NATIONALREVIEW.

COM
MARCH 2024

WITNESSING WAR
SEBASTIAN JUNGER
MICHAEL M. ROSEN & DANYA ROSEN
JAY NORDLINGER

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 VOLUME LXXVI, NO 3

CONTENTS
FEATURES ARTICLES BOOKS, ARTS & MANNERS

28 When Journalism Dies

The truth dies with it
by Sebastian Junger
53 GRAND NEW
32 Hope amid the Horror COALITION
George Hawley reviews Party
From Israel, stories of survival and love of the People: Inside the
by Michael M. Rosen & Danya Rosen Multiracial Populist Coalition

37 Corresponding from Ukraine Remaking the GOP, by

Patrick Ruffini
A talk with Yaroslav Trofimov,
of the Wall Street Journal
by Jay Nordlinger 55 DREAM ON

40 A Sporting Chance for Women Dominic Pino reviews Ours

Was the Shining Future:
Why male athletes should not compete with females The Story of the American
by Riley Gaines Dream, by David Leonhardt

42 How Wokeness Prevailed 18 ‘EVERYBODY’S

SECOND CHOICE’ 57 FEEDING THE BEAST
What the civil-rights revolution has wrought
by Thomas F. Powers The end of the DeSantis Leah Libresco Sargeant
campaign reviews Filterworld: How
46 When Clothes Made the Man by Audrey Fahlberg Algorithms Flattened
Culture, by Kyle Chayka
Missing the traditional menswear store
by Peter Tonguette
20 AFTER ARMS
50 Slipping the Surly Bonds CONTROL 58 EQUAL IN DIGNITY
America’s self-imposed Alexandra DeSanctis
On learning to fly restraints make less sense reviews Pity for Evil:
by Sarah Colleen Schutte than ever Suffrage, Abortion, and
by John R. Bolton Women’s Empowerment in
Reconstruction America, by
Monica Klem and Madeleine
23 PRO-WORKER, McDowell
NOT PRO-UNION
DEPARTMENTS & COLUMNS The labor force wants
flexibility; the GOP 61 THE MAN WHO
2 CONTRIBUTORS should offer it INVENTED ITALY
4 THE WEEK by C. Jarrett Dieterle M. D. Aeschliman revisits
17 THE LONG VIEW Rob Long Alessandro Manzoni’s novel
49 ATHWART James Lileks The Betrothed
59 THE BOOKSHELF Katherine Howell 25 NATALISM IS
65 CITY DESK Richard Brookhiser NOT ENOUGH
66 GARNER THE GRAMMARIAN Bryan A. Garner Raising the birth rate will 63 THREE’S COMPANY
67 POETRY William W. Runyeon require cultural change Ross Douthat reviews The
68 HAPPY WARRIOR David Harsanyi by Patrick T. Brown Holdovers
COVER: LUBA MYTS

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NATIONAL REVIEW / MARCH 2024

