Trump: Very Lucky in His Enemies

Peggy Noonan is far from being a Trump supporter, although she’s not an implacable enemy either. She sees his flaws, but hopes he will do better.

But she notes that Trump has one huge asset: his enemies.

Mr. Trump has struggled so colorfully the past three months, we’ve barely noticed his great good luck—that in that time the Democratic Party and the progressive left have been having a very public nervous breakdown. The new head of the Democratic National Committee, Tom Perez, performs unhinged diatribes. He told an audience in Las Vegas that “Trump doesn’t give a sh— about health care.” In a Maine speech, “They call it a skinny budget. I call it a sh—y budget.” In Newark, he said Republicans “don’t give a sh— about people.”

This is said to be an attempt to get down with millennials. I know a lot of millennials and they’re not idiots, so that won’t work.

The perennially sunny Rep. Maxine Waters of California called Mr. Trump’s cabinet “a bunch of scumbags.” New York’s junior Democratic senator, Kirsten Gillibrand, has taken to using the F-word in interviews.

I thought Mr. Trump was supposed to be the loudmouth vulgarian who swears in public. They are aping what they profess to hate. They excoriated him for lowering the bar. Now look at them.

And they’re doing it because they have nothing else—not a plan, not a program, not a philosophy that can be uttered.

The closest they got to meaning recently was when Mr. Perez found it helpful to say, of a Democratic mayoral candidate who’d backed some pro-life bills, that that kind of thinking had no place in the party. Bernie Sanders rightly called this out as madness. You can’t do this “if we’re going to become a 50-state party.”

Imagine a great, lost party defining itself by who it’s throwing out. They’re like the Republicans the past 20 years, throwing people out for opposing Iraq or George W. Bush, or for not joining NeverTrump. Where does this get you? It gets you to where we are.

That most entrenched bastion of the progressive left, America’s great universities, has been swept by . . . well, one hardly knows what to call it. “Political correctness” is too old and doesn’t do it justice. It is a hysteria—a screeching, ignorant wave of sometimes violent intolerance for free speech. It is mortifying to see those who lead great universities cower in fear of it, attempt to placate it, instead of stopping it.

When I see tapes of the protests and riots at schools like Berkeley, Middlebury, Claremont McKenna and Yale, it doesn’t have the feel of something that happens in politics. It has the special brew of malice and personal instability seen in the Salem witch trials. It sent me back to rereading Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible.” Heather Mac Donald danced with the devil! Charles Murray put the needle in the poppet! As in 17th-century Salem, the accusers have no proof of anything because they don’t know, read or comprehend anything.

The cursing pols, the anathematizing abortion advocates, the screeching students—they are now the face of the progressive left.

This is what America sees now as the face of the Democratic Party. It is a party blowing itself up whose only hope is that Donald Trump blows up first.

He may not be lucky in all of his decisions or staffers, or in his own immaturities and dramas. But hand it to him a hundred days in: He’s lucky in his main foes.

Even a casual observer can add to her list of liberal derangement. That’s not her fault. This is a column, not a book.

Health Care

Jeff Jacoby provides several examples from the debate on health care:

• “Donald Trump and Republicans just celebrated voting to let thousands of Americans die so that billionaires get tax breaks.” Those are the words of a prominent US senator.
• “They” — Republican House members who voted for the AHCA — “should be lined up and shot. That’s not hyperbole; blood is on their hands.” So fumes a professor at the Art Institute of Washington.
• “I hope every GOPer who voted for Trumpcare sees a family member get long-term condition, lose insurance, and die. I want the GOPers who support this to feel the pain in their own families. . . . I want them to be tortured.” Those sentiments are expressed via Twitter by a senior writer at Newsweek.
• “The GOP Plan For Obamacare Could Kill More People Each Year Than Gun Homicides.” That’s the headline in Vox, a popular news and opinion website.

There is no shortage of additional examples, just as enraged or hysterical. . . .

Some progressives justify the shredding of civil discourse; with Trump in the White House, they say, courtesy is a luxury the nation can’t afford. “America, don’t be polite in the face of demagoguery,” exhorts Jessica Valenti in the Guardian. Representative Ruben Gallego, an Arizona Democrat, is likewise unapologetic about resorting to rhetorical brutality. “This is a new time in politics where people are just blatantly lying and essentially producing policies that are going to kill people,” Gallego tells CNN. “I think the old time of civility needs to go until we actually go back to the rules.”

The Daily Caller lists many more examples of violence, harassment and intimidation.

And of course, who could forget Stephen Colbert’s deranged rant.  (Note that one word has been censored in the YouTube version, but was originally broadcast.)

Trump, it seems, is not very good at governing, but he’s great at driving his adversaries nuts. That’s a political asset, although it’s not the sort we would prefer he have.

What is new about this is not that a lot of liberals hate conservatives, and particularly hate Donald Trump (who isn’t really a conservative). People in American politics have long hated their partisan enemies. It goes back even further than the followers of Jefferson and Hamilton. And plenty of conservatives have hated liberals.

What is new, and peculiar to the left, is the overt claim that it is good to hate. That people on the other side deserve to be hated, harassed, intimidated and even attacked.

