, within two weeks of schools’ Arlington—like many other districts—
In a matter of weeks, coronavirus-fueled being closed, more than 80 percent of directed its teachers not to cover any new
closures reminded everyone of all the them were providing some type of meal content while teaching remotely in April,
purposes that schools serve that aren’t service, and 30 percent were delivering May, or June.
captured by test scores. In fact, one of meals to kids. And then there have been the pre-
current secretary of education Betsy While the dual mandate means that the dictable frustrations with teachers’ unions
DeVos’s first, and most popular, moves demands on schools are great, this should and education bureaucracies. The presi-
was to waive the federal requirement for not excuse schools when they fail to rise dent of the L.A. teachers’ union chose a
state testing. to the challenge—now or in the normal pandemic-induced school shutdown as
To repeat, schools have been given a course of events. Valuing public edu- the opportune moment to renew his
dual charge: academic and social. cation’s role isn’t a call to cut schools assault on charter schools. Meanwhile,
Schools enable parents to work, ease some slack. And the truth is that, in far too the union and the Los Angeles school
the burden on families, allow kids to many communities, schools have come up system negotiated a deal whereby
gather and interact under the eye of short in response to the coronavirus. Three teachers would receive full pay in return
responsible adults, and organize activi- weeks after schools started closing, the for working four hours a day, at times of
ties that give kids a productive outlet for Center for Reinventing Public Education’s their choosing, and with no obligation to
their energy. I’ve been told of commu- tracking of 82 major school systems drolly provide online instruction. In response to
nities in which teachers are walking in reported that “most districts are still not district officials worried about losing
parks with signs telling their students providing any instruction.” students, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, and
how much they miss them, while parents Then there are state and district Oregon nonsensically have barred new
bring their kids to wave, cheer, and see mandarins who’ve gotten tangled up in enrollment in virtual charter schools, even
that they’re still there. This is the raw, misbegotten notions of equity, leading as parents search for good virtual options.
primal stuff of community and human too many school districts to announce Even where instruction is up and
connectedness. that they’ll stop teaching new content or running, on-the-fly distance education is
JUSTIN SULLIVAN/GETTY IMAGES

The shutdown has been a stark re-
minder that we’ve also tasked schools
with providing a vast web of social
supports and services—from health care
skills. Virginia’s Arlington Public Schools,
a deep-pocketed, heralded school system,
dryly explained, “As part of our commit-
ment to ensuring equity of access to new
often a dismal experience for most kids
and parents. (This is a very different
question from the value of purposeful,
well-designed virtual instruction.) In an
29

unsurprising finding, Kaplan has reported
that 71 percent of parents worry that kids
learning remotely are “distracted from
their schoolwork by social media apps
and video games.”
Obviously, given all that’s going on,
it’s a safe bet that the learning loss will be
substantial. As the University of Texas’s
Paul von Hippel recently explained in the
journal Education Next,
when students returned to New York
City schools after the two-month strike
of 1968, their test scores were about
two months lower, on average, than
children’s scores the previous year.
French-speaking Belgian students
affected by the 1990 strike were more
likely to repeat a grade and did not
advance as far in higher education as
similar Flemish-speaking students
whose teachers did not strike. Test
scores fell sharply among New
Orleans–area children whose schools
closed because of Hurricane Katrina.
But given the social purpose of
education, this conversation should be
about more than just lost instruction.
After all, most Americans think about
their schools—district, charter, or
private—as community institutions.
They cherish those communities and
relationships. This is why it’s so pro -
foundly irresponsible for the super-
intendent of Washington State to publicly
muse, “Short of a vaccine, which people
continue to tell us is twelve to eighteen
months away, we have to figure out if it’s
safe to come back even in the fall.”
Look, of course educational leaders
need to respect the dictates of public
health and protect students. But, when
faced with a crisis, medical leaders
responded to COVID-19 by scrambling
to add ICU beds, acquire ventilators,
and care for every patient. They didn’t
muse that, in four or five months, they
might or might not be up to the task.
This isn’t the time for education
leaders to hem and haw. It’s the time for
creative thinking about how to best
fulfill the dual mandate with which
public education is charged. What’s
passing for distance learning is a shoddy
stopgap for addressing, at best, one-half
of that mandate. And if leaders in any
state or school are not up to the
challenge, they should just turn their
funds over to families so they can find
schools that are.
30 | w w w. n a t i o n a l r e v i e w. c o m
Twain in the
Text
Time of
Cholera
The disease afflicted the author as he
was writing what became The
Innocents Abroad
BY JOHN J. MILLER
HE first time Mark Twain saw
the Parthenon, he was about
T five or six miles away, on the
deck of a ship near the Greek
port of Piraeus. “Every column of the
noble structure was discernible through
the telescope,” he wrote in 1867. Beside
it lay the city of Athens. Twain and his
companions were “anxious to get ashore
and visit these classic localities as quickly
as possible.” “No land we had yet seen
had aroused such a universal interest
among the passengers.”
Then came a problem: The comman-
dant of Piraeus placed Twain’s ship
‘Disappointment was hardly a
strong enough word to describe
the circumstances.’
under quarantine. The Quaker City had
just come from Italy, where cholera was
rampant. Greece wanted to prevent its
own outbreak of a bacterial disease that
can kill. The commandant ordered the
travelers to stay aboard for eleven days
before disembarking. This long isolation
was too much, and the captain of the
Quaker City made arrangements to take
on supplies and sail for Constantinople,
the next scheduled stop. “To lie a whole
day in sight of the Acropolis, and yet be
obliged to go away without visiting
Athens!” wrote Twain. “Disappointment
was hardly a strong enough word to
describe the circumstances.”
These lines appeared in print two
months later in the Daily Alta California,
a San Francisco newspaper that had paid
for Twain to join one of the first orga-
nized tours of Americans in Europe. The
account appeared again almost word for
word in The Innocents Abroad, the 1869
book that made Twain famous. During
his life, The Innocents Abroad sold more
copies than any other book he wrote,
which means it outsold the better-known
tales about Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry
Finn. The traits that have made Twain
abidingly popular—humor, irreverence,
deep thinking about the nature and
promise of the United States—shine
from its pages.
It also reveals what happened when
Twain broke the Greek government’s
quarantine, evaded the police, and visit-
ed the Parthenon by moonlight.
When Twain arrived in Greece on
August 14, 1867, he was 31 years old.
He wore the familiar bushy mustache,
but his hair had not yet turned white. He
had grown up as Samuel Clemens in
Hannibal, Mo., worked as a riverboat
pilot on the Mississippi, and, during the
Civil War, headed to Nevada, where he
failed as a miner but started to know
success as “Mark Twain,” the writer. In
1865, based in California, he came to the
attention of readers in the East with a
short story, “The Celebrated Jumping
Frog of Calaveras County.” The novels
that would make him a superstar of
American literature lay in the future.
Shortly after moving to New York
City, a magnet for aspiring writers then
and now, Twain learned about a five-
month cruise to the Holy Land, orga-
nized by Henry Ward Beecher, the pastor
of a church in Brooklyn and the brother
of Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of
Uncle Tom’s Cabin. A group of about 75
would stop for excursions along the way.
Twain cooked up the idea to join and got
the Alta to pay his way in exchange for a
series of regular dispatches. He pro-
duced more than 50. Later, they became
the basis for The Innocents Abroad.
Twain delivered an amusing and
insightful narrative of people and places,
back when travel journalism was less
consumer-driven than it is now. Rather
than offering lists of things to do, he
M AY 4, 2020
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aimed to deliver a vicarious experience

for readers who probably never would
make the journey themselves. Readers
enjoyed Twain’s grumbling about his fel-
low passengers, whom he deemed too
old and straitlaced: “They never romped,
they talked but little, they never sang,
save in the nightly prayer-meeting,” he
wrote. “The pleasure trip was a funeral
excursion without a corpse.”
Twain found much to like across the
ocean, but he also loved to demolish
European pretensions. In Milan, he visit-
ed “an ancient tumble-down ruin of a
church,” home to The Last Supper, by
Leonardo da Vinci. A dozen artists had
set up easels to copy the masterwork. “I
could not help noticing how superior the
copies were to the original,” he dead-
panned. This was a major theme: Older
things aren’t necessarily better than
younger things. His patriotic point was
that the Old World should step aside and
watch the New World rise. The Innocents
Abroad may be read as a cultural decla-
ration of independence.
At a town beside Lake Como, which
Twain thought less beautiful than Lake
Tahoe, police escorted him and his
group to a “fumigation” in a cramped
room: “Presently a smoke rose about
our feet—a smoke that smelt of all the
Mark Twain in 1867
dead things of earth, of all the putrefac-
tion and corruption imaginable.” This dening quarantine. Determined to visit who were enforcing the quarantine. “So
was an effort to stop the spread of the Parthenon, Twain pondered his bad we dodged—we were used to that by
cholera. Twain provided a lively descrip- options: “Piraeus was a small town, and this time—and when the scouts reached
tion of the desperate measure as well as any stranger seen in it would surely the spot we had so lately occupied, we
a wisecrack about the lousy washing attract attention—capture would be cer- were absent.” The police headed in the
habits of Italians: He concluded that it tain.” That might mean months in a wrong direction. Meanwhile, a boat from
must have been cheaper for them to Greek prison. the Quaker City showed up. “We rowed
fumigate foreigners than to buy soap Twain decided to risk it. At 11 o’clock noiselessly away, and before the police-
for themselves. “I shall still try to pray P.M., he and three others “stole softly boat came in sight again, we were safe at
for these fumigating, macaroni-stuffing ashore in a small boat.” They avoided home once more.”
organ grinders.” Piraeus by climbing a hill: “Picking our The next month, Twain received his
Despite this penchant for insults, Twain way so stealthily over that rocky, nettle- comeuppance: In Damascus, he came
wrote a sincere tribute to the Dominican grown eminence, made me feel a good down with “a violent attack of cholera,”
friars who were the health-care heroes deal as if I were on my way somewhere possibly from bathing in a contaminated
of his time: “When the cholera was rag- to steal something.” They attracted bark- river. The sickness prevented him from
ing in Naples; when the people were ing dogs and a man who yelled at them seeing parts of Syria, but he still found a
dying by the hundreds and hundreds for eating his grapes. At the Parthenon, cause to laugh: It was “a good excuse to
every day; when every concern for the they bribed the local guards to open a lie there on that wide divan and take an
public welfare was swallowed up in self- gate. At last, they wandered around “the honest rest.” He recovered, and the trip
ish private interest, and every citizen noblest ruins we had ever looked upon” continued. Two months later, Twain was
made the taking care of himself his sole and admired the sleeping city of Athens: back in the United States, ready to write
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS/GETTY IMAGES