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 VOLUME LXXVI, NO 3
CONTRIBUTORS
Vice President, Editorial Operations Christopher McEvoy
M. D. Aeschliman has lived intermittently in the Italian-speaking
world since 1971 and was professor of Anglophone
Frederick M. Hess / Yuval Levin / James Lileks / Rob Long
culture at the University of Italian Switzerland
from 1996 to 2019. He has edited an edition of
Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities.
Chester E. Finn Jr. / Neal B. Freeman / Charles R. Kesler
John R. Bolton served as national-security adviser to President
Donald Trump and as U.S. ambassador to the
United Nations under President George W. Bush.
He is the author of The Room Where It Happened.
Patrick T. Brown is a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.
Michael Brendan Dougherty / Dan McLaughlin / Noah Rothman
C. Jarrett Dieterle is a resident senior fellow at the R Street Institute.
Riley Gaines is an ambassador for Independent Women’s
Forum and the host of the OutKick podcast Gaines
for Girls.
David Harsanyi is a senior editor of the Federalist.
George Hawley is an associate professor of political science at the
University of Alabama. His books include Right-
Wing Critics of American Conservatism and
Conservatism in a Divided America: The Right
and Identity Politics.
Sebastian Junger is the author of Freedom, Tribe, War, and
The Perfect Storm and a co-director of the
documentary Restrepo, which won the Sundance
Grand Jury Prize in 2010 and was nominated for
an Academy Award in 2011.
Thomas F. Powers chairs the political-science department at
Carthage College.
Danya Rosen studies at an Israeli premilitary academy 15 miles
from the Gaza border.
Michael M. Rosen is an attorney and writer in Israel and a
nonresident senior fellow at the American
Enterprise Institute.
Leah Libresco is the author of Building the Benedict Option. She
Sargeant runs the Substack newsletter Other Feminisms.
Peter Tonguette is a contributing writer at the Washington
Examiner.
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MARCH 2024 ISSUE; PRINTED JANUARY 25
Editor in Chief Richard Lowry
NATIONAL REVIEW MAGAZINE
Editor Ramesh Ponnuru
Senior Editors
Richard Brookhiser / Charles C. W. Cooke
Jay Nordlinger / David Pryce-Jones
Managing Editor Jason Lee Steorts
Literary Editor Katherine Howell
Executive Editor Mark Antonio Wright
National Correspondent John J. Miller
Senior Political Correspondent Jim Geraghty
Religion Editor Kathryn Jean Lopez
Art Director Luba Kolomytseva
Deputy Managing Editor Nicholas Frankovich
Layout Designer Eric Sailer
Assistant to the Editor in Chief Stacey Brody
Research Assistant Justin D. Shapiro
Contributing Editors
Shannen Coffin / Matthew Continetti / Ross Douthat
Daniel Foster / Jack Fowler / Bryan A. Garner
Roman Genn / Jonah Goldberg / Arthur L. Herman
Andrew C. McCarthy / John O’Sullivan / Reihan Salam
Andrew Stuttaford / Robert VerBruggen
Contributors
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Tracy Lee Simmons
NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE
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Managing Editor Judson Berger
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Staff Writers
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Content Managers
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News Writers
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Dominic Pino
Buckley Fellows in Political Journalism
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Brian Murdock
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William F. Buckley Jr.
National Review Inc. Board
Dale R. Brott, John Hillen, James X. Kilbridge,
Jerry Raymond, Rob Thomas
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 THE WEEK MARCH 2024
THE
WEEK
■ He backed down.
■ House Republicans stood down on plans to hold
Hunter Biden in contempt of Congress after the presi-
dent’s son brazenly defied subpoenas issued by the Ju-
diciary and Oversight Committees. The subpoenas were
valid, but Hunter’s lawyer argued that they were illegit-
imate, having been issued before the House approved
the impeachment inquiry. Hunter’s claim had political
weight because Republicans had made a similar one in
2019 about subpoenas of Trump-administration officials.
The contempt gambit also lost steam when Hunter sig-
naled that he would cooperate if the committees issued
a new subpoena. After some squawking, the GOP-led
committees agreed to do so—doubtless influenced by
the razor-thin Republican majority. It would have been
better to issue the subpoena a month ago, but everyone
went on vacation instead.
■ Scandal mires the prosecution of Trump and 18 oth-
ers under Georgia’s RICO law. A co-defendant alleges
that District Attorney Fani Willis asked Fulton County for
funding to address a Covid-era backlog of cases and then
diverted nearly $1 million to hire private lawyer Nathan
Wade as a special prosecutor on the case. Willis is said to
have been romantically involved with the married Wade
and benefited from the fees she paid him as he paid for
jaunts in Napa Valley, Florida, and the Caribbean. The
allegations come from the court file in Wade’s divorce
case, which was mysteriously sealed but has now become
public. Wade’s wife seeks to call Willis as a witness. The
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DA responded at a church service, admitting that she is “flawed” but
suggesting that racism is behind the allegations—although their source,
Mrs. Wade, is black (as are Willis and Wade). The court in the RICO case
has given Willis until February 2 to respond to defense claims that she
and Wade should be disqualified and the indictment dismissed. As has so
often been the case, critics of Trump’s ethical standards are displaying
low ones themselves.
■ After John Fetterman suffered a life-threatening stroke and turned
in a 2022 campaign-trail performance that revealed lingering strug-
gles to communicate, few would have predicted that the Democratic
senator from Pennsylvania would be the member of his party making
the most sense as 2023 turned into 2024. Fetterman took a forthright
stand in support of Israel against Hamas, posting hostage posters
outside his office, wearing an Israeli flag on his shoulders to the rally
for that country on the National Mall, and declaring, “Israel is really a
beacon of the kind of values, the American values and progressive ide-
als, that you want to see.” Fetterman has also continued to call for the
resignation of New Jersey Democratic senator Bob Menendez, object-
ing to the fact that an official accused in court of being an agent of the
Egyptian government is still getting classified intelligence briefings.
And while Fetterman isn’t on board with every immigration proposal
from Republicans, he has pushed back against left-wing taboos. “It’s
just hard to have a conversation or negotiation if you start throwing
around the term ‘xenophobic,’” he told Semafor. In the same inter-
view, he lamented antisemitism and campus craziness: “As an alum of
Harvard—look, I graduated 25 years ago, and of course it was always
a little pinko. But now, I don’t recognize it.” Forget Democrats—when’s
the last time you heard a Republican use the term “pinko” to describe
Harvard? Fetterman told NBC News he’s “not a progressive.” The Left
is horrified to learn this, but polling indicates Pennsylvanians are
relieved.
■ Late on the afternoon of Friday, January 5, the Pentagon press
secretary, Major General Pat Ryder, released a brief statement de-
claring: “On the evening of January 1, Secretary of Defense Lloyd J.
Austin III was admitted to Walter Reed National Military Medical Cen-
ter for complications following a recent elective medical procedure.”
Austin, who is 70 years old, not only was in the hospital but, we later
learned, had spent four days in the intensive-care unit. On January 2,
some of Austin’s duties were transferred to Deputy Secretary of De-
fense ­Kathleen Hicks, who was on vacation in Puerto Rico at the time.
According to CNN, Hicks was not told that Austin was in the hospital
when she assumed his duties and was not informed about his hospi-
talization for days. Nor was the president informed about any of this.
In short, while the U.S. military was conducting multiple dangerous
operations against Houthi militants and a strike that killed a leader
of the Iran-backed Harakat al-Nujaba terrorist group, which operates
in both Iraq and Syria, no one in the top ranks of the administration
knew Austin’s condition. A subsequent statement revealed that Austin
is being treated for prostate cancer. We wish him a speedy recovery.
But it should be in the private sector.
■ With a strong bipartisan vote, the House committee for tax policy
approved a deal that extends some tax cuts for business investment that
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 THE WEEK MARCH 2024
STRIKING TEAMSTERS UNION MEMBERS IN JERSEY CITY, AUGUST 13, 2023
were due to expire and expands the child tax credit in
various ways. The most valuable change to the tax credit
is protecting it from future inflation. (The deal does not,
unfortunately, protect it from past inflation, which has
already eliminated most of the increase that Congress
legislated as part of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017.)
Another point in the deal’s favor: It is paid for by reform-
ing a Covid-era tax break that has become notorious for
abuse. There are some conservatives who oppose the
deal on the ground that one of its provisions—allowing
low-income people to use a previous year’s income to
qualify for the child credit—would reduce their incen-
tive to work. But some people might respond by working
more, since one year’s work would earn a longer-lasting
reward. In any case, reasonable debate over that provi-
sion should not obstruct passage of a bill that is in the
main worthwhile. Congress works well every once in a
while, and this is one such case.
■ Never mind that manufacturing employment had
been growing steadily since the Great Recession and
had recovered to trend after Covid, and never mind
that the U.S. manufacturing sector is already larger than
Italy’s entire economy: Politicians decided manufactur-
ing needed help. So they passed several pieces of leg-
islation, most notably the CHIPS Act and the so-called
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Inflation Reduction Act, that included subsidies for manufacturing
in preferred industries such as semiconductors and green energy.
Total construction spending on manufacturing has skyrocketed since
those bills became law, and the Biden administration is celebrating, as
though spending money were a success in itself. Meanwhile, in the EU,
construction spending on manufacturing is flat. Is it really the case that
businesses were simply missing profitable investment opportunities
for years, when interest rates were near zero, and that these oppor-
tunities exist only in the U.S. and not in the peer economy of Europe?
Or is it more likely that U.S. politicians are engineering a politically
popular bubble?
■ Last year was supposed to be a big one for unions. Organized
labor received wall-to-wall positive press coverage through the UAW
strike, the Kaiser Permanente strike, a threatened Teamsters strike
at UPS, and more. Last year did see more labor actions than normal.
But the media’s coverage frequently became cheerleading. Headlines
talked of a “resurgence” in organized labor, with journalists frequently
portraying the strikes as a trend that was sweeping the nation’s work-
force. That was all undercut by one inconvenient fact, reported by the
BOB STRONG / GETTY IMAGES
Bureau of Labor Statistics in January: The unionization rate for 2023
declined to a record low of 10 percent. The total number of unionized
workers hardly changed last year. Americans still don’t want what
organized labor is selling, and the media have beclowned themselves
with the massive number of stories covering a “resurgence” that is
not happening.
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 THE WEEK MARCH 2024
A TESLA VEHICLE CHARGES IN FRIGID TEMPERATURES IN CHICAGO, JANUARY 17.
■ Cold weather can make the battery of an electric ve-
hicle (EV) take longer to charge and its range to fall sub-
stantially, especially if a chilly driver unwisely turns on
the heater. Chicago recently received a taste of what this
could mean, when a very cold snap left some EV drivers
hurrying to charging stations only to find lines so long
that their cars were out of power before the rescuing volts
could flow. Infuriating, but it was their choice to buy an
EV. As climate-related regulations tighten, however, the
ability to choose a new car other than an EV will be steadi-
ly reduced—and, in some places, eliminated. That’s bad in
principle and, as drivers may discover, in practice. It will
also lessen the competitive pressure on EV manufacturers
to innovate their way out of this and other problems.
■ There are four major airlines in the U.S., each of which
accounts for 15 to 18 percent of the domestic market:
American, Delta, United, and Southwest. There are sev-
eral smaller airlines that split the roughly 30 percent
that remains. Two of those, JetBlue and Spirit, wanted
to merge. The merged airline would have accounted for
about 10 percent of the market, giving it a chance to com-
pete against the four major airlines in a way each com-
pany couldn’t do on its own. But a federal judge, at the
urging of the Biden administration, blocked the merger
on antitrust grounds. JetBlue and Spirit are appealing
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the decision. Spirit might go out of business anyway, and if it does, its as-
sets could be purchased by one of the larger airlines, increasing market
concentration relative to the status quo. (Spirit had been entertaining
a merger offer from Frontier before JetBlue made a better offer.) If the
Biden administration really wants to increase competition in domestic
air travel, it should urge Congress to open the market to carriers from
other countries. As it stands, the four largest airlines are breathing a
sigh of relief at not having to face a larger competitor.
■ Because of climate concerns, the Biden administration may not
grant the necessary permits for a proposed new export terminal for
liquefied natural gas. Its priorities are sorely misplaced. One reason
Western Europe has remained (unexpectedly) steadfast in its support
for Ukraine is that a huge increase in LNG imports from the U.S. has en-
abled it to weather the loss of almost all its supply of Russian fossil fuels.
For the U.S. to do anything that could undermine this lifeline, or indeed
Europe’s belief in it (and by extension in America’s reliability as an ally),
would be a massive geopolitical blunder for minimal climate return.
KEVIN DIETSCH / GETTY IMAGES
■ Late last year, Ohio governor Mike DeWine (R.) vetoed a bill that
would have banned “gender-affirming care” for minors and required
student athletes to compete with their chromosomal equivalents. His
veto statement was perplexing, seeming to accept the premises of trans-
gender activists in dubbing these treatments a matter of life or death,
yet also professing to agree with the legislature that body-altering sur-
gery should not be performed on minors. In a follow-up executive order,
1/24/2024 4:58:09 PM
 PUTIN’S REVENGE!
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PutinsRevenge_0324_NatReview_8.125x10.75.indd
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1:22:28 PM AM
 THE WEEK MARCH 2024
DeWine did indeed ban such surgeries for minors. But the
Republicans who passed the bill in the first place were
unimpressed: The order did not touch on puberty block-
ers and hormone injections. The Ohio house of represen-
tatives has overridden DeWine’s veto. The senate has now
followed, and the bill will become law, as it should. And
DeWine will be embarrassed, as he should.
■ In Illinois, Democratic governor J. B. Pritzker took to
social media to trumpet the success of the state’s legal-­
marijuana industry, crowing that, “for the third year in
a row, Illinois had record-setting growth” in sales. Never
let it be said that the Illinois government is uniformly
hostile to business.
■ On January 2, after weeks of increasingly serious pla-
giarism allegations in the wake of her headline-­grabbing
testimony about campus antisemitism, Claudine Gay re-
signed as president of Harvard University. (She remains
a member of the faculty.) Her tenure was justifiably the
shortest on record. Gay was transparently guilty of mul-
tiple instances of plagiarism—as part of its attempted
damage control, Harvard permitted her to “amend”
some of her earlier publications, a remedy it does not
allow its errant undergraduates—and the light shone
upon her academic misconduct also revealed the mea-
gerness of her scholarship, a mere eleven publications
over her career. But Gay’s academic record came under
scrutiny in the first place owing to her testimony before
Congress in early December. Addressing the issue of
campus antisemitism, she said that calls to murder Jews
and extinguish Israel could well be protected speech on
campus, “depending on context.” (Harvard notoriously
does not practice this sort of bold free-speech absolutism
in other contexts.) Her defenders cry foul, saying that
what matters more than her misdeeds are her status as
a black woman and that of her critics as right-of-­center
nonacademics. Her detractors, however, understand
that defenses of this kind show the depth of the rot in
academia.
■ Item: In early 2024, the girls’ varsity basketball team
from the Leffell School, a private Jewish school in Harts-
dale, N.Y., went to play the Roosevelt High School team
in ­Yonkers. The game had to be cut short, and the Lef-
fell girls escorted out by security, after what has been
reported as unusually rough play by the Yonkers team,
members of which allegedly shouted “Free Palestine”
at Leffell players and “I support Hamas, you f ***ing
Jew.” Item two: At a “Flood Manhattan for Gaza MLK
Day March for Healthcare”—recall that Hamas called
its 10/7 attack “Operation Al-Aqsa Flood”—protesters
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targeted Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (yes, you read that
right), screaming, “MSK, shame on you, you support genocide, too,” as
children in a pediatric-care area watched from windows. Item three:
Introducing a lecture by Norman Finkelstein, the Israel-hating, Hamas-
and Hezbollah-loving former academic whose initial reaction to 10/7 was
to compare it to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and say it “warms every
fiber of my soul,” Representative Jamaal Bowman (D., N.Y.) exulted that
he was “starstruck.” It has not stopped being bizarre that the massacre,
rape, and abduction of Jews on October 7 in Israel set off an explosion
of hatred and bigotry against Jews worldwide.
■ Almost from the outset of Israel’s war to destroy Hamas, its left-wing
enemies decided to make themselves as obnoxious as possible. The
most visible expression of this commitment has been “protests” that
shut down transportation arteries. Demonstrators have blocked traffic
through New York City’s bridges and tunnels. They have blocked spans
across the Charles River in Boston and San Francisco Bay. They have
THE STAT
111 DAYS
111 days—the amount of time it took to accumulate the most
recent trillion dollars in national debt, according to the “Debt to
the Penny” report from the Department of the Treasury.
U.S. total public debt outstanding broke $34 trillion for the
first time on January 4. It broke $33 trillion for the first time on
September 15, 2023. But the 111 days between those two dates
are not the fastest the U.S. has ever accumulated $1 trillion in
debt. Here are the intervals for other recent trillions:
• 93 days to go from $32 trillion to $33 trillion
• 256 days to go from $31 trillion to $32 trillion
• 246 days to go from $30 trillion to $31 trillion
• 47 days to go from $29 trillion to $30 trillion
• 291 days to go from $28 trillion to $29 trillion
• 152 days to go from $27 trillion to $28 trillion
• 115 days to go from $26 trillion to $27 trillion
• 36 days to go from $25 trillion to $26 trillion
• 29 days to go from $24 trillion to $25 trillion
The 29 days during the Covid pandemic, from April 7, 2020,
to May 5, 2020, are the record for fastest trillion accumulated.
All told, the most recent $10 trillion in national debt took 1,265
days to accumulate. It took 219 years, from 1789 to 2008, to
accumulate the first $10 trillion in debt. by Dominic Pino
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 THE WEEK MARCH 2024