The Presidential Choice this Year

From Jeff Jacoby:

WOULD YOU HIRE a babysitter who lied with impunity? Would you choose a therapist who was a compulsive braggart? Would you want as your accountant or financial adviser someone who trailed the reek of corruption and bottomless avarice? Would you list your home with a real-estate agent who routinely played fast and loose with rules that others must abide by? Would you attend the church of a pastor who spewed insults and threats and trafficked in delusional conspiracy theories?

If so, you’ll have no trouble supporting Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton for president.

Jacoby is supporting Gary Johnson, a claimed libertarian. We are unimpressed with him, since he seems none too sharp, and he’s not really a libertarian. He supports gay marriage, a policy that uses government power to force on the entire population the moral judgment that gay unions are as legitimate as straight ones.

A real libertarian would privatize marriage.

So we view him to be not as outrageously bad as Trump and Clinton, but still bad. This is a bad year for American democracy.

Islam: Europe vs. America

From Jeff Jacoby in the Boston Globe:

LONG BEFORE TUESDAY’S terror attacks in Brussels, it was clear that Belgium had become a breeding ground for Islamist extremists. Hundreds of Belgian Muslims — as many as 500, according to one estimate — have gone to Syria and Iraq to fight for ISIS, making Belgium by far Europe’s leading supplier of foreign jihadists. Last November’s horrific slaughter in Paris was masterminded by a Belgian radical, Abdelhamid Abaaoud, and at least four of the men who carried out those attacks were from the Brussels district of Molenbeek. One of them was Salah Abdeslam, who was captured in Molenbeek, after an intense manhunt, on March 19.

For Islamist imams and terrorist ringleaders, such neighborhoods — heavily Muslim, densely populated, with high unemployment and crime rates — have proved fertile territory for recruiting violent jihadists. “There is almost always a link with Molenbeek. That’s a gigantic problem, of course,” Belgium’s prime minister said after the Paris atrocities.

But it’s only recently that the country’s security officials began confronting that “gigantic problem” with an appropriate sense of urgency. The New York Times reported last fall that weeks before the Paris attacks, Molenbeek’s mayor, Françoise Schepmans, was given a list of more than 80 Islamist terror suspects living in her district. She took no action and was unapologetic even after three of the men on the list took part in the Paris massacre.

“What was I supposed to do about them?” Schepmans told the Times. “It is not my job to track possible terrorists.”

That jaw-dropping complacency helps explain how an ISIS fifth column has been able to operate with such brazenness in Western Europe. But incompetent policing doesn’t explain why Muslims living in neighborhoods like Molenbeek, or in the banlieues outside Paris that have experienced violent riots, should be susceptible to Islamist radicalization in the first place.

Muslim communities are not inherently predisposed to violence. The presence of a sizable Muslim population in a non-Muslim-majority country does not inevitably presage jihadist bloodshed or demands for the imposition of sharia. It is true that some 650,000 Muslims live in Belgium, but five times as many — 3.3 million — live in the United States. Why hasn’t America become a hotbed of Islamic extremism? Why aren’t American Muslims by the thousands flocking to fight for ISIS, Al Qaeda, and other terrorist organizations? Why, despite the efforts of Islamist pressure groups such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations — a Muslim supremacist operation that masquerades as an advocate for civil rights — are most American Muslims intent on adopting America’s customs and way of life?

The United States has been far more successful at assimilating and integrating Muslim immigrants into American society and culture than has Western Europe. There are no Muslim ghettoes here like those in Molenbeek or the Paris suburbs, where authorities turn a blind eye to antisocial behavior and aggressive incitement by radicals preaching jihad. Of course there have been some heinous exceptions, such as the Tsarnaev brothers, the Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hassan, or the killers in San Bernardino. And mosques in American cities have often been built with funding from Saudi Arabia, which promotes a harsh and puritanical version of Islam.

Nevertheless, at the grass-roots level, Muslims in the United States, like other cultural and religious minorities, have had no problem acclimating to mainstream norms. In a detailed 2011 survey, the Pew Research Center found that Muslim Americans are “highly assimilated into American society and . . . largely content with their lives.” More than 80 percent of US Muslims expressed satisfaction with life in America, and 63 percent said they felt no conflict “between being a devout Muslim and living in a modern society.” The rates at which they participate in various everyday American activities — from following local sports teams to watching entertainment TV — are similar to those of the American public generally. Half of all Muslim immigrants display the US flag at home, in the office, or on their car.

Given America’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the bloody battles with Islamic regimes and insurgents, and the threat to homeland security from “lone wolf” terror attacks, it might seem surprising that Muslims in Detroit or Brooklyn aren’t at least as alienated as those in Molenbeek. But they aren’t. For despite the rise of identity politics and the balkanizing pressures of multicultural correctness, America’s melting pot still works. Generations of Muslim immigrants have come to America to escape repression, poverty, or war in their homelands. The life they have made for themselves here has been freer, safer, more prosperous, and more embracing than the existence they left behind. There are tensions, but not enough to keep most Muslims from fitting themselves comfortably into the American mosaic.

At a time when populist demagogues are doing so much damage to our social fabric, it is well to remember why Molenbeek is a European phenomenon, and not an American one. At the core of the American experience is a conviction that immigrants who come to America can and should become Americans. Patriotic assimilation turns profoundly dissimilar foreigners into proud and happy Americans. “Muslims in the United States,” Pew found, “reject extremism by much larger margins than most Muslim publics” around the world.