object, these men banded themselves
together and went about nursing the sick
and burying the dead. Their noble efforts
cost many of them their lives.”
From Naples, Twain’s paddle-wheel
steamship made for Greece and its mad-
“Not on the broad earth is there another
picture half so beautiful!”
On the return trip, they encountered
more dogs and vineyard sentries and
made it to the seashore. They hailed a
boat, but it turned out to be full of police
the book that would make him a house-
hold name.
The voyage also gave him a house-
hold: In 1870, Twain married Olivia
Langdon, the sister of a passenger he had
met aboard the Quaker City.
31
 American Foreign and
Defense Policy: Between
Scylla and Charybdis
Rather than react, we must chart a course
Text
BY MARK HELPRIN
IFTEEN years before the coronavirus pandemic, I wrote a
speech for a world-renowned physician who was coin-
F cidentally the majority leader of the United States
Senate, and thus not without influence. He went, whole-
heartedly, all-in, delivering it in the Senate, at Harvard Medical
School’s most important annual lecture, at Davos, at the
Bohemian Grove (where the only Bohemian to enthuse suffi-
ciently to request a copy was Henry Kissinger), and elsewhere.
And, of course, Senator Bill Frist took it to the White House.
He presented a strong—one might even say urgent—case for
establishing joint research and vaccine-and-curative manufac-
turing centers judiciously spaced throughout the country; the
doubling of medical- and nursing-school outputs; incentives for
commercial pharmaceutical and medical-device research and
production; increasing the number of hospital beds; providing
for the stocks, structures, and reserve personnel for large-scale
emergency field hospitals; and laying up stores of necessaries
ROMAN GENN
Mr. Helprin is a novelist and an essayist. This essay is sponsored by National
Review Institute.
32 | w w w. n a t i o n a l r e v i e w. c o m
such as personal protective equipment (PPE) and, specifically,
ventilators. Given that the laws of economics were not repealed,
the ancillary effect of the supply surge in some of these medical
goods—such as doctors, nurses, and hospital capacity—would
have lowered their cost or at least slowed its rise. He asked for
$100 billion per year. Had spending kept up at that level, which
it need not have to assure adequate preparation, it would have
amounted to only one-quarter of the monies shoveled into the
furnace of COVID-19 in the last few weeks alone. He got a total
of $2.4 billion over four years for the Strategic National
Stockpile that of late has proved wholly inadequate.
This is the American way, a wing and a prayer. We count on
the forgiveness of the vast wilderness and its once-perceived
infinite resources. Fail, and you can pick up and go elsewhere,
all the while enjoying the protection of God and the two great
oceans. But those days are over.
Perhaps we have learned the necessity of preparedness for
epidemics, but even in the midst of this emergency, and especial-
ly so, it is of supreme importance to recognize that the same prin-
ciple applies to defense and America’s continuing sovereignty
M AY 4, 2020
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as we know it, something we cannot take for granted given the
threats to it both internally, as a result of many species of decline,
and externally, the subject below. It may seem strange to address
the question of war in a time of epidemics, but just as 15 years
ago had the address of epidemics been heeded we might not be
in the position we are in now, we have the opportunity to avoid
a different kind of catastrophe 15 years hence.
In the three decades since the fall of the Soviet Union,
American foreign and defense policy under four Democratic
and three Republican administrations (one need not include the
adult Bush and his adult presidency) has been a primarily reac-
tive, deadly incompetent, crazy mix of unilateral disarmament,
overextension, appeasement, misapprehension, and lack of pru-
dent preparation. Having lost the knack of winning wars and
maintaining alliances, politicians of both parties boast fulsome-
ly about the military even as it has become decisively weaker
both absolutely and relative to its expanding tasks and the
growing strength of our adversaries.
As America reacts to one thing or another, each on its own, iso-
lated terms, and often unsuccessfully, the underlying forces gath-
ering to its disadvantage advance as if wholly unrecognized.
Success usually requires doing what is painful and difficult, but,
individually and collectively, Americans have developed con-
summate skill in shying from difficulty—from diet to debt, to
work, risk, sacrifice, and prudence. We readily fall victim to a
Scylla or a Charybdis rather than exercising the simple discipline
Turkey is playing off the U.S. against Russia as
Egypt’s Nasser did in the Fifties. We should be
decisive and seize the initiative.
that would allow us the reward of safe passage between them.
And in like fashion we suffer failures, in order of ascending
importance, in regard to the Middle East, Europe, Russia, China,
and the state of America’s alliances and military. Sadly, in what
follows, reference to roads not taken is born not of hindsight but
A
in recollection of policy publicly advocated at the time.
FTER 40 years of irrelevance in the Middle East, Russia
has reasserted itself to the detriment of all. It began
with President Obama and continues under President
Trump. Following Turkey’s hundred-year sleep, Recep Tayyip
Erdogan in full megalomania bids to restore a supercharged
Ottoman Empire with Turkey as the leader of a confederation of
61 Muslim countries and the first Islamic aircraft carrier. And
for the first time in more than 2,000 years, Persia is once again
facing the West from the shores of the Eastern Mediterranean.
These three malevolent forces are newly acting upon the ever-
volatile cockpit in which Africa, Europe, and Asia collide. Over
millennia, clashing empires shattered this battlefield into atom-
ized tribes, clans, sects, disappearing kingdoms, artificial states,
and constantly shifting alliances amid near-continuous warfare.
As in the intricate mosaics of Islamic art, which are never solid
fields of color, tile after tile flashes in alternating conflicts.
The United States focuses on one eruption or another without
coherent strategies for dealing with or authoring underlying
shifts, as once it did when it expelled Soviet influence and kept it
at bay for generations. What might have been some recent alter-
natives to our regional approach? After invading Afghanistan
we should have left within a few months, accepting both the
benefits and limitations of punitive action. Only after 20 years
are we now about to do that, despite the Taliban conquests and
massacres that will follow. As in Vietnam, we will declare vic-
tory. And Hillary Clinton is Cleopatra.
In Iraq, because only as it moves does the American military
go from strength to strength, we should have pivoted west and
crushed the Assad regime against the Israeli anvil. Leaving
compliant generals in Baghdad and Damascus, we could have
seated our forces in Saudi Arabia’s highly developed northern
military infrastructure linked to the sea and two days equidis-
tant from Riyadh, Baghdad, and Damascus, with the explicit
understanding that trouble and terrorism would bring us back.
Thus the center of gravity in the Middle East could have been
pacified and secured, our polity unshattered by division over
counterinsurgency’s toll in blood, our undegraded echelons her-
metically protected by the desert and ready for emergency
deployment elsewhere, and our defense budget devoted to the
major-power competition obviously on its way but foolishly
dismissed as “next-war-itis.”
Though we continued to fail in Iraq and Afghanistan, by the
end of George W. Bush’s second term, when it was absolutely
clear that Iran would develop nuclear weapons come hell or
high water, his parting gift should have been the destruction of
the means for their creation. Even in the unlikely event that Iran
would quickly choose to restart its nuclear program, a quarter
century’s work destroyed would take a quarter century to
rebuild, at which point it could receive another visit.
What should not have been done was to rescue the Iranian
economy from sanctions, release $150 billion to finance the
subversion of at least four regional states, allow ballistic-missile
development, and assure scheduled nuclear breakout. Even
Neville Chamberlain was not so blind as directly to subsidize
German arms and aggression. For such an unprecedented act,
Barack Obama, John Kerry, and their fools-in-aid so willing to
believe the ever-smiling Iranian negotiators (why could they
possibly have been so happy?) will be indelibly enrolled in the
annals of stupidity and betrayal.
But what prescription now for the Middle East, with the
patient, as so often before, dead yet again? Turkey is playing off
the U.S. against Russia as Egypt’s Nasser did in the Fifties. We
should be decisive and seize the initiative, moving both to expel
Turkey from NATO and to transfer American military bases
there to Greece, Egypt, and Jordan. Then we will see how
delighted are the Turks to fall into the embrace of Russia, their
near and ancient enemy, and whether this might cause a change
of heart, or, if not, regime.
At present, Russia is based in the Middle East only in the
wreckage of Syria. Thus our object should be to check its
33
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overtures to Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf states, and Israel by
providing them with the military presence (inter alia, in a
restored Sixth Fleet), aid, and support that the U.S. (GDP $22
trillion) can, and Russia (GDP $1.6 trillion) cannot. Iran will do
and suffer anything to get nuclear weapons. Though appearing
to buckle after the American killing of Qasem Soleimani in
early January, it succeeded via misdirection in accomplishing
its main objective, which was and is to buy nuclear time. Even
if it fails to develop a reliable ICBM, as the U.S. and the USSR
demonstrated in at least three separate programs, missiles can
be launched by dropping them in the sea and using the pressure
of surrounding water to steady them like a gantry. This way,
Iran can loft lesser-range missiles from freighters in the
Atlantic relatively close to the U.S. Several high-altitude
nuclear detonations resulting in strong, widespread, electro-
magnetic pulses would be sufficient to destroy the country, and,
alternatively, two or three major cities leveled by nuclear blasts
would go a very long way toward doing so. Especially given
Shiite messianic conceptions, the Iranian nuclear question is by
far the most important matter in the Middle East, existential
even for the United States. Apparently we dare not definitively
resolve it, as we must, and soon.
So, in the absence of unambiguous success in the sanctions
campaign, and sufficiently in advance of nuclear breakout, the
United States should covertly propose to Iran’s two other major
targets—Saudi Arabia and Israel—a massive, tripartite, short-
duration, aerial campaign against Iranian nuclear infrastructure.
Such an action would establish a new, unprecedented strong
horse (the classic Middle Eastern term for the dominant nation
or force) in firm control of the Middle East’s center of gravity.
The strategic geography would make a ground war unnecessary
on our part and virtually impossible for Iran beyond activating
sure-to-be-reluctant proxies. An Iranian-initiated missile and
naval war of injured pride would follow, but despite the damage
to Saudi oil production it would neither go well for Iran nor last
long. A major condition precedent for such a move, however,
would be a president who had not severely restricted his freedom
of action by deliberately alienating and inflaming his political
T
opponents as the chief strategy for rousing his base.
HE steady decline in Russia’s “soft” powers has left it
increasingly dependent on raw military potential, espe-
cially nuclear. Despite this, the conventional wisdom
discounts the Russian threat to Europe, in that, excluding
Turkey, the combined NATO and EU population is roughly six
times, and their GDPs 27 times, Russia’s. According to this
logic, the similar discrepancy between Israel and what are com-
monly called the confrontation states should mean that Israel
does not exist. And yet it does. The military balance in Europe
is not what it seems. America’s attachment to its European part-
ners is increasingly tenuous, its presence in Europe approxi-
mately 60,000 troops and a token number of aircraft in 2019, as
opposed to a third of a million troops and 640 aircraft 30 years
earlier. In the absence of adequate sea- and air-lift of military
echelons and logistics from the U.S. to Europe (76 percent of
the ships designated for this are so inadequately maintained that
they cannot even leave port), American forces have become
nothing more than what is commonly referred to by NATO
strategists as a trip wire, for a nuclear response that will not
34 | w w w. n a t i o n a l r e v i e w. c o m
occur, for example, should Russia reclaim, as it can in a single
day, its three former colonies on the Baltic.
Since the Cold War, NATO has doubled the length of its land
borders contiguous to the Warsaw Pact then and Russia and
Belarus now, while reducing its continental military capacity to
a fraction of what it was. For example, in 1991, Britain, France,
and Germany combined had, rounded, 1,250,000 regulars,
2,000 combat aircraft, and 10,000 tanks. Today, comparable
figures are 500,000 regulars, 800 aircraft, and 700 tanks. The
reduction is partially due to changes in tactics, to new weapon-
ry, and to similar Russian decreases, but also to an inaccurate
assessment of Russian capabilities and doctrine; the persistent
delusion that diplomacy rather than deterrent force kept the
peace in Europe during the Cold War; and the military-technical
misjudgment that advances in precision-guided munitions
(PGMs) justify Europe’s stand-down.
If, for example, a single plane can reliably hit ten times as
many targets per sortie as its predecessor, the thinking goes,
only a tenth as many planes are necessary, as ten will do the
work of a hundred. But not only can a hundred planes operate
in ten times as many places at once, the loss of a single plane in
the reduced force would diminish that force by a full 10 percent,
as opposed to only 1 percent in the force of 100. Further, in (rel-
ative to a major conflict in Europe) the far less taxing wars in
the Middle East, PGMs have often been in short supply. While
the U.S. mainly sat out the teensy war in Libya as it “led from
behind,” NATO ran out after less than a month. As the Maginot
Line and the wars in Vietnam and Afghanistan illustrate, tech-
nology does not always adequately substitute for strategy, or
quality for quantity.
The weakening of NATO in favor of diminished national mil-
itaries subject to differing authorities and doctrines presents
Russia with a fragmented opposition supping on the poisons of
modernism, self-abnegation, and the rejection of virtue, and
thereby unwilling properly to defend itself. In the not-so-distant
future, it is hardly impossible that totalitarian Russia, with a
honed conventional force and a long-time, hyper-permissive
nuclear doctrine that often blends nuclear with conventional
war and flirts with concepts such as nuclear “escalation to de-
escalate,” will succeed in separating Europe from the United
States and edging it into its orbit one step at a time.
NATO never should have stood down to the extent that it did
at the close of the Cold War, never should have expanded its
area of responsibility, never should embark upon remote oper-
ations, and never should relinquish its centrality of command.
The Trump administration’s unnecessary and promiscuous
trade fights with Europe, public goading of its leaders, and
denigration of NATO are purely negative. Rather, achieving
adequate European defense expenditures—always and forever
difficult—requires from the U.S. persuasive argument, incen-
tives, disincentives, public appeal (propaganda if you wish),
and diplomacy, not negotiating techniques disguised as infan-
tile tantrums, which may actually be infantile tantrums dis-
guised as negotiating techniques.
And one would think that the Europeans, noticing China’s
octopus embrace such as they themselves once imposed on the
rest of the world, feeling once again and in no small way the
aggressive expansion of Islam, and facing the direct threat of
Russian arms, would understand the deep and historically
proven necessity of both the American alliance and attending to
M AY 4, 2020
2col_QXP-1127940309.qxp 4/15/2020 12:59 AM Page 35
their own strengths. But, in an invitation to tragedy, they don’t.
As Russia threatens to dominate an emasculated NATO and
EU, Europe cannot be taken lightly or for granted, especially if
China masters East Asia and makes vassals of our Pacific allies,
and Iran continues to destabilize the Middle East. While the
modern Democrats, “citizens of the world,” display affection
for surrender on every front, President Trump thinks America
can go it alone in geopolitical isolation. The results of both
approaches promise to be very much the same. To wit,
T
Atlanticism must be restored.
WENTY years ago in these pages I explained in detail
why China would achieve rough military parity with the
U.S. by this date. It seemed clearly in the offing if one
took into account ancient Chinese principles adapted by the
Meiji and, subsequently and amazingly, Israel; extrapolations
of Chinese economic growth; and Deng Xiaoping’s stated
reform and military policies. (See my “East Wind,” in the
March 20, 2000, issue.) Though we are not quite there yet, we
are close. Among many other indications, the Chinese navy is