prevented travelers from accessing major

airports including in Los Angeles and New
York—even going so far as to launch balloons
in the path of aircraft to threaten the safety
of air travelers and cripple traffic. And they
are proud of it. “Our message is clear,” the
subversive group Jewish Voice for Peace
bragged. “As long as Israel is dropping bombs
on Gaza, there can be no business as usual.”
This campaign of mass lawlessness won’t end
until America’s urban officials summon the
courage to do their jobs.

■ After 33 years as CEO of the National

­ ifle Association, Wayne LaPierre is retiring.
R
During his tenure, the organization became
one of the most powerful lobbying groups in
the United States, helping to usher in a re-
naissance in the right to keep and bear arms.
When LaPierre took over in 1991, the Second
Amendment had become an afterthought.
Today, it is more robustly protected than it
has been at any other time in a century. With
that victory, however, came overconfidence
and self-indulgence, and in recent years the
NRA has been mired in distracting contro-
versy. Some of that controversy has been
contrived by the outfit’s political opponents,
but some of it—such as the use of members’
dues to fund the lavish lifestyles of LaPierre
and his colleagues—has been real. Since 2018,
the NRA has lost a million members, and its
influence on Capitol Hill has waned. Taken
as a whole, LaPierre’s tenure is impossible to
regard as anything other than a success—and
it is also impossible to avoid the conclusion
that, like so many in politics, he stayed far
too long.
Palestinian cause, and with Hamas. “The notion that Hamas is ‘evil’ for
■ In November, in Burlington, Vt., three college stu- defending their state from occupation is absurd. They are owed a state.
dents of Palestinian descent were shot while out walking Pay up,” he wrote in one comment. A terrible crime, but not, it would
on the street. The man who has been charged with the appear, one spurred by the anti-Muslim bias initially assumed.
attack faces life in prison for three counts of attempted
murder. Families of the victims have called for him to be ■ “Are the airstrikes in Yemen working?” Joe Biden was asked. The
charged with a hate crime, but authorities have not found straightforward question elicited a response that was as uncomplicated
the requisite evidence. What is publicly known about as it was unsatisfying. “Well, when you say ‘working,’ are they stopping
the alleged perp suggests he was mentally unstable—an the Houthis? No,” Biden replied. And yet the president insisted that
erratic work history, restraining orders, run-ins with his admittedly ineffective response to Houthi aggression would con-
police, an eviction over property damage and unpaid tinue. A week later, the Biden administration signaled its intention to
rent, a personal website with some posts in gibberish. craft a sustained military campaign designed to degrade the Houthis’
ROMAN GENN

In social-media posts reviewed by the Vermont news- capacity to project power into the Gulf of Aden and disrupt interna-
paper Seven Days, he had expressed sympathy with the tional commerce. If the duration of that campaign stretches into