Americanization — E Pluribus Unum — is not only a key ingredient in the American Dream. It also keeps us safe.

Bottom line: American culture, with its emphasis on individualism and personal freedom, is more benign than the culture of Europe.

But America has its enclaves of cultural pathology: colleges and universities. Under the tutelage of leftist faculty and campus bureaucrats, Muslim and Arab students are encouraged to nurse a sense of grievance, and especially to hate the state of Israel. Thus we have things like “Israeli Apartheid Week” week at Marquette.

In this, as in other things, academia is an island a cultural pathology in a generally benign national culture.

Minority Students as Victims of Affirmative Action

From Jeff Jacoby:

AFFIRMATIVE ACTION is once again before the Supreme Court. The case, Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin, arose from the usual scenario: A white student applied to the university but was denied admission, while black applicants with weaker academic credentials were admitted because of racial preferences designed to favor minorities.

It’s no mystery why Abigail Fisher, the rejected student in this case, would object to that racial double standard and take her protest all the way to the Supreme Court. What’s less clear is why the University of Texas embraces such a double standard.

Then, further on in the article:

What particularly concerns Heriot and Kirsanow [members of the Civil Rights Commission] is the substantial body of empirical evidence demonstrating that affirmative action hurts the very students it is intended to help. Their brief discusses the problem of “mismatch.” That is the term for what happens when an elite institution relaxes its usual standards to admit more racial minorities, thereby encouraging black students to enter schools where they are apt to be academically weaker than their peers. The result is that students admitted through affirmative action tend to cluster near the bottom of their entering cohort, to have lower grades and higher drop-out rates, and to more frequently abandon rigorous courses or switch to less demanding majors.

For anyone who cares about minority advancement, the toll taken by mismatch is heartbreaking. Only one-third of black students who enter law school, for example, end up graduating and passing the bar exam on the first attempt. Another example: At Duke University, to take another example, 54 percent of black and Hispanic men who started out as science and engineering majors switched to a different field, compared with a mere 8 percent of white male students who did so. A study of underrepresented minority students at 23 universities found that the number who would have successfully earned degrees in science, math, and engineering would have been between 35 and 45 percent higher — if only the students had attended schools where their academic credentials were closer to average.

The Civil Rights Commission has reported on the troubling “mismatch” phenomenon in several recent studies. An important 2012 book by legal scholars Richard Sander and Stuart Taylor Jr. delved into the issue in sober detail. There is little doubt that racial preferences have backfired, leaving the nation with fewer black doctors, lawyers, scientists, engineers, and professors than would otherwise be the case. There was some politically-correct hyperventilating when Justice Antonin Scalia asked about this research during the Fisher oral argument this month.

But there is nothing outrageous in taking a hard look at mismatch, or in seriously confronting the harm it has caused. Racial preferences have held back far too many minority students. The sooner those preferences are scrapped, the more success black students will achieve.

For a more detailed review of the evidence, which clearly supports Jacoby, check this article in the Wall Street Journal.

Affirmative action is not, in fact, about “diversity,” it’s about political correctness. A genuine diversity agenda would require recruiting conservatives and libertarians for faculty positions in most departments in most universities. It might require giving preference to students from poor and working class backgrounds. It would involve giving preference to foreign students coming from cultures quite different from that of the average American kid (and this includes the average black American kid).

Affirmative action, in other words, is not a genuine diversity policy. It’s just a racial spoils system.

Gun Control and the Watch List

From Jeff Jacoby:

“We have a no-fly list where people can’t get on planes,” Obama told CBS News, “but those same people who we don’t allow to fly could go into a store right now in the United States and buy a firearm. . . . That’s a law that needs to be changed.”

He repeated the popular Democratic talking point Sunday evening. “Congress should act to make sure no one on a no-fly list is able to buy a gun,” Obama insisted. “This is a matter of national security.”

Well, maybe — except that the San Bernardino butchers weren’t on any government watchlist. Neither was the Colorado Springs gunman. Or the mass shooter at the Oregon community college. There are an estimated 47,000 people on the federal no-fly list — but Dylann Roof, the Charleston church killer, was never among them. Nor were Boston’s Tsarnaev brothers. Nor was Adam Lanza, who murdered 26 victims at the Sandy Hook Elementary School. As far as is known, no perpetrator of any mass shooting in the United States has turned out to be on the no-fly list.

Dylann Roof, James Holmes, and Jared Loughner

On the other hand, the late Ted Kennedy was on the list. At least five times in 2004, the senior senator from Massachusetts was denied a boarding pass because the alias “T. Kennedy” appeared on the no-fly list. Each time, it took the intervention of Homeland Security officials to clear him for travel — and it still took Kennedy and his staff more than three weeks to get his name removed from the list.

Others blocked by the no-fly list have ranged from Washington journalist Stephen Hayes to a Florida toddler to Georgia congressman John Lewis to singer Yusuf Islam, formerly Cat Stevens. Even agents of the Federal Air Marshal Service have been caught in the no-fly net. There is nothing transparent about the government’s formula for adding names to the list, and there is no due process for getting one’s name cleared. For years, the government wouldn’t even confirm that someone was on the list. Only after the ACLU prevailed in a federal lawsuit last June did that finally change.