now larger than, if not yet superior to, our own; China is ahead
in quantum computing and communications; we are unaware
of the details of its nuclear arsenal and have failed to bring it
into an arms-control regime that would provide at least some
transparency and temporary restraint; and it is expanding its
military reach and basing abroad as America’s contracts.
The trade problem is the consequence of our own
negligence and greed.
Although the economic growth making all this possible has
been at least temporarily eliminated by the current world health
and economic crises, it is generally three times that of the
United States and applied to a hardly insignificant base: that is,
a GDP two-thirds the size of our own. Though the United States
has focused on economic relations with China while the far
more threatening military dimension remains virtually unrec-
ognized, the difficulties and imbalances are indeed a problem
of national security and must be addressed. But the trade prob-
lem is the consequence of our own negligence and greed.
Beginning in the Seventies, we knew that isolating ourselves
from rapidly intensifying world trade, due to the revolutions in
shipping technology and communications and the emergence
of developing countries, would degrade the quality of our
manufactures and exclude us from wider markets.
And we knew that the costs of labor at home and abroad
would take decades or perhaps a century to equalize. At that
time, the American tradition of innovation and mechanization
unsurpassed, we were by far the world leaders in computers,
communications, research, robotics, and investment capital.
But rather than spurred by cheap foreign labor to automate
and mechanize, we raced offshore to harvest short-term gains,
something terribly destructive not only of the economy but of
the character of the American experiment. The only solution
now is to stimulate research, innovation, and mechanization
on a grand scale while accepting the material sacrifices it will
take to do so, for such things come at a cost. But, character
unrestored, we now seek remedy not in competition and the
free market but in fiat trade, by regulation, tariff, and decree,
that has all the excessively supervisory presumptions of affir-
mative action or planned economies and, like them, is bound
to fail.
China is aggressively reordering the world via an oppor-
tunistic alliance with Russia aimed at dominating Eurasia.
Whereas a weaker Russia depends upon the decline of Europe
and openings created by the endemic madness of the Middle
East, China is powerful enough to bully the successful nations
that surround it, bringing them into its habitual tributary sys-
tem of suzerainty, thousands of years older than the Pax
Americana. Distressingly but not surprisingly, Secretary of
Defense Mark Esper’s attempt in November 2019 to elicit even
symbolic unity vis-à-vis China from an audience of nervous
Asian defense ministers fell completely flat. Blatantly assert-
ing control over the South China Sea, China builds island mil-
itary bases and sends fishing fleets and oil-exploration
platforms into the waters of sovereign nations to its south, while,
incredibly, harassing the rightful owners in their own waters. At
one time, these depredations would have been deterred by the
U.S. Navy. Now, however, quite apart from the risk of open
military confrontation with a nuclear power, the U.S. Navy
would not prevail.
With China in de facto control of and able to spike the
Panama Canal, 40 percent of the Navy would be unable to reach
the Pacific other than by running a persistent blockade off the
southern capes should China choose to deploy its nine nuclear
attack submarines in those inhospitable waters. American ships
that got through, and the two Pacific fleets, would then have to
steam vast distances and pass many choke points before even
reaching the area of operations. On the way and in tight pas-
sages, warships, auxiliaries, and convoys would be the targets
of China’s 48 other attack submarines, blue-water combatants,
land-based aircraft, and swarms of missiles specifically de-
signed to kill ships. Only then would our insufficiently support-
ed vessels, greatly reduced in number and within range of
thousands of China’s fighter planes and bombers, attempt to
exercise their powers. America has lost the South China Sea,
only for lack of immediate and resolute countermeasures. Now
the only remedy is not the stated aim of keeping it open but
rather to close it by blockade.
For China, Japan is obviously a much harder case than
Southeast Asia, but the same process has begun in the East
China Sea. Now rapidly catching up to the most advanced U.S.
naval technology, once its systems are matured, China, with
100 major shipyards, will have the option of the kind of surge
that allowed U.S. naval superiority in World War II, and we,
with six, will not. Our few Western Pacific bases, more or less
unhardened, are vulnerable to Chinese missiles, bombers, and
special operations. Nothing would have better stimulated
China to cooperate in denuclearizing North Korea than if we
35
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had properly fortified existing bases, established others in the
same mold, and embarked upon a naval and air buildup.
Instead, we threatened to tariff iPhones and strained to make
Xi Jinping buy more soybeans.
Further, underlying every geostrategic calculation involving
China is its known, stated, and sufficient nuclear deterrent.
However, it manufactures, stores, and deploys nuclear arma-
ments in an astounding 3,000 miles of tunnels opaque to
Western intelligence services. Given that all nuclear states sub-
scribe to varying nuclear doctrines, China may not share the
American conception of nuclear sufficiency. Crediting a differ-
ent calculus involving absorption of greater damage, over-
whelming retaliatory capacity, bluff, risk, and psychological
manipulation, China may someday unveil, courtesy of its hid-
den infrastructure, a massive nuclear arsenal that would shock
and intimidate the rest of the world. Which is why the Trump
administration, having been advised to bring China into a veri-
fiable arms-control regime, should not treat such an initiative,
T
as it has, offhandedly.
HOUGH the oceans cannot provide absolute security, and
never have, they can be leveraged to great advantage. In
the Cold War, despite intercontinental bombers and
ICBMs, American naval superiority was immensely advanta-
geous in fighting and deterring conventional war, and during
the world wars it was our chief guarantor. Great utility still
inheres in the oceans if it is understood in light of what soon
may come.
Given China’s rise, its expedient alliance with Russia, and its
reach across Asia into a senescent, enervated Europe, the
United States—while retreating neither from Asia nor from the
Old World—would do well to assure the possibility of retrench-
ment into the Western Hemisphere and the transformation of
this resource-rich half of the world, with combined populations
of a billion and GNPs recently and perhaps restorably of $28
trillion, into a fortified, unassailable base.
In view of modern conditions, how could a new version of the
Monroe Doctrine be possible? Although in 1823 the Atlantic
helped to insulate America from the European powers, the field
of maneuver in, for example, Brazil was equally inaccessible to
both our tiny navy and the large fleets of our rivals. It took a lot
of chutzpah to come up with such a policy, and yet, granted
British support, we stood by it.
China penetrates Latin America via diplomacy writ small and
capital writ large. In absolute terms our economy has before the
disruptions been 150 percent of China’s, in per capita terms
more than six times larger (thus allowing a greater margin of
resources to be diverted). Weak, Russian-sponsored Latin dic-
tatorships are infected splinters that should have been attended
to previously and now cry out for it. If Russia is able to muscle
us aside in its near-abroad, we should certainly be capable of
returning the favor. We have the advantage not only of geogra-
phy. Our Latin population can be an asset in forging benevolent
and respectful alliances in this hemisphere, and the general cor-
relation of forces makes it entirely possible to crowd out China
and Russia by means of fair and mutually advantageous trade,
economic aid and development, a free and democratic model of
governance, and restoration of the naval and air supremacy that
we are in the process of sacrificing because of muddled think-
36 | w w w. n a t i o n a l r e v i e w. c o m
ing and self-doubt. A new Monroe Doctrine would not entail a
young nation in the age of imperialism paradoxically flirting
with the system in defiance of which it was born. We don’t any-
more need cheap bananas, but a bastion against swelling totali-
tarianism could be a saving grace in things to come.
The U.S. will fail to meet accumulating challenges abroad
unless it repairs its alliances, restores its military strength, and
newly secures the Western Hemisphere, none of which is at
present a concern of the political parties except to oppose,
tepidly endorse, or let die. If one aspires to build a skyscraper
in New York and it doesn’t work out, the problem vanishes as,
in the context of a stable legal and economic system, one moves
on to the next thing. But whether enemies or friends, countries
hang around, and among nations there is no protection other
than in strength and maneuver. President Trump took office
schooled in commercial real estate and unaware of the balances
of power that determine international latitude of action. He
promptly took to whirling about, pressuring and attacking
allies, rivals, and enemies alike. Rather than alienating Europe,
Canada, Mexico, and every free nation in the Pacific, he might
have assembled them in a united front to address China’s rogue
behaviors. Instead, he embarked upon a blind lashing-out that,
among other things, sabotaged the increase in economic growth
he had achieved through tax and regulatory reforms. The U.S.
has experienced its greatest successes in winning and deterring
wars when substantively allied with other powers, and its great-
est failures otherwise, which is not to deny that at times we must
stand alone.
As it has with Southeast Asia, China is set to Finlandize
South Korea and Japan. Abandoning national loyalties (pace
valiant little Britain) for a defenseless, supranational bureau-
cracy, Europe is set to fall to demographic suicide, Russian
expansion, and uncontrolled immigration. Only with the rein-
vigoration of NATO and our Pacific alliances will it be other-
wise, and this we cannot bring about without reversing our
steep military decline.
The average peacetime military expenditure from 1940 to
2000 was 5.7 percent of GDP. In the past 20 years, the compa-
rable average in the base military budget—i.e., not including
emergency overseas contingency funding—has been 3.03 per-
cent. There is only one outcome rationally to expect after cut-
ting that budget by nearly half. Delusions in all quarters
notwithstanding, worn by two decades of low-intensity war, the
American military has fallen behind in nuclear deterrence, crit-
ical technologies, readiness, manning, training, and morale.
Our personnel are overburdened, our ships rusty, arsenals
depleted, bases poorly protected, air force contracting, defense-
industrial base disappearing, and funding insufficient. It is all a
matter of record. Is correction politically impossible? If so, sur-
vival as the kind of sovereign nation we have been since the
beginning is impossible. For, unaddressed and as always,
extortion from without will stimulate the rise of collaborators
from within.
To depart from myopic and solely reactive foreign and
defense policies so as to look ahead proactively will require rare
statesmanship, the defeat of the radically drifting Democrats as
constituted at present, and the restoration of informed, intelli-
gent, and adult Republican leadership. Though at the moment
we have only Scylla and Charybdis, the wide, calm waters
between them beckon and abide.
M AY 4, 2020
 Athwart
The Blather and the Bile
OCAL news, what’s left of it, has been great.
Hard, sad stories, uplifting tales, appeals to
L community, Blitz spirit. I work on a local paper
and couldn’t be prouder of what we’ve done.
On the other hand, though: The big national news media,
a purveyor of blather and bile in the best of times, have
spent the last month wearing a caul of rotten blubber. But,
you say, things have been horrid. Historically horrid. The
news from overtaxed hospitals is miserable; the economic
toll is harrowing. True. But an occasional piece of good
news would be nice. A little sliver of chocolate to go with
the cold, lumpy gruel. Instead, we get stories like this from
Business Insider:
“Americans are driving less because of the coronavirus.
That’s hurting red-light camera revenue.”
Boo and/or hoo.
At least the story didn’t blame Trump, but everyone
knows that’s his fault too, right? We know that if
President Obama had heard reports in December that
someone in Wuhan had a hacking cough, he would have
stood up, a steely glint in his eyes, pushed a button,
rushed toward a secret panel in the Oval Office as it
opened to reveal a fireman’s pole, and slid down to the
Batcave to personally make a vaccine. He was just
that good.
Instead, we have President Trump, who, if you believe
the chattering class, decided that mass death was a
crackerjack reelection strategy, threw himself into the
exquisitely lubricated machinery of the public-health
establishment to prevent the CDC from doing anything,
time-traveled to exhaust the supplies not replenished by
the previous administration, and used Jedi mind tricks to
get Democratic officials to encourage people to go to pub-
lic festivals.
If he’d acted more swiftly, would the coverage have
been different? If he’d acted contrary to the WHO’s dis-
missal of the possibility of human-to-human transmission,
perhaps a CNN interview might have gone like this:
“Dr. Torgenson, any views on the president’s refusal to
accept the WHO statement?”
“Yes. It’s troubling. The president is not a scientist. He
is a climate denier. He has no expertise—”
“Let me stop you right there, because climate has noth-
ing to do with this. Is it safe to say that the president is
erring on the side of caution to prevent mass fatalities in a
rapidly unfolding situation whose details are obscured by
an authoritarian regime?”
Can you imagine that? Sure! I mean, if you can enjoy a
Pixar movie with talking cars, you can imagine a CNN
host taking the side of the administration. Now let’s say
Trump shut down travel to and from China in early
January and CNN presents the following colloquy:
Mr. Lileks blogs at Lileks.com.
BY JAMES LILEKS Text
“Jack, I have to ask, why have some opposed a tough line
with China? Was it because we assume racism and xeno-
phobia in anyone on the right, or something else?”
“Well, Chris, yes, we do flatter ourselves by relying on
unexamined preconceptions we’ve held since college. But I
think there’s something more at work. I think a lot of us have
an unconscious deference to China because we realize it’s a
big media market, and our employers are invested in main-
taining good ties, even if it means turning a blind eye to the
obvious egregious offenses of the government.”
“Absolutely, Jack. I remember when we did a story about
Chinese treatment of the Muslim population, but it was a
few seconds in a piece about American Islamophobia. We
really do hate ourselves, don’t we?”
“I’d say that’s fair. There’s also grudging admiration for
China, because they build trains, and we love trains. Well,
we love the idea of trains, for the people. It’s a bit ironic
that we congratulate ourselves for being anti-authoritarian,
and we get watery knees at the thought of a leader who
can make the trains run on time.”
“Exactly. I’m quietly chastened just thinking about it.
But let me ask, why a travel ban just on China and not
Europe? Is it, as some say, because the latter is full of
white people?”
“I thought the same thing, since I see the world entirely
through the prisms of skin color and eye shape, but the
more I thought about it, the more it seemed it could be a
brief pause to let Europe, and Americans abroad, adjust to
the new reality before the inevitable ban.”
“Never thought of that! Thanks, Jack.”
It makes you sad to consider it, no? If only the president
had acted sooner, with decisive strokes—shut down every-
thing in early January, nationalized industry, assumed Il
Duce powers—surely the press would be effusive with
praise, tinged with a bit of embarrassment.
“You’re right, Mr. President, China did need confronting,
and we’re glad you opened our eyes to the importance of
bringing some elements of critical manufacturing back
home. We thought you just hated China because they
screwed up a batch of your branded ties ten years ago. Well,
turns out we’re not the smartest guys in the room, but gosh,
going forward we won’t huff the sweet perfume of our own
hindquarter emissions, and we’ll examine things with a new
perspective based in a holistic appreciation of the inevitable
failings, and triumphs, of human systems.”
Yes, you can bet it would’ve been just like that.
Even if the press had praised Trump because he did
everything they wanted on the timetable they’d invented,
well, six months later you’d have seen stories like this:
“Trump’s early shutdown may have saved some lives, but
nationwide, traffic-camera revenue is still down, leading
cities to cut funds for programs helping the most vulnerable.”
“R.” evil, “D.” good. As the man said: And that’s the
way it is.
37
Text The Long View
“I can’t hear him. Can anyone
hear him?”
“I can’t.”
“I can’t.”
“I can’t even see him.”
“Okay, then, let’s wrap this up, give
JOIN ZOOM MEETING the WHO story some real space,