12 NATIONALREVIEW.COM

0324_week_final.indd 12 1/24/2024 4:58:10 PM

 THE MARITIME STRATEGIST
As missiles fly over the Middle East and navies converge in
the Red Sea, the question of what the United States must
do to remain the dominant sea power has come to the fore.
Steven Wills suggests a larger, simpler fleet to augment the
300 ships currently afloat. A former naval officer who holds
a Ph.D. in military history and spent 20 years on active duty
aboard a variety of small- and medium-surface combatants,
Wills is now a scholar at the Center for Maritime Strategy
at the Navy League of the United States. The following
interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q: What is the status of the Navy?
A: The current status of the Navy is stressed. A lot of people
don’t understand that the Navy is not a battle fleet that sails
forth to fight an opponent but rather a rotational provider
of forward-deployed capability in three locations: the
Persian Gulf, the Mediterranean, and the Indo-Pacific. Three
hundred ships are not enough to fully sustain that effort
while preserving the maintenance, training, and downtime
required by our sailors to keep them at peak efficiency.
Q: You’ve written about the Navy’s need for a defined
maritime strategy—something the service has gone without
since the Cold War. What should today’s strategy be?
A: It’s a methodology. It’s a methodological approach to how
you size the Navy and tell it what to do. Back in the 1980s,
the office of the chief of naval operations (CNO) asked all
of the fleet commanders to tell him how many ships they’d
need to carry out their respective missions. The CNO looked
at fleets from 1,000 ships down to 400 ships and ended up
choosing 600 ships to contest the Soviet navy in the Atlantic,
the Pacific, and the Mediterranean—those were the three
key regional areas that were thought vital for the Navy to
have sea control and supportive national objectives. Keeping
patrols in the Indian Ocean and the Persian Gulf would have
required more ships and cost more money, so we let them go.
So there’s always a financial component to this.
Q: Do U.S. shipyards have the capacity and manpower to
build American warships? Would the Navy be better served
building its ships in yards abroad?
A: We allowed the shipyard–industrial base to decline
rather significantly in the wake of the Cold War. At the end
of the Cold War, we had over 20 shipyards in the country
capable of building ships the size of the Oliver Hazard
COURTESY OF STEVEN WILLS
Perry–class frigate and larger. We’re down to six or seven.
We need more. We’d need to attract serious reinvestment
while providing consistent work to retain high-demand
talent. The other option is partially building some ships
ROMAN GENN
outside the United States. The Australians’ most recent
class of amphibious warships, the Canberra class, for
example, were built in Spain and then sent to Australia and
0324_week_final.indd 13
STEVEN WILLS
fitted with government-furnished equipment. Congress,
though, would have to agree to that approach. And they’ve
been, as a group, reluctant. But if you do want to build the
Navy quickly, that’s certainly a way to do it.
Q: What have we learned about the Navy’s capabilities
during these exchanges with the Houthis in Yemen? Could
these lessons apply to a prolonged conflict in the South
China Sea or the Persian Gulf?
A: Absolutely. When you go and operate your equipment
in a real-world environment, against actual threats, you’re
always going to learn something. It’s not shooting down 30
missiles that are flying at your ship that the Chinese might
launch. But at least the basic mechanics of air and missile
defense are being exercised. And most of our opponents
haven’t even thought about war in a very long time. For
example, China has not fought a significant war of any kind
since 1979. There is zero experience there in terms of even
launching a missile against an actual threat.
Q: What do you most want for today’s Navy?
A: I would want 20 frigates in the water as quickly as
possible. Having a smaller fleet and continuing to abuse it by
driving it past its maintenance dates hurts everything—
it hurts people, it hurts readiness, it hurts equipment. Our fleet
in the post–Cold War era has become somewhat imbalanced
toward more high-end vessels. During the Cold War, we had
what was called a high–low mix, which has since faded away.
The DDG-51 [Arleigh Burke class] and the nuclear submarines,
for instance, are terrific warships, but they’re expensive. You
can’t have an entire force of Ferraris; you’ve got to have
some Ford F-150 trucks—basic vehicles that do basic things.
If we’re going to sustain these deployments to forward
locations—the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf, the Mediterranean,
and the Indo-Pacific—300 ships are just not enough.
 by Luther Ray Abel
NATIONAL REVIEW / MARCH 2024 13
1/24/2024 4:58:11 PM
 THE WEEK MARCH 2024
February, calls from Biden’s critics to seek congressional
authorization for these strikes will likely intensify. But
that wasn’t the Washington Post’s primary objection.
Rather, the outlet fretted that the Biden administration’s
lethargic response to Houthi terrorism “could derail the
war-ravaged country’s fragile peace and pull Washington
into another unpredictable Middle Eastern conflict.” The
casual observer might conclude that it was the Houthis’
campaign of brazen piratical raids on commercial ships
from the air and sea in concert with its drone and rocket
attacks on merchant and naval vessels alike that shat-
tered the “fragile peace” in Yemen.
■ Day after day, Russia bombs Ukrainian cities, includ-
ing the capital, Kyiv. Day after day, Russia kills Ukrainian
civilians, including evacuees—women and children try-
ing to flee. Ukrainian forces are losing territory and
running out of ammunition. Russia has its allies: Chi-
na, North Korea, Iran, et al. Ukraine is in great need of
its own allies. Congress and the president have so far
been unable to agree on terms for further aid to Ukraine.
But we should keep in mind that the cost of helping
Ukraine now is as nothing compared with the potential
cost of dealing with Russia after a conquest of Ukraine.
­Lithuania’s foreign minister, Gabrielius Landsbergis, put
it this way: “Nobody knows the exact timeline of Russia’s
madness, but we know Ukraine is buying us time and
paying for it with blood. If Ukraine wins, Russia’s expan-
sionism will be halted. If not, we will be wishing we had
used the bought time more efficiently.”
■ In Taiwan, current vice president William Lai tri-
umphed in a presidential election on January 13. Lai is a
member of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), the
party that holds the most skeptical view of the Chinese
Communists and was, until recently, openly supportive
of independence. Lai won with just a bit more than 40
percent of the vote, and the DPP failed to win a parlia-
mentary majority. His victory can be explained largely
by the failure of the opposition to unify. An election run
smoothly, delivering a complex result that will force the
parties to share levers of power, is another victory for
Taiwan’s democratic self-governance and a setback for
Beijing. But the biggest challenge may be yet to come.
Beijing detests Lai, viewing him as a proponent of Tai-
wan’s independence, and will likely retaliate, perhaps
around the time of his inauguration in May, with a new
trade war and provocative military exercises—or worse.
■ China’s birth rate has fallen to a record low for the
second year in a row. The number of births per 1,000
people fell from 6.77 in 2022 to 6.39 in 2023; the country’s
14 NATIONALREVIEW.COM
0324_week_final.indd 14
Penalizing parenthood, it turns out,
is far more effective than encouraging
it. China will be reckoning with the
economic and social costs of its aging
population for decades to come.
population shrank by 2.75 million, or 0.02 percent. The precise numbers
are questionable—this is China, after all—but the trend is clear. China
has been fretting about its fertility rate for a long time. In the early
1980s, under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping, the received wisdom was
that there were too many babies; the government’s one-child policy was
announced and, over subsequent decades, brutally enforced. In 2015,
the government said families were allowed to have two children; in 2021,
this was raised to three, and policies to encourage a baby boom were
implemented. But to no avail. Penalizing parenthood, it turns out, is far
more effective than encouraging it. China will be reckoning with the
economic and social costs of its aging population for decades to come.
■ The show trial of Jimmy Lai is under way. Lai, 76, is the great entre-
preneur and democracy advocate in Hong Kong who has been a political
prisoner since 2020. What is his show trial showing? That the authorities
are scared of criticism and contemptuous of the truth. In a new devel-
opment, they have named “co-conspirators”—foreigners who advocate
democracy and human rights in China and elsewhere. Two of them live
in London: Bill Browder, the founder of the Global Magnitsky Justice
Campaign, and Benedict Rogers, the founder of Hong Kong Watch.
The Chinese authorities are trying to scare off anyone who would help
­Jimmy Lai, or any other dissident. “Hang in there!” a supporter called
out to Lai in the courtroom. So should we all, until this man is free.
■ We do not know whether Javier Milei, the eccentric “anarcho-­
capitalist” economist who is Argentina’s new president, will end the
mismanagement that, over nearly a century, has turned his country
from one of the richest in the world to a poster child for decline. It’s
an enormous task, but a part of Milei’s good start has been to correctly
and loudly diagnose what has brought Argentina down: an overbearing
state, constant meddling in the functioning of free markets, and the long
sway of the thinking that has allowed both to continue. The implication
of the last is, as this didactic president well understands, the importance
of winning the battle of ideas. And so he flew (commercial) to Davos,
using that unlikely venue as a platform to deliver a powerful speech
(albeit with some unusual anarcho-capitalist twists) on the effectiveness
and moral superiority of free markets. It was aimed not only at his own
country, but also at those others now drifting into collectivism. They
should, he argued, learn from Argentina’s experience: “If measures are
adopted that hinder the free functioning of markets, competition, price
systems, trade, and ownership of private property, the only possible
fate is poverty.”
■ Ecuador’s Los Choneros cartel may have made the leap from organized
crime, which adapts to and operates within a political system, to terrorism,
which seeks to overturn it. After the cartel’s leader, known as “Fito,” broke
1/24/2024 4:58:11 PM
