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FEBRUARY 7, 2022 | VOLUME LXXIV, NO. 2 | www.nationalreview.com

Kyle Smith on moviegoing

ON THE COVER Page 19 p. 16

The Prosecutor
BOOKS, ARTS
Who Won’t & MANNERS
Prosecute 34 TERRY TEACHOUT IS DEAD
Mark Morris remembers a critic
There are leftist district attorneys and friend.
in Chicago, Boston, Houston, and 35 THE PATRIOT KING
St. Louis. And don’t forget San Robert G. Ingram reviews
The Last King of America:
Francisco, where Chesa Boudin The Misunderstood Reign of
presides over shoplifter heaven. George III, by Andrew Roberts.

Now we have to add to the list 37 FIXED IN THE FIRMAMENT

Peter Tonguette reviews Garbo,
Manhattan, where Alvin Bragg just by Robert Gottlieb.
swept to victory. Barry Latzer 39 A LIFE OF FIRE
Diane Scharper reviews Burning
COVER: HANS NELEMAN/GETTY IMAGES Boy: The Life and Work of
Stephen Crane, by Paul Auster.
ARTICLES
40 THE BELIEVER’S BRAIN
12 THE WELL-ARMED TROLL by Kevin D. Williamson Jonathan Leaf reviews The
On Vladimir Putin. Awakened Brain: The New
Science of Spirituality and Our
14 FRIENDS, AND ENEMIES, OF THE PEOPLE by Jay Nordlinger Quest for an Inspired Life,
The Russian government shuts down a leading civil-society and by Lisa Miller.
human-rights organization.
42 THE STORIED OED
16 THE CHORUS OF US ALL by Kyle Smith Bryan A. Garner explores books
about the Oxford English
Why we still go out to the movies.
Dictionary.

FEATURES 43 MOTHER LOAD

Ross Douthat reviews The Lost
19 THE PROSECUTOR WHO WON’T PROSECUTE by Barry Latzer
Daughter.

Meet Alvin Bragg, Manhattan’s new DA.

22 THE NEW WHITE FLIGHT by Michael Brendan Dougherty SECTIONS

The trouble with our upper middle class.
2 Letters to the Editor
24 A WORLD WITHOUT RULES by John R. Bolton 4 The Week
On the fantasy of world order. 32 Athwart . . . . . . . . . . . . . James Lileks
33 The Long View . . . . . . . . . Rob Long
27 DEFENDER OF THE DHIMMIS by Sam Sweeney 41 Poetry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Joshua Hren
Assad and the Christians of Syria. 44 Happy Warrior . . . . . . . Daniel Foster

NATIONAL REVIEW (ISSN: 0028-0038) is published bi-weekly, except for the first issue in January, by NATIONAL REVIEW, Inc., at 19 West 44th Street, Suite 1701, New York, N.Y. 10036. Periodicals postage paid at New York, N.Y.,
and additional mailing offices. © National Review, Inc., 2022. Address all editorial mail, manuscripts, letters to the editor, etc., to Editorial Dept., NATIONAL REVIEW, 19 West 44th Street, Suite 1701, New York, N.Y. 10036.
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FEBRUARY 7 ISSUE; PRINTED JANUARY 20

EDITOR IN CHIEF

Potter the Profound

Richard Lowry
NATIONAL REVIEW MAGAZINE
Editor Ramesh Ponnuru
Senior Editors In “It’s a Wonderful Festival” (January 24), Jack Butler describes how, during
Richard Brookhiser / Jay Nordlinger / David Pryce-Jones a weeklong festival every December, Seneca Falls in upstate New York
Managing Editor Jason Lee Steorts
Literary Editor Katherine Howell assumes the role of another small town in the same region, It’s a Wonderful
Vice President, Editorial Operations Christopher McEvoy
Executive Editor Mark Antonio Wright Life’s Bedford Falls. Jack cites some good evidence that Seneca Falls was
Roving Correspondent Kevin D. Williamson
Washington Correspondent John McCormack
indeed the model for the town conjured up by Frank Capra. The festival
National Correspondent John J. Miller sounds, well, wonderful. As I read Jack’s lovely account of his visit, however,
Senior Political Correspondent Jim Geraghty
Editor, Capital Matters Andrew Stuttaford it occurred to me that George Bailey, not the most imaginative of business-
Art Director Luba Kolomytseva
Deputy Managing Editors men, would never have seen the possibilities of cashing in on the movie in this
Nicholas Frankovich / Fred O’Brien way. But you know who would? Henry F. Potter. Potter, a visionary entrepre-
Assistant to the Editor in Chief Stacey Brody
Research Assistant Justin D. Shapiro neur, a titan who overcame the disadvantages of disability, goes unmentioned
Contributing Editors in Jack’s piece other than being rudely dismissed as “Scrooge-like,” a descrip-
Shannen Coffin / Matthew Continetti / Ross Douthat
Daniel Foster / Jack Fowler / Bryan A. Garner tion that doesn’t do justice to the magnificence of his lifestyle. Moreover, as I
Roman Genn / Jonah Goldberg
Arthur L. Herman / Yuval Levin pointed out in a 2001 appreciation of this much maligned if undeniably flawed
James Lileks / Rob Long / Andrew C. McCarthy figure (stealing $8,000: not good), this “Scrooge” offered to bail out Bailey’s
Reihan Salam / Robert VerBruggen
sloppily run Building & Loan and, indeed, Bailey himself (at a salary of
NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE
Editor Philip Klein $20,000 a year for three years: 1946 dollars).
Managing Editor Judson Berger
Submissions Editor Jack Butler In the movie, the magic of Pottersville was banished to a different timeline.
Senior Writers Nevertheless, I suspect that its creator would look at Seneca Falls’ festivities
Charles C. W. Cooke / Michael Brendan Dougherty
David Harsanyi / Dan McLaughlin and allow himself a quiet, dark smile.
Staff Writers
Alexandra DeSanctis / Madeleine Kearns
Critic at Large Kyle Smith
Art Critic Brian T. Allen
Andrew Stuttaford
National-Affairs Columnist John Fund
Associate Editors
Jessica Hornik Evans / Molly Powell JACK BUTLER RESPONDS: I am glad that Andrew enjoyed my dispatch from Seneca
Sarah Colleen Schutte / Nick Tell
Nick Tomaino / Craig Young Falls. I must, however, contest some of his assertions. As Andrew concedes
Content Managers that Potter’s theft of $8,000 belonging to the Bailey Building & Loan was “not
Calvin Corey / Kelvin Morales / Kathy Shlychkov
Web Producer Scott McKim good,” so will I concede Henry F. Potter’s business acumen. It is impressive
News Editor Jack Crowe
Media Reporter Ryan Mills that, as Potter puts it, during the Great Depression, George Bailey saved his
Media and Enterprise Reporter Isaac Schorr own business, while Potter “saved all the rest” of Bedford Falls. What’s not
News Writers
Brittany Bernstein / Caroline Downey / Zachary Evans impressive is the Potter-dominated town that emerges in the reality of
Collegiate Network Fellow Nate Hochman George’s nonexistence. In 2001, Andrew fawningly described Pottersville as a
EDITORS AT LARGE “glamorous, glittering” paradise. But beneath its glitzy gild is a community
Kathryn Jean Lopez / John O’Sullivan
beset by anomie and social distrust, one that treats its citizens like the “rabble”
BUCKLEY FELLOWS IN POLITICAL JOURNALISM
Dominic Pino / Jimmy Quinn
Potter disdains them as. Policemen fire shots into crowded city streets, while
men search desperately for their absent wives and take to drink to numb their
THOMAS L. RHODES FELLOW
Daniel Tenreiro pain. Pottersville reflects the “warped, frustrated” soul of Potter himself. The
Contributors Bedford Falls of George Bailey, meanwhile, may not be a perfect place, just as
Hadley Arkes / Chester E. Finn Jr. / Neal B. Freeman
Charles R. Kesler / Tracy Lee Simmons / Terry Teachout the Building & Loan is hardly a perfect business. (George himself wondered
Vice President, Operations & Finance Tom Kilkenny why his father ever started it.) But the way its people rally together and view
Accounting Manager Jessica Sevita themselves as a genuine community reflects George’s own virtues—virtues
Senior Accountant Vicky Angilella
Accountant Jake Lin that Potter, for all his acumen, could not fathom. That the It’s a Wonderful Life
Director, Circulation & Programs Danielle O’Connell
Technical Marketing Manager John W. Bush III Festival also has something of these virtues makes it more than a mere “cashing
Audience Development & Community Manager Kristin Veltry
Graphic Designer Cristi Name in” on the worthy legacy of Frank Capra’s rightly immortal film.
Manager, Office & Development Russell Jenkins
Executive Assistant to the Publisher Wister Hitt
Director, Sales Jim Fowler
PUBLISHER CHAIRMAN
Correction
E. Garrett Bewkes IV Dale R. Brott
The Wannsee Conference (“Infamy at Wannsee,” December 27) took place on
FOUNDER
William F. Buckley Jr. January 20, not November 20, 1942.
NATIONAL REVIEW INC. BOARD
Dale R. Brott
John Hillen
James X. Kilbridge Letters may be submitted by email to letters@nationalreview.com.
Rob Thomas

2 | www.nationalreview.com FEBRUARY 7, 2022

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■ We’d always assumed that “suitcase full of wine” was Boris

Johnson’s retirement plan. See page 6.

■ As that great American philosopher Kenny Rogers famously

understood, “If you’re gonna play the game, you’ve got to know
when to hold ’em, know when to fold ’em, know when to walk
away.” Clearly, Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer does not
know when to hold ’em, fold ’em, or walk away. If he did, he
would have backed away from his quixotic attempt to force a
vote on the Democrats’ “voting rights” agenda the moment he
learned that neither Kyrsten Sinema nor Joe Manchin was on
board with his plan. Instead, Schumer is barreling ahead with a
strategy that has fractured his own side, united his opposition,
and put his more vulnerable members at electoral risk. In
January, the pressure on Joe Manchin became so intense that
he felt obliged to shrug publicly at the prospect of a primary
challenger. “I’ve been primaried my entire life,” Manchin said,
“that would not be anything new for me.” Meanwhile, the pro-
abortion advocacy group, EMILY’s List, announced that it
would be withdrawing its support for Kyrsten Sinema unless she
relented on abolishing the filibuster. “Senator Sinema’s deci-
sion,” the outfit wrote, “means she will find herself standing
alone in the next election.” And for what? A bill that will fail.
The time to fold has long, long passed.

■ The endgame of the 2020 election exposed weaknesses in
the Electoral Count Act of 1887, which the two parties should
work together to reform. Unlike the Democrats’ push for a
radical federal takeover of voting and elections, ECA reform
would be modest and aimed at advantage for neither side.
Proposed reforms include  raising the thresholds for objec-
tions to state-certified electors and clarifying the limited role
of the vice president. Republicans have been warming to the
idea, with Mitch McConnell and John Thune both signaling
openness from Senate leadership and Jim Banks, head of
the Republican Study Committee in the House, noting the
need for reform so long as it is not a “Trojan horse” for other
Democratic proposals. House Democratic leaders are sup-
portive, and a bipartisan working group has formed in the
Senate. But under public pressure from Democratic elections
lawyer Marc Elias, both Joe Biden and Chuck Schumer have
scoffed at ECA reform for excluding their other election pro-
posals. Republicans should make them level with the public
about what’s more important to them: addressing a real issue
raised by January 6, or carrying on with their long-standing
agenda on voting laws.
■ Senator Mike Rounds (R., S.D.) said the 2020 presidential
election was “fair.” In a retaliatory statement, Donald Trump
said, “‘Senator’ Mike Rounds of the Great State of South
ROMAN GENN
McConnell agreed with his colleague: “I think Senator
Rounds told the truth about what happened in the 2020 elec-
tion.” McConnell has announced that he will run again for
Republican leader in the Senate. Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.)
asked Sean Hannity, “Can Senator McConnell effectively
work with the leader of the Republican Party, Donald Trump?
I am not going to vote for anybody for leader of the Senate, as
a Republican, unless they can prove to me that they can advo-
cate an America First agenda and have a working relationship
with Donald Trump.” The political calendar will, however,
give Graham the opportunity to change his mind a few times
before the event.
■ The Justice Department brought charges of seditious con-
spiracy against Stewart Rhodes and ten other members of the
Oath Keepers, a right-wing militia group, for plotting to dis-
rupt the count of electoral votes and storm the Capitol on
January 6. The law deliberately makes seditious conspiracy
hard to prove: NR’s Andrew McCarthy successfully prosecut-
ed the Blind Sheikh for his plot to bomb the World Trade
Towers in 1993 in part because the sheikh and his cronies
were so forthrightly anti-American in their public and private
statements. The Oath Keepers have uttered their own
doozies: “We aren’t getting through this without a civil war,”
read one of Rhodes’s encrypted chats. The prime mover of the

Dakota just went woke on the Fraudulent Presidential efforts to overturn the 2020 election, however, was no hum-
Election of 2020. . . . Is he crazy or just stupid?” Mitch ble Oath Keeper. Lame-duck president Trump, determined to