maybe ask their PR team to write it, if
https://newyorktimes.zoom.us/j/967 possible? And can we get some images
617333 of people who will die soon because
Password: 656414 Trump’s cutting their funding? Can we
get some of that?”
“Are we all here?” “We can do like a photo essay,
“I can’t hear you guys.” Dean? Maybe a series of Sunday
“Are you on mute? Need to take— Magazine portraits of people around
just hit the little microphone thing— the world who will die—‘Donald
Dean, can you hit the little microphone Trump: Angel of Death’ or something?
thing?” Just spitballing. We can come up with
“Hey! I can see you guys!” a better title.”
“Great, okay, all here.” “No, I like that one! Let’s do a six-
“Okay, let’s dive in. We need to talk parter Monday to Saturday leading
about the stories we’ll be covering for to the Sunday photo piece, they’ll
the next few days on the front page. love that!”
Who is covering WHO?” “The Pulitzer people?”
“Whom.” “I meant the Chinese, but them too.”
“Whom? Who is Whom?” “Dean, how do you want to handle
“No, I mean, it’s who is covering the Chinese angle? Looking like
whom, not who is covering who.” Trump is going full-on racist blame
“I mean who. Covering WHO.” game, so I was thinking that maybe we
“Oh, right. Hahahaha. Like the old send a team to China and do some
Abbott and Costello routine! I loved guy-on-the-street life-of type deals,
that!” with pictures and multimedia stuff for
“Me too!” the app—could be really impactful.”
“Me too!” “Love it. Let’s ask the government
“Me too!” to help us identify ordinary Chinese
“Actually, those movies were pretty people to interview.”
racist.” “Great idea.”
“True. And I condemn them.” “Hey, just chiming in here. Do
“Me too!” you guys think that maybe we
“Me too!” should be more critical of the Chinese
“Me too!” government? After all, it’s pretty
“But to answer your question, Dean, clear they lied about xxbxbbxxp
we’re doing a very deep dive on the akskksk pssstttttttttatttsttttatt kkkr-
whole tick-tock of how we got here, how rrrkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkk”
COVID-19 spread, and how the World “What happened?”
Health Organization heroically— “Are you guys still there?”
and bravely I might add—traveled to “Ni hao!”
China to collect government press re - “Who’s that?”
leases in person, well after the virus “Hello my friends! Hello! I am just
was raging—” dropping in here into this Zoom chat
“Was it raging? The Chinese say it for a moment to say hello to my
was pretty small potatoes.” friends!”
“Well, yes, of course, and we have “Who is that?”
no reason not to believe them. And yet, “Is that you, President Xi?”
it’s curious that there is a virus research “Ha ha yes it is Xi, so sorry for inter-
lab so close—” ruption. Just want to tell you how hard
38 | w w w. n a t i o n a l r e v i e w. c o m
BY ROB LONG
we are all working here in China to
eradicate the mysterious and
unknown-source virus.”
“How did you get into this call, if I
may ask, sir? This is a private New
York Times editorial meeting.”
“Yes, yes, I know. But I asked
myself, I said, ‘President Xi, don’t
we here in China own Zoom?’ And
the answer to that question was the
same as it is in many many cases,
and that answer was, sort of, yes.
Just want to pass on my good wishes
and to tell you that we in China are
pure transparent all day all time. We
can help you anytime with your
reporting and whatever you need
and we can also make certain sure
that your 5G phones work perfectly
all time.”
“Well, thank you, President Xi.”
“No reason to mention it! Zai jian!”
“Zai jian, sir!”
“Zai jian!”
“Zai jian.”
“Are we all done? Anything else to
discuss for the front section?”
“I have one thought, Dean, if I
may?”
“Sure.”
“I’m wondering if we gave enough
weight to Tara Reade, the woman who
has accused Joe Biden of sexual mis-
conduct? In light of how aggressively
we went after the Brett Kavanaugh
allegations, it seems to me that—”
“Can anyone else hear him?”
“—seems to me that we’re maybe
operating with a double standard here
and that—”
“I can’t.”
“I can’t.”
“I can’t.”
“—just ends up confirming our
critics’ worst suspicions, that we’re a
partisan propaganda sheet for the
Democratic Party—”
“We can’t hear you! Sorry! I’m sure
you had some excellent thoughts and
thanks for your input! Anyone else?
Okay then, meeting adjourned.”
“—so maybe we can discuss this . . .
Wait, can you guys hear me? Is every-
one disconnecting? Is the Zoom meet-
ing fin—”
LEAVE MEETING
M AY 4, 2020
 Books, Arts & Manners
What Drives
Deaths of
Despair?
ROBERT VERBRUGGEN
Text
I
Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism,
by Anne Case and Angus Deaton
(Princeton University Press, 312 pp.,
$27.95)
N 2015, economists Anne Case
and Angus Deaton garnered a lot
of media coverage for an academic
paper documenting a rise in
“deaths of despair”—from alcohol,
suicide, and drugs—among American
whites, especially middle-aged whites
without a college degree. Now they have
fleshed out their thoughts on the issue
in a book. Their argument is that in order
to combat this plague, the U.S. needs to
boost wages, bring back unions, fight
crony capitalism, and deeply reform the
health-care system.
If that strikes you as a preexisting wish
list that’s been tacked on to a problem
that happened to present itself but is only
tangentially related, you’re not alone.
Case and Deaton’s arguments linking
deaths of despair to their proposed
remedies are far from airtight, and as a
result the book is underwhelming.
Let’s start by taking a look at the scope
of the problem. In their definition,
“deaths of despair” comprise three
different categories. Drug deaths are
overdoses that, according to the medical
examiners and coroners who fill out
S P O N S O R E D B Y National Review Institute
death certificates, were either accidental In a sense, then, Case and Deaton
in nature or of an “undetermined” intent. haven’t really discovered much that’s
Alcohol deaths have several causes, new. They’ve mainly drawn more
including cirrhosis and other liver attention to the already well-
diseases. And suicides consist of all documented opioid epidemic, and in the
intentionally self-inflicted deaths, in- process pointed out that suicide and
cluding intentional drug overdoses. alcohol deaths are trending upward too,
Case and Deaton note that drug over- which is undeniably an important
doses make up by far the biggest share of problem but plays only a supporting
deaths of despair, but, bizarrely, they role in the spectacular explosion of
don’t provide a clear breakdown of how deaths of despair.
all three categories have changed over The book-length treatment of this
time. Fortunately, Senator Mike Lee’s observation could be saved, of course, by
Social Capital Project released a report a compelling argument about what to do
late last year with the relevant data, most about it, rooted in an accurate diagnosis
pertinently this chart tracking deaths of of why these deaths are rising. But the
despair among Case and Deaton’s main arguments here are mostly lacking.
demographic focus, middle-aged whites: Case and Deaton do get the origin story
mostly right on drugs, even if they are too
dismissive of the benefits that opioids
provide for pain patients who don’t
respond to anything else. In 1996, Purdue
Deaths of Despair,
Pharma released OxyContin, an opioid
In Total and by Cause
1914–2017, Crude Rates, chemically similar to heroin that
Non-Hispanic Whites Ages 45–54 released its dose over the course of
many hours. Some patients became
addicted to the drug they were
100
prescribed, and thanks to lax prescribing
90 Deaths of Despair
practices and corrupt doctors who ran
Suicide
80 Alcohol-Related
“pill mills,” the drug flooded onto the
Drugs
70
black market too. Some addicts crushed
Deaths per 100,000
60
the pills up and snorted them, defeating
50
the time-release mechanism. Tens of
40
thousands of people died.
30
We should absolutely hold those
20
guilty of this atrocity responsible and
10
try to prevent a repeat. But that doesn’t
0
amount to any kind of fix for the
1910 1920 1930 1940 1950 1960 1970 1980 1990 2000 2010 2020
epidemic today, as Case and Deaton
note. The abuse of prescription pain-
SOURCE: SOCIAL CAPITAL PROJECT ANALYSES OF
CDC DATA. PRIOR TO 1998, THE TREND INCLUDES
killers began to subside years ago, as
HISPANIC WHITES.
Here we see some very important Purdue reformulated Oxy to make it
things. First of all, while all three causes of harder to crush and doctors started
death have been rising since the turn of the prescribing opioids less—but addicts
century, two of them, suicide and alcohol, turned instead to heroin and fentanyl.
are not too far above the levels they hit as The problem to be solved now involves
recently as the 1970s, while the third— illegal drugs more than legal ones.
drugs—is continuing a very long-running So what to do? The most obvious
and long-accelerating increase. Even way to combat drug, alcohol, and
when we limit our focus to the current suicide deaths would be a full-court
century, maybe two-thirds of the death press, backed by massive federal
increase is from overdoses. The story here funding, against drug abuse, alcohol-
is overwhelmingly about drugs, and this ism, and depression. But Case and
would be even more the case if we Deaton have only muted comments to
counted addiction-related suicides as make about such approaches. The
drug deaths rather than as generic suicides. medication-assisted treatments for
39
books_QXP-1127940387.qxp 4/14/2020 6:09 PM Page 40
BOOKS, ARTS & MANNERS
opioid abuse that many find promising—
the medications work by satisfying an
addict’s cravings without getting him
high—are “likely being oversold”
because many addicts either don’t seek
help or they relapse. Stepping up law-
enforcement efforts against heroin and
fentanyl traffickers? Not really on their
radar. Alcoholics Anonymous? “The
scientific evidence is more positive
than not.” Suicide prevention? Case
and Deaton direct any struggling
readers to call a hotline but have rather
little to say about whether expanding
mental-health treatment could reduce
suicide rates.
Instead, they spend the bulk of their
time making a “root causes” type of
argument that pins deaths of despair on
the economic misfortunes of the white
working class. Oddly enough, this
argument begins with a chapter called
“False Trails: Poverty, Income, and the
Great Recession,” laying out the
reasons that economic explanations
don’t really fit the data. There was no
increase in poverty that began at the
turn of the century, making the timing
all wrong for poverty to be the ex -
planation, and at the state level there is
little correlation between whites’
poverty rates and their overdose rates.
The Great Recession greatly affected
incomes and employment but did little
to bend the upward trajectory of
deaths in either direction. One might
add that the longer-term patterns in
deaths of despair pictured above bear
little obvious relationship to economic
trends either.
Then they offer a theory that’s vague
enough to be hard to test in a rigorous
way. (As they put it, “readers will have to
decide whether our account is persuasive
without the benefit of controlled trials or
anything of the sort.”) The idea is that the
white working class gradually lost its
status and way of life starting in maybe
1970 or so, and this problem didn’t
become bad enough to noticeably
affect mortality until the turn of the
century—when people who’d been in
their twenties at the start of the process
reached middle age and their lives were
not as good as they’d expected, having
grown up in the idyllic (for white people)
’50s and ’60s.
This narrative is essentially economic,
though part of it is social and spiritual
too. In all these ways, higher- and lesser-
40 | w w w. n a t i o n a l r e v i e w. c o m
educated Americans are “coming apart,”
to use Charles Murray’s term.
Economically, as overall growth has
fallen off from the highs the U.S.
enjoyed decades ago, more and more of
capitalism’s rewards are being directed
to the best-off, owing to globalization,
the end of union bargaining power,
and the scourge of wage-suppressing
cronyism. Wages for non-college workers
have stagnated completely, indeed
declined somewhat, thanks in part to the
fact that our dysfunctional health-care
system diverts so much compensation to
insurance premiums before workers
even see it. Labor-force participation has
been falling among working-age males
for decades.
On the social side, the decline of
marriage, the rise of chaotic family
structures, and the weakening of
organized religion and other sources
of social capital have been especially
dramatic among those with less edu-
cation. (Papers from the Social Capital
Project and the sociologist Phil Cohen,
which aren’t cited in the book, have
confirmed that deaths of despair are
concentrated specifically among un -
married whites.) Case and Deaton
also report widening gaps in self-
reported well-being between whites
with and those without college
degrees. Oddly, lower-educated whites
are also reporting higher pain levels than
previous generations did, despite the
fact that jobs have become less
physically demanding.
This overarching narrative is solid to
a large extent, but lots of the particulars
are highly debatable. For one thing,
many of the data analyses here involve
trends stretching back 50 years or
more, and the authors are fond of
analyzing those with B.A.s separately
from those without. However, the no-
B.A. category represents an increasingly
disadvantaged group over time, be-
cause more people have acquired B.A.s
in more-recent years. (Hardly anyone
had a B.A. in 1950, but now about a
third of Americans age 25–54 do.)
Another big problem is that Case and
Deaton rely on an inflation-adjustment
method that’s well known to overstate
inflation, meaning that wages have
grown far more strongly than their
numbers suggest. They also arguably
shortchange the roles of the safety net
and women’s economic progress in
making work less necessary for men
and marriage less necessary for women
who want to have kids, and the
growing role of the safety net in
supplementing the incomes of people
who make low wages.
Yet it’s in connecting these half-
century trends—especially the economic
ones—to deaths of despair that Case
and Deaton are on their weakest footing.
“If we are to stop deaths of despair, we
must somehow stop or reverse the
decline of wages for less educated
Americans,” they declare, noting that
both minimum-wage hikes and wage
subsidies could achieve this. They want
to bring back unions and fix the health-
care system so that it costs far less too,
though they don’t give many specifics
as to what that would entail. Broadly
speaking, they think American capital-
ism has stopped working correctly and
needs to be fixed.
Of course, this makes sense as a
remedy for deaths of despair only if
Case and Deaton are correct that a
bunch of economic trends dating to
1970 or so caused a mortality problem
that started around 2000, a proposition
for which they admit to having no
concrete proof. And even if they are
completely correct, one wonders whether
the problem will wear itself out long
before their solutions can have an
effect. After all, if the issue is high,
unsatisfied expectations formed in an
earlier time, then future generations who
grew up in later decades presumably
won’t be so shocked by what they find
in middle age. As it happens, overdose
deaths dropped in 2018 for the first time
in nearly three decades, and fixing
capitalism could take a long time.
Some of Case and Deaton’s proposed
changes, including health-care reform
and higher wages for the working
class, are good goals in their own right,
of course. But the path from these
efforts to meaningful declines in the
death rate is blurry, especially when so
much of the problem comes from
opioid addictions that higher wages
will not treat. Given how much un-
certainty there is about whether Case
and Deaton have identified the right
underlying causes, and if so how
quickly their solutions could work,
attacking the problems of substance
abuse and suicide directly seems like a
much more promising approach.
M AY 4, 2020
 And yet, the blurbs. Even accounting
for the hyperbole of blurbs, the ones for
Discovering Cercas were shocking. For instance,
praise gushed from the lips of Mario
Manuel Vargas Llosa. There is a bona fide
genius, MVL. So, in corona-isolation, I
Mena picked up Lord of All the Dead, thinking
I would read a page or two.
I couldn’t put the book down.
What the hell is this book? The author
J AY N O R D L I N G E R
calls it, in his subtitle, a “nonfiction
novel.” I don’t see that, frankly. I think
the book is a biography, an autobiogra-
phy, a history—even a journal, to a
degree. I think it’s one man’s wrestlings
with his family, himself, and his country.
But the word “wrestlings” sounds bor-
ing. All we need, another writer, self-
Text
absorbed, working out his “issues” on the
page. Lord of All the Dead is anything but
boring. It is also unlike anything else:
strangely original.
The author’s family has a hero: his
mother’s uncle, Manuel Mena, who died
One of the beauties of this book is the
author’s relationship with his mother.
You need some of that, for relief from the
hell of war, for example.
Lord of All the Dead is, among other
things, a feat of organization. It is a book
about writing the book, as much as it is
the book itself. The book goes back and
forth, from past to present—always log-
ically, even unnoticeably (which con-
firms the logic). Sometimes, Cercas
refers to himself in the third person. As I
say, it’s a strange book.
And marvelously written. One sen-
tence goes on for a page and a third. A
stunt, maybe, but very effective, reflect-
ing the fervor of the writer’s thought.
The book begins with a short sentence—
an epigraph, from Horace: Dulce et deco-
rum est pro patria mori. “How sweet and