 Vladimir Lenin died 100 years ago,
on January 21, 1924. The evil of his
ideas and the ruin launched by his
deeds paved the way for the horrors
that defined so much of the 20th
century.
out of prison and set off inmate uprisings in prisons across the country,
Ecuadorian president Daniel Noboa declared a state of emergency, quickly
revised to an “armed internal conflict.” Gangs associated with the cartel
(of which there are 22, now considered terrorist organizations by Noboa)
temporarily seized a public TV station during a live broadcast. Armed
gangs elsewhere have kidnapped on-duty police officers and attacked and
robbed hospitals. A recent series of arrests of judges and prosecutors has
proven that Fito’s syndicate has long infiltrated Ecuador’s state institutions.
It seems no longer to be content with mere narcopolitics.
■ In his Angelus address at St. Peter’s Square on New Year’s Day, Pope
Francis spoke of his “deep concern” about “what is happening in Nica-
ragua, where bishops and priests have been deprived of their freedom.”
Two weeks later, Nicaraguan authorities announced their release of 19
political prisoners. Among the two Catholic seminarians and 17 clergy-
men they sent to Rome were two bishops, including Rolando Álvarez,
who was jailed last August after several years of criticizing the regime
of Daniel Ortega and aiding efforts by the Catholic Church to bolster
Nicaraguan civil society amid government oppression. In praising the
competence and sensitivity of the Vatican diplomats who negotiated
the prisoners’ release, government officials may have sought to deflect
attention from the embarrassment to which the pope exposed the re-
gime on the global stage. The church’s temporal soft power is sometimes
underestimated. The good news about the release of Álvarez and the
other 18 Catholic churchmen is tempered by the imposition of their exile
and by the knowledge that other advocates for freedom in Nicaragua
remain behind bars.
■ Felled by the last of a series of strokes brought on, quite possibly,
by the stress of running revolutionary Russia after a lifetime largely
devoted to study, writing, and invective, Vladimir Lenin died 100 years
ago, on January 21, 1924. The evil of his ideas and the ruin launched by
his deeds paved the way for the horrors that defined so much of the 20th
century. Yet there remains a dangerously persistent belief that Lenin’s
cause was noble but was turned by Stalin into something monstrous.
In reality, Stalin was Lenin’s star pupil, simply expanding the use of
Lenin’s methods—single-party rule, censorship, mass murder, mass
arrests, mass terror, concentration camps, the dehumanization of “class
enemies,” and all the rest—to build a totalitarian socialist state of which
Lenin would, for the most part, have approved (more secure in his posi-
tion than Stalin, he would have killed fewer veteran Bolsheviks). In his
very old age, Molotov, who knew both men, reportedly observed that
“compared to Lenin, Stalin was a mere lamb.”
■ The Saturday Evening Post limps along, in some form. Ladies’ Home
Journal is long gone. (It was the first American magazine to reach a
0324_week_final.indd 15
million subscribers.) Reader’s Digest limps along. Sports
Illustrated may do the same—but, basically, it is kaput.
Its editorial staff has been laid off. One may think that SI
has been with us forever, but it was founded only in 1954.
Frank Deford and Dan Jenkins were two of its most illus-
trious writers. It also published Faulkner and Steinbeck.
At its best, SI was great. At its less-than-best, it was still
great, somehow (unless it strained to be political).
■ First the Seattle Seahawks announced the end of
Pete Carroll’s run as head coach. Hired in 2010, he hit the
ground running and rebuilt a team that he led to two con-
secutive Super Bowls. The Seahawks won in 2013, and lost
in 2014 to the New England Patriots, whom he coached for
three seasons in the late 1990s. Bill Belichick succeeded
him in Foxborough and (with the help of Tom Brady) built
a dynasty, leading the Patriots to nine Super Bowls and
winning six of them. The day after the news that ­Carroll
had stepped down in Seattle, the Patriots announced
that they and Belichick were parting ways after 24 years.
Carroll will remain an executive for the Seahawks, and
Belichick, reported to be seeking a head-coach position
elsewhere, has already interviewed with Atlanta. Between
the announcements in Seattle and New England came
news from Alabama that Nick Saban was retiring, he
of the seven NCAA national championships. Saban and
­Belichick had coached together in Cleveland and bonded
over their Croatian ancestry, which Carroll shares on his
mother’s side. Pete, Nick, Bill: Congratulations.
POLITICS
The Cheese Stands Alone
Nikki Haley carried Dixville Notch, the hamlet whose
ritual postmidnight vote gives it the first headline on the
morning of the New Hampshire primary. It was her last
good news of the day, and no doubt of the campaign.
Despite an infusion of independents and fence-jumping
Democrats, Donald Trump beat her 54 to 43, a solid if
not blowout margin. Ron DeSantis had dropped out af-
ter an anemic second-place finish in the Iowa caucuses.
Vivek Ramaswamy and Chris Christie folded their tents
before him. Barring acts of God, the 2024 election will
be another Trump–Biden contest.
How did Trump do it? President Biden’s troubles—­
lingering inflation, wars and rumors of wars, his
debility—­could have benefited any Republican. But the
illegal-immigration crisis targets Trump’s strike zone.
No, he didn’t build the big beautiful wall on the border
when he was president. But his rhetoric gave aliens pause
and his arrangements with Mexico kept many of them
there pending vetting. Today’s chaos makes an ongo-
ing campaign ad for his measures. The loyalty of
NATIONAL REVIEW / MARCH 2024 15
1/24/2024 4:58:11 PM
 THE WEEK MARCH 2024
A NEW HAMPSHIRE VOTER CASTS HER BALLOT, JANUARY 23.
Trump’s longtime supporters is reinforced by the bliz-
zard of prosecutions that engulfs him. His rallies were
becoming old hat—how many times can you hear “The
Snake”?—but courtrooms became his new stage, turn-
ing a former president into an underdog. Finally, he still
enjoys the game. Pleasure in performers, politicians in-
cluded, is infectious.
The GOP, voters and leaders alike, is a Trump party.
What have they gained by the bargain? However motivat-
ing Trump’s legal troubles are for his base, they turn off
the ambivalent (Haley’s New Hampshire showing reflect-
ed this). Some prosecutions—Alvin Bragg’s bid to nail
him on business fraud—are rickety. Not all. Trump has
already lost sexual-abuse and defamation civil judgments
to E. Jean Carroll; the court is now reckoning further
defamation damages. His mishandling of classified doc-
uments seems brazen.
Trump’s rhetoric concerning these and other matters
is grossly irresponsible. He claims “complete & total”
immunity for presidential behavior, “even for events
that ‘cross the line.’” Not content to invoke the privileg-
es of royalty, he reminds audiences how fond he is of
dictators—­Putin, Xi, and Kim Jong-un are “very fine peo-
ple,” “brilliant,” “top of the line.” Leaders of republics
should have more respect for their systems, their fellow
citizens, and themselves.
16 NATIONALREVIEW.COM
0324_week_final.indd 16
Not that respect has ever been a Trump strong suit. The pleasure
he takes in campaigning is too often that of a primary-school bully—­
mocking John McCain’s injured arms, Biden’s stutter, and Haley’s eth-
nicity. (Vivek, call your office.)
Age is not only Biden’s problem. Trump is showing his—in the slath-
er of bronzer that has become his maquillage, and in the increasingly
frequent misspeaks—e.g., Nikki Haley being responsible for Capitol
security on January 6, 2021—that are all the more noteworthy in such
a practiced talker.
All this is to say nothing of Trump’s political positions. To flag only
one new concern: Many Republicans, as the party is now constituted,
would abandon Ukraine. Trump, the supposed China hawk, remarked
that Taiwan “took all of our chip business.”
Republicans will have ten months, at least, to watch the conse­
quences of their choice play out.
CORRECTIONS
SEBASTIEN ST-JEAN / GETTY IMAGES
In the Week (December 2023), the editors referred to a false accusation
that Israel had bombed Al-Shifa Hospital. In fact, the accusation con-
cerned Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital.
In “Big Law Gets Smaller” (Stuart Taylor Jr., December 2023), Paul
D. Clement was described as having litigated more than a thousand
cases before the Supreme Court. In fact, he has litigated more than a
hundred.
1/24/2024 4:58:12 PM
 BY ROB LONG
The Long View
MIAMI-DADE COUNTY CORRECTIONS DEPARTMENT
PROBATION REPORT
DATE FILED: February 11, 2025
PROBATION OFFICER: M. Peterson (signed)
SUBJECT/DOCKET: Felon Donald John Trump DOB 06.14.1946
DOCKET 766F US
DATE OF INTERVIEW: February 9, 2025
PLACE(S) OF INTERVIEW: Map Room, White House, Washington DC
PRESENT AT INTERVIEW: Felon, his two sons, National Security Advi-
sor Tucker Carlson, White House Spokesman Roseanne Barr
IS SUBJECT GAINFULLY EMPLOYED? Yes, in a way, though seems
part time.
HAS SUBJECT’S EMPLOYER BEEN NOTIFIED OF EMPLOYEE TRAVEL
RESTRICTIONS? Yes.
RESULT OF DRUG TEST(S): None/negative; lipid panel shows high
levels of salts, animal fats, traces of gravy.
HAS SUBJECT ATTENDED GROUP COUNSELING OR JOB-TRAINING
COURSES? No (see note below, may require Court intervention).
ASSESSMENT DURING INTERVIEW: Felon continues to be rude and
uncooperative to PO during regularly scheduled assessments and
interviews, and is often vague about his whereabouts and day-to-day
activities. When reminded that Felon has been offered a special dis-
pensation by the Court and is not required to wear an ankle-attached
location device in exchange for full cooperation and transparency,
Felon shrugs and glowers at PO. Some of this behavior is consistent
with other case files PO is experienced with. Some of it is unique to
this particular case, in that Felon is in the same environment and same
workplace culture that created the felonious conditions related to his
conviction. When asked specifically about protocols and regulations
in re: classified documents and their safekeeping, retention, etc. in
regard to National Archives Act etc., Felon becomes verbally abusive
though insists proper procedures are being followed. PO assesses that
this is as of this date true, though cautions that Felon is in very early
part of his presidential term, and probation lasts until 2032. Felon
has been fully informed that any deviation from official protocol will
result in immediate remand to Miami-Dade Corrections.
CONCERNS/RED FLAGS: Felon seems to be flouting the “known fe-
lonious associates and criminal society” clause in his provisional
release following Election Day 2024. Many of his associations are
0324_Long_final.indd 17