4 | www.nationalreview.com FEBRUARY 7, 2022

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THE WEEK
hold on to his job, filled his followers with lies about fraudu-
lent votes; pursued legal challenges that were dismissed and
often frivolously conceived; and pressured officeholders
great and small to violate their duties. His actions may
actually give legal cover to small fry—the president said the
election was stolen.  His moral culpability, generated by his
pathological fear of losing, should debar him from ever
having a chance to win, or lose, again.
■ Trump and Florida governor Ron DeSantis are trading
insults without naming each other. Trump said that politi-
cians who refused to say whether they had had boosters
lacked guts; DeSantis had recently dodged the question. Then
DeSantis said he regretted not speaking up early against fed-
eral pressure to institute lockdowns. Left unsaid: That pres-
sure came from Trump’s administration, and sometimes from
Trump himself. The equities, in our judgment, are split. The
initial shutdowns were driven first by individual behavior and
then by states, but governments stuck with them too long.
But Trump has tried to have it every which way on Covid
policy, and it is refreshing to see a Republican politician not
surrender to him after the first blast.
■ Back in 2017 and 2018, the growing list of Republican
retirements augured badly for the party’s fortunes in the
midterms; it eventually reached 34. By the time the elections
for the House of Representative were over, the GOP had lost
42 seats. Now, the shoe is on the other foot. At press time, a
remarkable 28 House Democrats—more than 12 percent of
the party’s caucus—have announced that they do not intend
to run for reelection. More alarming still for the Democrats,
many of the representatives who are retiring occupy the
competitive seats that would be first to fall in a Republican
wave year. The worst for Nancy Pelosi may be yet to come:
Historically, the pace of retirements tends to increase after
Christmas.
■ Last January, the Democratic Party was riding high, with
Gallup recording the largest percentage of Americans who
identified with the party since it began asking the question in
1991. By the end of the year, however, it was the Republicans
who were breaking records for party identification. Gallup
said the GOP had “an advantage over Democrats larger than
any they had achieved in more than 25 years.” The single-
year shift was a stunning 14 points. President Biden has
squandered the goodwill of the voters with astonishing rapid-
ity. Happily, there is still a price to pay in America for political
overreach and constitutional vandalism.
■ Republican objections to the Commission on Presidential
Debates have been building for years. In 2008, vice-
presidential-debate moderator Gwen Ifill was under contract
to write a book about Barack Obama. In 2012, Candy Crowley
erroneously “corrected” Mitt Romney. Republican National
Committee chairwoman Ronna McDaniel informed  the
commission that the GOP will try to keep its candidates from
participating in CPD events. This may well be a negotiating
ploy. But it is long past time to ask whether presidential
campaigns need a commission of retired politicians to orga-
nize a debate.
6 | www.nationalreview.com
■ Virginia’s new Republican
governor, Glenn Youngkin, is
not starting slowly. On his
first day he signed executive
orders and actions prohibit-
ing the use of critical race
theory in public education,
rescinding the vaccine man-
date for all state employees,
withdrawing from a regional
carbon-cap compact, and di-
recting all state agencies to cut the number of regulations by
25 percent. Perhaps most contentiously, Youngkin signed an
executive order allowing parents to make decisions on whether
their children wear masks in schools—although giving this
order full effect may require changing state law. The main
Democratic reaction so far has been shock that the governor
intends to keep his campaign promises.
■ At press time for our last issue, teachers’ unions in different
parts of the country were making noise about not returning to
class on account of Covid, but the stinkers in Chicago actually
did it. Chicago Public Schools were closed to in-person instruc-
tion for five days as the Chicago Teachers Union flexed its polit-
ical muscles by ordering its members not to report for work.
Of the union’s 22,000 members, 73 percent voted to approve
the “remote work action” and deprive Chicago’s students of in-
person instruction. The strike (let’s call it what it was) was based
on the idea that the surge in cases from the Omicron variant
made schools unsafe. Never mind that workers in every other
industry have been expected to show up to work; the teachers
are special. Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot, to her credit, did not
indulge their melodrama, saying they were holding students
“hostage.” That’s true, but it’s not unusual. Teachers’ unions
hold students hostage as a matter of course, prizing the job
security and benefits of educators above the actual results of
education (which, in Chicago Public Schools, are dismal). The
Chicago Tribune reported that many disgruntled parents
phoned Catholic schools, looking to enroll their children. Now
that this sorry episode is in the rear-view mirror, one hopes that
it illuminated the need for more choice in K–12 education and
made clear to more people the true character of teachers’
unions. Kids shouldn’t be denied education because adults
choose to pitch a fit.
■ Last year, the National School Boards Association (NSBA)
sent the White House a letter likening school-board protesters
to “domestic terrorists” and requesting that the administration
use any laws at its disposal, including the anti-terrorism
PATRIOT Act, to investigate. At the time, parents across the
nation were confronting school boards over masks, shutdowns,
and critical race theory. Attorney General Merrick Garland
swiftly acquiesced to this request by instructing FBI and U.S. at-
torneys’ offices to investigate parents protesting school boards.
ANNA MONEYMAKER/GETTY IMAGES
After the issue blew up, the NSBA apologized for sending the
letter, noting that there “was no justification for some of the
language” it included. It turns out, though, that the association
had coordinated with the White House and the Department of
Education before sending the letter. Further investigation is
warranted, albeit not the kind the NSBA had sought.
FEBRUARY 7, 2022
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■ In between bouts of fighting with Republican senators,
Anthony Fauci said something interesting: Everyone is going
to get the Omicron variant of Covid-19. The variant is highly
infectious, including among the vaccinated; but it is, espe-
cially for the vaccinated, usually mild. Public-health experts
are increasingly outspoken about the ineffectiveness of cloth
masks as a means of stopping transmission. The obvious
conclusion is one Fauci does not draw: Mask and vaccine
mandates are hardly ever called for. Almost all unvaccinated
adults are voluntarily assuming the risk of contracting Covid-
19, unvaccinated children are at low risk, and we can take
steps to protect those who cannot benefit from the vaccine
without upending society. If Covid is ubiquitous, Fauci need
not be.
■ The Supreme Court blocked President Biden’s attempt to
impose a sweeping Covid-vaccine mandate on 84 million
Americans. OSHA’s unprecedented rule would have applied
to all businesses with 100 or more employees. In the 6–3
decision (with the liberals predictably dissenting), the jus-
tices concluded that Congress, in establishing OSHA as a reg-
ulator of workplace safety, had not given it broad authority
over workers’ lives. A separate Biden mandate on health-care
workers survived, with Chief Justice Roberts and Justice
Kavanaugh joining the liberals in thinking that Congress had
given the secretary of HHS the authority to impose require-
ments on hospitals accepting payment from Medicare and
Medicaid. While we side with Justice Thomas and the rest of
the conservative dissenters, the justices were correct in recog-
nizing that HHS has long exercised powers over health-care
workers’ threats to patient safety while OSHA has no compa-
rable mission or history. The Court remains cognizant of the
separation of powers even if the Biden administration does
not.
■ Yet another mandate covers truckers who drive between
Canada and the U.S. Hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of
goods travel by truck across the northern border every year.
Until now, truckers have been exempt from border restrictions
between the two countries, but in January each country started
to apply vaccine mandates to the other’s truckers. Trade
groups on both sides of the border have warned that 10 to 15
percent of cross-border truckers aren’t vaccinated, and the
reduction in capacity that will result from the mandates will
only cause more price increases and chaos in supply chains.
We already have a shortage of truckers. The Biden administra-
tion regularly notes that supply chains are not entirely within
its control, but this is a self-inflicted problem it could have
easily headed off.
■ Malik Faisal Akram, a British national, held the rabbi and
three congregants of a synagogue in Colleyville, Texas,
hostage, demanding the release of Aafia Siddiqui, a Pakistani
jihadi imprisoned in a nearby Air Force base on an 86-year
sentence for the attempted murder of an American soldier in
2010. One hostage was released during negotiations. The
other three escaped when the rabbi, trained in hostage-crisis
management, threw a chair at their captor. After all were
safe, law enforcement shot and killed Akram. Another day in
the jihad and its war on America and on Jews. So why did an
FBI agent characterize the crime as “not specifically related
to the Jewish community”? (A later FBI statement called it “a
terrorism-related matter, in which the Jewish community was
targeted.”) Akram targeted Jews because he thought, per
ancient antisemitic tropes, that they were powerful enough to
do his bidding; and because, if the operation went south, he
would take some with him en route to martyrdom. Crime-
fighting requires knowing your criminals.
■ The inflation rate went up again in December, coming in at
7 percent year-over-year, the highest since June 1982. The
rate of monthly change slowed from 0.8 percent in November
to 0.5 percent, but that is still high, and the inflation is still
broad-based. In hearings over his reappointment as Fed chair-
man, Jerome Powell told senators that the economy needs no
more stimulus and the Fed is prepared to raise rates to quell
inflation. The first rate increase is set for March, and others
will take place later in the year. Powell is certainly correct that
no more stimulus is needed, and any new spending measures
the Biden administration cooks up should be opposed. The
chairman appears to be headed in the right direction, which
makes him a rarity among policy-makers in Washington.
■ The Chamber of Commerce proposes doubling immigration
to the United States in order to solve what it calls a “labor cri-
sis.” Not so fast. Wages are up sharply in the past year, with
paychecks rising most dramatically for workers in traditional-
ly lower-paying fields: hospitality and food service, trans-
portation, and warehousing. At the same time, corporate
profit margins remain at or near record highs: Firms and
shareholders are doing just fine. Flooding the market with
cheap immigrant labor at a time of record profits in response
to the “crisis” of higher wages at fast-food restaurants and
Amazon warehouses is an almost cartoonishly self-serving
proposal. A policy designed to retard wage growth for low- to
middle-income workers is a political loser—it will be laughed
out of the public square, and deserves to be.
■ The latest CDC data on drug-related deaths tell an under-
reported story: Single men have been disproportionately hit by
the opioid epidemic. As Patrick T. Brown noted in City Journal,
while this trend has been apparent for the past decade, it has
accelerated sharply in recent years even if the effects of the
pandemic are accounted for. The drug-related death rate for
unmarried men increased by 125 percent between 2010 and
2019, and single men in the male prime-working-age popula-
tion die of opioid overdoses at a much higher rate than their
married counterparts. Policy-makers who have been reluctant
to acknowledge the benefits of marriage, especially for young
men, should take note: Its breakdown has a body count.
■ The odds of a renewed Russian assault on Ukraine increased,
as diplomatic initiatives to prevent conflict muddled along.
U.S. officials met their Russian counterparts at three different
venues across Europe. The U.S. delegations to these talks, led
by Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman, pressed for a
compromise on the positioning of intermediate-range mis-
siles in Europe—of the sort that the INF treaty restricted
before the U.S. left the agreement in 2018 over Russian cheat-
ing. But Russian officials showed no signs of wavering from
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THE WEEK
their unreasonable demand that NATO not admit further
members. After those discussions, Moscow sent Russian
forces to Belarus for new military exercises, bolstering one key
part of its potential invasion force. An alarmed Senator Ted
Cruz (R., Texas) put up a bill to sanction Russia’s Nord Stream
2 pipeline. But the Biden administration beat it back. Why
should the Kremlin back down when the White House is
lobbying against steps to demonstrate Western resolve?
■ From 1990 to 2019, Nursultan Nazarbayev ran Kazakhstan as
if it were private property. The nation’s oil and mineral com-
panies were put in the hands of family members. Among the
many assets accumulated by Dariga, his eldest daughter and
dynastic heir, were no fewer than three of the most expensive
houses in London. Her husband, Rakhat Aliyev, was accused
of murder and torture, money laundering, extortion, and
kidnapping, only to take his own life in an Austrian prison.
In his eighties and still self-titled “Leader of the Nation,”
Nazarbayev appointed Kassym-Jomart Tokayev as prime min-
ister many years ago and as president in March. In the absence
of organized opposition, street protests about the cost of
living spread recently in several cities. Tokayev saw a chance
to prove that he was his own man. The protesters were really
bandits and terrorists, he claimed, and there were 20,000 of
them. He gave orders that the security forces were to shoot to
kill without warning. According to official figures, 225 protest-
ers were shot dead and 10,000 arrested. Accused of treason
and also arrested was Karim Massimov, former head of securi-
ty, and with him his daughter. President Putin declared that
the unrest had been coordinated by “a single center,” and his
response was to dispatch 2,000 Russian soldiers, mostly para-
troopers. Unusually for dictators losing power, Nazarbayev
simply disappeared; he went to ground but nobody knew
where.
■ On Twitter, the Russian embassy in London related a view of
Sergey Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister: “#NATO has
become a purely #geopolitical project aimed at taking over
territories orphaned by the collapse of the Warsaw Treaty
Organisation and the Soviet Union.” Radek Sikorski, the
Polish statesman and onetime NATIONAL REVIEW writer, had a
response: “Get this, @RussianEmbassy, once and for all, in a
language you can grasp. We were not orphaned by you because
you were not our daddy. More of a serial rapist. Which is why
you are not missed. And if you try it again, you’ll get a kick in
the balls.” Central and Eastern Europe will need more and
more of this spirit, as might we.
■ Swedish intelligence operatives have observed multiple
drone aircraft circling three nuclear facilities and the royal
palace. Swedish authorities are very pointedly not saying that
these are part of a Russian operation, but it is likely that they
are. Sweden is on high alert as Russia threatens to invade
Ukraine, and Swedish military forces recently were deployed
to Gotland, an island in the Baltic Sea, after three Russian
landing craft entered the area. In an interview with the BBC, a
Swedish official described the drones as military-style aircraft
rather than the sort operated by hobbyists. Moscow is working
to sow chaos everywhere Vladimir Putin’s arm can reach, from
Ukraine and Georgia to Sweden, as well as on social media and
8 | www.nationalreview.com
in the energy economy. Sweden is not a NATO member, but it
is worth keeping in mind that Swedish troops served alongside
U.S. forces in Afghanistan and in other conflicts, including the
1991 Gulf War—they are an important American ally and
deserve to be treated as such.
■ Throughout 2020, the U.K. was
under strict lockdowns. In late
May, Britons were permitted to
meet only one person outside
of their household. Hugs and
family visits (including visits to
the dying) were banned. Those
caught breaking the rules were
fined hundreds of pounds. But
having just survived the scandal
of an illicit 2020 Christmas
party, Boris Johnson and his staff
have just been revealed to have been operating under a different
set of standards in the spring as well. On May 20, Johnson’s
private secretary sent out a mass email telling Downing Street
staff to “make the most of the lovely weather” and “bring your
own booze” to a party in No. 10’s garden. Johnson says that he
believed this was a work event, though he has offered a “heart-
felt apology” to the public for how it appears. The loyalty of MPs
is now in question. If Boris Johnson falls, there will be some-
thing poetic in a party’s being the cause.
■ Two weeks after announcing that it would not renew the
license that enabled the Missionaries of Charity to receive for-
eign donations, the Indian government reversed its decision.
“We never thought it would happen so fast,” a spokeswoman for
the Catholic religious order told the Hindustan Times. Possible
reasons for the swift turnabout include not only the hope that
Pope Francis will follow through on his stated aim to visit India
this year but also the bad publicity provoked by the action
against an organization that provides care and shelter to thou-
sands of indigent persons worldwide, disproportionately in
India. In response to the initial decision not to renew the
license, the chief minister of West Bengal criticized the central
government, tweeting that she was “shocked” and that “hu-
manitarian efforts must not be compromised.” The chief minis-
ter of the neighboring state of Odisha allocated $100,000 to the
organization to tide it over. Such support from Indian officials
is all the more welcome given the increased persecution that
Hindu nationalists have been visiting on Christians and other
religious minorities. In the spirit of their founder, Saint Teresa
of Calcutta, the Missionaries of Charity carry on, fearless and
tenacious.
■ To mark the second anniversary of the U.S. drone strike that
killed its general Qasem Soleimani, Iran added 52 current and
former U.S. officials to a sanctions blacklist. The Iranian regime
purports to be able to seize assets from the likes of General Mark
BEN PRUCHNIE/GETTY IMAGES EUROPE
Milley and Robert O’Brien, one of Trump’s national-security
advisers. The Biden administration responded by vowing to
retaliate against any attacks on Americans. Then the Iranian
supreme leader’s office released an animated video depicting a
drone strike targeting Trump on the Mar-a-Lago golf course.
The absurdist quality of the 90-second video might make it
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THE WEEK
seem more a joke than a national-security threat, but Tehran
has long aspired to carry out assassinations and kidnappings on
U.S. soil. As the Biden administration continues nuclear talks
with Iran, let us entertain no illusions about the nature of the
regime.
■ Tennis star and anti-vaccine kook Novak Djokovic had a hard
time of it in Australia. Australia requires foreign visitors to be
vaccinated, and Djokovic refuses to become so. Instead, he
sought—and, temporarily, won—a visa based on a medical
exemption recommended by Tennis Australia and the state
government in Victoria. But the Australian Border Force was
not having it: Djokovic was detained, his visa was revoked
(twice, because of legal wrangling), and he was ultimately
deported. That deportation notionally means that he is banned
from reentering Australia for three years, but it is unclear
whether that provision will be enforced. Australia offers a tem-
porary deferral of its vaccination requirement in cases in which
a recent “acute illness” makes immediate vaccination inadvis-
able. Djokovic, who says he has tested positive for Covid in the
recent past (and who appeared at a number of public events in
the days immediately after that diagnosis), did not suffer an
acute case of Covid, or an acute case of anything else that would
make it dangerous to vaccinate him. He just doesn’t want to be
vaccinated. Australia would have been better off simply sticking
to its rules without trying to bend them to accommodate the
celebrity—and, probably more to the point, the ambitions of
Tennis Australia.
■ Outside Hollywood, extinction (or some lesser devastation)
by asteroid was not a cataclysm we used to spend much time
worrying about. It was unlikely, and there was nothing we
could do about it. But technology has moved on. NASA is keep-
ing a wary eye on the trajectory of “near-earth objects,” and a
test spacecraft, shot into space on one of Elon Musk’s rockets,
is currently hurtling towards a (harmless) asteroid with a view
to knocking it off course. Less happily, it has emerged that
there is an angle of approach that would allow an asteroid to
sneak up on us undetected until almost the last moment. The
problem can, apparently, be fixed by tweaking some algo-
rithms. Until then, keep watching the skies—if only to know
when to duck.
■ The bird-watching world recently celebrated a significant
achievement: Tiffany Kersten broke the record for the highest
number of birds seen in one year in the lower 48 states. In
THE GRAHAM STARK PHOTOGRAPHIC LIBRARY/HULTON ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES
birding lingo, what Kersten did happened in a “big year,” an
endeavor that runs from January 1 until December 31 and can
include a number of regions, for example Hawaii, Canada, and
some French islands. Kersten, a 35-year-old from Texas, found
herself without a job and dealing with difficult personal issues
last February. While trying to make money leading birding
tours in the area, she met another birding record-maker,
Charlie Bostwick, who encouraged her to attempt a big year.
After countless hours flying, driving, and hiking all over the
contiguous U.S., Kersten broke the original record of 724 birds
when she saw the bat falcon. But because this bird isn’t on the
American Birding Association’s official list yet, she solidified
her achievement with a sighting of the northern lapwing.
Congrats to Kersten on her impressive accomplishment.
10 | www.nationalreview.com
■ Sidney Poitier was an actor of exceptional elegance,
dignity, and grace. He grew up on a farm in the
Bahamas. Living in New York, he worked as a dishwash-
er, wanting to be an actor. This dream was hampered by
his limited ability to read. Discovering this, an elderly
Jewish waiter helped him with his reading, night after
night, after closing, for weeks. Later in his life, Poitier
talked of this in an interview, with considerable emo-
tion. In 1967 alone, Poitier starred in three popular
films: To Sir, with Love; In the Heat of the Night; and
Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. In the way he conducted
his career, he had a very positive
impact on race relations. He re-
ceived a slew of awards: an Oscar,
for Best Actor; a Grammy, for
Best Spoken Word Album; the
Presidential Medal of Freedom;
an honorary knighthood from
Queen Elizabeth. For more than a
half century, Poitier was a radiant
presence. He has died at 94 in Los
Angeles. R.I.P.
■ Charles E. McGee was a sophomore at the University of
Illinois when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor. Ten months later, he
enlisted in the Army. It sent him to the Tuskegee Army Air
Field, where he trained to be a pilot, joining other recruits in a
unit reserved for African Americans. The Tuskegee Airmen, the
first black aviators in the U.S. armed forces, served with dis-
tinction, a quiet reproach to the racial segregation that blem-
ished the military and much of America at the time. Stationed
in Italy, McGee escorted bombers on missions in central
Europe. After V-E Day, he continued his service, now with the
Air Force, as a pilot in Korea and then Vietnam. He rose to the
rank of colonel and retired in 1973, having flown 409 combat
missions. In 2020 he was promoted to the rank of brigadier gen-
eral by an act of Congress and honored as a special guest at a
State of the Union Address. “No noise,” he told the Washington
Post in 1989, recounting his 6,308 hours in the cockpit. “No
clutter of the earth.” Winking, he added, “It’s probably the clos-
est I’ll ever get to heaven.” Maybe not. Dead at 102. R.I.P.
■ The reviews that Terry Teachout began writing for NR in the
mid Eighties had the smoothness of a professional and the
authority of an elder. They were in fact the product of a small-
town boy and recent college grad then working in a bank in
Kansas City. Terry found his voice so early because he always
had a love of the arts, and of the people who were its creators
and subjects, matched by a desire to know as much about them
as he could and share it as widely as possible. He spent four
decades play-, concert-, and gallery-going, reading reading
reading, and writing it all up, to length and on deadline, in
prose that was amiable, clear, and wise. Besides his journalism
he produced librettos, plays, and books, all worthwhile,
though the best of them may be his Louis Armstrong biogra-
phy Pops—a lovable man depicted by another one. His many
readers, the art world, and his friends at NR will miss him
dearly. Dead, a month before his 66th birthday. R.I.P.
FEBRUARY 7, 2022
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POLITICS
A New Low for Biden
J
OE BIDEN has had a long career of careless pronouncements
and demagogic speeches, but he outdid himself with his
cynical rant on voting rights in Georgia.
In a push to pass two sweeping Democratic voting bills fed-
eralizing a swath of election rules, Biden took a rhetorical
sledgehammer to the legitimacy of America’s elections and
identified opponents of the bills as domestic “enemies” on
par with some of the most reprehensible figures in U.S.
history.
It was a disgraceful performance, witless and sloppy even
by Biden’s standards.
He picked Georgia as the location of his speech because the
state has been smeared by the Left, with Stacey Abrams (a
conspicuous no-show at his speech) leading the way. Georgia
has supposedly been a hotbed of voter suppression for
years, culminating in the election-reform law that Republican
governor Brian Kemp signed last year.
To the contrary, Georgia long ago adopted some of the
rules that Democrats now consider indispensable to democ-
racy. The state has had no-excuse absentee voting for 15
years, widely available early voting for more than a decade,
and automatic registration since 2016. The League of Women
Voters in Georgia has complained that it has difficulty finding
anyone new to register to vote.
Turnout has been boffo in the state. In the 2020 election, it
exceeded 2008, when Barack Obama fueled big numbers, and
the Senate runoffs last January doubled the previous record
for a runoff election.
The charge now is that Georgia’s reforms will reverse all
this. That’s hard to believe. The law continues to allow no-
excuse absentee voting and expands hours available for early
voting.
President Joe Biden speaks in Atlanta, Ga., January 11.
The specific elements of Biden’s indictment were no more
compelling than his general picture. He mentioned long
lines, which are a function of incompetent local election
administration, not state policy (and the reform law tries to
address long lines). He assailed limits on drop boxes, a pan-
demic innovation that is being preserved, if scaled back. He
alleged that it will be harder to vote by mail, presumably a ref-
erence to the state’s moving away from signature match as a
way to verify ballots—signatures have long been thought to
be too inexact—and using driver’s-license numbers instead.
Inevitably, he returned to the activist complaint about
restrictions on giving food and water to voters standing in
line, a provision meant to prevent politicking among them
that was inspired by a similar rule in New York State.
Biden also hit a change that allows the state election board
to remove the local election board in underperforming coun-
ties. The worry is that this capability will be used to rig the
vote in localities. That’s not very plausible. Under the law, an
investigation has to take place for 30 days before such a
takeover, and the county can appeal to a judge. Since elections
in Georgia have to be certified in ten days, the law doesn’t
leave enough time for the state board—assuming it were so
brazen—to take over a county and change its vote count.
More broadly, Republicans around the country who are on
board with Donald Trump’s lies about 2020 and running for
office in state and local elections would encounter insupera-
ble legal obstacles if they tried to disregard the popular-vote
tally after another Trump run in 2024.
Biden’s speech fell flat. The White House tried to squirm
away from its comparison of opponents to Bull Connor and
Jefferson Davis, and as soon as Biden got back to Washington,
Arizona Democrat Kyrsten Sinema reiterated her long-standing
opposition to changing the filibuster, dooming the whole
effort.
Biden thus shredded his own credibility in Georgia, and
got nothing for it. A typical moment for his presidency.
ANADOLU AGENCY/GETTY IMAGES
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The Well-Armed Troll
On Vladimir Putin
BY KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON
S
OMEONE ought to remind
Vladimir Putin that his side
lost the last cold war—and in-
form him that he is likely to
lose this one, too.
Putin is a ridiculous caudillo running a
third-rate gangster state with a GDP per
capita that is half of Lithuania’s and
barely ahead of Kazakhstan’s. His is a
country that is in both economic and
demographic decline—on its way toward
being a “great power” with the demo-
graphics of the United Kingdom, the
economy of Mexico, and the geopolitical
standing of North Korea. But just as
criminals are often weak men who are
able to temporarily dominate others
through ordinary viciousness, criminal
regimes may momentarily raise their
standing in the world—and maybe even
engage in a little profitable blackmail—
through simple lawlessness.
Vladimir Putin does not want for
12 | www.nationalreview.com
confidence. He has published a couple
of “draft treaties” for ending the crisis
in Ukraine—a crisis entirely of his own
creation—that are so delusional and
arrogant that Russia specialists at the
Brookings Institution and elsewhere
have concluded that they were designed
to be rejected. But there is very little rea-
son to conclude that the demands in the
draft treaties are not exactly what Putin
wants—and maybe even what he expects
to get from a war-weary United States
led by a senescent placeholder presi-
dent. Joe Biden’s headlong retreat from
Afghanistan, with hardly any consulta-
tion or coordination with our allies, left
NATO members shocked and dismayed,
and what discomfited Berlin and Brussels
may have emboldened Moscow—which
hardly needed the encouragement.
Against the background of that reck-
less U.S. retreat, Russian troops were
dispatched to the Ukrainian border, and
Russian demands were dispatched to
Washington. The demands in the draft
treaties amount to giving Moscow veto
power over all NATO decisions of any
consequence: Putin demands that NATO
rescind its offer to bring Ukraine and
Georgia (both of which already are
partially occupied by Russian troops)
into the alliance and put an end to the
process of doing so; Putin demands
that no NATO forces or weapons be
deployed in the NATO countries that
joined after 1997, which together
compose almost half of the member
states. In exchange for NATO’s meet-
ing these demands, Moscow promises
almost nothing—not even the manda-
tory redeployment of troops away from
the Ukrainian border.
In addition, the treaty would prohibit
both the United States and Russia from
placing intermediate-range missiles out-
side their own territory—or deploying
them within their own territory if doing
so would put those missiles within strik-
ing distance of the other party. Such an
arrangement would have been redun-
dant under the 1987 Intermediate-Range
Nuclear Forces Treaty, which mandated
eliminating such weapons entirely,
an agreement that Moscow chose not
to withdraw from but simply ignored,
deploying new intermediate-range
missiles in 2014. This is the diplomatic
equivalent of a burglar trying to sell you
back what he stole from your house.
What is almost amusing is that these
are the kinds of heavy-handed dictates
normally handed down by the victor to
the losing side in a war. Putin’s Russia is
something closer to the opposite of that:
the remaining rump of what Ronald
Reagan called an “evil empire,” but an
empire nonetheless. Putin’s dream
treaty would in effect take NATO back
to the late 1990s and fix it there—while
Putin would be free to move. It is almost
nostalgic: a tacit admission that Russia
has been left behind.
That freedom to move may be the key
to understanding what is at work inside
the Putin regime. As Nicolas Tenzer of
the Paris-based Centre d’Étude et de
ALEXEY NIKOLSKY/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES
Réflexion pour l’Action Politique argues
in a very interesting essay reprinted
in Claire Berlinski’s “Cosmopolitan
Globalist” Substack newsletter, Putin’s
ideology—to the extent that it is an
ideology—is a cult of movement, of action
for its own sake, the politics of action
FEBRUARY 7, 2022
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that fascinated the proto-fascists of
Italian Futurism and that Hannah
Arendt, among others, identified as a key
element of totalitarianism. Putinism,
Tenzer argues, consists of a “double
movement: internally, with increasingly
brutal, radical, total repression and  the
ever-greater militarization of society,
from the earliest age; externally, with
incessant aggression and destabilizing
action, on new fronts.” Which is to say:
rigor and suppression at home—“home”
being not only Russia but anywhere
under Russian influence—and chaos
everywhere else, at least as far as Putin’s
arm can reach. At the moment, Putin’s
regime has shown itself able to project
power into poorly defended territory:
Ukraine, which his forces have partly
occupied; Kazakhstan, where Russian
troops and mercenaries recently were
deployed to crush protests against the
government of autocrat Kassym-Jomart
Tokayev; Mali, where Russian troops
It would be unrealistic to demand that Kyiv
build a stronger and more democratic state
and then stand by, feigning helplessness,
as Vladimir Putin unbuilds that state.
have installed themselves in bases lately
abandoned by the French. And the Putin
regime has flexed its muscles on poorly
defended virtual territory as well, using
Facebook and other social media in an
attempt to destabilize the United States
by undermining faith in the legitimacy of
its elections. For a middling and sinking
power, any opportunity to shake things
up is an opportunity to reverse the de-
cline.
Putin is, in that sense, a very well-
armed troll—opportunistic, attention-
seeking, happy to upset the cart and
see if any apples roll his way. But the
Russian regime necessarily looms larger
in the Western mind than do those of
Putin peers such as Kim Jong Un for
three reasons: (1) The Cold War trained
Western policy intellectuals to think of
Russia as a great power, and the habit
remains even though Putin has nothing
like the real geopolitical power enjoyed
by Joseph Stalin or Leonid Brezhnev; (2)
Putin’s forces are in close proximity to
our European allies, including NATO
members; (3) although the old Soviet
nuclear arsenal has declined, Putin has
something on the order of 1,600 strate-
gic warheads ready to go—on missiles,
bombers, and submarines—and a thou-
sand strategic warheads in storage,
according to the estimate of the Bulletin
of the Atomic Scientists. The first of those
three considerations is a matter of intel-
lectual inertia, but the other two are live
concerns.
American political leaders in both par-
ties have focused a great deal of atten-
tion on the Nord Stream 2 natural-gas
pipeline connecting Russian producers
with German consumers—opposition
to which just happens to accord with
the business interests of U.S. energy
producers—but if Washington is looking
to lean on Moscow, then the American
eye should travel southwest from Berlin
to Brussels, the corporate home of SWIFT
(the Society for Worldwide Interbank
Financial Telecommunications), the
financial-messaging system that makes a
great deal of modern banking possible.
While states such as Russia and Cuba
have shown themselves willing and able
to endure conventional financial sanc-
tions, cutting a nation out of the SWIFT
system is a different thing altogether.
Without access to SWIFT, a country’s
businesses cannot pay for imports—or
get paid for exports—in the conventional
way. Iran weathered other U.S. sanc-
tions, but when its access to SWIFT was
interrupted, its oil exports collapsed and
Tehran came to the negotiating table.
(The Obama administration did not
make much of the opportunity, unfor-
tunately.) A sanctions bill being pro-
posed by Senator Bob Menendez (D.,
N.J.) would impose SWIFT sanctions
on Moscow if Russia invades Ukraine.
It is the financial version of nuclear retal-
iation: The habitually crass Senator
Menendez calls it “the mother of all
sanctions.”
But while Washington was carrying
the big stick in 2012, by SWIFT’s own
account it was complying with European
regulations enforcing EU sanctions—the
firm describes itself as “neutral,” but
adds: “SWIFT is incorporated under
Belgian law and had to comply with this
regulation as confirmed by its home
country government.” There is no such
regulation regarding Russia, and the EU
“blocking statute” forbids SWIFT and
other financial firms to comply with
sanctions imposed from outside the
European Union. There are two excep-
tions to that EU regulation: U.S. sanc-
tions on Cuba and the U.S. sanctions
imposed on Iran in 1996 and 2012.
Without EU support, using SWIFT as a
cudgel against Moscow will be difficult
or impossible, and it is unlikely that
such support would be forthcoming—
the German newspaper Handelsblatt
reported in January that using SWIFT
against Moscow already had been quietly
rejected out of fear of destabilizing
financial markets or encouraging the
development of non-European alterna-
tives to SWIFT.
It may be that Moscow understands
the alienation of our European allies
better than Washington does.
Ukraine is weak, and it has long been
undermined by corruption—it is not
Russian opposition alone that has kept
Ukraine’s NATO accession in limbo.
But the country has made important
advances against the most fundamental
kind of corruption—the looting of the
treasury by elected officials, something
that has no doubt been noticed in
Moscow, which cannot abide much
transparency. It would be unrealistic to
demand that Kyiv build a stronger and
more democratic state and then stand
by, feigning helplessness, as Vladimir
Putin unbuilds that state.
Putin is acting as though Russia had
already won the contest this time
around. Washington’s alienation of tra-
ditional allies, and its own seeming
inability to act, does nothing but encour-
age that confidence.
13
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Friends, and
Enemies, of
The People
The Russian government shuts down
a leading civil-society and
human-rights organization
BY JAY NORDLINGER
M
EMORIAL has been called
“the conscience of Russia.”
“The keeper of the national
memory.” It has also been
called an “enemy of the people,” by
defenders of the Soviet Union and of the
current Russian government. The gov-
ernment has now shut that organization
down.
Is Memorial, in fact, an organization?
Yes. Or a civil-society group or a foun-
dation. But it is also a network, a move-
ment: an archipelago of groups and
people, working with a common pur-
pose.
That purpose is twofold: to find out
and tell the truth about the past; and to
promote democratic values in the pre-
sent. Obviously, Memorial is intolerable
to the regime of Vladimir Putin.
Memorial emerged in the late 1980s,
during the Soviet Union’s period of glas-
nost and perestroika: a loosening. The
first chairman of the group was Andrei
Sakharov, the great physicist who be-
came a great human-rights champion.
Sakharov was born in 1921, meaning
that the year just past was his centennial
year. He died in 1989, on December 14.
The state opened its prosecution of
Memorial in the Russian supreme court
on December 14, 2021. (Of course, you
could say that the real supreme court in
Russia is Putin.) That date, according to
Vladimir Kara-Murza, was not a coinci-
dence.
Kara-Murza is a prominent democracy
leader and writer. He was a lieutenant to
Boris Nemtsov, the Russian opposition
leader, murdered within sight of the
Kremlin in 2015. Kara-Murza himself
has survived two murder attempts (by
poison).
Putin and his government are big on
14 | www.nationalreview.com
symbols, says Kara-Murza, and that
includes dates. Putin awarded the Order
of Merit for the Motherland to a senator
from Chechnya, Suleiman Geremeyev,
on February 27, 2020. Geremeyev is
strongly suspected of involvement in the
murder of Nemtsov—on February 27,
2015.
On June 4, 2021, Putin signed a law
that essentially prohibits anyone con-
nected to Alexei Navalny from running
for office. Navalny is Russia’s most
prominent political prisoner right now.
His birthday is June 4.
Speaking of birthdays: Anna Po -
lit kov skaya was murdered in 2006,
on October 7—Putin’s birthday. Polit-
kovskaya was an illustrious and brave
journalist, and a sharp thorn in Putin’s
side.
There is often occasion to quote Garry
Kasparov, the former chess champion,
now a human-rights champion: “I be-
lieve in coincidences, but I also believe
in the KGB.”
Natalia Estemirova was another jour-
nalist, and worked for Memorial. In
2007, she won a prize named after Anna
Politkovskaya. In 2009, she too was
murdered—abducted from her home,
shot up, and left in the woods. There are
many such cases.
Over the past 30 or so years, the men
and women of Memorial have engaged in
a wide range of activities. They compiled
a list of Soviet Gulag camps. They created
a national database of victims—victims
of state terror. They launched a project
called “Last Address,” in which small
plaques are placed on the last known
addresses of the doomed. They have pro-
vided financial and legal aid to victims’
families. They have built libraries and
museums, both physical and virtual.
They have also publicized names of
victimizers—secret-police executioners.
This has sat especially badly with the
current government.
In the 1990s, Memorial was largely
unmolested. Indeed, the Russian presi-
dent, Boris Yeltsin, was a member of
Memorial. This changed when Putin
rose to power at the end of the decade.
Memorial’s offices were raided, officially.
Or burned to the ground, unofficially,
by masked arsonists.
One of Putin’s political prisoners is
Yuri Dmitriev, a Memorial researcher in
Karelia. He located and dug up mass
graves. In 2017, I wrote a piece about
him called “The Grave-Hunter, Hunted.”
The government imprisoned him on
trumped-up charges of child pornogra-
phy and the like (an old tactic, favored by
the KGB). In the last days of 2021, just as
they were shutting down Memorial, the
authorities lengthened Dmitriev’s prison
sentence from 13 years to 15.
In 2018, the authorities imprisoned
Oyub Titiev, a Memorial worker in
Chechnya. (They first planted drugs in
his car—that was their pretext.) After an
international campaign of pressure,
however, he was released the next year.
I was able to interview him in 2020. I
asked Titiev why he engaged in human-
rights work, despite the dangers. Like
most such workers, he could not really
answer. Something in his conscience,
or gut, impels him to do the work. He
can do no other.
From 2014 to 2016, the Kremlin
labeled the components of Memorial
“foreign agents.” This is a damning
charge, of course: that a person or
organization is an agent, or tool, of
foreigners, out to harm the nation.
“Foreign agent” is akin to “enemy of
the people.” Memorial has never been
anything but a Russian movement:
about Russians, for Russians.
Would you like to know something
amusing—darkly so? Memorial people
earned the label “foreign agent” because
they objected to Putin’s revival of that
very label from Soviet days.
When the authorities finally shut
Memorial down, it was on grounds that
Memorial had violated Putin’s foreign-
agent law. But the grounds were fun-
damentally irrelevant. A fig leaf. When
a dictator decides, he decides.
It is dangerous—if not criminal—to
tell the truth about the Soviet Union
in today’s Russia. In 2016, Vladimir
Luzgin, a blogger, stated a simple his-
torical fact: The Soviet Union invaded
Poland in 1939. For this, he was prose-
cuted (and represented by a Memorial
lawyer). Luzgin was lucky, getting off
with a hefty fine. He could have gone to
prison.
(The supreme court issued its ruling
on Luzgin on September 1, 2016. As you
remember, Germany invaded Poland on
September 1. The Soviets, in accordance
with the Nazi-Soviet Pact, invaded on
the 17th.)
According to Memorial, there are 430
political prisoners in Russia right now—
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more than in the late Soviet period.