T
Lord of All the Dead: A Nonfiction Novel,
by Javier Cercas, translated from the
Spanish by Anne McLean (Knopf,
288 pp., $26.95)
HIS is one of the strangest
books I’ve ever read. And it’s
strange that I picked it up in
the first place.
In my business, publicists send you
books, and, a few months ago, a publicist
sent me two by Javier Cercas. I had
never heard of him. Come to find out, he
is a big figure in his country, Spain, and
prominent elsewhere as well.
One of the books was Soldiers of
Salamis, a novel published in 2001.
(Huge bestseller.) The second was the
one I’m writing about, Lord of All the
Dead, published in 2017. It is now avail-
able in an English translation by Anne
McLean. Both books deal with the
Spanish Civil War.
And there was my problem. I have
nothing against the Spanish Civil War.
But I had read and heard enough about it.
(I have even written about it a little, in
books and articles.) There are countless
things to learn about, or acquaint oneself
with, in this crowded world. And there is
only so much time.
My thinking was, If I never hear
another word about Republicans,
Nationalists, Franco, the Abraham
Lincoln Brigade, “Cara al sol,” and all
that, it will be too soon.
PETER
in the war at age 19. This Manuel was a
golden boy, and then—cut down. Cercas
In sleep and half-sleep
grew up hearing about Manuel Mena,
(Which is most of time),
especially from his mother. But for
His nature shifts for me:
Cercas and some other family members,
Stunted—unwolfed—sublime;
there was a wrinkle: Manuel had died on
the Nationalist side.
He is a thug, a plaything,
Cercas is a man of the Left (though not
Or we never found him,
the illiberal Left).
And he’s thin air,
One day, he was talking to his friend
Our hopefulness around him.
David Trueba, a writer and filmmaker. In
fact, Trueba made a movie out of that
He crowds us jealously,
Cercas novel, Soldiers of Salamis. On
Snaps at our friend;
this day, they were talking about Manuel
He pledges sacrifice Text
Mena, the subject that clung to Cercas.
Clear to the end,
Trueba said to him, “I now understand
that in Soldiers of Salamis you invented
Then cowers at incursions.
a Republican hero to hide the fact that
As we goof around the boat,
your family’s hero was a Franco-ist.”
He springs to rescue us, and flounders
Cercas answered, a touch defensively,
In booties and a coat.
“More like a Falangist.”
Cercas did not want to write his
Who is this idiot?
Manuel Mena book. He was as reluctant
And yet the mission
to write it as I was to read it. For one
He heads against our tears—!
thing, what would he tell his mother?
Whose was this vision?
How could he face her? What if he dis-
covered things that were not very nice?
Who paid the price
His mother wanted him to write the
To rescue him, who cast
book—very much so. She didn’t under-
The dice against
stand why he hadn’t already. He said to
His worthlessness at last?
her, “And what if you don’t like what
you read?” She answered, with a twinkle
Who teased and humanized him
in her eye, “You’re now trying to say that
With that name?
you write books so that I’ll like them?
He keeps it, though—
Talk about shutting the barn door after
The one with which he came.
the horses have fled!” —SARAH RUDEN