problematic—notably his close day-to-day
interactions with S. Bannon (also on proba-
tion) and Vice President Kari Lake. When
informed that these associations need to be
closely monitored by the Court, Felon again
resorts to personal insults relating to the PO’s
hairstyle and personal appearance, including
PO’s weight, which is ironic and troubling.
Further­m ore, Felon has issued himself a
“declassifying sticker-dispenser” that auto-
matically dispenses a small “Declassified”
decal, via what is clearly a modified jumbo
Pez dispenser of the type available at gift and
party-supply stores. It is unclear to PO if this
is in fact legal going forward, but when Felon
is reminded that he is currently on probation
for past actions, he becomes distracted and
sullen. Suggest closer monitoring of associ-
ates and effective liaison with National Ar-
chives personnel.
FOLLOW-UPS: Felon continues to insist on
blanket privilege to travel outside the ­United
States, on which the Court has yet to rule.
Felon is nevertheless planning a major trip
abroad to Moscow, Pyongyang, Budapest,
and other locales and refuses to agree to wait
for the Court to waive his travel restrictions.
PO suggests an expedited hearing to settle
this matter, and suggests in the meantime
that Felon be remanded to Miami-Dade Cor-
rections as he is clearly a flight risk.
AREAS OF IMPROVEMENT: Felon is required
to attend job-training and counseling c­ lasses
as per Federal sentencing guidelines as well
as anger-management classes either in per-
son or online. Since sentencing, Felon has yet
to attend either. When reminded of feder-
al regulations in regards to probationary-­
period training, Felon insists that former
governor of Florida Ron DeSantis is attend-
ing these courses in his place and “sending
me notes and summaries and whatnot.” This
is clearly beyond the established regulations,
and PO requests Court intervention in this
matter. From all reports Felon has plentiful
time in the weekday morning period until
noon for social media usage, and some of that
time could be used for Court-­ordered coun-
seling and training.
CONCLUSION: It is the recommendation of
the PO that since Felon is barely complying
with the minimum legal requirements per
Federal guidelines, he should be subject to
fine and/or remand. Further, Felon seems
unwilling to assent to “spot” checks from PO
and exhibits no understanding of the seri-
ousness of his crime. Continually threatens
to pardon himself but has yet to do it. Very
little hope of rehabilitation. Probable repeat
offender.
NATIONAL REVIEW / MARCH 2024 17
1/24/2024 3:05:34 PM
 ARTICLES
‘Everybody’s
Second
Choice’
The end of the DeSantis
campaign
BY AUDREY FAHLBERG
 Newton, Iowa
O
n Saturday, December 2, Florida governor Ron DeSantis
hit a major milestone. He’d completed what in Iowa pol-
itics is known as the “full Grassley,” a nod to the famed
tradition of the state’s senior senator, who aims to visit
all of the Hawkeye State’s 99 counties every year. At the
end of his rally, DeSantis got the dreaded voter question
that came to define the 2024 Republican presidential
primary: How will you govern differently from former
president Donald Trump?
“So one, I mean, I think—I think his policies were
overall sound.” DeSantis then embarked on a five-­minute-
long answer touching on his own legislative record as
governor of Florida while ticking through the former
president’s policy failures: elevating Anthony Fauci, not
draining the swamp, not finishing the border wall.
On a low-turnout caucus night, Trump captured
51 percent of the vote. DeSantis finished a distant sec-
ond, 30 points behind him, besting former U.N. am-
bassador Nikki Haley only narrowly. Six days later, he
dropped out.
Countless analyses have already been written about
his campaign’s missteps: its series of messaging resets
and layoffs over the summer, its decision to outsource the
entire ground game to a super PAC it couldn’t control,
and its inability to fend off criticisms of the candidate’s
lack of charisma. But the overarching problem was that
DeSantis never figured out how to break through as the
first choice of enough Republican voters. The party is
still dominated by an indicted former reality-TV star and
quasi-incumbent who refused to participate in debates.
18 NATIONALREVIEW.COM
0324_articles_pages18–20.indd 18
And to hear his critics tell it, DeSantis was
too arrogant to accept much criticism un-
til it was too late.
His campaign sliced the Republican
electorate into three camps: die-hard
Trumpers, those who liked Trump but
were open to alternatives, and those who
never voted for Trump or were unlikely
ever to vote for him again. The second
camp was thought to be DeSantis’s sweet
spot. The moderates, he assumed, would
flock to him eventually.
The challenge that emerged for him
was to distinguish himself from Trump
without alienating his supporters—
a daunting task but perhaps not an in-
surmountable one for a highly skilled
retail politician. But then came Trump’s
criminal indictments and, in December,
the decisions of two states to kick him off
the ballot.
As one person in DeSantis’s orbit put
it two days before he dropped out: “The
reason why Ron isn’t going to be suc-
cessful is because he’s everybody’s sec-
ond choice. If you love Trump, and his
policies, then you just like Trump better
than him. And if you want someone else—
you’re done with Trump—Nikki’s more
LUBA MYTS
compelling.”
1/24/2024 11:35:35 AM
 DeSantis teased his official launch
with a spring book tour, during which he
began to court the very online New Right.
He called Russia’s unprovoked invasion of
Ukraine a “territorial dispute.” He talked
constantly about the culture war. And
before he officially announced, he used
the first indictment against Trump as an
opportunity to take a shot at the front-­
runner while criticizing the charges on
the merits: “I don’t know what goes into
paying hush money to a porn star to se-
cure silence over some type of alleged
affair. I can’t speak to that.”
Donors were puzzled. Who advised
him to attack Trump and weigh in on
foreign policy before entering the race?
Why did he spend the spring insisting he
wasn’t a candidate but acting like he was,
inviting Trump to attack him in ads and
on social media? And why, in lieu of a tra-
ditional campaign launch beside his wife
and three young children, did he wait un-
til late May to debut his candidacy during
a bizarre conversation with Elon Musk on
Twitter Spaces?
“It’s been a dysfunctional, disor-
ganized mess from before he got in the
race,” said New Hampshire–based GOP
consultant Dave Carney.
Donors began giving Haley another
look. Unlike DeSantis, who signed a six-
week abortion ban in Florida, she ran to
the center on that issue. She appealed to
the traditional wing of the GOP on for-
eign policy, particularly with respect to
Ukraine.
Her upward momentum in
independent-­f riendly New Hampshire
meant that DeSantis was no longer viewed
by donors as the only plausible alterna-
tive to Trump, even if Haley’s path to the
nomination remained tricky. No matter
that DeSantis’s advisers warned donors
that Haley had no realistic shot at winning
enough support from Republicans to get
the nomination even if she pulled off a sur-
prise upset in the Granite State. (Trump
ended up beating her there decisively.)
The donors flocked to her anyway. And on
seeing all the favorable media coverage,
many Trump-skeptical voters followed.
In hindsight, it’s plain that running
to the center could have carried risks
LUBA MYTS
for DeSantis. First, he’s not a moderate,
0324_articles_pages18–20.indd 19
and so any attempt to portray himself as
such likely would have come across as in-
authentic. And second, abandoning the
conservative lane could have given more
runway to another non-Trump conser-
vative in the race such as South Carolina
senator Tim Scott or even biotech entre-
preneur Vivek Ramaswamy, who had a
brief polling surge in August.
While Haley gained momentum
through December, DeSantis struggled
to make a clear and concise closing pitch
beyond “Donald Trump’s running for his
issues, Haley’s running on the donors’ is-
sues, I’m running on your issues.”
On the ground, many Iowans told NR
that they appreciated DeSantis’s record in
Florida but that it wasn’t his time to run.
“We had heard that from the beginning
of the campaign,” said one volunteer with
Never Back Down, Desantis’s super PAC.
So even though many Republicans
liked DeSantis, “you don’t see people go-
ing crazy over him,” as Linda Barnum of
Colfax, Iowa, put it at the governor’s early-­
December 99th-county rally in Newton.
As he continued to lag in the polls in the
lead-up to the caucuses, ­DeSantis allies
pointed to the robust ground-game oper-
ation of Never Back Down and described
it as their saving grace. But as one of the
super PAC’s own consultants told NR: “You
can’t sell bad dog food.”
Three days before the Iowa caucuses,
DeSantis unloaded on the conservative-­
media complex for boosting Trump. “He’s
got basically a Praetorian Guard of the
conservative media—Fox News, those web-
sites, all the stuff they just don’t, they don’t
hold him accountable because they’re wor-
ried about losing viewers, and they don’t
want to have the ratings go down.”
The irony is that DeSantis had long
been a regular on Fox News before he
‘One of the things that made DeSantis an icon in the
party was viral video clips of him smacking down liberal
reporters. The last time we got one of the viral clips was
before he ran for president.’
NATIONAL REVIEW / MARCH 2024
joined the race. Once he did, he shut out
most mainstream and legacy conservative
outlets until the summer.
Even as late as December, when NR
trekked out to Iowa to cover the final
stretch, the campaign said that we could
interview the governor only if we wrote a
story about his faith outreach, not a state-
of-the-race piece. We said that we operate
under the same editorial standards that
most other newsrooms do, in that we do
not allow campaigns to dictate coverage.
The campaign then rescinded its earli-
er offer to make DeSantis available for a
ten-minute interview.
DeSantis’s decision to blackball me-
dia early on was one of the biggest mis-
steps of his campaign, especially given
how well he performs in adversarial in-
terviews. “One of the things that made
DeSantis an icon in the party was viral
video clips of him smacking down liberal
reporters,” said a source associated with
Never Back Down. “The last time we got
one of the viral clips was before he ran
for president.”
His campaign apparently theorized
that depriving reporters of clicks and
access would deprive reporters of their
relevance. If it worked for his reelection
campaign in Florida, why not for a presi-
dential campaign nationally?
But DeSantis’s nearly 20-point victory
in his gubernatorial race in 2022, added
to his record of substantive policy wins,
meant that he was perceived early on