And Memorial is applying strict criteria,
when classifying political prisoners.
Also, one can classify only known cases.
There are undoubtedly many unknown
ones: people unofficially detained or
“disappeared.”
Last October, Memorial screened the
movie Mr Jones in its Moscow offices.
The movie is about Gareth Jones, the
Welshman who reported on the Soviets’
terror famine in Ukraine, carried out in
the early 1930s. Jones was murdered—
almost certainly by Soviet agents—in
1935, the day before his 30th birthday.
As Memorial was screening the film,
about 30 masked men burst in, yelling
“Shame!” and halting the screening.
Memorial staff called the police—who
then locked the staff and the attendees
into the offices, questioning them for
hours, and requiring personal informa-
tion from them: address, phone number,
employer, etc. Yuri Dmitriev at work in 2006
It is natural for a dictatorship to want
to control the past. To shape a people’s Outside the supreme court last De- but in some informal way, as people,
understanding of the past, which affects cember, a crowd gathered to lend some individually or together, try to perform
the present, and future. In the supreme kind of moral support to Memorial. This the work. I believe that these people
court last December, the chief prosecu- was reminiscent of Sakharov, who in should be remembered by us foreigners.
tor, Alexei Zhafyarov, said, “Memorial 1975 stood outside the courtroom where They are Russian, too—as Russian as
creates a false image of the Soviet Union his friend and fellow dissident Sergei Putin and his supporters. And they are
as a terrorist state.” He also said that Kovalev was being tried. A guard said patriots, if by patriotism we mean love
Memorial “makes us repent of the Soviet to Sakharov, “You are a disgrace to the of country, rather than power, money,
past, instead of remembering glorious Soviet Union.” In reality, Sakharov was and lies.
history”—and “probably because some- one of its best. In November, Putin gave his Order
one is paying for it.” Kovalev was too. He, like Sakharov, of Friendship to the Hungarian foreign
A question: Why is the Russian gov- would go on to be chairman of Memorial. minister. It was presumably well earned.
ernment so intent on defending the Around 100 members of the Russian The Putin regime has many friends,
Soviet Union and suppressing the truth Academy of Sciences have signed an and more enablers, in free countries. But
about it? Vladimir Kara-Murza gives an appeal, saying, “The destruction of who will be the friends of Yuri Dmitriev
answer so simple, and so obvious, it Memorial is an attempt to deprive the and other political prisoners? Who will
could be overlooked: Many of the people nation of its memory, which we must not speak out for Memorial?
now in the government served the Soviet allow in order to avoid a repetition of Back in the 2000s, when he was free
Union—including the strongman him- the era of monstrous repression.” to work, Dmitriev grumbled, “We don’t
self. He came from the very organization, On December 10, Dmitry Muratov know the past, and we don’t want to
the KGB, that implemented mass terror received the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo. know.” This was when the regional gov-
and murder. Many others in the current He shared it with Maria Ressa, a jour- ernment, in Karelia, erected a monu-
government came from that organiza- nalist from the Philippines. Muratov is ment to Yuri Andropov, the KGB chief
tion, too. the editor in chief of Novaya Gazeta, one who rose to premier of the USSR. You
Who wants to be reminded of his past of the few independent outlets left in can understand such frustration, and
crimes? Or his present ones? Russia. Six of his colleagues at the paper even despair. But there are many Rus-
COURTESY OF RUSSIAN HUMAN RIGHTS ALERT

When the Soviet Union dissolved in
1991, a lot of people said, “No witch
hunts. We must not have witch hunts.”
They meant, “Forget accountability—too
messy. Let’s just move on.” Kara-Murza,
Kasparov, and others recall what leading
Russian democrats of the time said:
“If we fail to account, the witches will
come back, and hunt us.”
have been murdered, including Anna
Politkovskaya and Natalia Estemirova.
In his address, Muratov spoke of
Memorial and its impending strangula-
tion. “Memorial is not an ‘enemy of the
people,’” he said. “Memorial is a friend
of the people.”
Kara-Murza says that Memorial will go
on, maybe not with a formal structure,
sians who indeed want to know, and
who greatly admire Dmitriev and his
like.
Dmitriev compiled “books of remem-
brance,” in which he catalogued victims
of state terror. In the foreword to one
of his books, he said, “The moral of
the story is brief: Remember! As is my
advice: Take care of one another.”

15
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because fans could stay home and watch studios know we’re not going to show

The Chorus
it on HBO Max and partly because the up very often, and they’re cool with
movie is a slog.) that. If you’re the age I was when Raiders
When you’re my age and you’re a of the Lost Ark came out, the arrival of a

Of Us All movie critic, the second most common

Why we still go out to the movies
BY KYLE SMITH
thing you hear is “We never go out to the
movies anymore.” Indeed, why bother?
Encanto hit theaters on November 24
and was included on Disney+ a month
later. (The thing I hear most often when
new Spider-Man movie fills you with as
much excitement as the arrival of a new
Steven Spielberg movie did when I was
in high school. (There happens to be a
new Spielberg movie in theaters now,
but nobody under the age of “getting an

T
people learn I’m a critic is “How many MRI on my knee next week” cares about
HEbiggest and most satisfying movies do you see a week?” I’ve an- West Side Story, which is why it is shap-
laugh I have ever heard in a swered this question 50 times, and given ing up as one of the biggest flops of
movie theater was on my 15th about 50 different answers, because “it Spielberg’s career.)
birthday in 1981, at the Sack varies” seems evasive. And “zero to 25” For young people, the relevant com-
Palace Cinemas in West Springfield, seems too broad.) parison is not “Should I see this in the-
Mass. Raiders of the Lost Ark wasn’t a I’m 55, and so the people I meet tend aters or should I see it on TV?” but
comedy, so no one saw the gag coming to be in my age bracket, which is why I “Should I leave the house tonight or
when the scary guy with the scimitar keep hearing about how no one goes to stay home with my boring parents?”
started doing his drum-majorette rou- the movies anymore. Moviegoing isn’t going away, because
tine with his big salami-slicer. When But I have news for my fellow Gen young people need to get out of the
Indy pulled out his pistol and shot the Xers and older generations: We’re house and hang out with other young
guy, you couldn’t hear anything but almost irrelevant to the theatrical people. It’s social media and gaming,
laughter for the next 30 seconds. motion-picture business. The movie not the pandemic, that are the main
Laughter, like coronavirus, does its
best work in crowds. Would I have
laughed at that scene while watching it
on my couch? Yeah, but not like that.
There are scary aspects of crowds, but
there is also a certain animal joy to
romping with the pack, laughing (or
screaming or cowering or cheering or
crying) with hundreds of fellow hu-
mans.
Which is why, throughout the pan-
demic, I’ve been dismissive of those
who say moviegoing is dead. A month
ago, Spider-Man proved me right: Amer-
ica is rushing to see No Way Home,
which is now the fifth-highest-grossing
movie in U.S. history (even though it
isn’t one-fifth as good as Raiders of the
Lost Ark). People were aching to see a
fun, light-hearted adventure in theaters,
and no germ, bug, particle, or CDC
warning was going to keep them at
home, even though there is far more
innovative and interesting television
programming on offer now than ever
before. Culturally speaking, Spider-
Man: No Way Home is the main event
of 2021—not the new Adele album,
not the NFL season, and certainly not
whatever picture wins the Oscar next
spring while seven people watch on TV.
COURTESY OF SONY PICTURES

Sony released the new Spidey only in

theaters because Sony, unlike Warner
Bros., isn’t stupid. (The Matrix Resur-
rections made about as much of a splash
as a cotton ball in Lake Michigan, partly Tom Holland as the title character in Spider-Man: No Way Home