S P O N S O R E D B Y National Review Institute 41

BOOKS, ARTS & MANNERS
honorable it is to die for one’s country.”
I can almost hear Patton say, “No: It is
sweet and honorable to make the other
poor bastard die for his country.” Wilfred
Owen, 1,900 years after Horace,
referred to “Dulce et decorum,” etc., as
“the old Lie.”
And yet, if no one dies for his country—
sweetly and honorably or not—you may
not have a country.
Seeing as we’ve brought up antiquity,
why does Cercas title his book as he
does? Achilles, remember, was the ulti-
mate golden boy, cut down in battle. He
is the Manuel Mena of eternal and uni-
versal lore. In The Odyssey, Achilles
delivers himself of these stunning
words: “Illustrious Odysseus, don’t try
to console me for my death, for I would
rather toil as the slave of a penniless,
landless laborer than reign here as lord
of all the dead.”
Cercas dedicates himself to finding
out everything about Manuel Mena he
can. This is not easy, because, in about
Cercas is no longer ashamed of his
family’s past. On the contrary, he is
ashamed of his prior shame.
1946, there was a sizable bonfire in the
village of Ibahernando, in the province
of Cáceres, in western Spain: Manuel’s
mother, with her sisters around her, was
burning all of the hero’s effects: letters,
notebooks, photos, clothes, everything.
These mementoes were simply too
painful to have around.
Trying to “trap the past,” says
Cercas, can be like trying to “trap water
in your hands.” He is a meticulous re -
searcher, with a “maniacal urge for
veracity,” as he says. Yet he does indulge
in speculation—informed speculation.
He is apt to write something like this:
“I am not a fantasist or a literato.” (He is
definitely a literato.) “But if I were, I
would say”—and then he goes ahead and
says it. He then says, “But I am not a fan-
tasist or a literato.” Naturally, he’s hav-
ing his cake and eating it, too. But he is
not being hypocritical. He knows what
he is doing, and he knows we know.
We, too, can imagine how Manuel
Mena might have been captured by
Fascist rhetoric. Thousands of young
men were. José Antonio, the founder of
42 | w w w. n a t i o n a l r e v i e w. c o m
the Falange Española, was a master of
Romantic nationalism. When he thun-
dered against the capitalists and the
Marxists, and thundered for the People
and the Nation, hearts swelled and feet
marched. The other side had its own, and
similar, seductions.
It was a clash of ugly illiberalisms, the
Spanish Civil War. Hardly a true democ-
rat in sight.
Like Spain at large, little Ibahernando,
Manuel’s village, was split right down
the middle. Yet people were known to
switch sides, seamlessly. Did Spaniards
care about ideology? Some did, sure—
but listen to an old man, talking to
Cercas: “Back then, people got killed
over any little thing. Over arguments. Out
of envy. Because someone exchanged
four words with someone. For anything.
That’s how the war was.”
That war is hell is such a cliché, it is
almost offensive. And yet Cercas man-
ages to find new ways to make the
point, or illustrate it. War is more Goya
than Velázquez, he says: the least pret-
ty thing ever. Manuel Mena was a pro-
visional second lieutenant, one of
many thousands. They had a name for
provisional second lieutenants: “corpses-
in-waiting.”
The rotten truth, says Cercas, is that
Manuel died for nothing. But he does
not disparage his great-uncle, the family
hero. Far from it. He knows that good
and golden people can die in bad causes.
(Was Achilles’ cause so hot?) Also, he is
no longer ashamed of his family’s past.
On the contrary, he is ashamed of his
prior shame.
This book is what critics call “sear-
ingly honest.” (See how I have cheated,
by pinning the cliché on others, while
using it?)
When he was at last able to tell
Manuel Mena’s story—and, by exten-
sion, his own—Javier Cercas felt a
sense of euphoria. So did I, on merely
reading the book. I can only imagine
what it was like to write it. A major
achievement, in historical, literary, and
moral terms.
The Ghost
In the
House of
American
Fiction
J A M E S M AT T H E W
WILSON
Text
W
Longing for an Absent God: Faith and Doubt in
Great American Fiction, by Nick Ripatrazone
(Fortress Press, 300 pp., $27.99)
HAT it might mean to
speak of Catholic litera-
ture is a bit of a thorny
question, or, rather, there
are so many ways to pose the question
that it might incline one to despair of
answering. Nick Ripatrazone, a poet and
fiction writer in his own right, goes about
the task, in Longing for an Absent God, in
the only manageable way. He wades right
in and, in turning from one author to
another, sees what churns up. The result
is not so much a critical study as a liter-
ary journalist’s tour of the margins of
American Catholicism where they over-
lap with the established center of the
modern American novel.
This is not Ripatrazone’s first look at
Catholicism in American letters. In The
Fine Delight (2013), he offered a theory
of what he calls the “Catholic literary
paradox.” Some books might be called
Catholic because their author is a sincere,
practicing Catholic, while others might
Mr. Wilson’s most recent book is The Hanging
God.
M AY 4, 2020
books_QXP-1127940387.qxp 4/14/2020 6:09 PM Page 43
be because we see traces, forms, even
mere residue, of Catholic belief some-
how inscribed in the work itself despite
the unbelief of the author.
The Fine Delight made more of an
attempt than the present book does to give
us a satisfactory critical theory to under-
stand that paradox. It also tried to do so
with specific reference to the changing
cultural footprint of Catholicism after the
Second Vatican Council. But, after such
bold opening gestures, it quickly turned to
the easier task of surveying the work of
three unambiguously (“unparadoxically”)
Catholic writers: Ron Hansen, Andre
Dubus, and Paul Mariani.
Hansen, a novelist best known for his
historical fiction, is also a deacon of the
Catholic Church. Dubus wrote his many
short stories from a perspective in-
formed by the masculine code drilled
into him in the military and the moral
vision of purity he imbibed in church.
Ripatrazone has taken upon himself a serious challenge.
The authors he considers are some of the most widely
acclaimed novelists of the last half century.
The work of the poet and literary biogra-
pher Paul Mariani seems like a Jesuit
spiritual exercise: In his own life and in
the lives of the poets he admires, Mariani
attempts to discern the workings of the
Holy Spirit.
The Fine Delight concluded with brief
discussions of younger, less established
figures, all of whom fit the bill as Catho-
lic writers about as comfortably as
Hansen, Dubus, and Mariani. The word
“paradox” seems almost superfluous to
understanding them.
Not so with this new book. Longing
for an Absent God takes a long while to
wend its way to its main subject, but
when it finally arrives there, we see that
Ripatrazone has taken upon himself a
serious challenge. The authors he
considers—Don DeLillo, Thomas
Pynchon, Toni Morrison, Cormac Mc-
Carthy, Louise Erdrich—are some of the
most widely acclaimed novelists of the
last half century. Some might find
Pynchon’s postmodern hijinks obscure
and irritating, but no one doubts their
ingenuity. DeLillo’s witty scenes from
American life testify to a great breadth of
imagination, even when his plots fail.
S P O N S O R E D B Y National Review Institute
Morrison’s brutal depictions of racism
sometimes seem to sacrifice literary
achievement in pursuit of topicality, but
no one could seriously dispute the moral
reckoning that takes place in her novels.
Erdrich’s portrayal of Native American
life has been less widely recognized but is
nonetheless a significant achievement.
And, finally, for those of us who thrill to
Faulknerian logorrheic epic melodrama,
McCarthy is something better than a rein-
carnation. He’s an improvement.
These five novelists have not only
critical praise in common; they have
also their baptism in the Catholic Church
and the ongoing, meaningful influence
of the Church on their literary imagina-
tions. Ripatrazone strives mightily to
show us just what that might mean. The
difficulty lies in finding words ade-
quate to give expression to the “para-
dox.” We might call some of them
“lapsed” Catholics, whose childhood
catechizing persists at the level of senti-
ment, but it is not entirely clear that all
of them are indeed “lapsed.”
Ripatrazone favors the familiar term
“cultural Catholics,” which is a helpful,
if vulgar, usage. Catholicism is a dog-
matic faith, but one that casts a penum-
bra far beyond its creed and doctrines.
The Catholic intellectuals Josef Pieper
and Christopher Dawson both argued, in
the last century, that cult is the basis of
culture. What the cult worships as tran-
scending the world gradually finds
expression in the forms of everyday life,
of culture. As Philip Rieff, the great
Freud scholar, has suggested, our per-
ception of sacred order gives form to our
social order, and this act of interpreting
the sacred within the profane is specifi-
cally what it means to have a culture.
Any social order that denies the exis-
tence of the sacred, Rieff tells us, is bet-
ter described as an anti-culture.
The writers Ripatrazone studies illus-
trate such a theory of culture, at least to
some extent. Whatever their beliefs as
human beings, as authors they draw, here
and there, on the forms of Catholic faith in
order to give shape to the stories they tell.
Ripatrazone shows us as much, and
well indeed. To take them up in order once
more: He considers the way DeLillo’s
early novels, Americana and Endzone,
show characters in pursuit of a self-
transcending silence that is almost
monastic. Amid the busy Protestant hum
of modern American life, perfection
remains tied to contemplation, holiness,
and stasis (what the religious orders call
the vow of stability).
Pynchon’s labyrinthine novels, with
their codes and puzzles that lead no-
where, on Ripatrazone’s telling reflect
a sacramental imagination that sees
everything as—to use Dante’s word—
polysemantic. In the quest to interpret
the apparent signs embedded in the
world around us, we find layer on layer
of meaning, even if they lead us, like the
letter V, in disparate directions and so
issue in no clear, unified vision. Just so
does a lapsed Catholic view the world:
Taught to read the signs lying silently
within the order of existence, he nonethe-
less finds their author missing.
McCarthy’s demonic dramas enact
something similar on the moral plane.
We encounter, in his books, scenes of
gruesome, absolute evil. The Catholic
apologist Pascal writes that theological
knowledge begins in disappointment; we
learn what the justice and charity of God
are only by seeing their negation or
absence in the fallen world in which we
live. For McCarthy, our encounters with
evil stir us to recognize the good that
ought to exist but that never actually
appears, except perhaps in the form of a
remembered sentiment in which we can
no longer believe.
When Ripatrazone turns to Morrison’s
work, the insight gained from reading it in
a Catholic light is less certain. On the one
hand, the Nobel Prize–winner frequently
referred to herself as “a Catholic,” and
sometimes, regretfully, as “lapsed.” On
the other, it is not obvious that it is the
disfigured body of Christ on the crucifix
that informs her concern with the human
body, in beauty, ugliness, and suffering,
nor is it clear that the elements of haunting
43
BOOKS, ARTS & MANNERS
and superstition in her books come from
maturing in a Church that spends its days
in communion with the saints, living and
dead. Traditional African-American cul-
ture and the historical experience of
slavery seem more promising sources
for understanding Morrison’s themes.
Someone, at some point, however, had to
take her at her word, and that is what
Ripatrazone does here.
Finally, Erdrich’s work offers an inter-
esting departure from the “cultural
Catholic” paradox Ripatrazone traces in
the other writers. Our age, and our litera-
ture departments, are overflowing at pre-
sent with the concerns of “identity
politics,” a noxious and philistine trend
that for three decades now has sought to
reduce every literary work to an allegory
of the experience of this or that sex or
racial or ethnic group.
Erdrich’s work is frequently set on
Indian reservations, and one need not
look hard to see that it explores the “dual-
ity” that ostensibly comes from her being
both Chippewa and Catholic. Her char-
acters move sometimes quietly—and
sometimes with tension and difficulty—
between traditional Native American reli-
gious practices and those taught by the
Church, often by religious orders running
parochial schools on the reservation.
This aspect of Erdrich’s work testifies
to the challenge Ripatrazone faced in
writing this book. Catholicism has cultur-
al expressions, to be sure, but it teaches
also that the truth saves by transcending
any and every cultural expression. In this
sense, it hardly makes sense to speak of
a “tension” between faith and one’s eth-
nic experiences.
But Catholicism also proposes that
the one truth everyone must understand
is that the Truth Itself took on flesh,
entered history, and transformed and
redeemed it—every last thought, every
last atom of it—as Jesus Christ, Son of
God. We should expect such a holy cat-
aclysm to reverberate far beyond those
places where people explicitly accept
the faith.
Ripatrazone’s previous book demon-
strated that there are contemporary
Catholic authors worthy of the wider lit-
erary world’s respect. This new one
shows that some of those authors the
world already respects contain spiritual
depths that are too often ignored, but
that help us to better appreciate their
artistic achievement.
44 | w w w. n a t i o n a l r e v i e w. c o m
Text
Progressive
Populism’s
Dashed
Hopes
TOBIAS HOONHOUT
T
The Populist’s Guide to 2020: A New Right
and New Left Are Rising, by Krystal Ball and
Saagar Enjeti (Strong Arm Press,
244 pp., $19.99)
IMING is everything for
election-cycle treatises, which
tend to have a shorter shelf life
than do other political books.
Praise a candidate’s legacy too late or
envisage a political party’s emerging
strength too early and you submit your
thesis to the unpredictability of the vot-
ers. Such is the case with Krystal Ball and
Saagar Enjeti’s manifesto, The Populist’s
Guide to 2020: A New Right and New
Left Are Rising, which was released in
February. The nascent revolution at its
heart—the supposed left–right populist
“realignment” that animates the duo’s
project—risks being crushed in the crib.
Ball, a former MSNBC host, and Enjeti,
a former Daily Caller correspondent, have
attracted praise from a heterodox crowd
that ranges from Glenn Greenwald to
Steve Bannon. The two are cohosts of
Rising, a fire-breathing display of populist
punditry, from both the left (Ball) and the
right (Enjeti), that is produced by The Hill
and streams daily on YouTube. While the
show borrows the aesthetic of the main-
stream media, it is self-consciously icono-
clastic. In an era of insurgent politics and
rampant skepticism of media, it’s the
Bernie–Trump show that owns the elites.
Despite starting less than a year ago,
Rising’s audience has ballooned to
400,000 subscribers on YouTube, with
over 3.4 million hours watched in the last
month—enough fans to allow The
Populist’s Guide to debut on Amazon’s
best-seller list.
The book is composed largely of
the pair’s on-air monologues, offering
the screen-averse reader a sample of
Rising’s “greatest hits” with some origi-
nal commentary mixed in. The authors’
goal is “to challenge conventional wis-
dom and shift both parties to work in the
interest of the working class instead of
their current financial masters.” But
ultimately this ambition undoes their
analysis—as the 2020 race proves, their
vision clouds their judgment.
The progressive Ball and the conserva-
tive Enjeti differ in their beliefs and their
preferred policies, but they are united by
an economic framework and by a convic-
tion that America is beset by working-
class anxiety. As they put it, they share a
“central diagnosis of the rot in this coun-
try, of how we got to this place, and a
deep skepticism of power.” Exhortations
against the establishment are a staple:
“Speak up. Make people uncomfortable.
Don’t let the ‘experts’ convince you that
better isn’t possible.” As good populists
do, Ball and Enjeti focus on exposing
problems. In the book’s first three sec-
tions—titled “Core Rot,” “Media,” and
“Identity”—they go after “neoliberalism,”
media bias, and identity politics.
While Ball shares with other Democrats
a visceral dislike of President Trump, she
trains her fire on members of her own
party’s establishment. “Just imagine if a
fraction of the time devoted to Russiagate
and Ukrainegate had instead been spent on
increasing Social Security, or a $15 mini-
mum wage, or Medicare-for-All,” she
writes in a chapter criticizing the failed
impeachment. She also hammers the pun-
dit world of her past life, documenting
how the mainstream media bared their
“ideological and biased” preferences in
coverage of the 2020 field. An entire chap-
ter is dedicated to her former employer
MSNBC, which—for various reasons—
she says is “no friend of the left.”
Enjeti offers criticisms of the Right,
echoing the 2016 Trump campaign’s
rejection of the Republican Party’s past
affinity for liberal immigration and free
trade. “Republicans should become
more comfortable with using the power
of the government to help direct market
forces toward the goal of conserving our
M AY 4, 2020
books_QXP-1127940387.qxp 4/14/2020 6:10 PM Page 45