as the overwhelming favorite to take on
Trump. That early momentum, and sub-
sequent interest from Republican donors,
meant that media scrutiny was inevitable.
Ignoring or publicly mocking reporters
wouldn’t make them disappear.
“I came in not really doing as much
media,” he told radio host Hugh
19
1/24/2024 11:35:35 AM
 Hewitt on January 18. “I should have
gone on everything.” Over time he be-
came a regular on mainstream networks,
appeared less fidgety on the stump, and
found his footing in one-on-one interac-
tions with voters. He even scored an en-
dorsement from popular Iowa governor
Kim Reynolds.
“Ron DeSantis was constantly open
to advice throughout the campaign and
grew as a candidate because of it,” said a
source familiar with the campaign’s think-
ing. “The reason he was able to overcome
nearly $50 million in negative spending in
Iowa to take second is because of his work
ethic and his willingness to adapt.”
But as others who worked to get him
elected tell it, the problem is that his
shifts in strategy came too late. “Because
he’s so insulated—there’s only a couple
of people that he’ll talk to—you’ve got to
convince those people to tell him the right
thing to do,” said someone in DeSantis’s
orbit. “He got better; he just didn’t get
better faster.”
From the start, the DeSantis orbit
struggled to maintain goodwill between
its campaign and its main super PAC. As
one Never Back Down volunteer put it,
“The way it was set up, you were never
able to get everyone in the same room
and say, ‘Hey, we’re on the same team
here.’” The governor and his wife and
closest adviser, Casey, became frustrat-
ed with Never Back Down’s ad strategy,
leaks to reporters, and cash-burn rate—­
developments that prompted DeSantis’s
Tallahassee allies to start a new super
PAC, Fight Right, in the final stretch.
“It was disappointing for the cam-
paign that former PAC officials spent
more time leaking to hurt the governor
than executing the mission,” said a source
familiar with the campaign’s thinking.
“The campaign could have gone the way
of Scott Walker in July if it wasn’t for
DeSantis and the campaign being able
to make changes to run as an insurgent
underdog.”
As super-PAC officials tell it, the
governor’s high-handedness and dis-
trust were so acute that oftentimes only
senior campaign officials could attend
donor events hosted by the super PAC,
according to sources familiar with the
20 NATIONALREVIEW.COM
0324_articles_pages18–20.indd 20
matter. Donors also felt isolated from the
candidate.
Never Back Down officials viewed
campaign staffers as inexperienced, un-
sure of their message, and unwilling to
give the governor tough advice.
In May, the campaign gathered con-
servative social-media influencers for a
Tallahassee meet and greet to get feed-
back and boost morale among DeSantis’s
biggest online cheerleaders.
In an interview with NR, attendee
Ryan Girdusky, a political consultant,
recalled looking around and thinking to
himself: Oh, I know these people, but they
don’t really know anything about cam-
paigns. And he noticed how few people
were eager to criticize the governor: “One
of the other ‘influencers’ said to a senior
staffer, ‘He really needs a haircut because
his hair is a little bushy on the sides.’ And
the staffer said, ‘You say that to him. I’m
not going to tell him that.’”
On the evening of January 15, ­DeSantis
announced to his supporters inside the
Sheraton West Des Moines Hotel that he’d
got his ticket “punched” out of Iowa.” He
railed against the media for underestimat-
ing him and calling the race before some
precincts had finished voting, all while
glossing over the devastating reality that
Trump had beaten him by nearly 30 points.
To many of those who watched his
campaign unravel in real time, his “strat-
egy” at the time couldn’t have been more
fitting: barreling toward New Hampshire
and South Carolina with no clear path to
the nomination, other than to hope for a
bad showing and eventual drop-out from
Haley. Two days before New Hampshire’s
January 23 primary, he released a video in
which he announced that he was suspend-
ing his campaign and endorsing Trump.
In the minds of his supporters, the in-
dictments made all the difference.
“That sound you hear is a giant suck-
ing sound of the money and the enthu-
siasm going to Donald Trump, away
from the other candidates,” Never Back
Down adviser Rebecca Hagelin said at
­DeSantis’s election-night party in Iowa. “I
personally have found that Ron DeSantis
is the candidate I’ve been praying for my
entire life. But in America, you can’t beat
a reality-TV star, I guess, right now.”
ARTICLES
After Arms
Control
America’s self-imposed restraints
make less sense than ever
BY JOHN R. BOLTON
On June 18, 1935, the United Kingdom
and Germany entered “a permanent
and definite agreement” that limited
Germany’s total warship tonnage to 35
percent of the British Commonwealth’s.
This was a major concession from Great
Britain, since agreements at the Wash-
ington (1921–22) and London (1930) na-
val conferences had already significantly
reduced its own fleet. Hitler defined
“permanent and definite” to mean last-
ing less than four years: He abrogated the
treaty on April 28, 1939, four convenient
months before the Molotov–Ribbentrop
Pact carved up Poland and started World
War II. Arms control at work.
After 1945, America concluded a se-
ries of treaties that were, when signed or
shortly thereafter, almost uniformly dis­
advantageous to us. Considerable efforts
to eliminate these restraints have been
made, but significant risk remains of re-
verting to the old ways or not extracting
ourselves from the remaining harmful
treaties. Whoever next wins the pres-
idency should seek the effective end of
the usual arms-control theology before
the tide turns again.
To have any chance of bolstering U.S.
national security, arms control must fit
into larger strategic frameworks, which
it has not done well in the last century.
1/24/2024 11:35:35 AM
 We need a post–post–
Cold War strategy
avowedly skeptical of
both the theoretical and
the operational aspects
of the usual approaches
to arms control.
Even if they made sense in their day,
many arms-control treaties have not with-
stood changing circumstances. Preserv-
ing them is even less viable as we enter
a new phase of international affairs: the
era after the post–Cold War era. Russia’s
invasion of Ukraine, Iran’s ongoing “ring
of fire” strategy against Israel, China’s
aspirations for regional and then global
hegemony, and the Beijing–Moscow axis
augur trying times. We need a post–post–
Cold War strategy avowedly skeptical of
both the theoretical and the operational
aspects of the usual approaches to arms
control.
Rethinking arms-control doctrine
down to its foundations began with
Ronald Reagan’s 1983 Strategic Defense
Initiative and resumed with George W.
Bush. The partisan and philosophical de-
bates they launched have continued ever
since, but the next president will confront
­foreign- and defense-policy decisions that
cannot be postponed or ignored. Best to
do some advance thinking now.
Bush’s aspirations were more limited
than what liberals derided as Reagan’s
“Star Wars.” Bush worried about Amer-
ican vulnerability to the prospect of
“handfuls, not hundreds,” of ballistic mis-
siles launched against us by rogue states.
Providing even limited national missile
defense, however, required withdrawing
from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM)
Treaty, as Bush did in December 2001.
Arms control’s high priests and priestess-
es, and key senators such as Joe Biden and
John Kerry, were apoplectic. Missile de-
fense was provocative, they said. Leaving
the ABM Treaty meant abandoning “the
cornerstone of international strategic
0324_articles_final.indd 21
stability” (a phrase commonly used by
politicians, diplomats, and arms control-
lers) and upsetting the premise of mutual
assured destruction, they said.
But Bush persisted and withdrew. As
the saying goes, the dogs barked and the
caravan moved on. In 2002, Bush turned
to a new kind of strategic-arms agree-
ment with Vladimir Putin, the Treaty
of Moscow, which set asymmetric limits
on deployed strategic nuclear warheads
and was structured in ways very differ-
ent from earlier or later nuclear-­weapons
treaties. We abandoned the complex,
highly dubious counting and attribution
metrics of prior strategic-weapons deals,
as well as verification procedures that
Russia had perfected means to evade.
The Treaty of Moscow was sufficiently re-
viled by the arms-control theocracy that
Barack Obama replaced it in 2010 with
the New START (Strategic Arms Reduc-
tion Treaty), reverting to failed earlier
approaches, more on which below.
During Bush’s first term, we also
blocked efforts in the United Nations at
international gun control. We established
the G-8 Global Partnership—to increase
funding for the destruction of Russia’s
“excess” nuclear and chemical weapons
and delivery systems—and launched the
Proliferation Security Initiative to combat
international trafficking in weapons and
materials of mass destruction. Neither
effort required treaties or international
bureaucracies. We unsigned the Rome
Statute, the treaty that had created the
International Criminal Court, to protect
U.S. service members from the threat of
criminal action by unaccountable global
prosecutors.
Finally, the Bush administration
scotched a proposed “verification” proto-
col to the Biological Weapons Convention
(BWC) that risked intellectual-property
piracy against U.S. pharmaceutical man-
ufacturers but did not enhance the ver-
ification of breaches. The BWC and the
Chemical Weapons Convention express
aspirations not to use these weapons of
mass destruction, but it is almost impossi-
ble to verify compliance with them. More-
over, arms controllers forget that the
BWC sprang from Richard Nixon’s uni-
lateral decision to eliminate American
NATIONAL REVIEW / MARCH 2024
biological munitions, which proved that
we could abjure undesirable weapons sys-
tems on our own.
The Bush administration went a
long way toward ending arms control,
but the true believers returned to pow-
er under Obama. Eager to ditch the he-
retical Treaty of Moscow, his negotiators
produced New START—the lineal de-
scendant of two earlier SALT (Strategic
Arms Limitation Talks) and three START
agreements—which entered into force in
February 2011 for ten years, extendable
once for five more. The Senate should
never have ratified this execrable deal,
as I explained in these pages (“A Treaty
for Utopia,” May 2010). Nonetheless, with
a Democratic majority it did so in a late-
2010 lame-duck session, by 71 votes (all
56 Democrats, two independents, and 13
Republicans) to 26. While the vote seems
lopsided, there were three nonvoters—
retiring anti-treaty Republicans who
opposed ratification—and the Senate se-
cured the constitutionally required two-
thirds ratification majority by only five