16 | www.nationalreview.com FEBRUARY 7, 2022

base_QXP-1127940387.qxp 1/18/2022 6:33 PM Page 1
3col_FINAL_QXP-1127940387.qxp 1/19/2022 12:33 AM Page 18
threats to the theatrical movie busi-
ness. If you can have fun with other
people without leaving the house, you
have less reason to leave the house. The
weird/funny/tragic flip side of this is
that young people seem to be getting
Get the Best less nooky than ever before.
But you can spend only so much time
on Instagram or Xbox before you feel
of NR in Your the urge to get out into the world and
remember that you’re alive. The thing
Inbox we tend to forget about movies is that
they’re cheap. Two people can spend
two and a half hours at a movie for $30
(not including popcorn). You’d lay out
Sign up for more money than that if you spent two
our free hours at Applebee’s, or bowling, or hav-
ing drinks. About the only conceivable
newsletters social activity that would be cheaper
would be hanging at a fast-food joint
today. (which wouldn’t take two hours) or a
trip to Starbucks (which could take two
hours but would also scream “cheap
date”).
Compared with all these other activi-
To sign up, ties, though, movies are a lot more
exciting. Sitting through a new Spider-
scan the code below. Man epic means experiencing twists
and laughs and excitement, and it’s a
unique experience. If you’re the kind of
person who likes Starbucks or Wendy’s,
you’ve probably been to one hundreds
of times, and the experience is pretty
much always the same. Also, Spider-
Man gives you something to talk about
afterwards: Wasn’t that great when
Electro said, “Gotta watch where you
fall”? Even in a dismal year such as
2021, moviegoing was a $4.5 billion
business in North America.
Many films grossed about half of what
industry observers expected of them
or visit last year, but the disturbing aspect of
nationalreview.com/newsletters the box-office chart is that the pandemic
seems to have accelerated a trend that
was much discussed before the pan-
demic: People are going only to block-
buster franchise pictures. Of the top ten
highest-grossing movies domestically
last year, nine were sequels or episodes
in franchises; the only freestanding new
movie, Free Guy, came in at No. 10. In
an age in which we’re drowning in ad-
vertising, it’s almost impossible to sell
people on something genuinely new at
the movies.
But the news gets worse: Free Guy
was a fantasy about a video-game char-
acter. Movies about real people attract
no attention whatsoever. Twelve years
18 | www.nationalreview.com
ago, The King’s Speech earned $139 mil-
lion domestically—something impossi-
ble to imagine happening today. The
year before that, The Blind Side earned
$256 million. Both of these movies
seem very Netflix-y today. The highest-
grossing movie of 2021 that was reality-
based was The House of Gucci, No. 27 on
the year with a pathetic $48 million
gross. Awards-bait movies that used to
build their audience as more and more
people discovered them over the winter
now seem to have no chance at the
theatrical box office because the Oscar
ceremony is no longer a celebration of
quality middlebrow movies but merely
a tiresome rehash of woke talking
points barely disguised as entertain-
ment. Last year’s Black Lives Matter
Oscars essentially ordered the audience
to drink castor oil out of a Champagne
flute. Three hundred and twenty-two
million out of 332 million Americans
decided they had better things to do
than watch what was once a mammoth
cultural event.
Does it matter if offerings such as
Sideways or Million Dollar Baby are now
seen by audiences at home rather than
at the movies? In a way, no: This sea-
son’s divisive end-of-the-world comedy
Don’t Look Up is, by virtue of having
been released on Netflix in December,
a driver of cultural chatter in a way it
probably would not have been if it had
been released solely in theaters, where
it would have attracted a minimal au-
dience because people wouldn’t have
wanted to risk the ticket price on such a
dicey proposition as a satirical climate-
change allegory. (The previous theatri-
cal comedy from writer-director Adam
McKay, the Dick Cheney comedy Vice,
didn’t sell a lot of tickets, whereas Don’t
Look Up is the second most watched
original movie on the streaming ser-
vice.)
As long as movies are still being
made for adults, there’s no need to
gripe about this: With the kids out of
the house watching superheroes, we
can settle down and marvel at the
German expressionism of The Tragedy
of Macbeth on Apple TV+. Theatrical
movies for adults seem to have gone
the way of poking around Pier 1
Imports for fun, but there’s something
to be said for getting cinematic art
delivered to you without leaving your
easy chair.
FEBRUARY 7, 2022
2col_FINAL_QXP-1127940309.qxp 1/19/2022 1:01 AM Page 19
The Prosecutor Who
Won’t Prosecute
Meet Alvin Bragg, Manhattan’s new DA
BY BARRY LATZER
Y
OUmay have the impression that criminal-justice
progressives took a big hit in the last election. That’s
because the media played up the defeat of the
Minneapolis measure to replace that city’s police
with a new public-safety department. But while that was a
significant victory over the anti-police movement, it wasn’t
the only criminal-justice issue on ballots. Nationwide, voting
results were mixed. In Austin, Texas, for instance, a measure
to undo a slashing of the police-department budget by one-
third failed. And more ominously, progressive prosecutors,
such as Philadelphia’s Larry Krasner, continue to win elec-
Mr. Latzer is an emeritus professor of criminal justice at John Jay College of
Criminal Justice in New York City. His forthcoming book, The Myth of
Overpunishment, will be published in early 2022. He wishes to thank
Steven Wasserman of the Manhattan Legal Aid Society for reading and
commenting on this essay. The views expressed here are, however, those of
the author alone.
tions. There are leftist district attorneys in Chicago, Boston,
Houston, and St. Louis. And don’t forget San Francisco,
where Chesa Boudin presides over shoplifter heaven (and
faces a recall election in June over his policies). Now we have
to add to the list Manhattan, where Alvin Bragg just swept to
victory.
To Bragg’s credit, he laid out in detail his policy plans, a
reflection of previous jobs in which he gained familiarity with
the legal issues surrounding criminal cases. But those plans
are so driven by ideology and so fixated on reducing incarcer-
ation that one can only hope he does not (or cannot) carry
them out.
MICHAEL M. SANTIAGO/GETTY IMAGES
To prove my case, I will explore in depth two policy issues
that Bragg discussed at length in his campaign literature.
They are issues that every district attorney must deal with:
pretrial release (the processing of a case after arrest and
before final adjudication) and the treatment of low-level
offenses (in New York, misdemeanors and violations).
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Releasing Criminals
Pretrial release is the handling of a case shortly after arrest
and before final adjudication (by trial or, more likely, a plea).
In most of the United States it is a settled matter that danger-
ous arrestees can be held in jail before adjudication. Nearly
every state empowers judges to detain defendants in the
interest of public safety even though their cases haven’t yet
been adjudicated. The Supreme Court greenlighted this years
ago (United States v. Salerno, 1987), differentiating punish-
ment (permitted only after adjudication) from administrative
confinement.
New York State is the outlier, limiting judges to considera-
tion of flight risk and forbidding them to take the arrestee’s
dangerousness into account. Compounding the problem, New
York’s recent bail-reform law requires release in the absence
of a demonstrated risk of flight. It also prohibits either bail
or jail in most cases even with proof that the defendant is
unlikely ever to enter a courtroom voluntarily.
Since the overwhelming majority of states allow bail or jail on
public-safety grounds, the hot national debate is over the use of
objective measures, sometimes fashioned into algorithms, to
determine the risk of release. New Jersey, for example, recently
adopted such an algorithm, but New York is out of the loop,
willfully blinding itself to the public dangers of release.
DA Bragg is content with New York’s reforms and seems
bent on making things even worse. He opposes giving New
Whether a crime is violent and whether the
defendant has priors and a history of no-shows are
objective, nonracial considerations.
York judges (and prosecutors) the discretion to determine a
defendant’s dangerousness when deciding whether to release
him. Why? He thinks dangerousness determinations are
racist. “I have no confidence,” he says, that “there is any race-
neutral way to predict who is dangerous at such an early stage
in the case.”
This is preposterous. Suppose there is compelling evidence
that a defendant has committed a violent crime and that he
has, in addition, a prior conviction for a crime of violence.
Assume as well that he has a history of failing to appear in
court. Under such circumstances, most people would con-
clude that the judge certainly should have the authority to
send the defendant to jail, or at least to impose bail. It would
create a real danger to the public to release such a person
willy-nilly.
An algorithm or even a simple list of the considerations
described above is obviously race-neutral. Whether a crime is
violent and whether the defendant has priors and a history of
no-shows are objective, nonracial considerations. Whether
the evidence is compelling, even though not yet tested at trial,
is also unrelated to race. (An example would be testimony
from a victim who knows or is related to the defendant.) A
prediction that such a defendant would be a public threat if
released—and such a case is not uncommon—is entirely race-
neutral.
But Bragg buys the woke thinking that disparate racial
20 | www.nationalreview.com
impact is the same as race bias. In other words, if the criteria
for bail or jail, even if totally race-neutral, put a dispropor-
tionate number of African Americans in jail, then the criteria
must be faulty. This reasoning is profoundly flawed. It ignores
the realities that the proportion of criminal activity involving
blacks is significantly higher than the proportions involving
whites or Hispanics, while blacks compose a lower share of the
population. For instance, just before the pandemic, in 2019,
African Americans accounted for 55 percent of felony arrests
in Manhattan, where they were only 12 percent of the popu-
lation. Whites, who were 47 percent of the population,
accounted for only 10 percent of the felony arrests; Latinos,
26 percent of the population, were 35 percent of felony
arrestees. Consequently, race-neutral criteria are bound to
impact blacks more often—unless Bragg finds a way to estab-
lish racial quotas for prosecution.
If Bragg’s office encourages the release of dangerous defen-
dants because they are black, then it will add to the crime
and disorder in communities of color, which is where such
defendants are most likely to reoffend. Instead of obsessing
over the racial makeup of dangerous defendants, DA Bragg
should ask himself whether minority communities deserve
the full protection of the law-enforcement system.
Manhattan’s new DA goes beyond even New York’s flawed
new bail law, promising to establish a presumption of release:
“My office will recommend non-incarceration for every case
except those with charges of homicide or the death of a victim,
[or] a class B violent felony in which a deadly weapon causes
serious physical injury, or [certain] felony sex offenses.”
Note that Bragg will recommend against incarceration in
every single pretrial case, with a limited list of exceptions. His
list is totally inadequate. There are numerous violent crimes
that do not involve death, or a serious injury from a deadly
weapon, or a felony sex offense, but, for the sake of public
safety, warrant incarceration. There should be no presump-
tion of release in such cases. Here are just a few examples:
robbery second degree, which involves several robbers work-
ing together, or physical injury to the victim, or the display of
a gun; assault on a police officer, firefighter, or judge; gang
assault second degree, which involves an attack by two or
more people and results in serious physical injury, such as that
caused by a shooting or stabbing; aggravated vehicular
assault, caused by reckless driving either when drunk or with
a suspended license; reckless endangerment first degree,
which creates a grave risk of death; stalking first degree, which
causes physical injury to the victim; and menacing second
degree, which places a person in fear of physical injury by
displaying a deadly weapon or repeatedly following the
victim or repeatedly putting the victim in fear.
How does releasing people arrested for crimes like these
help black communities—or any community, for that matter—
especially given the high likelihood of repeated crimes?
FEBRUARY 7, 2022
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Low-Level Offenses
DA Bragg promises to dismiss every misdemeanor or divert
the case out of the criminal-justice system. Many misde-
meanors are worthy of criminal punishment, so his overbroad
approach is unwarranted. If Bragg wants to divert these cases to
some other quasi-judicial body, that’s fine if there are insti-
tutions capable of handling them. But this is little more than
a pointless shell game, since, as I’ll show in a moment, the
current system is quite lenient.
Bragg claims that there are too many low-level prosecutions,
that the punishments for these offenses “are disproportionately
harsh,” and that the penalties “fall disproportionately on the
backs of people of color.”
Our courts have been clogged with petty offenses for too long.
From smoking marijuana to jumping a turnstile, our criminal
courts spend far too much time treating minor offenses with the
same blunt instruments used to address homicides and other
violent crimes. . . . This deluge of low-level prosecutions has
disproportionately harmed people of color: over 80% of those
charged with misdemeanors and 82% of those charged with non-
criminal offenses are people of color.
Too many low-level cases? First, this is for the state legisla-
ture to determine, not a single district attorney. If the legis-
lature wants to decriminalize low-level offenses, including the
violent misdemeanors I listed above, that’s within their author-
ity. Of course, that won’t ever happen. But a prosecutor’s dis-
cretion in handling a particular case or even a particular crime
shouldn’t be inflated into the power to cancel entire chunks of
the penal law.
Bragg is right about one thing, though: Minor crimes con-
stitute the lion’s share of criminal cases. They were 79 per-
cent of all prosecutions citywide in 2019. So what? Minor
crimes always predominate—always have and always will. It
would be a very scary city if major felonies were the dominant
crimes. We can, of course, debate which behaviors should be
decriminalized, weighing the social impact of various acts,
the effectiveness of noncriminal sanctions, and the effect of
the punishments on the offender. As the public’s standards
change—think adultery, abortion, marijuana possession—we
may want to decriminalize additional crimes. But wholesale
decriminalization of minor crimes by a prosecutor is an abuse
of authority.
Second, Bragg grossly exaggerates the prosecutorial impact
of low-level convictions on African Americans. In 2019, there
were 20,980 misdemeanors charged in Manhattan, of which
9,770, or 47 percent, of the defendants were black. The citywide
percentage is identical: Blacks made up 47 percent of the defen-
dants in misdemeanor cases prosecuted. People of color are not
being prosecuted at anywhere near the 80 percent level that
Bragg claims.
Nor are the punishments “disproportionately harsh.” When
misdemeanor cases citywide were arraigned—that is, brought
before a judge for the first time a day or two after arrest—90 per-
cent of the defendants were released and 10 percent were
admitted to bail. And these figures were for 2019, before the
2020 bail reform made release virtually mandatory.
In the next phase of the cases, between arraignment and
disposition (meaning the determination of guilt or innocence),
68 percent of the misdemeanor defendants were released. At
sentencing, the final step in the adjudication process, very few
low-level offenders were incarcerated. Of 21,644 Manhattan
misdemeanants sentenced, only 12 percent got jail time beyond
their period of pre-sentencing incarceration. A third (34 per-
cent) were sentenced to time already served, and another third
(33 percent) were conditionally discharged. Should those dis-
charged defendants violate the conditions of release, Bragg
declares, he will simply ignore their contempt for the law. Even
if there is “clear evidence that the person willfully violated
conditions of release, or if the individual has failed to appear
more than once on the current charge,” Bragg will, he says,
forbid his assistant DAs to seek bail or jail without supervisory
permission.
Surely a system that releases 90 percent of misdemeanor
defendants within a day or two of arrest and sentences only
12 percent of those convicted to additional jail time is not “dis-
proportionately harsh.” Nor is there much disparity between
the incarceration of blacks and other groups. The incarceration
rate for African Americans in Manhattan is only slightly above
the rate for Hispanics, for instance.
Group Incarceration Rate
18%
Non-Hispanic White
232 incarcerated of 1,290 convicted
23%
Non-Hispanic Black
1,100 incarcerated of 4,879 convicted
19%
Asian
23 incarcerated of 123 convicted
22%
Hispanic (any race)
619 incarcerated of 2,830 convicted
SOURCE: HTTPS://DATA.MANHATTANDA.ORG/#!/SENTENCES
While his racism claim is baseless, the central problem with
DA Bragg’s approach is his premise that prosecuting low-level
offenses is inherently wrong. Low-level crimes such as exces-
sive noise at night, aggressive panhandling, jumping subway
turnstiles, streetwalking prostitution, public use of drugs, loi-
tering in apartment-building hallways, and public urination are
offensive to the vast majority of citizens. They undermine
neighborhoods by creating anxiety and fear and making streets
unsuitable and unsafe for families and children. They attract
drug dealers, other serious criminals, and boisterous rowdies.
Who would want their kids to play on such streets or walk to
school there unaccompanied? These offenses make residents
reluctant to go out, walk about, use the parks, or even shop
locally. They even make them afraid of their own apartment
buildings. In short, they force the law-abiding to surrender
public spaces to the lawless.
Low-level offenses are all about public disorder. We’ve seen
what widespread disorder can do to our cities, and we don’t
21
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want to return to the horrors of the 1970s and ’80s. If disorder
blights minority communities more than white neighborhoods,
then they deserve and will demand, as they did in the crack-
cocaine era, stepped-up enforcement—even if it means that
disproportionate numbers of minorities will be prosecuted.
The notion that increased law enforcement is harmful is a
deeply troubling position for a prosecutor. Prosecution remains
one of the most effective tools we have for coping with mis-
conduct. The public depends on prosecutors to protect the
law-abiding by bringing criminals under control, be they petty
or serious. Bragg doesn’t get this. He is more concerned with the
welfare of the offenders than with that of their victims or of the
communities they despoil. But the more lenient he is with
offenders, the more they will repeat their crimes as word
spreads on the streets that there is no enforcement. (Think
about the effects of unenforced shoplifting laws in San
Francisco, which has led to gangs boosting goods with im-
punity, closing down or crippling scores of businesses. Even
the city’s leftist mayor, London Breed, declared that “it’s time”
for “the reign of criminals who are destroying our city . . . to
come to an end.”) Leniency victimizes law-abiding residents,
including—and probably especially—those living in communi-
ties of color. This is the soft racism of underenforcement.
P ROGRESSIVES are under the illusion that prosecutors are
all-powerful and that woke DAs can upend the criminal-
justice system. (See, for example, Emily Bazelon’s book
Charged.) They are mistaken. Even a district attorney such as
Bragg can do only so much. Take low-level offenses. The penal-
ties are so insignificant that it has rightly been said that the
arrest and prosecution alone are, in most cases, the real punish-
ments, the only punishments. Of course, if the new district
attorney refuses to pursue certain offenses altogether, and
the police therefore refuse to arrest, we will see significant
change—and it won’t be for the better. Otherwise the police,
with their decision to arrest, hold the key card.
The role of the district attorney’s office at sentencing for seri-
ous crimes is another example of the limits on prosecutors.
Bragg has threatened to undercut the state legislature’s sen-
tencing provisions by systematically recommending sentences
at the low end of legislative guidelines—even for some of the
most serious criminals. While the prosecutor can recommend a
sentence within the guidelines, the judge does not, however,
have to accept that recommendation.
In short, the system controls the DA, maybe more than the
DA controls the system. Still, New York City has a big crime
problem, and the new mayor, Eric Adams, has promised to get
it under control. One week into Mayor Adams’s term, after
Bragg reaffirmed his leniency policies in a lengthy memo, the
new NYPD commissioner, Keechant Sewell, publicly attacked
the DA in an email to the entire police force. In the message,
which was released to the media, Sewell told her officers she
was “very concerned about the implications to your safety
as police officers, the safety of the public and justice for the
victims.” Bragg and Sewell subsequently met to iron out differ-
ences, while Adams declined to criticize the district attorney.
We’ll see if Bragg will back down and adjust his no-
incarceration policies. For New York City and Mayor Adams,
the stakes could hardly be higher.
22 | www.nationalreview.com
The New
White Flight
The trouble with our upper middle class
BY MICHAEL BRENDAN DOUGHERTY
T
HE white upper middle class is deranging American
politics. We should have seen it coming.
In 2010, America’s last famous novelist, Jonathan
Franzen, launched on the reading public Freedom, his
tale of a striving family headed by Walter and Patty Berglund.
They were gentrifiers in St. Paul, Minn. The paterfamilias was
a lawyer at the conglomerate 3M but no corporate cutthroat.
He biked to work and was in the outreach-and-philanthropy
department. The Berglunds were “the super-guilty sort of
liberals who needed to forgive everybody so their own good
fortune could be forgiven; who lacked the courage of their
privilege.”
Freedom is a moving and sometimes scabrous portrait of the
liberal white upper middle class in the George W. Bush years,
when this genteelly progressive vision was failing them, not
just politically but personally. It is a portrait of a class whose
members prize their own savvy—their way of doing good for
others while doing well for themselves. Their gift to the world
is their cleverness and broadmindedness, and they seek
greater freedom to exercise these gifts upon the world.
But Freedom portrays something darker. The Berglunds are
increasingly conscious that they are completely losing their
connection to others. Their son goes to live with downwardly
mobile and—to the Berglunds’ eyes—louche Republicans.
The Berglunds remain somewhat ignorant and dumbfounded
in the face of political criticism from black Americans. Their
class is Coming Apart from the rest of the country. And their
aspirations have a dark side. Franzen writes as a judgment of
one character a line that is prophetic of the Berglunds: “The
personality susceptible to the dream of limitless freedom is a
personality also prone, should the dream ever sour, to misan-
thropy and rage.”
And it all comes to pass. Walter Berglund turns apocalyptic
about the environment. “WE ARE A CANCER ON THE PLANET!”
he screams on social media. He goes to Washington and
earns a massive salary at a nonprofit. His renewed and now
superzealous commitment to the cause leads him to collude
with a wealthy Texan to evict poor families from a Virginia
mountaintop in order to preserve a habitat for birds that
aren’t even endangered.
Franzen’s work correctly anticipated that the internal psy-
chodrama and aspirations of this class—his own—were warp-
ing American life. He anticipated the turn toward doomsday
moodiness and punitive moralism. But he could not foresee
how the election of Barack Obama, and the resistance he met,
has brought upper-middle-class whites to radicalize on issues
of race rather than of the environment.
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College graduates started voting more for Democrats in the
1980s. High-education voters are now a crucially important
part of the Democratic coalition. According to a survey of the
available data, Democrats have been constantly expanding
their advantage among those with high education. In 2016
the trend was still gathering strength. Thomas Piketty writes:
Above high-school level, the relation between education and
Democratic vote is strongly increasing: in particular, 70% of
voters with Master degrees (11% of the electorate) supported
the Democratic candidate, and 76% of voters with PhD degrees
(2% of the electorate), vs 51% of voters with Bachelor degrees
(19% of the electorate) and 44% of high-school graduates (59%
of the electorate).
Also in 2016, Democrats for the first time won a majority
of high-income voters. Subsequent surveys have seen the
reported political affiliation of other professional classes
shift leftward, notably that of doctors.
White upper-middle-class liberals are bidding for national
political dominance of the Democratic Party as a way of
crowning their dominance in other culture-shaping institu-
tions. Their gift to the world is not their cleverness over the
ignorant, but their righteous fury at the wicked. And it fuels
a toxic politics that is zealously attached to protecting their
economic privilege.
It is white upper-middle-class liberals in particular
who have undergone the ‘Great Awokening.’
These are the “dream hoarders” described by the Brookings
Institution’s Richard Reeves. The top 20 percent of American
earners—the ones beneath the 1 percent, but doing better
than four-fifths of their countrymen—voraciously organize
to protect their economic privileges. They protected from
Obama’s proposed revision the tax privileges for “529” col-
lege savings accounts. Through the new congressional major-
ity of 2018, they demanded a full restoration of state- and
local-tax deductions. Their congressional representatives
demand student-loan forgiveness. All of these are forms of
welfare for the upper middle class.
A T the same time, it is white upper-middle-class liber-
als in particular who have undergone the “Great
Awokening” and adopted beliefs on racial politics
that fall to the left of those held by racial minorities.
Sociologist Zach Goldberg at the Center for the Study of
Partisanship and Ideology has demonstrated that white
Democrats are significantly more likely than non-white
Democrats to prioritize the use of “inclusive” language to
avoid offending people with different backgrounds. White
Democrats are more likely than blacks and Hispanics to say
that citizens should not be allowed to vote on how many
immigrants are allowed to move to the U.S. and from which
countries.
Where upper-middle-class whites have the upper hand,
they are the ones defunding the police—even as many police
forces are now majority-minority in their composition. It was
upper-middle-class white politics that led Seattle to cut the
wages of its first black female police commissioner, and fund-
ing for the department as a whole. The subsequent exodus of
qualified cops and the deadly disorder of the Capitol Hill
Autonomous Zone riots were the result.
One could charge the white upper middle class of America
as committed to a form of ruthless meritocracy in some areas