American way of life, American workers,
and American families,” he writes.
At the core of The Populist’s Guide to
2020 are critiques of most of the Demo-
cratic field. High on the naughty list are
the failed centrists. Ball dismisses Pete
Buttigieg as “the Boomer candidate” for
“the college-educated MSNBC watch-
ing type.” And Enjeti blasts Kamala
Harris: “Her entire political ethos was
founded on being a woman of color who
touted neoliberal economics.” Funda-
mentally for their case, the authors then
deliver a broadside against Joe Biden, in
behalf of Bernie Sanders.
Ball and Enjeti declare Biden to be a
“representative of the centrist establish-
ment,” a figure upholding a “bipartisan
commitment to wars, soft corruption, and
steady grinding of the working class in the
name of efficiency.” Enjeti rips Biden’s
“neoliberal” record in an essay on the for-
mer vice president’s legacy in the Obama
administration, pointing to his promotion
of the North American Free Trade
Agreement and his weak record on China
as the proof in the pudding. Ball calls the
Sanders’s rock-concert-like rallies gave off more of
a college-kid-who-read-Marx-once vibe than
one of New Deal–era organizing.
former vice president “inarticulate” and
“unimpressive” and blames him for creat-
ing “the very rot which led to Trump in
the United States and other right-wing
populist movements around the world.”
Throughout the book, Ball makes the
case for Sanders—not only as her pre-
ferred candidate but as the candidate best
positioned for electoral success: “Bernie
is the representative of a left-wing class-
based movement that could answer
Trump’s right-wing populism with
something new, a Democratic Party that
actually delivers for the entire multi-
racial working class.” This characteriza-
tion is jarring when set against the
Vermont progressive’s collapse, for the
second straight Democratic primary,
against an allegedly weak, establishment
front-runner. Before he dropped out of
the race, Sanders’s support among black
voters was down significantly, and he
had hemorrhaged votes from non-
college whites, suggesting his working-
class base had shrunk since 2016. And
his hoped-for record youth turnout didn’t
S P O N S O R E D B Y National Review Institute
materialize. The failures raise serious
questions about the prospects for pro-
gressive populism, among them: What
animates the Left? A revolution of class
consciousness, or a collection of socially
liberal cultural crusades?
As Samuel Huntington famously wrote,
“the great divisions among humankind
and the dominating source of conflict will
be cultural.” For all the book’s warnings
about the dangers of identity politics, per-
haps the most telling passage of The
Populist’s Guide to 2020 is Enjeti’s damn-
ing description of the dynamic that will
bring about “the eventual downfall of
the American Left”: “No matter how
much you want to tout progressive eco-
nomics, the intersectionally woke mem-
bers of your coalition will always impose
their PC litmus tests upon you,” he
warns the economically minded members
of the Left. “They will not allow a single
concession . . . to the cultural right and will
demand representation in any future ad-
ministration they are likely to hold.”
Sanders’s political demise illuminates
this conflict. While Ball tries to paint the
movement of the Vermont independent as
a genuine revolution, distilling a fusion of
democratic socialism and intersectionali-
ty into slogans fit for TV, Sanders’s fail-
ures illustrate the error of touting the
“consistency” of his vision and message
in the war to end all class wars. In reality,
the campaign’s 2020 pitch to young vot-
ers amounted to adopting some new
woke and hip markers. He went from
being a hardliner on illegal immigration
in 2015—a working-class position
Trump espoused to great effect—to call-
ing the president’s position “dehumaniz-
ing.” He touted endorsements this
election cycle from uber-wealthy models
and pop stars while railing against wealth
inequality. His rock-concert-like rallies
gave off more of a college-kid-who-read-
Marx-once vibe than one of New Deal–
era organizing. And as he spoke of
waging a people’s revolution against the
status quo, Sanders personally apolo-
gized to Biden after a surrogate wrote an
op-ed about Biden’s “corruption prob-
lem.” For all his posturing, Sanders has
been more of a hippie godfather than a pro-
tagonist in the great progressive struggle.
His fall demonstrates how the institu-
tional strength of the Democratic Party,
built on Bill Clinton’s and Barack
Obama’s mainstream popularity, has been
able to mollify the angry winds of pro-
gressive populism with incremental cul-
tural shifts of the Overton window. As
Matt Stoller recently quipped, “the ‘pro-
gressive movement’ is basically just an
aesthetic critique.”
While The Populist’s Guide to 2020
offers a populist paradigm for the future of
American politics—potentially moldable
in a post-coronavirus world—its fatal con-
ceit is the assumption that both Left and
Right must answer the putative rise in
working-class political energy. A different
sort of shift seems more likely. Michael
Lind argued in an April 2016 New York
Times op-ed that “in one form or another,
Trumpism and Clintonism will define
conservatism and progressivism in
America.” As Republicans continue to
align with working-class voters by “mov-
ing somewhat to the left on middle-class
entitlements and somewhat to the right on
immigration and trade,” Lind predicted
that Democrats would react to balance the
bipartisan system by moving toward
“finance-friendly economics with social
and racial liberalism” to represent more
upper-class constituents. Indeed, on his
podcast for the Hudson Institute, The
Realignment, Enjeti offers a frequently
perceptive exploration of these issues.
If the Tea Party’s 2010 surge of pop-
ulist anger within the GOP was a portent
of Trump’s shock victory in 2016, the
resurgence of moderate Democrats and
the party’s blue suburban wave in the
2018 midterms may herald an upscale
future for the party that once dominated
union halls. Ball and Enjeti envision
working-class populism as a panacea for
America’s political deadlock, but the
realignment may already be underway—
on terms Ball would find unfavorable.
The Democratic Party’s swift rejection of
Bernie Sanders suggests committed pop-
ulists may have a future on only one side
of the aisle.
45
 BOOKS, ARTS & MANNERS
City Desk
Remembrance
Of Meals Past
Text
E
RICHARD BROOKHISER
MPTY, silent; hanging on, if at
all, with delivery and takeout:
the city’s restaurants, its nodes
of gathering, eating, and talk.
For those that are long gone, for those
that may be gone for good, a roll call.
Names, please.
There was a time when Lutèce was the
best restaurant in the city, one of the best
in the country. The mere speculation,
quoted in a New Yorker article by John
McPhee, that they used frozen turbot
We want these places for meeting friends;
we want them for seeing strangers.
was enough to cause a journalistic and
culinary scandal. We went there a few
times for birthdays. Once we brought my
mother-in-law (b. 1912) for one of hers—
her 70th? The garçon said, when my wife
told him, “Ah don’t believe zat—you are
sisters. Non, you are sisters.” A lie that
was meant to be recognized and appreci-
ated as a noble one: politesse.
Luchow’s, an old ethnic tourist trap,
with an actual strolling oom-pah band. The
food was pretty awful, except for the veni-
son and the goose, which were excellent.
It was there that I had my first Berliner
Weisse. Hint to freshmen (I had to be told):
Don’t drink it till they add the fruit syrup.
The Four Seasons: that cool cube, with
a marble pool and the metal beaded cur-
tains. High Modernism, which, as it aged,
became the Modernism of the past. We
were regulars; when the string quartet fin-
ished their last rondo at the Metropolitan
Museum, we would rush to Fifth Avenue
46 | w w w. n a t i o n a l r e v i e w. c o m
and a cab and close it down. We went dur-
ing the last week it was open. At the next
table sat a girl, maybe eight, with her
grandmother. She, I thought, will be the
last person to remember it.
Danal, East Village domain of its
Franco-Israeli owner. He and his partner
were opening a high-end stuff shop when
his aunt said, Why don’t you serve tea?
The model was Mariage Frères in the
Marais. Tea became meals, and crowded
out the stuff. Their coltish waitress, Jamie
Comer, was so charming she was actually
named in a New York Times restaurant
review. It closed after fights with land-
lords at two locations. “My landlords
were Iranians,” lamented the owner. “One
was a Muslim, one was a Jew; zey were
both terrorists.”
The menu of Chinatown Brasserie rep-
resented a cuisine that usually sends me
running the other way: Chinese with
tweaks. What’s the matter with Chinese
untweaked? But a lot of their dishes were
good; they served Dark and Stormys,
also good; and the staff was a delight.
The décor was Hollywood orientalist:
circular leather upholstered booths,
Chinese lanterns hanging from a high
ceiling. When my wife was in the hospital
with leukemia and I was spending two
days every day, one in real world the other
in hospital world, they sent me a dinner
and comped it. We went on a summer
vacation one year and came back, ready
for dumplings, to find that it had closed.
I have praised and mourned the Coffee
Shop. I have praised its excellent maître d’,
Carlos Sosa, who on the night of 9/11
walked three miles from Union Square
down to Ground Zero in the hope, vain
as it turned out, that he might somehow
be of help. The place was often jammed,
but membership had its privileges. I was
meeting my agent there once for lunch
and found him on the corner, outside, try-
ing to summon me on his smartphone.
“What’s the matter?” I asked. “It’s a half-
hour wait,” he said. “Let’s see,” I suggest-
ed. In we went, and were given a booth, in
the back, away from the censorious eyes
of the unseated. “You have juice!” my
agent exclaimed. They employed a large
waitstaff, of lovely young men and
women. Rising rents, plus the prospect of
the $15 minimum wage, finally shuttered
it. Now there is a bank (thank God, the
nearest was an entire block away).
Speaking of juice, NATIONAL REVIEW
had a special relationship to Paone’s on
34th Street, around the corner from our old
offices. What is to food as seductive is to
sex? Whatever it is, that was the tone of Mr.
Paone describing his specials. WFB once
showed Mr. Paone his favorite gadget (Bill
always had a new one): a bread-baking
crock-pot. You put the dough in overnight,
and in the morning, presto! fresh bread.
Mr. Paone, who was clearly revolted to the
depth of his soul, listened politely, defer-
entially; WFB was a customer, an amico,
an uomo di rispetto. Besides, he probably
knew from long experience that this en-
thusiasm too would pass. After Paone’s
closed, the building stood a long time
shuttered, unchanged. I noticed recently
that it had finally been torn down.
There was a restaurant whose name I
forget in Grand Central Terminal, at the
top of the stairs on the Vanderbilt Avenue
side. You could look down at the delicate
little golden clock in mid floor, like a tea
service; at the hurrying commuters; at
the vast windows and up at the ceiling
mural of constellations. There I made
Terry Teachout laugh the hardest I have
ever seen him (he laughs well, so this
was special). I cannot repeat the remark,
which was both slanderous and vulgar,
except to say that one element of the
punchline was Mick Jagger. The current
occupant of the space is a Cipriani bar.
Around the corner from my apartment
is a coffeehouse serving cookies, eggs,
and sandwiches, unimaginatively named
71 Irving after its address; at its first
address it was 52 Irving. I went there just
before the virus hit hard; the only other
patrons were a family of tourists.
We want these places for meeting
friends; we want them for seeing strangers.
We want them in order to be respected;
we want them in order to be anonymous.
Poets and prophets imagine heaven.
Here is my version: an immense restau-
rant, compounded of all of them, with all
the people I have ever known. You can
meet and eat and it will never close.
M AY 4, 2020
 Text Film
Re-
Enchanting
U
The Suburbs
R O S S D O U T H AT
NDER normal, non-pandemic
circumstances, this column
would probably be covering
the new live-action remake
of Mulan, once slated to hit theaters at the
end of March, or No Time to Die, featur-
ing Daniel Craig’s last scowling appear-
ance as James Bond, which was supposed
to be released on April 10. In our reality,
neither of those movies is coming out
until at least the fall, and for now nothing
else is either, and anyway if they did come
out nobody would be able to see them. So
the trade of movie reviewing is in the
same straits as the business of sports-
writing or restaurant criticism: The great
machine on which we barnacled our-
selves has ground to a sudden halt.
But with this difference: Nobody is
going to open a slick new restaurant
when the only way to feed the paying
customers is takeout, but at some point
the financial incentives may be strong
enough that the 2020 movie slate starts to
show up on your computer or television
set. Or alternatively, if theaters reopen
sooner rather than later, the crowds may
still be too small and nervous to create
financial hits, and distributors will have
no choice but to embrace a dual-release
strategy, on streaming and in theaters
simultaneously—a strategy that theater
chains facing bankruptcy would no
longer have the leverage to resist.
The revolutionary implications for
the movie business can be considered
another time; for today, let’s be solipsis-
tic and consider how this might change
the critic’s experience. The dual-release
strategy has already been employed by
movies that were out before the lock-
downs started: The Invisible Man, Emma,
Pixar’s Onward, and several others all
had a little pre-pandemic time in theaters,
but now you can watch them instantly on
your TV. I reviewed Emma last issue; I’m
reviewing Onward in this column. And
I’m quite sure the latter movie played a lot
PIXAR
S P O N S O R E D B Y National Review Institute
Ian and Barley Lightfoot, voiced by Tom Holland and Chris Pratt, in Onward
better on my television than it would have
had I seen it at the local multiplex.
That’s mostly because of how I
watched it: Not perched alertly (well,
reasonably so) on a movie seat in the mid-
dle of a workday, with a podcast behind
me and a column draft up next, but
sprawled on the couch among my chil-
dren at the end of a long day of “home-
schooling,” a.k.a. the kind of everyday
parental grind from which a movie, any
movie, feels like a blessed respite.
And from that vantage point, Onward
delivers. It has a clever conceit: It’s set in
a world of fantastic creatures, elves and
centaurs and cyclopes and flitting fairies,
where someone figures out electricity and
everyone decides that since technology is
so much more reliable than magic, why
not just ditch the flaming swords and wiz-
ards’ orbs and build the modern suburbs
instead? (An establishing shot: two pega-
corns fighting over a trashcan on a sub-
division curb.) It has a characteristic Pixar
plot: some adult stuff about loss and
family wrapped around a quest narrative,
as two elf brothers—Ian and Barley,
voiced by Tom Holland and Chris Pratt—
rediscover the archaic joy of questing in
an effort to cast a spell their late father
left them that would let him see them for
one day as adults. And it has enough
quips and patter to carry you between the
action scenes, most of them courtesy of
Pratt’s Barley, an ebullient van-driving
Dungeons and Dragons nerd who’s des-
perate to bring back his world’s lost magic.
For killing 100 minutes on the couch
with your kids, that’s a pretty solid run of
strengths—with a bonus added for the
fact that all three of our beloved offspring
requested a repeat viewing the next day,
instead of tearing one another apart as
usual arguing over what to watch.
But I’m pretty sure that if I’d been
watching Onward in the darkness of the
theater, I would have walked away think-
ing “B-minus” instead of “A-minus,”
because I would have had more time and
more reasons to think about all the ways
it’s rushed and undercooked—stealing
notes and beats and plot devices from
better Pixar movies, returning to the
same jokes in its world-building instead
of seeking complexity or depth, using
the boys’ literally half-present father (his
legs return without his body) mostly for
sight gags before the conclusion lays the
half-earned sentiment on thick.
Above all, I would have been more
irritated by the way a movie that’s sup-
posedly all about restoring the enchant-
ments of Faerie to a disenchanted world
never really tries to capture anything of
the genuinely otherworldly character of
magic, the numinous and perilous feelings
that should be stirred when the hollow
hills open and the impossible comes
knocking. Instead, the idea of fantasy in
Onward belongs to the clichés (not even
the reality) of D&D role-playing, in which
characters with silly names wield arbitrary
magics chasing a supernatural MacGuffin.
It’s a story of magic returning or reawak-
ening, of materialism collapsing under
supernatural pressure, that makes the mag-
ical world feel like an amusing video
game scripted by someone who maybe
read a Lord of the Rings knockoff, once.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, my kids are
yelling and I’m going to see if they’ll
watch it one more time.
47
Text Happy Warrior BY DANIEL FOSTER