Even more opaque than the no-fly list is the gargantuan Terrorist Screening Database. The government has conceded in the past that it “misidentified” tens of thousands of blameless individuals, yet it continues to add names at a staggering rate. In court filings in 2014, federal officials disclosed that more than 1.5 million names had been added to the terror watchlist in the previous five years. Data from the National Counterterrorism Center indicate that of 680,000 names on the watchlist in 2013, fully 40 percent were described as having “no recognized terrorist group affiliation.”

With a little bad luck, anyone could find himself added to these terror watchlists run amok. To propose making rosters so sloppy the basis of draconian new limitations on a core constitutional right isn’t “common sense” gun control, merely cynical grandstanding.

So conservatives have a good case in opposing this particular form of “gun control” that Obama and the liberals want.

But where are the liberals on the whole issue of the “watch lists?”

The right to keep and bear arms is guaranteed in the Bill of Rights (whether the liberals like it or not). But the Fifth Amendment says that no person can be “deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” While the Founders could not have conceived of modern air travel, the right to travel is clearly a form of protected liberty.

No serious proposal to reduce gun violence can ignore the general incompetence of government. Nor can it ignore the deranged cunning of people who engage in mass killings.

Politically Correct Nonsense About “Cultural Appropriation”

From Jeff Jacoby:

For seven years, the Center for Students with Disabilities at the University of Ottawa has sponsored free on-campus yoga classes, a popular program taught by a professional yoga teacher from the city’s Rama Lotus Yoga Centre. To the reasonable among us, free yoga for special-needs students may sound innocuous and gentle. But not to the vigilantes of political correctness, who successfully pressured the university’s student government to suspend the classes as an intolerable instance of “cultural appropriation.”

According to the Ottawa Sun, the disabilities center confessed its thoughtcrime in a public statement. While yoga may be “accessible and great for students,” it said, that doesn’t excuse the “cultural issues of implication” involved. The societies where yoga originated “have experienced oppression, cultural genocide, and diasporas due to colonialism and Western supremacy [and] we need to be mindful of this and how we express ourselves while practicing yoga.”

For votaries in the left’s High Church of Perpetual Dudgeon, nothing is safe from the outrage machine. Yoga is just the latest addition to the list, and if you don’t understand why it’s insensitive, racist, and neocolonialist for disabled students in Canada to take a weekly class in mindful stretching — well, get thee to a reeducation camp.

Everywhere these days you can find the harpies of cultural correctness ginning up a controversy over someone else’s wrongful “appropriation.” They denounce Australian hip-hop sensation Iggy Azalea for rapping with a “blaccent.” They demand that Selena Gomez apologize for donning a bindi. They fume when Americans embrace foods from Asian or Middle Eastern societies while “ignoring . . . oppression faced by those communities.” They howl when white models wear their hair in cornrows. They slam gay white men for adopting black women’s gestures or expressions.

“Appropriation occurs,” lectures “Hunger Games” actress Amandla Stenberg, “when a style leads to racist generalizations or stereotypes where it originated, but is deemed high fashion, cool, or funny when the privileged take it for themselves.” Stenberg is only 16, so her self-righteous tone may be a function of adolescence. It’s typical, though, of cultural-sensitivity zealots who are quick to complain when people reared in one culture take on elements of a different culture.

But the complaints are humbug. Cultural appropriators shouldn’t be chastised. They should be cheered.

All culture is “appropriated.” All human societies, tribes, religions, and nationalities have been influenced by others. Ideas and tastes aren’t the exclusive property of any group, and they can no more be confined behind rigid cultural or geographical boundaries than they can avoid shifting over time. Obviously it is never right to gratuitously give offense merely to be offensive. But there is nothing gratuitous about borrowing from other people’s cuisine or dress or music, especially when it is done with appreciation and enjoyment.

Writing in The Washington Post recently, Ruth Tam described “the shame associated with immigrant foods” like the Cantonese dishes she grew up eating in her parents’ Chicago home. She recalled her mortification at being told by a classmate that her house smelled of “Chinese grossness.” Today, many of those dishes have become trendy; foodies flock to upscale eateries to try them. Yet instead of celebrating the swelling popularity of foods she has always loved, Tam is angry. Those fashionable diners are indulging a kind of “discount tourism,” she snaps. “American chefs . . . use other cultures’ cuisines to reap profit.”

What a blinkered mindset! Human cultures aren’t sealed beakers from which no particle must be allowed to escape. We all have the right to draw from each other’s wellsprings of tradition and art, knowledge and lifestyles. Not just because imitation can indeed be the sincerest form of flattery, but because “cultural appropriation” is how we progress. We learn, if we are fortunate, from the experience of others — we are enriched by their contributions, deepened by their insights, broadened by their disciplines.

Yoga, like all culture, belongs to everyone, and it is no thoughtcrime to say so.

This whole business is so stupid that only in academia could it be taken seriously.

Refusing to Appropriate

Suppose, for example, that people in the U.S. refused to “appropriate” anything from India? Suppose they said “India? That backwater? That country with all those ignorant people? Why would we want to imitate them?” But Americans don’t think like this. They will cheerfully glom onto things from India in which they find value.