of life and to ruthless egalitarianism in all the others. Debt
relief and minimum-lot-size regulations for the households
in their neighborhoods. Lawlessness in the name of advancing
equality for your neighborhoods. The speech codes that this
class invents and adopts in the name of easing the burdens on
“the marginalized” are wielded as weapons in an open form of
class warfare on the lower-middle-class and working-class
kids who do not have the breeding to master that form of
politesse.
The bastion of political sanity among Democrats is with
their non-white voters and their working-class voters. It was
Manhattan, by far the richest borough of New York City, that
elected a district attorney in Alvin Bragg who was committed
to a soft-on-crime agenda, including emptying the jails of
nearly any perp who had not committed a serious assault or
murder. The far more diverse outer boroughs provided the
electoral heft for Eric Adams’s tough-on-crime campaign.
Similarly, in the national party, it was black voters and
black members of Congress who helped steer the Democrats
away from cortado socialists and toward Joe Biden in the
Democratic primaries of 2020.
Now, it would be easy to leave the matter here and end on
the summary judgment. Every politically revolutionary class
has been populated by the “guilty bourgeoisie,” who are in-
capable of handling privilege with grace or success with
generosity. Overwhelmingly employed by larger firms, or in
the professions, the members of this class lack the confidence
or delusion of being self-made. In a strange way, our radicals
are institutionalists.
And what is the quality of these institutions? Cutthroat and
luxurious. Matt Feeney, who authored the new book Little
Platoons: A Defense of Family in a Competitive Age, documents
how the college-admissions process has colonized the life of
middle-class families, even those containing only young chil-
dren. Ivy League schools have expanded their admissions
numbers much more slowly than the population of possible
applicants has grown. According to Jeffrey Selingo, “Ivy
League colleges grew by 14 percent over the last 30 years,
lagging far behind the 44 percent rise in the number of high
school graduates.”
With the Common Application swelling the ranks of stu-
dents who apply, the admittance rate drops to well below
10 percent at the top schools. This lack of growth at the top—
and the proliferation of non-top-tier schools, whose names
investor Peter Thiel has said read like a “dunce cap” on a
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résumé—has led to ferocious competition even at the pre-
school level among parents. In this environment, second-tier
schools—the Swarthmores, Dukes, and NYUs—can raise their
tuition rates to levels that make them ultra-luxury products,
as expensive as an exclusive golf club. In a memorable anec-
dote, Hamilton College admissions officials included an
example of the kind of essay they like to see, the first line of
which was, “On the day my first novel was rejected, I was
baking a pie.” The essay concluded with the successful sign-
ing of the applicant’s book contract.
These dynamics vastly increase the perceived value of
admission to a top-tier school. And it subtly reinforces a dark
message for the nation’s elites: Your children will have to
work much harder than you did to achieve even the relative
status you have at present.
T HE American dream included the bedrock faith, which
in previous ages most parents had, that today’s chil-
dren will be better off than their parents. The institu-
tions of American life to which America’s upper-middle-class
white liberals are loyal and on which they depend have
arranged themselves in a way to destroy that faith in progress
and positive-sum outcomes. And what enters the scene if the
American dream sours? Misanthropy and rage.
This explains, in part, how political correctness has become
a status competition, one that is spreading from college into
the corporate workforce through the lateral imitation of
administrators. What is a Human Resources administrator
but a private-sector member of the dean’s office? It is yet
another layer of competition and a sorting mechanism.
Especially as woke ideology expands the number and type
of sexual minorities, it also expands the opportunities of
white children to obtain a coveted status as a transgressed
minority, a kind of work-around for the drudgery of meritoc-
racy. Previous generations of young people saw the phenom-
enon of “lesbians until graduation,” but the institutions of
American life are conspiring to create the “transgendered
until admitted.”
And if the American dream feels like a perishing fantasy in
the present even for those as blessed as upper-middle-class
whites, it is not surprising that they would increasingly adopt
and propagate a revisionist history and view of their country—
such as that offered by the 1619 Project—that damns America
as a set of illusions covering over a substance of capitalist
oppression.
What this class desperately needs, perhaps what the coun-
try needs, is a credible belief in America’s abundance of
opportunities, alongside the security of knowing that failures
or shortcomings do not forever doom one to a life of misery or
exile from the way of life you knew as a child. The virtue of
America’s upper middle class is its fastidiousness and inex-
haustible energy and ambition. Those virtues deserve and
require institutions that channel their energy into enterpris-
es that are truly productive, or at least more productive than
being an extension of Human Resources. Perhaps these
enterprises would even bring white upper-middle-class liber-
als back into sympathetic contact with their countrymen—
the blacks who resist gentrification, or the deplorables they
once wished to leave behind in St. Paul.
24 | www.nationalreview.com
A World
Without
Rules
On the fantasy of world order
BY JOHN R. BOLTON
M
UCH like Covid-19, some bad ideas never disappear.
One misbegotten, potentially dangerous idea
holds that we live in a “rules-based international
order,” or should at least aspire to. At first glance,
this notion seems innocuous. In the domestic law of consti-
tutional republics, don’t we have “rules-based order”? Why
not internationally?
References to the “order” are now ubiquitous, but its
meaning remains unclear. Possible definitions abound, since
Western diplomats seem determined to mention “rules-
based international order” everywhere, in G-7, G-20, U.N.,
EU, OECD, OSCE—even NATO—communiqués and speeches.
It’s as if intoning the words often enough, as in religious cer-
emonies, will make them true. But as Ben Scott, an analyst
writing in the Interpreter, observed, “although the ‘rules-
based international order’ is central to Australian strategy,
what exactly this concept means remains a work very much
in progress.” In a 2017 speech, Canadian foreign minister
Chrystia Freeland offered her take: “Canada has a huge inter-
est in an international order based on rules. One in which
might is not always right. One in which more powerful coun-
tries are constrained in their treatment of smaller ones by
standards that are internationally respected, enforced, and
upheld.”
Whatever the “order” is, the Biden administration is for it.
The president endorsed it in addressing the U.N. General
Assembly last September, in his 2021 U.N. Day proclamation
in October, and in his first talk with Indian prime minister
Narendra Modi after becoming president. Secretary of State
Antony Blinken invoked the “order” to open his and
National-Security Adviser Jake Sullivan’s embarrassing
March 18, 2021, Alaska meeting with their Chinese counter-
parts.
Commentators, too, are for it. Fareed Zakaria, as he wrote in
the Washington Post, supports a “liberal, rules-based interna-
tional order” but also endorses Sullivan saying that “the object
of the Biden administration is to shape the international envi-
ronment so that it is more favorable to the interest and values
of the United States and its allies and partners to like-minded
democracies” (sic). That sounds like vintage Barry Goldwater,
Mr. Bolton, who served as national-security adviser to President Trump and
U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, is the author of The Room Where
It Happened.
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thus highlighting a problem that arises when the “order” flubs
one of America’s priorities, which happens more frequently
than its acolytes like to admit. Whose “order” are we talking
about?
Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov opined on this ora-
torical flood in 2019: “There have been attempts . . . to replace
the universal norms of international law with a ‘rules-based
order.’ This term was recently coined to camouflage a striving
to invent rules depending on changes in the political situation
so as to be able to put pressure on disagreeable states and often
even on allies.” Ironically, devotees of “international law”
(another vague, shape-shifting term) worry that the “order” is
so much broader than “law” that the former may undermine
the latter.
W HAT should we make of all this? Cynical politicians
likely think: “Why not endorse the ‘rules-based inter-
national order’? It means everything and anything,
so what’s the harm?” Unfortunately, however, severe con-
sequences can flow from national-security policies based on
illusions. To the extent the “order” possesses any coherence,
its implications for countries that prize their constitutional
sovereignty, as America still does, are troubling.
History provides context and a better understanding of the
lineage of the “rules-based international order.” Starting in
1945, with the United Nations replacing the failed League of
Nations, there was a burst of support for “world government,”
through either enhancing the U.N. or other means. Some en-
visioned a “world federation,” although it was, like “world (or
global) government,” ill defined. In 1949, otherwise sensible
young congressmen such as Richard Nixon, John F. Kennedy,
and Gerald Ford endorsed resolutions embracing these con-
cepts in various ways. Even Ronald Reagan was a member,
albeit briefly, of the United World Federalists. Despite its initial
appeal, “global government” didn’t fare well in America and the
less toxic brand “world federalism” quickly replaced it, but they
traveled in the same direction. The Cold War froze debate about
global government for almost four decades. Other ideas for
“international order” nonetheless still abounded.
As Europe’s empires decolonized, many newly independent
states used the U.N. system to increase concessional assistance
flows from the “first world” to the less developed “third
world.” (The Communist “second world” offered ideology
and armaments but had little wealth to share.) Gossamer
concepts like the “new international economic order” and
the parallel “new world information and communications
order” envisioned global wealth redistribution and regula-
tion. Third-world diplomats and their Western
advocates weaponized entities such as the U.N.
Conference on Trade and Development, to oppose
the free-trade-oriented General Agreement on
Tariffs and Trade, and the U.N. Educational,
Scientific and Cultural Organization, to transfer
intellectual property and other assets of “the com-
mon heritage of mankind” from developed to less devel-
oped countries. These efforts ultimately foundered
during the Reagan administration, which flatly
ROMAN GENN
refused to play the game, pursuing American interests
unashamedly and ignoring the unrealistic leftist
ideologies embodied in the sundry “orders.” Other ploys to
redistribute “the common heritage of mankind” and simultane-
ously undermine sovereignty, such as the Law of the Sea Treaty,
remain afloat, but Washington never ratified that one and
hopefully never will.
Nonetheless, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the USSR’s dis-
solution unleashed a revival of post–World War II euphoria for
supranational institutions. Even President George H. W. Bush
endorsed a coming “new world order” after the 1990–91
Persian Gulf War and communism’s collapse. Others, however,
including even nominal American allies, focused, typically
under the radar, on constraining Washington, the “sole super-
power,” or, in French foreign minister Hubert Védrine’s more
pejorative term, the hyperpuissance.
Rebranding was again required, and “global governance”
became the prevailing buzzword. The lineal descendant of
“global government,” this new variant sounded less all-
embracing and therefore less threatening; but its ultimate
(perhaps hazier) objective was essentially identical because of
the reductions in national sovereignties that both required for
implementation. A Commission on Global Governance, no less,
comprising self-appointed luminaries and embraced by the
U.N., informed us in 1995 that “the development of global gov-
ernance is part of the evolution of human efforts to organize life
on the planet, and that process will always be going on.”
For its supporters, the European Union was the apotheosis of
the global-governance trend, with European leaders gleefully
transferring “competencies” to the growing mega-state. Not
surprisingly, European enthusiasts were eager to help the
United States give away its sovereignty to global institutions as
well.
Along with the EU’s seemingly inevitable greater glory
(Brexit not even a cloud on the horizon), in 1999 came the
International Criminal Court (ICC), purportedly exercising
jurisdiction even over citizens of nonmember states and
second-guessing whether states dealt adequately with war
crimes or crimes against humanity. Other international
courts, such as the Law of the Sea Treaty’s tribunal, seemed
intent on expanding their jurisdiction to extend global gover-
nance. Multiple efforts by these bodies to restrict national
decisions on the interna-
tional use of force, often
under “human rights”
cover, included argu-
ing that any use
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of force without express Security Council approval was illegiti-
mate.
Even the Clinton administration rejected certain of these
initiatives; for example, it didn’t sign the International Land
Mines Convention. In 1999 the Senate unexpectedly but deci-
sively rejected the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, intended
to ban all nuclear testing. During George W. Bush’s administra-
tion, global governance lost momentum. America “unsigned”
the ICC’s founding treaty, withdrew from the 1972 Anti–
Ballistic Missile Treaty, blocked U.N. efforts to impose inter-
national gun control, and tanked a hopelessly ineffectual,
counterproductive draft verification protocol for the Biological
Weapons Convention.
During Obama’s presidency, however, the “rules-based inter-
national order” emerged. Underground during the Trump years,
the “order” was resurrected by Biden’s arrival, and it is once
Pretending to play at law-and-order internationally has
come nowhere close to making it so but, sadly, has likely
deluded many people into believing that they need not take
more-effective steps to ensure their peace and safety.
again “game on.” The most benign effect of incessant incan-
tations about the “order” would be irrelevance. Much like the
endless repetition of the U.N. Charter phrase “international
peace and security,” it doesn’t bring either notion closer to
reality. Simple indifference, therefore, is an appealing response.
U NFORTUNATELY, whether political leaders believe or even
understand what they say, their statements have con-
sequences. Westerners who worship “international
order” may not realize that the idea has an unsavory history,
long predating 1945, where we began above, and much of it
shocking. In the most hateful and extreme forms, Nazism was
an aspiring world order, and Imperial Japan’s Greater East Asia
Co-Prosperity Sphere was similarly motivated. In more palat-
able variants, the Roman and British empires were proto–world
orders, as were successive Russian and Chinese empires and
many others. Americans have long been skeptical of inter-
national orders. Napoleon’s ambitions prompted Thomas
Jefferson to say, “It cannot be in our interest that all Europe
should be reduced to a single monarchy.” Not just any “interna-
tional order” will do.
So, does the appeal turn instead on the phrase “rules-
based”? Certainly not, because “rules” can also be objection-
able, some of them savagely so. In fact, “rules-based” is only
one aspect of “order” itself, making for a definition both repet-
itive and incomplete. One of Minister Freeland’s sub-rules,
that “might is not always right,” doesn’t solve the problem;
might is very frequently employed precisely because countries
can’t decide peacefully what is right. Nor does her view that
rules should be “internationally respected, enforced, and
upheld” help, since historically the only truly effective means
to uphold and enforce rules is through force or the threat
of force. As for “international respect,” force has always
26 | www.nationalreview.com
warranted more respect than incantations, unpleasant though
that reality may be.
Advocates of the “rules-based international order” make the
same fundamental mistake as their “global government”/“global
governance” predecessors, trying to equate managing global
disputes with managing domestic disputes. International
affairs are ultimately about power and politics, not law. The
historical absence of international institutions, such as courts,
prosecutors, and jails, that actually “enforce and uphold”
rules is not accidental. Creating them ex nihilo, without the
pre requisites that exist within countries, where citizens
have renounced the use of force to settle disputes, does not
change that reality. The manifest ineffectiveness of the
International Court of Justice has made it a joke. The Inter-
national Criminal Court, after just over 20 years, is nearly there.
U.N. peacekeeping forces are deployed almost uniformly in
conflicts where the concrete stakes for the great powers are
trivial, insufficient to energize them to attempt some kind of
lasting dispute resolution. Even nation-states that believed
they had renounced using force internally have found them-
selves engaged in bloody civil wars. We live in one. Pretending
to play at law-and-order internationally has come nowhere
close to making it so but, sadly, has likely deluded many
people into believing that they need not take more-effective
steps to ensure their peace and safety.
One example of an ineffectual “rules-based international
order” was the 1928 Kellogg–Briand Pact, an attempt to outlaw
war. It failed (although Secretary of State Frank B. Kellogg did
get a Nobel Peace Prize). As noted on the State Department’s
Office of the Historian website, the pact “did little to prevent
World War II or any of the conflicts that followed. Its legacy
remains as a statement of the idealism expressed by advocates
for peace in the interwar period.” Kellogg–Briand’s real-world
impact effectively ended before the ink on the treaty dried,
subsequent Nuremberg convictions producing no deterrent
effect. So much for renouncing force as an instrument of
national power.
O PTIMISTICadvocates of the “rules-based international
order,” conveniently disregarding millennia of earlier
human history, would respond that drawing conclu-
sions from Kellogg–Briand ignores how times and conditions
have changed. But consider how incantations about the “order”
might affect today’s crises. The “rules” against changing
Europe’s borders through force apparently never made it to
Moscow. Russia illegally annexed Crimea and successfully used
force in the Donbas, creating another “frozen conflict,” as in
several other former Soviet republics. Vladimir Putin has
ignored sanctions and other reprisals and appears fully
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prepared to ignore them again. As recently as New Year’s Eve,
he threatened a complete rupture in Moscow–Washington rela-
tions, which he knows is the one thing, other than military
force, most likely to rattle the State Department.
China is playing a similar cat-and-mouse game with Taiwan
and is ignoring international judicial rejection of its territorial
claims in the South China Sea. Beijing is violating, without con-
sequences, its treaty with the United Kingdom that returned
Hong Kong to full Chinese sovereignty. The “rules-based inter-
national order” is meeting cultural genocide against China’s
Uyghurs with symbolic diplomatic boycotts of the Winter
Olympics. Beijing, like Moscow, has its own ideas about what
the right “order” is, visited upon two of Freeland’s fellow
citizens. In 2018, China seized two Canadians as hostages to
exchange for a senior Huawei official arrested in Canada for
extradition to the United States. Ultimately, the Biden adminis-
tration broke down and agreed to a swap.
Neither Russia’s nor China’s belligerence will be resolved in
the Security Council, where their vetoes ensure inaction. Nor
will the threat from Iran, which has torn up the Nuclear Non-
Proliferation Treaty (NPT). As the U.S. and others beg Tehran to
return to the 2015 nuclear deal, its obstruction of International
Atomic Energy Agency officials remains in full swing. Iran also
continues arming and funding Houthi rebels in Yemen’s grind-
ing conflict, which long ago passed from civil strife to surrogate
international war. North Korea violated the NPT, then withdrew
from it, and is closer to having deliverable nuclear weapons
than ever before. The “rules-based international order” is
clutching its pearls but doing very little else in either case.
Biden accepted Trump’s deal with the Taliban (but not the
legitimate Afghan government) and withdrew U.S. and NATO
forces from Afghanistan. His “rules-based international
order” adherents watched the country descend into chaos and
brutality, as the capability to carry out terrorist attacks against
America, by the Pentagon’s own admission, is now less than
six months away. More pearl-clutching.
It is never prudent to base national-security decisions on
delusion, but that is the palpable risk of taking seriously notions
of a “rules-based international order.” What order exists in the
world today results from American military, political, and eco-
nomic strength and the alliance structures we created globally
post-1945. No other nation or combination of nations could do
what we have done, nor could any international organization.
We did all this not out of altruism but because it was in our
national interest, and we have benefited enormously in eco-
nomic terms alone but also politically and militarily. Our allies
too often fail to meet the mutual obligations they have agreed
to shoulder, about which we should vigorously remind them.
But we made these commitments not for their benefit, but for
our own. No other country will safeguard our interests or our
jury-rigged order better than we will. When we exit some area
on the globe, as Afghanistan is proving before our eyes, no
better order emerges.
Until lions lie down with lambs, a “rules-based international
order” is a fantasy. The world will see only partial orders, such
as ours, facing vigorous resistance from competing visions and
philosophies. Today, the partial order that suits America best
is the one we created and sustain. We “respect, uphold, and
enforce” it, along with willing allies, whom we should not
abandon. There is no better alternative.
Defender of
The Dhimmis
Assad and the Christians of Syria
BY SAM SWEENEY
R
ECENTLY I was in the city of Hassakeh, Syria, sitting
and making small talk with two Syrians, one Kurdish
and the other Syriac Christian. The Christian said he
would like to invite me to his house but, because he
lives in the government-controlled area of the city, he couldn’t.
He’d previously had a guest from another Arab country, and
the government’s security service immediately knocked on his
door, asking who the guest was. As an American journalist with-
out a Syrian visa, I would not be welcome in the government-
held part of the city. (Hassakeh is currently divided between
the majority of the city that falls under the control of the
Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces and a small section that
falls under the control of the Syrian government.) The Kurd
sitting with us immediately piped in, saying that it was for the
people’s benefit that the government kept such a close watch
on the security situation. That was why Syria was so safe before
the war. The Christian enthusiastically agreed.
The conversation was remarkable only in that I have a simi-
lar one almost every day in northeastern Syria. A great nostal-
gia has taken hold for iyyam ad-dawleh, the days when the
government was in charge. I hear it from Christians, Kurds, and
Arabs. While I would posit that the nostalgia comes with a
healthy dose of selective memory loss about the worst behav-
iors of the Syrian regime, it nonetheless also carries an obvious
truth: You don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone. “We
were living in a dream, and now we’ve woken up,” an Assyrian
Christian in his twenties told me. While there are obviously
many who disagree, a large share of Syrians I talk to would
rewind the clock to 2010 if they could and do everything pos-
sible to prevent the anti-Assad protests from starting. That
sentiment is most pronounced among Christians, and much
of that community never left the Assad government’s side
throughout the conflict.
The Christian attachment to Bashar al-Assad and his regime
is an oft-misunderstood aspect of the Syrian civil war. The
Catholic and Orthodox churches in particular have been moral-
ly condemned, from many corners, over their ties to the Assad
government. The journalist Idrees Ahmad tweeted, during the
visit of a Vatican delegation to Damascus in July 2019, that “the
two people disgracing themselves while Idlib is being decimat-
ed by Assad’s bombs are Cardinal Peter Turkson of Ghana, head
of the Vatican’s department for Promoting Integral Human
Development, and Italian Cardinal Mario Zenari, the [pope’s]
ambassador in Syria.” Charles Lister, a prominent Syria
Mr. Sweeney is a writer based in the Middle East and the president of
Mesopotamia Relief Foundation, which works in northeastern Syria.
27
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Catholics gather on Palm Sunday in Damascus, April 14, 2019.
commentator at the Middle East Institute in Washington, D.C.,
tweeted a photo of the same visit with the tongue-in-cheek
comment, “The Catholic Church never disappoints, does it? All
smiles in Damascus, visiting Assad today.” Middle Eastern
churches have been even more closely associated with Assad
and his regime. The patriarchs of the Syriac Orthodox,
Antiochian (Greek) Orthodox, and Melkite (Greek) Catholic
churches are all based in Damascus, and all regularly appear
smiling in photo ops with Assad.
I T would be easy to dismiss the churches’ relationship with
Assad as a pragmatic one based in their desire to protect
their flocks, which are largely in areas controlled by
Assad’s government. Indeed, for Western Christians, pragma-
tism often seems the key factor in the approach to Assad. They
don’t love Assad but feel an obligation to Christians in Syria
and therefore strive to maintain a relationship with the gov-
ernment that is primarily responsible for them and that has
largely protected them. Such a pragmatic reading, however,
ignores the fact that many Syrian Christians have great and
genuine affection for Assad and don’t see him as merely the
least bad option. An Armenian friend from Aleppo told me in
2013 that the day Hafez al-Assad died in 2000 was the saddest
day of her life.
This view is firmly rooted in the notion among many
Christians that any of the political alternatives within Syria
would not bring about positive change for Christians. As this
same Armenian friend pointed out, her grandparents survived
the Armenian genocide and came as orphans to Syria. Her
father grew up in poverty, but within a generation the family
had rebuilt its wealth and become extremely successful. What
LOUAI BESHARA/GETTY IMAGES
more could a community devastated by genocide ask for in
their new home? I found the argument convincing. Less con-
vincing was her assertion that Syria was not a dictatorship
because she herself had never been prevented from saying
something she wanted to say.
28 | www.nationalreview.com
A specific conundrum besets the advance of democracy in the
Middle East: Many people in the region don’t see democracy
as viable in their society. That sentiment is particularly wide-