From March’s Madness to April’s Fools

/11 was my senior year of high school. It hap- Her many critics are of course right that previous generations
pened 20 miles in a straight line from the physics had things a whole lot worse (that’s basically always been

9 classroom where we were when the principal

came over the loudspeaker, and when you went to
the McDonald’s on Route 17 during sixth-period lunch, you
could see the black column of smoke on the skyline where
the buildings had been. Our town of 14,351 lost two men in
the attack—including my lab partner’s father—and eventu-
ally three more to the wars it started.
I was not an especially brave 17-year-old, and I remember
being pretty well freaked out for a couple of weeks there.
Particularly at the sound of the loud, low-level F-16 passes
over our condo that evening, and over the next few days
watching the live camera they kept trained, in anticipation,
on the Empire State Building each time it was evacuated
true), and I haven’t dedicated the first half of this column to
autobiography just to bitch and moan.
Instead I relate all this because it occurred to me that the
present crisis—the virus—is a weird mash-up of those sev-
eral fears and anxieties from the last two decades. Like 9/11
it’s a collective trauma and a collective tragedy. If you don’t
now, you will probably soon know someone who dies in
this pandemic. Like the financial crisis, it has knocked tens
of millions of working Americans on their asses, upended
their best-laid plans, set them back a year, a decade. And like
a sniper on the loose it has us all taking weird routes on the
sidewalk, probably more scared than the numbers dictate we
ought to be, engaging in rituals that make us feel a little bit

The U.S.
because of another anonymous bomb threat. safer and not a little bit more ridiculous.
I went off to college the next fall in Wash - But there are also unwelcome novelties in

has lost faith

ington, D.C., and just before midterms the this experience. For example, it’s the first cri-
Beltway sniper—snipers, as it turned out— sis of my lifetime to occur under a complete

in both
started murdering people up and down the and total lack of trust by the public in the

politicians
I-95 corridor, including four in one day in institutions tasked with guiding us through it.
October. Sometime that week I caught my- Don’t get me wrong. Ordinary Americans

and the press

self half-consciously walking in a serpentine have been pretty great. Our doctors, nurses,
and random fashion across a quad in Foggy truck drivers, and deliverymen have buoyed

at precisely
Bottom and was so embarrassed I would us. And together we’ve distanced. Home-

the time
have welcomed a .223 to the butt cheek for schooled. Donated. Volunteered. Built things.
being such a wuss. Even hired.

we need
After the customary four years, I took my But poll after poll shows that the U.S.,
bachelor’s, then spent an abortive couple of almost uniquely among countries dealing

competence
semesters at graduate school back in New with outbreaks, has lost faith in both politi-

from both.
York, and right about the time I dropped out
to get a (relatively) real job as a writer, the
subprime-mortgage market collapsed, set-
ting off the Great Recession.
That one I experienced with an almost French absurdity. It
set my single mother—a loan officer—back nearly a decade,
but for my own part it was like Dylan said: When you ain’t
got nothin’, you got nothin’ to lose. My student-loan for-
bearances came and went, I hawked my meager wares at
several publications, and I lived on a series of futons atop any
number of staircases with a rotation of roommates in several
Manhattan neighborhoods—interrupted by a couple of fur-
loughs to my childhood bedroom in New Jersey, the less said
about which the better.
Eventually, things improved, as they usually but don’t
always do. I paid off my student loans about a year before
abolishing them became the official position of the Demo -
cratic Party; met my wife; married her; bought a house; and
sometime about six weeks ago I thought, “Hey, things are
not terrible. I mostly have my crap together. Maybe it’s
time to start a family.”
No doubt God had a good laugh.
A fellow Millennial caught hell online the other day for
saying we’re a generation that has “never known stability.”
cians and the press at precisely the time we
need competence from both.
So on one side we have governors and
beat cops engaged in petty and pointless acts
of vindictive governance, taking down license plates at
church parking lots, shutting down “nonessential” aisles in
big-box stores, chasing lone joggers out of public parks. And
on the other side we have “just the flu” madmen, some of
whom have the president’s ear, so angry that the economy
has shut down six months before their guy goes up for reelec-
tion that they are setting out to disprove the old political saw
that the Constitution is not a suicide pact.
And in the middle we have a press that is determined to do
their worst when we need them at their best, spending half
their time fluffing CCP malefactors and the rest of it trying to
goad the White House into making decisions that confirm
their low opinion of it, as if what the public needs most right
now weren’t information about treatment research or relief
efforts, but a story from CNN proving, at long last, that the
president sometimes behaves erratically.
This too shall pass, of course, and we may yet emerge from
these hard times stronger than before. But that will depend on
the courage of our neighbors outstripping the utter frivolity
of our leaders.

48 | w w w. n a t i o n a l r e v i e w. c o m M AY 4, 2020
base_QXP-1127940387.qxp 4/14/2020 4:32 PM Page 2

“How big government gets that way: It takes over new

turf in time of crisis, then hangs on to much of it after
the crisis is over.” —Fortune
Everyone knows the U.S. government has grown in size, scope,
and power during the past century—but how did this enormous
transformation happen?
Crisis and Leviathan has the answers.
By manipulating crises, both real and imagined, governments extend
remorseless controls—to the great detriment of human liberty and
wellbeing. Americans have suffered this growth in government in the
past. And, unfortunately, during this Coronavirus pandemic, we may
now be witnessing one of the greatest expansions ever.
Grounded in historical evidence, the renowned economist and historian
Robert Higgs explains how during critical episodes in the history of the
United States, the political class has used everything from half-truths to
outright deception to extend the reach of government power. But citizens
can reverse this suffocating process that is threatening our country.
Crisis and Leviathan makes compelling reading for those seeking
to understand the slow destruction of America’s political economy—
and what needs be done to restore liberty to her people.

“Important, powerful.”
—James M. Buchanan, Nobel Laureate in Economics
“Wonderful book!”
—Mike Pence, Vice President of the U.S.
“In the face of the coronavirus pandemic,
everyone should read Crisis and Leviathan.”
—Stephen J. Moore, Founder, Club for Growth
800-927-8733
$19.95 Paperback | $25.00 Hardcover
384 pages | Available in eBook Format
100 Swan Way, Oakland, CA 94621-1428 | info@independent.org | www.independent.org Index | 8 Tables | 5 Figures
base_QXP-1127940387.qxp 4/14/2020 12:46 PM Page 2

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