So white performers will adopt a black accent and black hairstyles? For most of American history, things associated with black people were considered unacceptable among reputable whites. That’s no longer true, something that could be seen as evidence of huge racial progress — unless you are a politically correct grievance monger.

Does the evil of “cultural appropriation” work the other way? Do Americans have the right to be pissed off when people abroad appropriate our cultural artifacts? Is the international popularity of rock music (as well as country music, jazz, blues, etc.) something we Americans should resent?

Of course, if you are a politically correct leftist in India, and hear rock music on the radio (and yes, you most certainly can) you would be appalled. But not at Indian “cultural appropriation,” rather at American “cultural imperialism.” It’s always America that is evil.

An Example of Appropriation

We know that blues is black people’s music, so what are we to make of this?


Two black blues musicians playing with two whites who are appropriating black music. For shame!

But somehow, B.B. King doesn’t seem to mind jamming with Eric Clapton. But what does he know, compared to your English professor, or your Philosophy professor? Were he still alive, King should have a talk with your university Associate Provost for Diversity.

Final Note

At about 8:20 a black guy named Robert Randolph joins in on a pedal steel guitar. But the pedal steel is part of country music. Will the appropriation never end!

The Truth About Scandinavian Socialism

It seems Democrats have come out of the closet as socialists, proclaiming their faith in European socialism. Of course, they don’t invoke socialism in Greece, or Italy, or France or even the U.K. It’s Scandinavian socialism they always cite. But the notion that it should be imported to the U.S. is naïve.

From Jeff Jacoby:

Liberals have had a crush on Scandinavia for decades. “It is a country whose very name has become a synonym for a materialist paradise,” observed Time magazine in a 1976 story on Sweden. “Its citizens enjoy one of the world’s highest living standards. . . . Neither ill‑health, unemployment nor old age pose the terror of financial hardship. [Sweden’s] cradle-to-grave benefits are unmatched in any other free society outside Scandinavia.” In 2010, a National Public Radio story marveled at the way “Denmark Thrives Despite High Taxes.” The small Nordic nation, said NPR, “seems to violate the laws of the economic universe,” improbably balancing low poverty and unemployment rates with stratospheric taxes that were among the world’s highest.

Such paeans may inspire Clinton’s love and Sanders’s faith in America’s socialist future. As with most urban legends, however, the reality of Scandinavia’s welfare-state utopia doesn’t match the hype.

To begin with, explains Swedish scholar Nima Sanandaji, the affluence and cultural norms upon which Scandinavia’s social-democratic policies rest are not the product of socialism. In Scandinavian Unexceptionalism, a penetrating new book published by the Institute of Economic Affairs, Sanandaji shows that the Nordic nations’ prosperity “developed during periods characterized by free-market policies, low or moderate taxes, and limited state involvement in the economy.”

For example, Sweden was a poor nation for most of the 19th century (which helps explain the great wave of Swedish emigration to the United States in the 1800s). That began to change as Stockholm, starting around 1870, turned to free-enterprise reforms. Robust capitalism replaced the formerly agrarian system, and Sweden grew rich. “Property rights, free markets, and the rule of law combined with large numbers of well-educated engineers and entrepreneurs,” Sanandaji writes. The result was an environment in which Swedes experienced “an unprecedented period of sustained and rapid economic development.” In fact, between 1870 and 1936 Sweden had the highest growth rate in the industrialized world.

Scandinavia’s hard-left turn didn’t come about until much later. It was in the late 1960s and early 1970s that taxes soared, welfare payments expanded, and entrepreneurship was discouraged.

But what emerged wasn’t heaven on earth.

That 1976 story in Time, for example, went on to report that Sweden found itself struggling with crime, drug addiction, welfare dependency, and a plague of red tape. Successful Swedes — most famously, Ingmar Bergman — were fleeing the country to avoid its killing taxes. “Growing numbers are plagued by a persistent, gnawing question: Is their Utopia going sour?”

Sweden’s world-beating growth rate dried up. In 1975, it had been the 4th-wealthiest nation on earth (as measured by GDP per capita); by 1993, it had dropped to 14th. By then, Swedes had begun to regard their experiment with socialism as, in Sanandaji’s phrase, “a colossal failure.”

Denmark has come to a similar conclusion. Its lavish subsidies are being rolled back amid sharp concerns about welfare abuse and an eroding work ethic. In the last general election, Danes replaced a left-leaning government with one tilted to the right. Loving Denmark doesn’t mean loving big-government welfarism.

The real key to Scandinavia’s unique successes isn’t socialism, it’s culture. Social trust and cohesion, a broad egalitarian ethic, a strong emphasis on work and responsibility, commitment to the rule of law — these are healthy attributes of a Nordic culture that was ingrained over centuries. In the region’s small and homogeneous countries (overwhelmingly white, Protestant, and native-born), those norms took deep root. The good outcomes and high living standards they produced antedated the socialist nostrums of the 1970s. Scandinavia’s quality of life didn’t spring from leftist policies. It survived them.