spread in Syria’s Christian community, but it’s certainly not
unique to Christians. Can you impose a system that is meant to
give power to the people if they don’t want that power? I was
recently driving with a Christian in northeastern Syria when a
man riding a motorcycle cut us off. In an SUV, we were not in
danger, but the man and his wife and infant on the motorcycle
certainly were. He didn’t seem even to notice that we had
almost crushed him and his family. “And these people want
freedom?” my companion chuckled. “When Arabs say they
want freedom, they mean chaos.”
I’ve heard variations on this theme countless times. Most
news coverage of protests against the Assad government
missed this substantial segment of the population, the cautious
supporters of the regime who feared the alternative more than
they had ever feared the government. While this sentiment has
grown during the last decade of civil war, it was certainly pre-
sent leading up to the war as well. In June 2010, before the Arab
Spring was even a thought, Reuters reported on Christians in
Syria who were worried about developments in neighboring
Arab countries. The article’s title summed up the sentiment:
“Christians view Syria as haven in unstable region.” Their worst
fear, that the chaos then beginning to take over the region
would come to Syria, came true. The conflict probably ended the
Christian presence for good in certain parts of Syria, particularly
those that came under ISIS or opposition and Turkish control.
Elsewhere, migration rates have skyrocketed, threatening the
long-term viability of the Christian community.
T
understand the Christians’ attachment to the Assad
O
regime, it’s important to understand the community’s
history in the region, both distant and more recent.
Many Christians think that Muslim society as a whole is hostile
to them and that therefore security and stability are their first
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2col_FINAL_QXP-1127940309.qxp 1/19/2022 1:02 AM Page 30
priority. Similarly, they believe that Christians have little real-
istic chance of obtaining political power in an Islamic society
and that a democratic system would therefore not necessarily
help Christians.
Christian supporters of the Syrian revolution, in trying to
undermine their community’s support for the Assad regime,
have pointed out that the standing Syrian constitution—
supposedly a secular bulwark against Islamist domination—
prevents a non-Muslim from becoming president. Most
Christians would respond with an obvious truth: A democratic
system would probably reduce rather than increase the likeli-
hood of a Christian leader in Syria. When Islam arrived in Syria
in the seventh century, Christian political power came to an
abrupt end, resuming only briefly in the Crusader states
(which were run by European, not Middle Eastern, Christians).
Under Islam, Christianity’s fortunes ebbed and flowed.
Islam granted Christians, along with Jews, a protective status
known as “dhimmitude” (from dhimmiyyah in Arabic). It was
protection in exchange for loyalty. By today’s standards, we
would say they were treated as second-class citizens. They
were not expected to wage jihad against Islam’s enemies.
Instead, they paid a tax, the jizya, and were granted—in
theory—protection by the Islamic caliphate. In practice, their
status depended mostly on internal and external political
dynamics. There was no conception of citizenship as we
understand it today, or of the rights and responsibilities that
come with it. Instead, there was only power and fealty, and
Christians never had hopes for power, so fealty was their only
option.
In the late Ottoman Empire, it seemed that the situation
could change. A series of reforms led to the enactment of a
constitution governing the empire’s affairs, which came into
effect in 1876. The constitution was a major step forward for
Christians in the Ottoman Empire, giving them almost equal
status as citizens. “All subjects of the empire are called
‘Ottomans,’ without distinction, whatever faith they profess,”
the constitution read. While it still defined Islam as the
empire’s official religion, it affirmed the principle of freedom
of religion, stating that “the state will protect the free exercise
of faiths professed in the Empire.” It would be tempting to see
this as a step in the right direction, but the move toward a
more national empire, rather than a religious one, ultimately
led to the Armenian genocide (which also targeted other,
non-Armenian Christians), effectively ending the Christian
presence in what is now Turkey. Many Christians learned a
valuable lesson from the experience: Promises of political
change and equality were not likely to improve the situation of
their community.
The Christian community in Syria is essentially made up of
two groups. The first, who mostly identify as ethnic Arabs,
inhabit the western portion of the country, in cities such as
Damascus, Homs, Latakia, and Aleppo. These Christians are
primarily Greek Orthodox and Catholic, and their history in
Syria is long. Following the genocide in Turkey, Syria’s
Christian community was boosted by a second group, new-
comers fleeing the Ottoman government and the Kurdish
tribes that had largely carried out the genocide. These
Christians spoke Armenian, Turkish, Kurdish, Syriac, and in
some cases Arabic. They belonged to the Armenian Orthodox,
Armenian Catholic, Syriac Orthodox, Syriac Catholic, and
30 | www.nationalreview.com
Chaldean Catholic churches and to the Assyrian Church of the
East. In some cases, they joined the existing Christian com-
munity in the western part of the country, particularly in the
city of Aleppo, but a large number of them went to Syria’s
northeast, known as the Jazeera region. The French govern-
ment, in charge of Syria after World War I, gave them land and
privileges, and the Christians became the backbone of cities
such as Qamishli and Hassakeh.
The memory of the genocide, exacerbated by Turkey’s
refusal to acknowledge it, remains deeply ingrained in the
Armenian, Syriac, and Assyrian communities of Syria. They
became extremely suspicious of outsiders and close-knit, in
many cases continuing to speak the Syriac and Armenian lan-
guages they had used in Turkey. The role of Kurdish tribes in
carrying out the genocide also created a widespread Christian
suspicion of Kurds, helping to push the Christians in the
northeast toward the Assad government. Christians who have
backed the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces have
struggled greatly to convince their brethren to overcome this
historical suspicion.
In addition, Arabic-speaking Greek Orthodox and Catholics
have long remembered anti-Christian violence such as what
occurred in 1860, when sectarian conflict in Mount Lebanon
spilled over into Damascus. As tensions escalated, Ottoman
troops withdrew from the Christian quarters of Damascus’s
old city, allowing a Muslim mob to destroy all the neighbor-
hood's churches and kill at least 5,000 of the 22,000 Christians
then living there. This left Christians in the region with an
enduring suspicion of their Muslim neighbors, though it’s less
potent than that fostered by the memories of genocide in
Turkey.
In light of this history, the Christian attachment to Bashar
al-Assad’s government can be better understood. Assad
offered the Christians the same deal that Islamic leaders had
offered in the past—namely, protection in exchange for loyalty.
For most Syrian Christians, this has been a better bargain than
any promises of equal rights, which they wouldn’t expect to be
honored. In 2019, I was interviewing a Christian from the city
of Raqqa, which became ISIS’s de facto capital when the group
controlled large swaths of Syria’s northeast. I asked him
whether he was surprised that the group had been able to take
over the city. He told me he was not surprised, and that the
people of the city had been waiting, expecting a group like ISIS
to show their true colors. Agree or disagree, this perception
has largely fueled the Christian attachment to Assad.
Some Christians have rejected the notion that their commu-
nity’s fate is inseparably tied to the fate of the Assad regime.
A few, such as Michel Kilo, were prominent in the pre-2011
opposition movement, and others rose to prominence during
the revolution. These individuals, however, remained mostly
at the periphery of their community.
A NOTHER anti-Assad movement has gained traction
within the Christian community of the northeast—
namely, the various Christian parties tied to the
Kurdish-led, American-backed Syrian Democratic Forces. The
appeal of this movement is primarily a result of the unique
makeup of the Christian community in the country’s north-
east. In most of Syria, Christians identify as ethnically Arab
FEBRUARY 7, 2022
2col_FINAL_QXP-1127940309.qxp 1/19/2022 1:02 AM Page 31
and speak Arabic as their primary language. In the northeast,
however, Syriac and Assyrian Christians have used the chaos
since 2011 to assert their non-Arab identity. The Syriac Union
Party in particular has gained legitimate popular support.
The crux of their movement is the rejection of the national-
ist ideology of the ruling Baath Party, which asserts Arab iden-
tity as the only ethnic identity of Syria. Aligning with the
Kurdish movement has helped the Aramaic-speaking Syriac
and Assyrian peoples of the region break free of the Arab-
nationalist ideology that rejected them as a separate people
with a unique history and ethnic identity. Corruption and
sectarianism within the Autonomous Administration, which
governs areas under the control of the U.S.-backed Syrian
Democratic Forces, has not helped the effort to overcome
Christian suspicion of the movement.
The story of Faris al-Khoury provides a good summary of the
political prospects of Syria’s Christian community in the mod-
ern era. Al-Khoury became prime minister in 1944, while the
French mandate was still in place during World War II. He
is the highest-ranking Christian in Syria’s modern political
history. Even in his day, however, it was understood that
his Christian background limited his rise. A quote attributed
to Palestinian writer Mohammad Ali al-Taher, perhaps apoc-
ryphal since I can find it only secondhand, says that had
al-Khoury’s last name been “al-Joury” or “al-Houry,” he
would have been president of Syria. The joke relies on the fact
that in Arabic the letters kh, j, and h all have the same shape,
but kh has a dot above, j a dot below, and h no dot. “Khoury,”
Don’t just read
Listen.
Available anywhere you listen to podcasts.
meaning priest in Arabic, is one of the most common Christian
family names in the Levant. If his name had had a dot below,
or no dot, he might have been mistaken for a Muslim and his
political rise would have been assured.
The constitutional prohibition of a non-Muslim president
merely reflects the attitudes of a large portion of the popula-
tion toward Christians. A few Christians saw a prospect for
change in Syria and joined the anti-Assad protest movement
in 2011. A larger number see the prospect for positive change
in the northeast and have thrown in their lot with the Kurdish
movement there, hoping that a political opening is possible as
non-Arab peoples in the region are recognized.
For most Syrian Christians, however, Assad remains the
preferred option. Many have a genuine love for the man,
while others simply fear the unknown or recognize the unfor-
tunate reality that, for their community, he may be the lesser
of two evils. Because Assad has carried out atrocities against
his own people, Christians’ attachment to him has confused
many. One need not agree with their political choice, how-
ever, to understand that their attachment did not emerge in a
vacuum. If the past ten years of war have not been enough to
shake their support for Assad, it seems unlikely to change as
Assad consolidates his victory and looks to reemerge on the
international stage. His protection of the Christian commu-
nity will certainly be a large part of his case for reacceptance,
and no doubt there will be many Syrian Christians willing to
help him argue that Syria’s political isolation should come to
an end.
31
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TERFnet
P
HOTOS have been over the Internet for months:
Thieves are targeting train cars, stripping them
of their cargo, opening the boxes, and taking the
good stuff. The tracks are littered thick with sun-
dered boxes. The president of the Union Pacific recently
complained to the city, noting that the train bulls were
arresting the same people and the prosecutors were letting
them go with a slap on the wrist. Well, not a slap. More like
a pat: There, there, you had a bad day, but it’s going to be okay
now.
In the old days, hardened rail-yard cops carrying rugged
cudgels with interesting stains would have made short work
of the vandals. In the old days, people thought the system
worked like Dragnet. The TV show is regarded today as both
stodgy and slightly campy, if it’s regarded at all, but in its
original run on radio it was a hard-boiled, “realistic” look at
a cop’s job. Nearly every episode began the same way.
SERGEANT FRIDAY, speaking in a voiceover: It was Monday. It
was hot in Los Angeles. We were working the night shift out
of day watch. The boss was Captain Kepin. I was on my way
to robbery division.
(Sound effect of door opening.)
Room 301.
OFFICER SMITH: Hey, Joe.
FRIDAY: Hi, Frank. How are you?
SMITH: Not so good. It’s Faye. She’s hacked off at me
again.
FRIDAY: Why’s that?
SMITH: It’s her brother. He’s been staying with us for nine
months. I tell you, Joe, he can’t do anything wrong in her
eyes. I came home the other night, you know, found him
all dressed up in her things.
FRIDAY: Her things?
SMITH: You know. Her things. Women things. What you’d
call foundation garments.
FRIDAY: Well, I wouldn’t know about that. I’m notoriously
averse to female things in a way the show seems hesitant to
address.
SMITH: Trust me, Joe, you don’t want to see my brother-
in-law in a Maidenform bra. I dreamed of a lot of things but
that wasn’t one of them.
(Phone rings.)
FRIDAY: Hot shot, I’ll get it. Friday, here. Yeah. Where?
Pico? Got it. (Hangs up phone.) Well, your brother-in-law
might like this one.
SMITH: Why’s that?
FRIDAY: The Train Gang? They just stole a thousand pair
of pantyhose.
(Baleful woodwinds play.)
In the next 23 minutes, Friday and Smith would track
down the members of the Train Gang. They would be
apprehended at a rooming house and would bitterly
denounce each other, making sneering remarks to the
cops. Then the announcer: In a moment, the results of that
32 | www.nationalreview.com
BY J AMES LILEKS
trial. We would be informed that the suspects had been
found guilty, presumably during the cigarette-commercial
break, and that California law required a sentence of not
less than two but no more than 398 years for the crime.
DUM DA DUM DUM.
Occasionally Friday would ventilate a crook and make a
laconic remark tinged with annoyance, as if thinking of the
paperwork ahead. This was generally accepted as the way
the world worked. If you repeatedly broke into trains, stole
things, and got caught, the prosecutors would . . . what’s the
word? Prosecute. Now it’s as if the chief prosecutors are
determined to keep people out of jail, if possible. Dragnet
would be different now.
FRIDAY, speaking in a voiceover: It was Tuesday. It was
cool in L.A., due to capitalism’s inability to treat the planet
as something other than a disposable commodity. We
were working the day watch out of Spontaneous Property
Redistribution. The boss was Captain Pelagius.
(Sound effect of door opening.)
FRIDAY: Hey, Frank.
SMITH: Hey, Joe. You get that sheet from the boss about
the train robberies? He’s pretty hacked off about it.
FRIDAY: Which one? The subway holdups? The Amtrak
pistol-whipping? The gang that’s targeting the Disneyland
monorail?
SMITH: No, those were sent down to the Misdemeanor-
Engagement Unit. It’s about the gang that’s repurposing
train cargo for community usage.
FRIDAY: Captain said the offenders have hit the train 20
times in two months, and that’s an indication that social
conditions have not improved enough to suggest they stop.
SMITH: Yeah, but the train they hit yesterday was carrying
a shipment of hormones and puberty blockers for trans-
gender teens. Kinda puts a new spin on it.
FRIDAY: Hate crime?
SMITH: Hard to say. But one of the suspects liked a tweet
from J. K. Rowling.
FRIDAY: And?
SMITH: Word on the street says she’s a TERF.
(Baleful woodwinds play.)
FRIDAY, speaking in a voiceover: In the modern lingo of
the underworld, a TERF is a trans-exclusionary radical
feminist. Their methods of operation are known to all
police officers; they use social media to spread a message of
biological essentialism. The public is often unaware that
their neighbor, their friend, the salesperson at the store
may be a TERF. It’s our job to make sure the public does
not prioritize mere property crimes over the necessary work
of reconstructing gender paradigms.
And so on. By the way, Friday never said “Just the facts,
ma’am.” But he also didn’t say “Just the subjective inter-
pretation of events seen through the postcolonial intersec-
tional prism,” either. Which might be why the character
endures.
FEBRUARY 7, 2022
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“And now I’ll take a few questions.
Ron?”
“Mr. President, a lot of Americans
are concerned about inflation and
the economy, the Russian military
moves threatening Ukraine, China,
the state of the Covid pandemic right
now, and they want to know what
your favorite sandwich is. Is it a BLT?
Is it a ham-on-rye situation?”
“Steve, I’m so glad you asked that.
I guess if I had my druthers I’d go for
a turkey, maybe a club-sandwich-
type deal. But before I go I need to
ask you a question. Why are all of
you guys in your underwear? And
why do I seem to be running in
sand?”
“Mr. President? Mr. President?”
“Yes?”
“You dozed off there for a mo-
ment.”
“Yes?”
“We’re here in the Oval Office,
talking about how we’re going to
deal with the voting-rights bill in the
Senate and the strategy to reset the
administration’s direction.”
“I know where we are.”
“It’s Tuesday at eleven in the
morning.”
“I know!”
“We’re in the middle of a meet-
ing.”
“I know. Keep going, I’m listen-
ing.”
“Sir, with all due respect, if you’re
too tired for this—”
“I am not too tired! And I’m get-
ting sick of people telling me I’m
dozing off when I am merely listen-
ing with my eyes closed.”
“Um, okay. So, Ron, our plan for
the reset is that we introduce some
new initiatives that connect with
working Americans. We’ve made a
chart listing the biggest concerns—
schools, especially, among parents,
and the economy, but we’re thinking
fuel prices might be the first focus.”
“What do you think, Barack?”
“I think you’re in big trouble, Joe.
In the first place, you’re pushing all
the wrong stuff, and in the second,
you’re wearing a very heavy rain-
coat.”
“Yeah, I am. Why is that, you guys?
What are you? Squirrels? Chip -
munks?”
“We’re doctors, Joe.”
“Ha! Chipmunks! And you’re
dressed like short-order cooks. Re-
member those? Boy oh boy, going
into a diner and smelling the fresh
coffee and the grill. It’s all scrambled
eggs up there now, isn’t it, fellas? In
the old noggin o’ mine?”
“’Fraid so, Joe. Remember those
words?”
“Person, man, TV, and what’s the
next one?”
“You got ’em wrong, Joey.”
“Hey! Who let my first-grade
teacher in here? Person, man, woman,
camera, TV! TV!”
“Sir?”
“What?”
“We were talking about the recent
poll numbers and then suddenly you
jolted awake—”
“Hey now!”
“Excuse me, suddenly you jolted . . .
upright . . . and said ‘TV’ and I guess
we are all wondering what that
might mean in the context of this
meeting. That we are having. Here in
the Oval Office. On a Tuesday morn-
ing. Of your presidency. The Biden
presidency. Which is yours. Because
you are Joe Biden. As I’m sure you
recall.”
“I don’t think I like your tone.”
“Sir, would you prefer it if we met
as a group and then came back to you
with a few concrete proposals?”
“No I would not prefer it if you met
as a group and then came back to me
with a few concrete proposals, which
I think you’ll agree are almost the
exact words you used just moments
BY ROB LONG
ago, proving that I am in fact wide
awake and listening and in charge of
my, you know, my . . . my . . . things in
my head . . . What am I trying to say?”
“Your faculties, sir?”
“Right. Those. And when I men-
tioned television earlier, what I was
getting at, and maybe I was going
too fast for you young people, was
that I should go on television, con-
nect with the people, real people,
not Beltway types. Get me on a plane
and send me out to, you know, this
country, which I know has a specific
name but just at the moment—”
“America.”
“Yes, thank you! Get me out there,
on the hustings, on TV and what-
not.”
“Sort of, let Biden be Biden?”
“Yes! Now you’re getting it.”
“Well, sir, that’s an interesting
idea. And to be honest, we’ve been
avoiding personal appearances and
television events because so many
of them last longer than seven min-
utes, which to be frank seems to be
what some doctors call the ‘window
of lucidity,’ but, Ron, what do you
think? Should we map out a poten-
tial 30-day direct-to-the-people
television strategy?”
“There are either too many chairs
for this table or not enough table,
which makes sense because this is
my old dining room from way back
when, Scranton, I think, and that
place was always too small, plus
there aren’t any stairs and hey!
Cupcakes! Plus I think there are a lot
of very pretty girls just in the next
room, I think I’ll go say hello, but for
some reason my legs are so heavy! I
can’t stand up! I can’t stand!”
“Mr. President?”
“Don’t answer them, Joe. Even-
tually they’ll stop asking.”
“Thanks, Madam Justice Soto -
mayor.”
“Mr. President?”
“Mr. President?”
“Mr. President?”
33
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Terry
Teachout
Is Dead
MARK MORRIS
T
ERRY was a marvelous, imagi-
native, confident, honest gen-
tleman. He was also a very
opinionated, educated, generous critic.
And he had an enormous capacity to
maintain his interests and his very high
standards . . . high, yet achievable. He
wrote about what he actually saw and
read and heard, and not just the sort of
Platonic ideal of what a work of art could
or should be, as reviewers often suggest.
He was kind and forthcoming in both
his praise and his criticism. Although I
hadn’t spent time with him in many
years, I consistently read his work with
interest—his interest stimulated my
own. I read his articles on plays that
I would likely never see, and music I
wouldn’t hear. The entire U.S.A. was his
beat. He championed the regional and
the local without the cliché New Yorkish
condescension. But still, he would never
assume that you would agree with his
opinions and would happily listen to
yours.
Terry wrote on my work and on me and
my company an age ago. And he was one
of the few critics that I felt really under-
stood what I was up to, from a choreo-
musical angle. Of course, he didn’t
always agree with what I presented, but
he never dismissed the seriousness and
import of anyone’s work just because it
didn’t grab him. He was in no hurry to
prove his deeply held beliefs, and his
conservative nature was a refreshingly
level-headed defense of tradition, classi-
cism, and history. Amongst the several
plays and books that he wrote, All in the
LILLY LAWRENCE/GETTY IMAGES
Dances: A Brief Life of George Balanchine
Mr. Morris is a choreographer, conductor, and
director, and the founder and artistic director of
the Mark Morris Dance Group, a dance company
based in Brooklyn, N.Y.
34 | www.nationalreview.com
Terry Teachout in 2015
is the book that’s dearest to me. Mer-
cifully, it is not another hagiography; it is
non-adulatory, non-elitist, non-snooty.
It is a fun, exciting read for anybody and
not just the Balanchine devotees (and I
am one). And it is short.
Terry and I initially met when he came
for a rehearsal and an interview, which
grew into a friendship. We talked on
Bach, Gershwin, Balanchine, Thomson,
Petipa, et alia with ease. It seemed a
great compliment to be closely listened
to by someone with his expertise. Go
back and read his work in all its variety
and constant development; he got better
and better . . . and sweeter. He was loved
and admired. He was a doll.
The great jazzist (and friend to both of
us) Ethan Iverson, who stayed in contact
with Mr. Teachout much more closely
than I did, wrote about him on his blog
Do the Math. Here is some of it:
I met Terry over two decades ago when
he wrote about Mark Morris. Frankly, I
was surprised that someone working as
dance critic knew anything about jazz.
We kept in touch, and his blog About
Last Night was a direct inspiration when
starting Do the Math. . . .
I liked Terry, appreciated his per-
spective, but also felt I owed him a
favor. His 2000 profile of Morris put me
on the cover of Sunday Arts in the New
York Times. (Picks up phone and calls
home: “Hey, Mom? Drive to Eau Claire
tomorrow and get the New York Times.”)
He also advised me on prose issues
when I first started trying to write criti-
cism. So, when I heard that Terry was
releasing a book on Duke Ellington, I
figured it was time to interview Terry
for DTM.
But, after setting up the interview, it
turned out I didn’t love Duke: A Life of
Duke Ellington. Indeed, I wondered if
I would be dishonoring my ancestors if I
gave the book positive press. It was a
kind of a personal crisis: I literally fell ill
with a flu that wouldn’t go away. Finally,
somewhat in desperation, I wrote a re-
buttal to the biography, “Reverential
Gesture.” Immediately my body healed
and I was fit as a fiddle. . . .
I figured springing my essay on Terry
would be unfair, so I sent it along for
comments. He corrected a few things
and said, “Go get ’em, tiger.” The in-
terview and my rebuttal ran side by
side. . . .
I expected Terry to drop me as friend
and associate. Incredibly, he just stayed
the same warm self. Especially on
Twitter, he constantly signal-boosted
my work. After Trump was elected, I felt
a chill deep in my bones and abruptly
quit interacting with anyone I regarded
as conservative. Terry didn’t change,
so in time I circled back and sent him
further things for input. . . .
I try not to make enemies, but stuff
happens. If you have visible opinions in
the world, conflict is unavoidable. After
hearing of Terry’s death, I pondered his
vast skill in staying above the fray and
connecting people through kindness and
friendship. There is definitely a lesson
to be learned from Terry’s seemingly
effortless and graceful deportment. I
never told him I admired him for those
reasons, but I wish I had.
Requiescat in pace et in amore Terry
Teachout.
FEBRUARY 7, 2022
books_FINAL_QXP-1127940387.qxp 1/18/2022 9:34 PM Page 35
The Patriot
King
ROBERT G. INGRAM
The Last King of America: The Misunderstood
Reign of George III, by Andrew Roberts
(Viking, 784 pp., $40)
T
HE Declaration of Independence
is an odd document. Or, as
Andrew Roberts more pointedly
puts it in his important new biography of
George III, the Declaration “is simulta-
neously grotesquely hypocritical, illogi-
cal, mendacious and sublime.” The first
paragraph took the then-unusual step of
declaring the 13 British North American
colonies’ independence. The second
paragraph perorated on the divinely
endowed “unalienable Rights” of all
peoples. The rest enumerated the British
king’s abuses. Most non-Americans
prized the first paragraph—the Declara-
tion quickly became the model for others
around the world who wished to declare
their own independence. Most Ameri-
cans have valorized the Declaration’s
second paragraph. “I have often inquired
of myself, what great principle or idea
it was that kept this [nation] so long
together,” Abraham Lincoln observed.
“It was not the mere matter of the sep-
a ration of the colonies from the
motherland; but that sentiment in the
Declaration of Independence which gave
liberty, not alone to the people of this
country, but, I hope, to the world, for
all future time.”
But what about the rest of the Decla-
ration, much the largest chunk and the
Mr. Ingram is a professor of history at Ohio
University and the director of its Menard Family
George Washington Forum.
S P O N S O R E D B Y NATIONAL REVIEW INSTITUTE
one that actually justified indepen-
dence? Most either ignore it or accept as
writ the long list of “facts . . . submitted
to a candid world,” which its authors
thought demonstrated that “the his-