Sanandaji makes the acute observation that when Scandinavian emigrants left for the United States, those cultural attributes went with them and produced the same good effects. Scandinavian-Americans have higher incomes and lower poverty rates than the US average. Indeed, Danish-Americans economically outperform Danes still living in Denmark, as do Swedish-Americans compared with Swedes and Finnish-Americans compared with Finns. Scandinavian culture has been a blessing for native Scandinavians — and even more of one for their cousins across the ocean.

No, Scandinavia doesn’t “violate the laws of the economic universe.” It confirms them. With free markets and healthy values, almost any society will thrive. All socialism does is make things worse.

Community Must Face Black On Black Crime

From Jeff Jacoby of The Boston Globe.

Debating capital punishment at an Ivy League university a few years ago, I was confronted with the claim that since death sentences are more often meted out in cases where the victim is white, the death penalty must be racially biased. It’s a spurious argument, I replied. Whites commit fewer than half of all murders in the United States, yet more whites than blacks are sentenced to death and more whites than blacks are executed each year. (56 percent of death row inmates are white, and of the 53 murderers executed last year, 32 were white.) If there is racial bias in the system, it clearly doesn’t operate in favor of whites.

But if you do choose to focus on the race of victims, I added, remember that nearly all black homicide is intraracial -- more than nine out of 10 black murder victims in the United States are killed by black murderers. So applying the death penalty in more cases where the victim is black would mean sending more black men to death row.

After the debate, a young black woman accosted me indignantly. Ninety-plus percent of black blood is shed by black hands? What about all the victims of white supremacists? Hadn’t I heard of lynching? Hadn’t I heard of James Byrd, who died so horribly in Jasper, Texas? When I assured her that Byrd’s murder by whites was utterly untypical of most black homicide, she was dubious.

. . . [M]any Americans, like the woman at my debate, still seem to view racial questions through an antediluvian lens. To them, it is always the 1960s: White bigotry remains a clear and present danger, and the reason so many black Americans die before their time.

But the data aren’t in dispute. Though outrage over “racism” is ever fashionable, African-Americans have long had far less to fear from the violence of racist whites than from the mayhem of the black underclass.

“Do you realize that the leading killer of young black males is young black males?” asked Secretary of Health and Human Services Louis Sullivan 16 years ago. “As a black man and a father of three, this really shakes me to the core of my being.”

From Georgia Congressman John Lewis, a veteran of the civil rights movement, came a similar cry of anguish. “Nothing in the long history of blacks in America,” he lamented in 1994, “suggests the terrible destruction blacks are visiting upon each other today.”

Happily, crime rates have declined from their 1990s peak. But it remains the case that the worst destruction in black America is self-inflicted.

In a new study, the Justice Department’s Bureau of Justice Statistics confirms once again that almost half the people murdered in the United States each year are black, and 93 percent of black homicide victims are killed by someone of their own race. (For white homicide victims, the figure is 85 percent.) In other words, of the estimated 8,000 African-Americans murdered in 2005, more than 7,400 were cut down by other African-Americans. Though blacks account for just one-eighth of the US population, the BJS reports, they are six times more likely than whites to be victimized by homicide -- and seven times more likely to commit homicide.

Such huge disproportions don’t just happen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously warned 40 years ago that the collapse of black family life would mean rising chaos and crime in the black community. Today, as many as 70 percent of black children are born out of wedlock or raised in fatherless households. And as reams of research confirm, children raised without married parents and intact, stable families are more likely to engage in antisocial behavior.

High rates of black violent crime are a national tragedy, but it is the law-abiding black majority that suffers from them most. “There is nothing more painful to me at this stage in my life,” Jesse Jackson said in 1993, “than to walk down the street and hear footsteps . . . then turn around and see somebody white and feel relieved.”

It isn’t an insoluble problem. Americans overcame white racism; they can overcome black crime, too. But the first step, as always, is to face the facts.

Having had a bizarre experience with some race hustling politicians on the Governor’s Commission on Reducing Racial Disparities in the Wisconsin Justice System, we know how deep the denial and demagoguery can go.

Is Respect for Life “Ideology?”

From Jeff Jacoby, discussing President Bush’s veto of a bill that would fund embryonic stem cell research, using cells derived from killing embryos.

Jacoby, he makes clear, differs from Bush on this issue. But he respects the president’s logic.

A human embryo is not just another lab supply or raw material, to be manipulated or destroyed at will. Even in nascent form, human life must be treated with dignity and care. How and under what circumstances embryos can be harvested for their stem cells are not just scientific questions. First they are questions of ethics and morality, and of the values we wish to live by.

Or are they? To judge from the criticism of Bush’s stem cell veto last week, nothing outranks the claims of science, and only a zealot could think otherwise.

“With one pen stroke,” charged Governor Bill Richardson of New Mexico, “President Bush has ignored hard science, embraced misplaced ideology, and turned his back on the millions who stand to benefit from . . . stem cell research.”

Similarly, Senate majority leader Harry Reid blasted Bush for “putting the politics of his narrow ideology ahead of saving lives.”

So did Senator Hillary Clinton: “This is just one example of how the president puts ideology before science.”

And Senator Barack Obama: “The promise that stem cells hold does not come from any particular ideology; it is the judgment of science, and we deserve a president who will put that judgment first.”