tory of the present King of Great
Britain is a history of repeated injus-
tices and usurpations, all having in
direct object the establishment of an
absolute Tyranny over these States.” The
members
charges against George III ranged from
enjoy full access to our
sending “hither swarms of officers to
harass our people, and eat out their sub- unparalleled conservative
stance,” to having “plundered our seas, commentary and analysis.
ravaged our coasts, burnt our towns, and
destroyed the lives of our people.” The
Declaration meant to establish incontro-
vertibly that George III was a “tyrant . . .
unfit to be the ruler of a free people” and
that his tyranny justified American in- Learn more at
NATIONALREVIEW.COM/PLUS
dependence. Andrew Roberts will have
none of it. Only two of the 28 charges
against the king had any merit, he in-
sists, and the king was no tyrant.
Roberts is British, a Tory, and a very
fine historian, one favorably disposed
to the United States but not hung up
on elite American preoccupations. In
defending George III, Roberts pushes
back against more than two centuries of
Whig obloquy. From the time George
ascended the throne in 1760, Whigs
resented him for rehabilitating the
Tories, who had spent 46 years in the
political wilderness. Ever since, a Whig
historiographical tradition that included Never see a meter
Winston Churchill has cast George as or a paywall when
“a heartless, absolute sovereign.” browsing the
Like most of Roberts’s previous books, NATIONAL REVIEW website
The Last American King is a doorstop, at and see more of
once exhaustively researched and writ-
the best content from
ten in accessible, non-jargony prose.
Meticulous and forensic, it sometimes
our top writers.
reads like a defense counsel’s case for his
client. Roberts grounds his freshest in- PLUS, unlock the digital
sights on the 200,000-plus pages’ worth version of NATIONAL REVIEW
of Hanoverian manuscripts from the magazine and archives,
Windsor archives, which Elizabeth II indulge in an ad-minimal
recently authorized to be digitized and
website experience,
published. It is not perhaps always self-
evident why the case needs to be made, and so much more!
given that there has also been a long
Tory historiographical tradition that
has not aspersed George III. Roberts’s
defense of George III, though, is the
fullest, the clearest, and likely to be the
most definitive. It also offers a tantaliz-
ing vision of what might have been had
the British North American colonists
not declared their independence.
35
books_FINAL_QXP-1127940387.qxp 1/18/2022 9:34 PM Page 36
BOOKS, ARTS & MANNERS
Roberts is at his most convincing
in showing that George was a not-
unenlightened king. George III was
England’s third Hanoverian monarch.
The family had come to the English
throne in 1714 not because they had any
solid blood claim to rule England but
because they were Protestants who
would uphold the Glorious Revolution’s
settlement in church and state. The
Hanoverian kings and their heirs mostly
hated one another, and this was no less
true of George III, save that he loathed
his grandfather, George II, rather than
his father, Frederick, who died in 1751.
It is not hard to see why George might
have detested his grandfather, who
intentionally slow-rolled Frederick’s
burial and had his disemboweled, un-
sewn, unembalmed body placed beneath
young George’s apartments. What lov-
ing son would not have seethed at being
“subjected to the stench of his father’s
rotting corpse thanks to his grandfa-
ther’s neglect”? George III took from
George III’s passing may have been
lamented, but, unlike Napoleon or
Churchill, he had not shaped his age.
Frederick a lasting disdain for political
factionalism and an admiration for the
principles of Bolingbroke’s The Idea of
a Patriot King. As his boyhood essays
showed, he also valued constitutional-
ism, preferred a “blue water” interna-
tional policy, and strongly opposed the
institution of slavery. These were just
some of the ideological commitments
of what Roberts characterizes as “a
civilized, good-natured, Christian and
enlightened monarch who worked en-
tirely through the Cabinet and Par -
liament, and was subject to moral and
ethical restraints as well as a desire to be
a good Patriot King to all his subjects.”
His enlightenment, though, did not ex-
tend to emancipating Catholics from
civil disabilities, a reform he implacably
opposed.
If Roberts persuasively illustrates
George III’s enlightened qualities, he is
perhaps less convincing in demonstrat-
ing that George III was a different kind of
political animal or even that it would
have mattered for Britain had he been
cut from different cloth. In politics he
36 | www.nationalreview.com
was always ultimately a follower, not
a leader. Given the revolutionary set-
tlement after 1689, which ratified
Parliament’s sovereignty, it would have
been hard for it to have been otherwise.
Eighteenth-century British politics was
dominated by the jostling for ministerial
power in which the monarch’s prefer-
ence could be dispositive but was rarely
determinative. “The torrent is too
strong to be resisted: Your Majesty is
well apprized that, in this country, the
prince on the Throne, cannot, with pru-
dence, oppose the deliberate resolution
of the House of Commons,” Lord North,
George’s favorite prime minister, coun-
seled him in 1782. “Your Majesty having
persevered, as long as possible, in what
you thought right, can lose no honour if
you yield at length.” Such had been the
case at least since 1714.
Two crises defined George’s long reign:
the deteriorating American situation and
the French Revolution. Roberts spends
well over half of the book charting the
crack-up of Britain’s North American
empire. While it is abundantly clear that
the American colonists unfairly charged
George III with tyranny, it is equally
clear that Britain’s North American pol-
icy depended on the vicissitudes of par-
liamentary politics, not on George’s own
strategic vision or policy preferences. At
every stage of the American crisis, he
followed what most MPs wanted. That
he was for fighting to keep the American
colonies within the empire was pre-
dictable. What else would he have been
expected to do? And certainly it is
admirable that he did not want “to fight
the kind of scorched-earth campaign
that every other contemporary despotic
power would have fought” to keep the
American colonies. But had Parliament
itself wanted to fight such a war, could
he have stopped it? Almost certainly
not. Nonetheless, when the Americans
won the war, George was gracious when
welcoming the new ambassador, John
Adams: “I was the last to consent to
the separation; but the separation hav-
ing been made, and having become
inevitable, I have always said, and I say
now, that I would be the first to meet the
friendship of the United States as an
independent power.”
Towards the French revolutionaries,
he was less emollient. Probably his
greatest contribution to the effort to
defeat them was to back the ministry of
William Pitt the Younger, who became
prime minister when only 24 years old.
Pitt did not live to see the French revolu-
tionary wars’ end. George, for his part,
lapsed into permanent madness in 1810,
a madness likely the result of manic
depression, not porphyria. When he died
in 1820, the nation mourned his passing,
with over 30,000 people paying him
their respects. “Patriot King was what
his father had urged him to be,” Roberts
concludes, “and what all his life he had
considered himself to be, glorying in the
name of Briton.”
George III’s passing may have been
lamented, but, unlike Napoleon or
Churchill, subjects of earlier Roberts
biographies, he had not shaped his
age. During his 60-year reign, though,
Britain had transformed from a second-
tier European power into what Sellar
and Yeatman jokingly dubbed “top
Nation.” While he does not belabor the
point, Andrew Roberts reckons that it
would have done the world good had the
18th-century British empire remained
intact. As he puts it, “a world in which
the American Revolution never took
place could have been one in which a
united British-American global empire
would have been far too powerful for
Kaiser Wilhelm II to threaten war in
1914, so no Bolshevik Revolution, no
Adolf Hitler, no Cold War.” Moreover,
the mid-19th-century bloodshed in
North America might have been averted,
since “British and Canadian Liberals
joining with Northern abolitionists
might have voted to abolish slavery in
the 1830s or 1840s, sparing the United
States its Civil War.” Even France might
have benefited, as it would have been
spared occupation in two 20th-century
world wars. George III’s life had a tragic
ending, as an educated, decent, enlight-
ened king slipped into a state in which
he routinely referred to himself as “the
late King.” On Andrew Roberts’s telling,
the fate of Britain’s North American
empire also had a tragic ending, one
whose consequences were unintended
but nonetheless disastrous.
FEBRUARY 7, 2022
books_FINAL_QXP-1127940387.qxp 1/18/2022 9:34 PM Page 37
Fixed in the
Firmament
PETER TONGUETTE
Garbo, by Robert Gottlieb
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 448 pp., $40)
H
AVE you ever wondered why
we call movie stars “movie
stars”? How and when did the
actors and actresses who populate the
silver screen come to be compared to
objects in the night sky? In truth, it
shouldn’t take an etymologist to sur-
mise that the celestial metaphor arose
from the nature of the performers
themselves: Especially during the
Golden Age of Hollywood, the screen
personages who proved most popular
were generally those who remained
slightly out of reach—as bright, yet as
distant, as the real stars in the heavens
above.
To the earliest moviegoers, the stars
must have seemed simultaneously
near and far: Charlie Chaplin, Douglas
Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, and their ilk
would appear and make the audience
laugh, weep, or dream, but the minute
the house lights came up, they would
vanish. In the absence of television talk
shows or social-media platforms, there
was little to satiate interest in the stars
in the meantime. During the silent era,
audiences would not have even known
what the stars sounded like. Fan maga-
zines probably filled in some blanks.
Even when sound came to the movies,
the smartest stars recognized the ad-
vantages of being elusive or at least
Mr. Tonguette writes about the arts for the Wall
Street Journal, the Washington Examiner, the
American Conservative, and other publications.
S P O N S O R E D B Y NATIONAL REVIEW INSTITUTE
media-shy. In retiring from the screen
long before age would have dictated it,
Cary Grant avoided appearing to the
masses as anything less than fit as a
fiddle; and in making his later screen
appearances infrequent and generally
fleeting, Marlon Brando forever left
audiences wanting more. Nowadays,
the situation is a bit different. The stars
are simultaneously more and less acces-
sible, emitting political opinions, woke
platitudes, and glimpses of the luxe
life on Twitter or Instagram, but their
omnipresence only proves how deeply
strange these people really are. In a very
literal sense, Gwyneth Paltrow is quite
mysterious—it’s a mystery how a well-
brought-up lady such as she went from
winning an Oscar to hosting a “sex ther-
apy” program on Netflix—but her brand
of mystery is of an altogether different
character from that of, say, Greta Garbo.
Which brings us to the great Swedish
movie star, who, more than any star
before or since, embodied the spell the
medium was capable of casting over
millions. Her most famous films, in-
cluding Anna Christie (1930), Grand
Hotel (1932), and Camille (1936), were
sensations in their day, but it’s general-
ly agreed that, whatever inherent cine-
matic value they may have possessed,
Garbo’s presence in them—stoic, in-
scrutable, obliquely alluring—was the
primary reason for their success.
Garbo’s decision to wall off her pri-
vate life from public view—she resisted
the publicity machine during her peak
years in Hollywood and sought to avoid
it outright following her retirement in
1942—also contributed to her seem-
ingly impenetrable persona. Conse -
quently, Garbo, born Greta Gustafsson
in Stockholm in 1905, has long been a
tough nut to crack for her many idol-
aters; as the song says in The Sound
of Music, how do you hold a moonbeam
in your hand? Of course, that hasn’t
stopped literary types from trying.
Thirty-two years after the star’s death
at 85 in 1990 (isn’t it strange to think of
Garbo living as late as the midpoint of
the first Bush administration?), Robert
Gottlieb has become the latest literary
eminence to tackle Garbo. In this highly
readable new book, he gives us Garbo in
full, surveying her life, career, and lega-
cy in a work that blends elements of
biography, history, criticism, and ency-
clopedia.
The former editor in chief of Simon
and Schuster, successor to William
Shawn as the editor of the New Yorker,
and, most pertinent to his present
assignment, author of fine biographies
of George Balanchine and Sarah
Bernhardt, Gottlieb not only draws on
his own keen appreciation of Garbo but
enlists more than a few of the many
notable writers, critics, and colleagues
who have, at one time or another,
waxed poetic about her inimitable qual-
ities.
At the back of this beautifully de-
signed and illustrated volume is a sec-
tion entitled “A Garbo Reader,” in which
Gottlieb shows off his deep knowledge of
what might be called the Garbo bibli-
ography. Herein is film critic Raymond
Durgnat, on how Garbo overcame the
shoddy parts she was saddled with early
on: “To see, in these early films, Garbo
breathe life into an impossible part is
like watching a swan skim the surface
of a pond of schmalz, and, finally, with
long, slow, persistent strokes, mysteri-
ously as natural breathing, streak to
some unknown horizon.” And director
Clarence Brown, on the unknowable
mysteries that lay beneath that enig-
matic face: “Garbo had something
behind the eyes that you couldn’t see
until you photographed it in close-up.”
And Simone de Beauvoir, expressing the
same thought in a haughtier manner:
“Garbo’s face had a vague expression
onto which you could project anything
at all; you can’t project anything onto
Bardot’s face. It is what it is.” Gottlieb
includes, as the cherry on the sundae,
some song lyrics in which Garbo is
namechecked, including Cole Porter’s
“You’re the Top”: “You’re the National
Gallery, / You’re Garbo’s salary . . .”
As entertaining and sometimes re-
vealing as these accounts are, quite
often Garbo’s disciples reach out for
something solid but come away with
fists full of so much stardust. Happily,
Gottlieb has his own feet planted solidly
on the ground. The stardom of most
Golden Age icons can seem inevitable—
it seems inconceivable that John Wayne
would ever have been an insurance
salesman or a truck driver or anything
but a movie star—but, of course, their
stardom resulted from the usual mix of
talent, grit, and luck. Garbo is no ex-
ception. To prove the point, Gottlieb
does the useful work of chronicling the
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BOOKS, ARTS & MANNERS
practical steps by which awkward, ma-
terially disadvantaged, erratically edu-
cated young Greta from Stockholm
became the object of nearly a century’s
worth of adulation.
Despite remaking herself as a soli-
tudinarian later in life, the youngest
daughter of Karl and Anna Gustafsson
harbored dreams of show business from
a young age and so invited the fame
from which she later fled. Gottlieb de-
scribes Greta as the ringleader of neigh-
borhood theatrical shows—a girlhood
friend recalls her casting herself in the
lead roles and bossing everybody else
around: “You must come in like this and
pretend you are very much surprised to
see me and look like this,” Greta would
say. While admitting that countless
youngsters dream of stardom, Gottlieb
notes the unusual intensity of Greta’s
obsession: “It’s hard to believe that
apart from Greta, there was ever a girl of
eight or nine who would walk some dis-
tance to theaters in the evening and
stand at the stage door, alone, for hours,
just to watch the actors and actresses
come in and go out.”
Gottlieb ably sketches the Garbo
origin story: In 1920, when she was
14, Greta gained employment at a
Stockholm department store, where,
eventually catching the eye of a superi-
or called Miss Hellberg, she was invited
to model hats for the store’s spring cat-
alogue. There followed appearances in
advertising films and, by the end of the
year, a job as an extra in a feature film,
The Gay Cavalier. Later, while studying
at the Royal Dramatic Theater Academy
in Stockholm, Greta was noticed by
director Mauritz Stiller, an eminence in
Swedish cinema, and cast in his epic
production The Saga of Gösta Berling
(1924). Gottlieb quotes earlier Garbo
biographer Karen Swenson, who notes
that, at some point during the shoot,
Stiller became among the first to recog-
nize that Greta was no ordinary in -
génue: “Later scenes were even shot
differently, with more of an emphasis
on close-ups.” Gottlieb judges as plausi-
ble the story that Stiller conferred the
surname “Garbo” on his protégé.
Eventually, Louis B. Mayer sum-
moned Garbo and Stiller to M-G-M,
though—in yet another confirmation of
the eternal validity of the plot of A Star
Is Born—only one of the two was des-
tined for longevity at the studio. (It
38 | www.nationalreview.com
wasn’t Stiller, who died in 1928.) Even
so, Hollywood had only limited notions
of how best to use Garbo, who, for a long
stretch, was cast in so-called vamp roles
in films with titles such as “Flesh and
the Devil.” “I cannot see any sense in
dressing up and doing nothing but
tempting men in pictures,” the star later
insisted. Ironically, although Garbo got
her start during the silent era and in
many ways seems a relic from that
period, it was only when the movies—
and she—started to talk that the
breadth of her talent became appar-
ent. Anna Christie is described as an
artistic breakthrough—“The crucial
thing is that in her first talking film,
Garbo successfully plays a real woman,
however stagy much of the dialogue and
action may be,” Gottlieb writes—and,
while the films made in its immediate
wake were of variable quality, most of
them showed her to full advantage.
Gottlieb can be acerbic in describing
these early talking pictures—writing
about the clunky multi-star vehicle
Grand Hotel, he wonders whether the
author of the original novel, Vicki
Baum, merely used clichés or in fact was
This isn’t the sort of biography that
one puts down with the feeling of
having figured out its subject.
That’s as it should be.
the source of them—but he is never less
than appreciative of Garbo (who, play-
ing a prima ballerina in Grand Hotel,
uttered one of the movies’ most famous
lines: “I want to be alone”). “We believe
she’s a great ballerina, even though she
doesn’t look like a dancer or move like
one,” writes Gottlieb, a noted dance
critic. Yet he doesn’t slide into mumbo-
jumbo when recounting perhaps the
most significant few seconds of her
career: the final image of 1933’s Queen
Christina, in which Garbo, playing the
Swedish monarch, looks off screen with
a certain passive grandeur. Yet, Gottlieb
reveals, director Rouben Mamoulian
had no fancy direction for his star
but only far more basic instructions.
Mamoulian told her, he recalled: “You
must make your mind and heart a
complete blank. Make your face into a
mask; do not even blink your eyes while
the camera is on you.” The director con-
tinued: “This was one of those mar-
velous spots where a film could turn
every spectator into a creator.”
Gottlieb rightly celebrates Garbo’s
less steely turn in 1939’s Ninotchka—
the Lubitsch classic that drew in audi-
ences with the promise that “Garbo
laughs”—but by the time of what be-
came her final film, 1941’s underrated
farce Two-Faced Woman, the public had
already started to move on. Here, World
War II gets the blame—the film came
out just before the bombing of Pearl
Harbor—but if the Allies’ attempt to
save Western civilization hadn’t cur-
tailed Garbo’s career, it would have
been something else. Was Garbo ready
for Technicolor? And widescreen? And
(gulp) advancing age? Can we imagine
her as a viable screen presence in the
Sixties? Would we wish her to ride off in
a wave of appearances on Dick Cavett
and guest spots on Bewitched or The
Love Boat? It’s a good thing that Garbo,
as we learn here, declined a cameo in
Airport 1975—how different our mea-
sure of her might have been!
Gottlieb teasingly itemizes potential
comeback projects that may or may not
have tempted Garbo at the time, in-
cluding Luchino Visconti’s never-made
adaptation of In Search of Lost Time,
but it seems likely that the actress
recognized that her stardom was best
preserved by declining opportunities
to further it. Gottlieb’s descriptions of
Garbo’s idiosyncrasies, habits, and
peculiarities, as well as her longtime
friendships with Salka Viertel, Cecil
Beaton, and others, are interesting in
and of themselves, but this isn’t the sort
of biography that one puts down with
the feeling of having figured out its sub-
ject. That’s as it should be: Although
Gottlieb adds to and clarifies her story,
Garbo remains in the galaxy of Holly-
wood stars because she is, still, so far,
far away.
FEBRUARY 7, 2022
books_FINAL_QXP-1127940387.qxp 1/18/2022 9:34 PM Page 39
A Life
Of Fire
DIANE SCHARPER
Burning Boy: The Life and Work of
Stephen Crane, by Paul Auster
(Henry Holt, 800 pp., $35)
S
TEPHEN CRANE was 24 years old
when his masterpiece, The Red
Badge of Courage, was pub-
lished in 1895. The novel—known for
its irony, its realistic battle scenes, and
its poetic imagery—features Henry
Fleming, a protagonist just a few years
younger than Crane at the time. The
story, about a Union soldier who flees
from battle, took on a life of its own
and has never gone out of print.
Crane described his book as a study
in fear. He had used the Civil War set-
ting to enhance the novel’s emotional
impact, which it did. So effective was
his writing that people thought he was
much older than he was; they also
believed he had fought in the war. But
he had never been in a battle. He had
interviewed several veterans and read
old articles in magazines about the
war, but ultimately he imagined the
story.
The youngest of 14 children of a
Methodist preacher and his wife, Crane
was born in Newark, N.J. Only nine of
the children survived infancy. The
family frequently moved as his father
was transferred to various parishes.
Stevie, as he was called, began to read
Diane Scharper is the author of several books,
including Reading Lips and Other Ways to
Overcome a Disability. She teaches memoir and
poetry for the Johns Hopkins University Osher
program.
S P O N S O R E D B Y NATIONAL REVIEW INSTITUTE
at four. At the same age, he nearly
drowned in New Jersey’s Raritan River
because he fearlessly walked into it
until the water was up to his face. He
would have gone under if an older
brother hadn’t pulled him out.
After his father died, when Crane
was eight, his mother supported the
family by working as a freelance writer
of religious articles for Methodist
publications. The daughter and sister
of Methodist ministers, she was strict
in her religious beliefs and crusaded
against gambling, smoking, drinking,
dancing, and other frivolous activities,
including the reading of novels.
Although he had written short sto-
ries as a boy, Crane’s career started
when he began reporting for the New
Jersey Coast News Bureau, a newspaper
managed by his brother, Townley, a
professional journalist. Soon Crane
went on to publish articles and sketches
in the New York Tribune. In 1892, he
moved to New York City and worked as
a freelance writer. His articles mostly
focused on the impoverished classes,
including the homeless.
Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, the first
of Crane’s novellas, was partly inspired
by his newspaper articles on the seedy
underlife of the Bowery. Self-published,
the story came out in 1893 under the
pseudonym “Johnston Smith.” Sup -
posedly, Crane didn’t want to scandal-
ize his family.
To enliven his reporting, Crane prac-
ticed a type of proto–New Journalism,
decades before the genre was born in
the 1960s. In writing about the poor,
he lived on the streets, even staying
outside during snowstorms. He in -
terviewed chorus girls and stayed in
flophouses and brothels. (Once, he
befriended and defended a prostitute
who was being hounded by the police.)
To study war, he worked as a war cor-
respondent in the mid to late 1890s in
Cuba, Greece, and Puerto Rico. He
contracted typhoid, malaria, yellow
fever, and the tuberculosis that even-
tually killed him.
After he moved to England in 1898,
Crane became friends with literary
stars such as Joseph Conrad, H. G.
Wells, and Henry James. He wrote
prolifically during this time and ulti-
mately published five novels, two
novellas, over 200 short stories, tales,
and sketches, two books of poetry,
and hundreds of newspaper articles.
Even when he was dying and too weak
to sit up and hold a pen in his hand, he
whispered his stories to his common-
law wife, Cora. At 28 years old, his body
was worn out. He died of TB on June 5,
1900, in a sanitarium at Badenweiler in
the Black Forest. Cora brought his body
back to the U.S. to be buried in Hillside,
N.J.
Paul Auster, in his new book, Burning
Boy, argues that Crane is a writer of
“unimpeachable brilliance” and is
“America’s answer to Keats and Shelley,
to Schubert and Mozart.”
A prizewinning author and poet,
Auster offers a nearly 800-page study
that is less like a story of a life and
more like an argument for the quality
of Crane’s writing. He combs through
Crane’s fiction, nonfiction, and poetry.
Writing from the perspective of an old
writer admiring a young writer’s talent,
Auster suggests that one read Crane
“slowly and deliberately, sentence by
sentence, with brief pauses.”
Auster writes in a conversational
style, occasionally using colloqui-
alisms and clichés. His book is reminis-
cent of sitting in a graduate class and
listening to a professor delve into the
intricacies of Crane’s oeuvre. But the
text is somewhat hard to follow as it
zigs and zags from anecdotes about
Crane’s life to lengthy excerpts from
his work accompanied by Auster’s
analysis, which can be heavy reading.
Several times I consulted my copy
of Stephen Crane: Prose and Poetry
(Library of America) so that I could
more fully understand Auster’s refer-
ences.
The book contains some light touches,
however, as in a photograph of Crane
holding one of his three dogs—most
likely his favorite, Sponge. Auster also
points out that Crane loved horses and
once brought one to live in his broth-
er’s barn (which didn’t seem to be
appreciated). Crane liked risk-taking,
adventure, and colors—especially the
color red. Once, as a small child, he
followed a visitor out of the house
because he was fascinated by her red
skirt. Crane used colors frequently in
his work, as is apparent in his titles: “A
Dark Brown Dog,” “The Black Riders,”
“The Blue Hotel,” and others.
Auster believes that Crane had
synesthesia, in that sounds were colors
39
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BOOKS, ARTS & MANNERS
to him. Crane said that every sound
triggered a color in his brain. This
steady neurological bombardment
made him a “human tuning fork” and
was the source of the “strangeness of
his work,” according to Auster. One
might compare his writing to a kaleido-
scope. Take, for instance, the opening
of his essay “The Open Boat”:
None of them knew the color of the
sky. Their eyes glanced level, and
were fastened upon the waves that
swept toward them. These waves