What these statements have in common is their use of “ideology” as a pejorative for the principles and ethical values that have guided Bush’s thinking on the stem cell issue. They treat “science” as an unqualified good, and reproach the White House for letting ethical qualms impede scientific progress. Yet not all science is progress, and not all ethical qualms are impediments.

It is for man to master science, not the other way around. Unfettered scientific investigation isn’t always morally neutral, nor a sufficient end in and of itself. We all want diseases to be cured and lives to be prolonged, but there are ethical limits to how far we can go in acquiring knowledge that may one day save human life. Embryonic stem cell research, as Bush notes, is at the leading edge of a series of moral hazards. It is not blind “ideology” to say so.

“You don’t need religion to tremble at the thought of unrestricted embryo research,” wrote Charles Krauthammer, a physician and former member of the President’s Council on Bioethics, last January. “You simply have to have a healthy respect for the human capacity for doing evil in pursuit of the good. Once we have taken the position of many stem cell research advocates that embryos are discardable tissue with no more intrinsic value than a hangnail or an appendix, then all barriers are down. . . . The slope is very slippery.”

I wouldn’t have vetoed the bill Bush rejected. Nevertheless, I appreciate his effort to block that slippery slope. As science tugs us toward a brave new world of manufactured human life, it is more urgent than ever that moral boundaries not be ignored when biomedical public policy is made.

It’s a bit ironic that proponents of embryonic stem cell research call opposition to their agenda “ideology.” In reality, science has it’s own ideology. That ideology says “if we can do it, we should do it, and moral scruples be damned.”

Science also has its own set of vested interests. There is potentially vast wealth to be made from stem cells, and it’s ironic that the sort of liberals who are happy to bash pharmaceutical companies for their “excess profits” and who want to regulate all kinds of other economic activity are laissez-faire people on this.

But actually, they aren’t laissez-faire people. Nothing in the Bush policy prevents private individuals or corporations from funding stem cell research. These folks want a taxpayer subsidy.

Marriage: Gay & Straight

From Jeff Jacoby, some politically incorrect, but certainly sensible, thoughts on gay marriage.

Is marriage intrinsically connected to bearing and raising children? Advocates of same-sex marriage often argue peremptorily that it is not .

“In today’s society,” Yale law professor William Eskridge asserts in The Case for Same-Sex Marriage, “the importance of marriage is relational and not procreational.” The privileged status of marriage in modern society, in other words, has to do with the love and commitment of the spouses, not with the needs of any children those spouses may produce. In its 2003 Goodridge decision mandating same-sex marriage, the Massachusestts Supreme Judicial Court was even more emphatic. To the argument that the state’s interest in marriage is connected to procreation, the SJC replied categorically: “This is incorrect.”

As evidence that marriage and childrearing are not fundamentally related, same-sex marriage proponents frequently point out that married couples aren’t required to have children. No law prevents infertile couples from marrying or orders childless marriages dissolved. If procreation is so important to marriage, they say, why should elderly couples, or couples determined not to have children, be permitted to wed?

[. . . ] No mainstream opponent of same-sex marriage claims that having children is the sole purpose of wedlock. Marriages can serve any number of purposes, as diverse as the people entering into them -- cementing the bond between devoted partners, guaranteeing financial security, having a legitimate sexual outlet, ensuring companionship, and so on. People get married for various reasons; the desire to raise a family is only one of them.

What makes marriage a public institution, however -- the reason it is regulated by law and given an elevated legal status -- is that it provides something no healthy society can do without: a stable environment in which men and women can create and bring up the next generation, and in which children can enter the world with mothers and fathers committed to their well-being.

Because sex between men and women makes children, and because children tend to do best when raised by their mothers and fathers, society has a vested interest in encouraging long-term, monogamous, heterosexual marriage. True, not all married couples reproduce. But every opposite-sex marriage has the ability to give a father and a mother to any child the couple creates or adopts. That is something no same-sex couple can provide, which is one reason homosexual marriage has never become a social institution.

Of course procreation is not the only reason to marry, but to insist that marriage is not closely related to having children is like arguing, to use an analogy offered by marriage scholar David Blankenhorn, that cars are not intrinsically connected to driving.

“When you acquire ownership of a car,” Blankenhorn writes in his forthcoming book, The Future of Marriage, “society does not impose upon you a binding obligation to drive it. If you buy a car but fail to drive it, the state does not for that reason revoke your driver’s license. . . . Cars can be about many things, including pleasure, aesthetics, economic gain, and social status.” But whether any particular car is driven or not, cars and driving are intrinsically linked.

Similarly, whatever the circumstances of any married couple, marriage and procreation are intrinsically connected. Men and women make babies; babies need mothers and fathers. That is why there has always been a public stake in the marriage of husbands and wives. And why no such stake exists in the union of same-sex couples.

Jacoby omits another important reason to extend the right to marry to opposite sex couples who may not in fact bear children.

For government to determine who will and who won’t likely have children would be excessively intrusive.

Demanding that couples seeking a marriage license prove they are fertile, and demanding they swear that they intend to bear children simply isn’t acceptable. And even if it were, how would we enforce the promise?

Of course, we could deny the right to marry to couples until the child is born. But society has an interest in children being conceived, born and raised by married biological parents. We’ve long fudged on the “conceived” part, and more recently fudged massively on the “born” and “raised” part, but that doesn’t change the fact that society has such an interest. Indeed, the social cost of the fudging is now huge and obvious.

Liberals are always lecturing people about how one should not “impose ones moral views” on other people. They are most likely to do this when they are themselves trying to impose their moral views on others.

The simple fact, however, is that letting anybody get the special treatment that comes with marriage is an “imposition.” Society’s interests in the welfare of children may justify this imposition where heterosexual couples are concerned, but nothing can justify it where homosexual couples are concerned.

If one does not buy this argument, it makes more sense to privatize marriage entirely than to extend it to same sex couples.

We think of homosexuals demanding the right to marry as akin to pacifists demanding admission to West Point. One has a right to be a pacifist. We think that position is flatly wrong, but you have a right to it.

But social institutions have a purpose. When you freely opt out of the purpose behind the institution, you have opted out of the institution.

Global Warming Dissent

We have blogged fairly regularly on the fact that the notion of anthropogenic global warming has become an official orthodoxy, not a scientific theory subject to debate and discussion.

Yesterday’s column by Jeff Jacoby of the Boston Globe outlines how much serious dissent there is among reputable scientists.

You know that big United Nations report on global warming that appeared last week amid so much media sound and fury? Here’s a flash: It wasn’t the big, new United Nations report on global warming.

Oddly enough, most of the news coverage neglected to mention that the document released on Feb. 2 by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was not the latest multiyear assessment report, which will run to something like 1,500 pages when it is released in May. It was only the 21-page “Summary for Policymakers,” a document written chiefly by government bureaucrats -- not scientists -- and intended to shape public opinion. Perhaps the summary will turn out to be a faithful reflection of the scientists’ conclusions, but it wouldn’t be the first time if it doesn’t.

In years past, scientists contributing to IPCC assessment reports have protested that the policymakers’ summary distorted their findings -- for example, by presenting as unambiguous what were actually only tentative conclusions about human involvement in global warming. This time around, the summary is even more confident: It declares it “unequivocal” that the Earth has warmed over the past century and “very likely” -- meaning more than 90 percent certain -- that human activity is the cause.

That climate change is taking place no one doubts; the Earth’s climate is always in flux. But is it really so clear-cut that the current warming, which amounts to less than 1 degree Celsius over the past century, is anthropogenic? Or that continued warming will lead to the meteorological chaos and massive deaths that alarmists predict? It is to the media. By and large they relay only the apocalyptic view: Either we embark on a radical program to slash carbon-dioxide emissions -- that is, to arrest economic growth -- or we are doomed, as NBC’s Matt Lauer put it last week, to “what literally could be the end of the world as we know it.”

Perhaps the Chicken Littles are right and the sky really is falling, but that opinion is hardly unanimous. There are quite a few skeptical scientists, including eminent climatologists, who doubt the end-of-the-world scenario. Why don’t journalists spend more time covering all sides of the debate instead of just parroting the scaremongers?

Only rarely do other views pierce the media’s filter of environmental correctness. A recent series by Lawrence Solomon in Canada’s National Post looked at some of the leading global-warming dissenters, none of whom fits the easy-to-dismiss stereotype of a flat-Earth yahoo. There is, for example, Richard S.J. Tol -- IPCC author, editor of Energy Economics, and board member of the Centre for Marine and Climate Research at Hamburg University. Tol agrees that global warming is real, but he emphasizes its benefits as well as its harms -- and points out that in the short term, the benefits are especially pronounced.

“Tol is a student of human innovation and adaptation,” writes Solomon. “As a native of the Netherlands, he is intimately familiar with dikes and other low-cost adaptive technologies, and the ability of humans in meeting challenges in their environment.” Whatever changes global warming may bring, Tol is confident that human beings will adjust to them with ingenuity and resourcefulness.

Another dissident is Duncan Wingham, professor of climate physics at University College London and principal scientist of the European Space Agency’s CryoSat Mission, which is designed to measure changes in the Earth’s ice masses. The collapse of ice shelves off the northern Antarctic Peninsula is often highlighted as Exhibit A of global warming and its dangers, but Wingham’s satellite data shows that the thinning of some Antarctic ice has been matched by thickening ice elsewhere on the continent. The evidence to date, Wingham says, is not “favorable to the notion we are seeing the results of global warming.”

Still other scientists profiled by Solomon contend that the sun, not man, plays the dominant role in planetary climate change.

Henrik Svensmark of the Danish National Space Center, for instance, believes that changes in the sun’s magnetic field, and the corresponding impact on cosmic rays, may be the key to global warming. Nigel Weiss, a past president of the Royal Astronomical Society and a mathematical aerophysicist at the University of Cambridge, correlates sunspot activity with changes in the Earth’s climate. Habibullo Abdussamatov, who heads the space research laboratory at Pulkovo Astronomical Observatory in Russia, points out that Mars is also undergoing global warming -- despite having no greenhouse conditions and no activity by Martians. In his view, it is solar irradiance, not carbon dioxide, that accounts for the recent rise in temperature.

Climate-change hyperbole makes for dramatic headlines, but the real story is both more complex and more interesting. Chicken Little may claim the sky is falling. A journalist’s job is to check it out.

But when journalists have signed onto a moralistic crusade, don’t expect much checking.