were of the hue of slate, save for the
tops, which were of foaming white,
and all of the men knew the colors of
the sea.
Although among his fans Crane’s
novels and short stories tended to be
his most popular work, Crane himself
preferred his poetry collections, The
Black Riders and Other Lines and War Is
Kind. Both display his talent for the
telling detail and evocative image as
well as his sense of irony. They also
show the influence of the Japanese
haiku and anticipate the imagist move-
ment, which was on the horizon. I find
so much condensed and pent-up ener-
gy in a Crane poem that reading it is
like watching someone pull a rubber
band until it snaps with a shocker end-
ing.
Poem LXII in The Black Riders exem-
plifies the power of his style, as well as
what Auster argues is Crane’s bedrock
message: “Life is lived face to face and
nose to nose with death.” (This poem
also partly inspired the “Burning Boy”
of Auster’s title.)
There was a man who lived a life of
fire.
Even upon the fabric of time,
Where purple becomes orange
And orange purple,
This life glowed,
A dire red stain, indelible;
Yet when he was dead,
He saw that he had not lived.
As this comprehensive biography
suggests, Crane stands at the cusp of
modernism; his work turned away from
19th-century novels, which told read-
ers what to think and feel. Instead,
Crane “established a literature of pure
telling,” which brings his imagined
world alive and thereby enriches his
readers.
40 | www.nationalreview.com
The
Believer’s
Brain
JONATHAN LEAF
The Awakened Brain: The New Science of
Spirituality and Our Quest for an Inspired Life,
by Lisa Miller (Random House, 288 pp., $28)
T
HE United States spent, adjusted
for inflation, a quarter trillion
dollars on the Apollo project.
The most famous of the astronauts
who reached the lunar surface, Neil
Armstrong, later suffered such severe
depression that he was deposited in a
psych ward. I have no doubt that he found
that more frightening than his expedi-
tion into outer space, and granted how
many more people will make the journey
Those who have experienced
depression will tell you that the most
dreadful thing about it is simply
the fear that it will continue.
to and from despair, it’s surprising that
more effort hasn’t been expended un-
derstanding the science behind it.
Those who have experienced
depression—and I regretfully count
myself among that number—will tell
you that the most dreadful thing about
it is simply the fear that it will continue.
However bearable a week or an hour of
it may be, the presentiment that it could
Mr. Leaf is a playwright living in New York.
go on indefinitely is like mustard gas. On
dry land you feel you are about to drown.
One useful take on the subject comes
from Lisa Miller, a psychology professor
at Teachers College, Columbia Univer-
sity, and the author of the 2015 best sell-
er The Spiritual Child: The New Science
on Parenting for Health and Lifelong
Thriving. That book focused on research
demonstrating that rates of psycho-
pathology in adolescents are tremen-
dously diminished through religious
attachment. It turns out that teens
actively involved in a church, temple,
or mosque are less likely to drop out
of school, self-harm, or suffer from
despair. And if the goal is to prevent
out-of-wedlock childbirth, it seems that
religion is a powerful prophylactic.
In her new book, The Awakened Brain,
Miller looks at recent neuroscience deal-
ing with brain health and plasticity. This
provides her with an opportunity to
inform the public about some rather
startling examples of improvement seen
on the neural MRI scans of people who
say that they are spiritually engaged. In
addition, she examines a number of the
current theories about the etiology of
depression: how it starts and why it can
become chronic.
These are not her only concerns.
Rather, Miller frequently switches to
accounts of her own battle with depres-
sion. Twenty-five years ago it arose
when she and her husband were failing
in their efforts to conceive a child. This
experience gives the book an added
dimension: a window through which
those unfamiliar with depression can
understand it as something palpable—at
once deadening and frighteningly alive.
Insofar as the government has spon-
sored research on the subject, that re-
search has focused on drugs. Lauded
discoveries came in waves. In the early
1960s, researchers promoted hallu -
cinogens. But subsequent investigation
showed that while LSD could “heal” an
occasional traumatized patient, it also
FEBRUARY 7, 2022
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increased the risk of suicidal episodes—
even in seemingly healthy people. As
alongside this finding there arose fears
among the general public of the advent
of the hippie subculture, the government
promptly halted its research funding.
Then, near the end of the decade, in-
terest shifted towards two new families
of “breakthrough” pharmaceuticals:
monoamine oxidase (MAO) inhibitors
and tricyclic antidepressants. The first
class was eventually shunned when it
was realized that it can induce dangerous
spikes in blood pressure. The second was
scorned for causing dry mouth, blurry
vision, and—worst of all—weight gain.
A little more than a decade later the
discovery of selective serotonin reuptake
inhibitors (SSRIs) prompted the public
to reengage with medicinal approaches.
Though generally no more effective
than tricyclics, the SSRIs—drugs with
trade names such as Prozac, Paxil, and
Zoloft—offer the sexy side benefit of
weight loss. Consequently, they have
emerged as the favored remedy. Yet
studies show they are often little better
over time than a regimen of physical
exercise. As Miller notes, “only half of
treated patients see a disappearance of
symptoms within a year of intervention,
while another 20 percent find only a
partial reduction of symptoms; and the
positive effects that are gained through
intervention are not enduring—when
we stop taking the drugs, depression or
anxiety often returns.”
Perhaps the problem is that pharma-
cological treatments skip past the un-
derlying question of cause. That fact
prompts psychoanalysts to clear their
throats, effortfully bidding for our
notice. But research on both psycho-
analysis and most forms of psychothera-
py shows that they function best as a
supplement to other methods. Ironically,
a type of talk therapy that has been found
to have better documented outcomes is
cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT),
an approach that does not focus upon
examination of the sources of despair.
Rather, CBT emphasizes changing think-
ing through repeated interventions
of positive “self-talk.”
Miller begins her story in the lab.
That’s where she and her co-workers
were examining data sets that they had
compiled from brain-imaging tests.
These compared self-described religious
and spiritual folk with determined skep-
S P O N S O R E D B Y NATIONAL REVIEW INSTITUTE
tics and nonbelievers. To her colleagues’
surprise, it turned out that faith strongly
correlated with indicators of mental
health. That finding was reinforced
when the Columbia researchers looked
at electroencephalograms (EEGs). These
revealed that believers had higher levels
of high-amplitude alpha waves. Miller
knew that these brain signals tend to
increase when patients are placed on
SSRIs and that they fade out when
patients are taken off the drugs. So this
was an intriguing finding. The research
unit then discovered that those recover-
ing from depression who are believers
had particularly elevated levels of alpha
waves compared with those of recover-
ing nonbelievers. This suggests that the
original finding was not just a sign of
correlation. It implies causation: that
faith can alleviate despair.
HOW TO SHOULDER
WHAT REMAINS
Aeneas, more than any, secretly  against it.
Mourned for them all.  Miller’s personal contest with de -
      —Vergil, Aeneid
Why do you haunt us, pious
Aeneas,
Archaic hero, my brother?
You who transgressed hell’s hard
orders
All to hear your father’s wishes.
Tell me how to, so beleaguered,
Shoulder well what can be
salvaged
Of our patrimony’s body,
Even though it’s been beheaded
Like the Baptist Herod hated,
Even though Achilles’ son—
Master mocker, caustic Pyrrhus—
Has trespassed our inner sanctum
Poised to halt the sacrifices.
Hard to pray these Pater Nosters
When our Fathers lock the
churches,
Saving Pilate litigation.
Please Aeneas, will you teach us
When to flee and when to build,  psychedelics should be looked to as
How to hate all war but make it
When the holy laws are breaking?  What the talking heads show much less
How to rally wearied exiles
While revering dead companions,
How to mourn manlike in secret.
—JOSHUA HREN
Miller is critical of the psychiatric
establishment for ignoring the connec-
tion. Her critique of this disregard is
informed by her experiences working
with the chronically depressed in insti-
tutional settings. She cites cases in
which patients she was treating were
actually discouraged by her psychiatric
co-workers from praying or seeking
answers from religion. More, she im-
plies that the disdain of the doctors was
spurred by their egotism and pride.
They were, it seems, intent on side-
lining the competition.
If you have been through a bout with
what Churchill called the “black dog,”
you undoubtedly know that it unites
sadness with meaninglessness. The
blank emptiness of the surrounding
space deprives the experience of suffer-
ing of a feeling of connectedness or
purpose. As this is what religion pro-
vides, it should be among the most
obvious treatment approaches—no
matter that the greater part of the psy-
chiatric establishment has scrupulous-
ly avoided it or, like Freud, made war
pression concluded favorably. On the
night that she and her husband learned
that they were to adopt a boy from
Russia, she conceived the elder of her
two daughters. That was also the start
of a period of religious and spiritual
awakening—hence, the title of her
book. It turns out that it’s appearing
on the heels of How to Change Your
Mind, by Michael Pollan, author of The
Omnivore’s Dilemma. In his new book,
Pollan returns to the 1960s, promoting
hallucinogens as a palliative for dis-
tress. In doing so, he leaves his readers
in the dark about the data showing that
use of MDMA (ecstasy) is associated
with markedly increased rates of sui-
cide attempts among the young. Pollan
omits that widely reported finding from
the National Household Survey on Drug
Abuse. It has been pointedly ignored,
too, by an adoring liberal intelligentsia.
(At one point he actually suggests that
the answer to the problem of suicide.)
appreciation for is the redemptive
power of faith. That is merely proven by
several millennia of human existence.
With this in mind (so to speak), readers
will find Miller’s book timely.
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BOOKS, ARTS & MANNERS
Garner the Grammarian
The Storied
OED
BRYAN A. GARNER
S
CHOLARS wouldn’t be surprised
at the copious literature about
lexicography—“the art or prac-
tice of writing dictionaries,” as Samuel
Johnson defined it in 1755. After all,
every scholarly discipline has its techni-
cal treatises and learned journals. What
might surprise anyone, though, is the
number of trade books about the writ-
ing of one particular dictionary: the
Oxford English Dictionary.
The genre began with K. M. Elisabeth
Murray’s Caught in the Web of Words:
James A. H. Murray and the Oxford English
Dictionary (1977). The author was the
chief lexicographer’s granddaughter,
who gave us a serious and searching
account of how an autodidact from a
small Scottish village became editor of
the greatest scholarly undertaking of
the Victorian era. The OED was to ac-
count for every word in the language, to
show all its senses over time, and to
give published instances of each sense
throughout history. It required an army
of contributors across the English-
speaking world and a chief editor who
could organize their findings and reduce
everything to the printed page.
Caught in the Web of Words is the
enthralling story of the endless difficul-
ties that nearly led to the abandonment
of the whole enterprise. Like other lexi-
cographers in history, Murray made the
mistake of agreeing to be paid by the
letter (a certain sum for words beginning
with A, another sum for B, and so on).
What nobody had realized was the extent
of the language’s word-stock. It was as if
a builder had bid on constructing a large
house without understanding that he
was actually going to create Versailles.
42 | www.nationalreview.com
Speaking of shelter, Murray worked in
nothing so grand. The OED’s birthplace
was a corrugated-iron shed in his back-
yard, called the Scriptorium. It was out-
fitted with slots on the wall for storing,
in alphabetical order, hundreds of thou-
sands of paper slips on which illustra-
tive quotations were written. As the
Scriptorium was being constructed,
Murray’s neighbor noticed that it would
interfere with his view of the Oxford
spires. He was the legendary law pro-
fessor A. V. Dicey, an expert on English
constitutional law. Dicey complained to
Murray that the Scriptorium was “injur-
ing his outlook,” and he threatened to
sue. So the Scriptorium was sunk three
feet into the ground to give Dicey a
better view.
That catastrophic move meant that
the Scriptorium suffered perpetual seep-
age. Heaters were installed, but they
made the air so noxious that it was diffi-
cult to breathe inside the uncomfortable
structure. Murray’s junior colleagues
complained of the situation through the
years, sometimes balking at entering
until the heaters were turned off.
Not so bad, you might say, since the
project was planned to take only a
decade, beginning in 1879. But you can’t
build Versailles in a decade. When
Murray died 36 years later, in 1915, the
work was still only about two-thirds
complete.
If Elisabeth Murray’s book is mostly
a biography of her grandfather, the
greater sweep of the story is told by
Peter Gilliver in The Making of the
Oxford English Dictionary (2016). At
twice the length, this book gives a
greater perspective and brings us up to
date. The OED’s second edition, of 1989,
edited by John Simpson and Edmund
Weiner, came in at 20 volumes—as
opposed to the 13 volumes completed
in 1928 by Murray’s successors. Gilliver
brings us into the third edition, which
is exclusively online. He writes with
the benefit of 30 years’ experience as a
practicing lexicographer on the OED
staff.
Still another perspective is provided
by Professor Lynda Mugglestone, of
Pembroke College, Oxford, with her
Lost for Words: The Hidden History
of the Oxford English Dictionary (2005).
Mugglestone discusses the work
through the lens of social history. She
notes that “the intended empiricism
of the dictionary is filtered through
distinctly male-as-norm ideologies.”
The definition of pension, for example,
long suggested that “women cannot be
famous artists or writers,” given that
the word was said to denote a sum paid
“as a matter of bounty, to aged artists,
authors, etc., in recognition of eminent
achievements, or to their widows.” Ex-
amples like that were legion—thousands
of them eliminated in the 1989 edition.
There is more. Charlotte Brewer’s
Treasure-House of the Language: The
Living OED (2007) is a lively account that
begins with the publication of the final
installment of the first edition. John
Simpson, chief editor of the second and
third editions, has written a terrific
memoir: The Word Detective: Searching
for the Meaning of It All at the Oxford
English Dictionary (2016). Then there is
The Ring of Words (2006), by Gilliver
and two other OED editors, chronicling
J. R. R. Tolkien’s early professional
work on the great book, beginning in
1915. And if you’d like an entertaining
account of what it’s like to read the full
dictionary over the course of a year,
there’s Ammon Shea’s Reading the
OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages
(2008).
We can’t forget Simon Winchester,
the superb historical researcher who
writes with uncommon brio in all his
work, including The Meaning of Every-
thing: The Story of the Oxford English
Dictionary (2003). Winchester gives the
best account, for example, of the raving
A. V. Dicey and his agitated insistence
on sinking the Scriptorium into the
ground: “Murray and his colleagues
were forced to sit with their feet in boxes
filled with newspapers, to protect them
from the chill and the draughts.”
But the most famous treatment of
all is Winchester’s best seller The Pro-
fessor and the Madman (1998), about
the American doctor who, having been
confined at Broadmoor Asylum after
murdering an innocent father and
husband, devotes the remainder of
his life to sending Murray illustrative
quotations—more than 12,000 of them.
There are astonishing turns in the
story; if they occurred in a work of fic-
tion, they’d be considered over-the-top
implausible.
Yes, it was made into a major motion
picture. If you haven’t seen it, do. You
won’t regret it.
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Film
Mother
Load
ROSS DOUTHAT
T
HE LOST DAUGHTER, adapted by
Maggie Gyllenhaal from an
Elena Ferrante novel, is a movie
about maternal ambivalence and rebel-
lion: the mother who feels stifled by her
children, imprisoned by their unavoid-
able demands, and who doesn’t merely
endure with patience or stoicism but
acts out, breaks bad, tries to escape. The
film has been nearly universally praised
for its artistry, and also for breaking an
important taboo by acknowledging a
reality and complexity to motherhood
that our society suppresses. Yet both
forms of praise are misguided: There is
no such taboo, and The Lost Daughter is
interesting in its parts but, as a whole,
not particularly good.
The film has two narratives, in two
different periods of time. In the present,
Leda Caruso (Olivia Colman), a middle-
aged Harvard academic—“Cambridge,
near Boston,” she says when asked
about her origins—takes a vacation in a
slightly down-at-the-heels part of the
Greek coast, where she develops a fixa-
tion on a younger mother named Nina
(Dakota Johnson), part of a rowdy Greek-
American clan, who seems unhappy
with her husband and, more notably,
with her preschool-aged daughter.
Then, in the past, we see Leda herself
as a younger mother, played by Jessie
Buckley, struggle to reconcile her bud-
ding academic career—she translates
poetry into Italian—with the challenges
of mothering two little girls.
The past is warmly shot, intimate,
domestic, punctuated by occasional
joyful moments, but fundamentally
unhappy: Leda’s girls are constantly
demanding, her apartments are claus-
trophobic, her husband (Jack Farthing)
is a conspicuously unhelpful partner
and an unsatisfying lover. The present,
YANNIS DRAKOULIDIS/NETFLIX
meanwhile, has the chilly vibe of a high-
end thriller: The resort and its environs
have a sinister emptiness, Nina’s rela-
tives carry an air of mafioso menace, and
there are intimations of death—rotten
S P O N S O R E D B Y NATIONAL REVIEW INSTITUTE
fruit, a worm in a doll’s eye—to match an
opening shot, unexplained till the end,
of Leda collapsing on a beach.
As the story unfurls we learn the roots
of Leda’s fascination with Nina and her
daughter, as her memories of being a
struggling young mother carry us to a
period of real maternal betrayal, begin-
ning with her affair with an older aca-
demic (Peter Sarsgaard, the director’s
husband, bearded and amusing) that
clearly still shadows not just her rela-
tionship with her now-adult daughters
but her very sense of self. And this shad-
ow somehow motivates her not just to
sympathy with the younger woman but
to a strange act of aggression—the theft
of Nina’s child’s doll, which Leda keeps
for days while Nina’s family searches for
it and the child becomes inconsolable,
reshaped by the theft into the un -
manageable equivalent of the difficult
daughters that Leda once betrayed.
Olivia Colman and Dakota Johnson in The Lost Daughter
The various cultural takes that have
spun out from The Lost Daughter have
suggested that this story invites us to a
taboo-breaking sympathy with Leda in
both her incarnations. But as Anastasia
Berg and Rachel Wiseman point out in a
terrific essay for the Point magazine, far
from being some sort of great cultural
secret, the idea of maternal ambivalence
has actually been a “commonplace and
acceptable” feature of Western art,
with the feminist era layering new and
diverse portraits atop a foundation
clearly laid in Shakespeare, Austen,
Ibsen, and Flaubert. Indeed, Berg and
Wiseman make a strong case that the
most distinctive thing that Gyllenhaal
does with the source material of the
Ferrante novel is to make it less com-
plex, less ambivalent, by cutting away
some of the book’s interest not just in
why mothers leave but in why they
might return.
Beyond this question of originality,
though, the deeper problem with the
movie is that the two parts just don’t fit
together, not only in their moods but in
their performances. Colman is a terrific
actor but I did not for a moment believe
that she was playing the same person as
Buckley. (It doesn’t help that the other
characters at the resort keep talking
about how young she looks for a 47-
year-old, even though the way the movie
costumes and shoots Colman makes her
look older than her years, much deeper
into middle age.) The younger Leda is a
sympathetic sinner, a passionate human
carried onto the rocks of her mistakes on
swift currents of frustration and desire.
The older Leda has warm moments but
in her fundamental mode she is playing
the villain in a low-stakes psychological
thriller—a creepy and miserable charac-
ter performing weird manipulations on
the younger woman, and still stranger
operations on the doll.
You can find interpretations to save
this disjunction—that we’re seeing the
life-altering toll of maternal failure, or
the consequences for both the flesh and
the psyche of society’s unfair burdening
of women. But those feel like special
pleading. In the end there are two
movies in The Lost Daughter, both inter-
esting in their way, the first much more
human and the second much creepier,
that don’t really make up a single story
or belong in the same film.
43
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Theories of Joe Biden
T
HERE are people in this line of work who can
remember where they were when the second
vote on the third continuing resolution of 2011
failed thanks to the switch-in time of Gern
Blanston, who briefly represented northern South Carolina
after the infamous MacGuffin Affair cost Fuzzy Dunlop
his seat but before redistricting forced Blanston into a
head-to-head matchup with Pierre Delecto.
That ain’t me. I know more than the average civilian,
sure, but if you put a gun to my head I couldn’t tell you for
certain whether there was a Senate Republican leader
between Trent Lott and Bill Frist or which of the Chicago
Daleys was briefly Obama’s chief of staff.
Maybe I don’t find that level of trivia interesting or
important. Maybe the accelerated churn of
the news cycle has made it impossible to
keep any kind of timeline at my fingertips. Joe Biden
Or maybe I’m just a bad pundit. In any case
whenever Rich Lowry asks an exit question
is a guy
on the Editors podcast about whether some who is
short on
moment will be “remembered as a turning
point” or “forgotten in a month,” I have a
default answer.
But there’s one big exception to this substance
rule I’ve been thinking of recently, a rela- and whose
comfort
tively transient bit of effluvium, that really
bothered me at the time and has stuck in
my head in the years since. It’s the vice-
presidential debate between Joe Biden and zone
Paul Ryan in 2012.
At the time I remember writing that it
is smears.
was one of the more shameful displays of
flimflammery and demagoguery from a national political
figure that I had ever seen. And despite a kind of Cambrian
explosion of such displays in the years since, I stand by it.
The very worst of Joe Biden was on exhibition. The used-
car salesman with the Cheshire grin, kissing your baby
while stealing its lollipop. It was like his claim to a black
audience during that same election that Mitt Romney—
Mitt Romney—would “put y’all back in chains,” but
stretched out over a couple of hours. The ever earnest and
archly midwestern Ryan, who would rather have conduct-
ed the entire debate in Excel spreadsheet formulae, simply
ran into a buzzsaw of bull crap. Biden dodged and danced,
lied and exaggerated and smeared, and ran out the clock.
I’m not sure how many votes it moved, but to me it was
the clearest distillation to that point of the kind of creature
Joe Biden is. The only thing that puzzled me then was
whether Biden’s rhetorical hyperinflation was tactical
condescension to swing voters, whom he didn’t trust to
“get it” without thermonuclear embellishment, or whether
he was just a lying liar who lied because to lie is what
comes naturally.
It’s relevant in light of Biden’s widely condemned
44 | www.nationalreview.com
BY DANIEL FOSTER
recent speech on the seemingly doomed federal election-
takeover bill. The one where he said that if you are in favor
of forcing Democratic functionaries to hand out free pizza
at least 26 feet away from a voting booth then you make
Bull Connor look like multi-platinum recording artist
Beyoncé Knowles.
That speech settled the question the Paul Ryan debate
raised for me.
Many Biden allies, who it should be noted also found the
speech excessive and in poor taste, are disposed to argue in
favor of rhetorical hyperinflation, that the colorful slurs
and slanders were merely misguided attempts of emphasis
of what is otherwise an important bill with a noble end.
But if Biden really thought “voting rights” were that
important—and here I should stop to say
that failing to put scare quotes around
that phrase in this context is, to borrow a
Bidenesque adjective, literally a form of
media bias. But if Biden really thought
“voting rights” were that important, that
the future of American democracy were on
the line, his party would be trying to work
with Republicans to reform the Electoral
Count Act, which actually had a bearing
on what happened in 2020 broadly and
January 6 specifically, instead of being
largely indifferent to GOP overtures on
the subject.
But the bill isn’t important, and its fail-
ure isn’t a threat to democracy. Closer to
the opposite is true. It’s just that Joe Biden
is a liar. More to the point, he’s a liar whose
Build Back Better agenda just got demoted to Build Back
Later, and who quickly had to pivot back to “voting rights”
because that was the next-most-recent democracy-in-the-
balance progressive priority to have gone down in flames,
in the form of H.R. 1, and was therefore the nearest distrac-
tion at hand.
There are other theories of Joe Biden, of course. That
the speech was a form of “elder abuse,” in that it was put in
front of him by the unhinged DSA-adjacent youngsters
who really run the White House; or merely that Biden him-
self is too old and pudding-headed to be up to the hard
work of lowering the temperature and finding common
ground that he promised in his lofty inaugural. That the
ridiculous name-calling is a kind of corner-cutting. But
those theories amount to the same thing. A guy who is
short on substance and whose comfort zone is smears.
It’s certainly too late for the old dog to learn new tricks,
and we shouldn’t expect any soul-searching or recalibrat-
ing. Far likelier that we see more—and more, and more—of
the same. The problem with taming monetary inflation,
which Biden may yet learn, is that it tends to feed on itself
in a vicious circle. The same is true of bull crap.
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