votes. Today, given a possible Republican
majority ahead and the unlikelihood that
so many Republicans would defect again,
ratifying a successor treaty is a dubious
prospect at best.
The Trump administration resumed
untying Gulliver, exiting the Intermediate-­
Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty in 2019.
While the INF Treaty may have made sense
in the 1980s, by the time of withdrawal
only the United States was abiding by its
provisions. The likes of China and Iran,
not treaty parties, were accumulating sub-
stantial numbers of intermediate-range
ballistic missiles, and Russia was system-
atically violating INF Treaty limits. That
left America as the only country abiding
by the treaty, an obviously self-inflicted
handicap that withdrawal corrected. Then,
in 2020, the U.S. withdrew from the Open
Skies Treaty because Russia had abused
its overflight privileges and because our
national technical assets made overflight
to obtain information obsolete. Russia sub-
sequently withdrew from Open Skies.
But the arms-control theology still
has powerful adherents. On January 26,
2021, newly inaugurated Joe Biden sent
his first signal of weakness to Putin
21
1/23/2024 10:00:56 PM
 by unconditionally extending New START
for five years without seeking modifica-
tions to it. This critical capitulation was
utterly unwarranted by New START’s
merits or by developments since its rat-
ification. The treaty was fatally defective
in that it did not address tactical nuclear
weapons, in which Russia had clear supe-
riority. It remains true that no new deal
would be sensible for the United States
unless it included tactical as well as stra-
tegic warheads.
In addition, technological threats that
postdate New START (which deals with
the Cold War triad of land-based ballistic
missiles, submarine-launched ballistic
missiles, and heavy bombers) need to be
confronted, especially cruise missiles,
which can now reach hypersonic speeds.
Most important, China has made
substantial progress since 2010 toward
becoming a peer nuclear power. Beijing
may not yet have the deliverable-weapons
capacity of Washington or Moscow, but
the trajectory is clear.
A tripolar U.S.–Russian–Chinese nu-
clear world (no other power has or will
have rates of warhead production com-
parable to China’s) would be almost
inexpressibly more dangerous than a
bipolar U.S.–USSR world. The most criti-
cal threat that China’s growing strategic-­
weapons arsenal poses is to the United
States. How will it manifest? Will we face
periodic, independent risks of nuclear
conflict with either China or Russia? Or
a combined threat simultaneously? Or
serial threats? Or all of the above? An-
swers to these questions will dictate the
nuclear-force levels necessary to deter
first-strike launches by either Beijing or
Moscow or by both, and to defeat them
no matter how nuclear-conflict scenarios
may unfold.
Bilateral nuclear treaties may be sensible in a
bipolar nuclear world, but they make no sense in
a tripolar world. Russia and China surely grasp
this. We can only hope Joe Biden does as well.
22 NATIONALREVIEW.COM
0324_articles_final.indd 22
None of this is pleasant to contem-
plate, but, as Herman Kahn advised,
thinking about the unthinkable is nec-
essary in a nuclear world. These existen-
tial issues must be addressed before we
can safely enter trilateral nuclear-arms-­
control negotiations. Beijing is refusing to
negotiate until it achieves rough numeri-
cal parity with Washington and Moscow.
There is little room for diplomacy any-
way, since in February 2023 Russia sus-
pended its participation in New START.
Further strategic-weapons agreements
with Russia alone would be suicidal: Bi-
lateral nuclear treaties may be sensible
in a bipolar nuclear world, but they make
no sense in a tripolar world. Russia and
China surely grasp this. We can only hope
Joe Biden does as well. Next January, our
president will have just one year to decide
how to handle New START’s impending
expiration. We should assess now which
candidates understand the stakes and
are likely to avoid being encumbered by
agreements not just outmoded but dan-
gerous for America.
A closely related challenge is the is-
sue of U.S. nuclear testing. Unarguably,
if we do not soon resume underground
testing, the safety and reliability of our
aging nuclear arsenal will be increasingly
at risk, as America’s Strategic Posture, a
recent congressionally mandated report,
shows. Since 1992, Washington has faced a
self-imposed ban on underground nucle-
ar testing even though no international
treaty in force prohibits it. The Limited
Test Ban Treaty of 1963 bars only atmo-
spheric, space, and under­water testing,
a gap that the Comprehensive Nuclear-­
Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT), which would
have banned all testing, was intended
to close. Because, however, not all five
legitimate nuclear powers under the
Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) ratified
the CTBT, it never entered into force and
likely never will. Though the U.S. signed
the CTBT in 1996, the Senate rejected its
ratification by a vote of 51 to 48 in 1999.
Russia recently announced its withdraw-
al, thereby predictably dismaying Biden’s
advisers. The next U.S. president should
extinguish the CTBT by unsigning it. As
was recently revealed, Beijing seems to
be reactivating and upgrading its Lop Nor
nuclear-testing facility. We can predict
confidently that neither China nor Russia
will hesitate to do what it thinks neces-
sary to advance its nuclear-weapons ca-
pabilities. We should not be caught short.
Additional unfinished business in-
volves the Conventional Armed Forces
in Europe (CFE) Treaty, another arms-­
control “cornerstone,” this one of Euro-
pean security. Effective since 1990, as the
Cold War ended, CFE became obsolete
almost immediately. The Warsaw Pact
disbanded (its members largely joining
NATO) and the USSR fragmented. Russia
suspended CFE Treaty compliance sev-
eral times before withdrawing formally
in November 2023, having already invad-
ed Ukraine, another CFE Treaty party.
In response, the United States and our
NATO allies suspended CFE Treaty per-
formance. Like the CTBT, the CFE Treaty
is a zombie that the next president should
promptly destroy.
The list of arms-control-diplomacy
failures goes on. The NPT, for example,
has never hindered truly determined
proliferators such as North Korea (which
now has a second illicit nuclear reactor
online) or Iran, much as arms-control
agreements have consistently failed to
prevent grave violations by determined
aggressors.
This long, sad history has given us
adequate warning, and the next pres-
ident should learn from it. The array of
threats the United States faces makes it
imperative that we initiate substantial,
full-spectrum increases in our defense ca-
pabilities, from traditional combat arms
and cyberspace assets to nuclear weap-
ons. Instead of limiting our capabilities,
we must ensure that we know what we
need and have it on hand. We are nowhere
near that point.
1/23/2024 10:00:56 PM
 ARTICLES
Pro-Worker,
Not Pro-Union
The labor force wants flexibility;
the GOP should offer it
BY C. JARRETT DIETERLE
The recent United Auto Workers strike
against General Motors not only set the
political world abuzz but was a through-
the-looking-glass moment in American
politics. The leading Republican presi-
dential candidate for 2024, former pres-
ident Donald J. Trump, dramatically
embraced the union cause, alongside
other prominent members of his party.
This pro-union bear hug built upon last
year’s railway strike, during which Ted
Cruz, Josh Hawley, Marco Rubio, and
other conservative senators sided with
unions in a vote over paid sick leave.
­Afterward, Cruz declared that the GOP
was now a “blue-collar party.” But beyond
flashy press conferences and occasion-
al high-profile show votes, this new vein
of conservative populism has yet to put
forth a cohesive approach to American
labor policy.
In tension with these populist tides are
the traditional Lincoln–Coolidge–Reagan
pro-business impulses of the Republican
Party. It remains the political home—at
least for now—of capital and business
SCOTT OLSON / GETTY IMAGES
interests, with about 60 to 70 percent of
corporate CEOs continuing to identify as
Republicans. Despite a recent high-profile
dispute with the Chamber of Commerce,
Republicans still receive the vast majority
of its election endorsements.
0324_articles_final.indd 23
UNITED AUTO WORKERS MEMBERS PICKET OUTSIDE THE FORD
ASSEMBLY PLANT IN CHICAGO, OCTOBER 10, 2023.
For its part, the political Left con-
tinues trying to fit the square peg of
20th-century labor policies into the
round hole of a 21st-century economy,
pushing for one-size-fits-all minimum-­
wage rules and even proposing European
ideas such as sectoral bargaining, which
would allow unions to influence entire
sectors of the economy at once.
In the years ahead, starting with
the 2024 elections, both Democrats
and Republicans will be jockeying for
working-­c lass votes. While cultural is-
sues will likely continue to play a role—
perhaps even the predominant role—in
the everyman-­versus-elites dynamic of
modern American politics, the party
that most effectively articulates a co-
gent modern labor policy will be best
positioned to attract support from the
working class. The best way forward
for the Right is a labor-policy agenda
that is neither reflexively pro-union nor
pro-business but rather pro-worker and pro-
flexibility.
***
It would be hard to overstate the impor-
tance of flexibility to workers in today’s
economy. Close to 60 percent of workers
report that workplace flexibility, such as
work-from-home policies, are more im-
portant than salary or benefits. While it
NATIONAL REVIEW / MARCH 2024
might be tempting to narrow the import
of these findings to the professional sal-
aried class, surveys of hourly and shift
workers show that over 80 percent of
them view the ability to influence their
work schedule as key to job satisfaction.
I n de p e n de nt c o nt rac t i n g, g ig-­
economy work, and similar arrangements
can therefore be attractive options for
many working-class Americans. Over 60
percent of those employed in gig work list
flexibility as the main reason they pursued
it. Contrary to narratives on the political
left, these workers generally pick their ca-
reers not by necessity but by choice, with
over 70 percent saying that it was their
first option. Despite this, progressives are
increasingly hostile toward contract work.
The American Rescue Plan, promoted and
passed by Democrats, lowered the Form
1099-K reporting threshold for third-­
party payment services from $20,000 to
$600. This change will disproportionately
affect contractors and the self-employed—
who tend to rely on third-party payment
platforms such as PayPal or Venmo—by
drowning them in paperwork.
A worker-flexibility agenda would
reduce the administrative burden on in-
dependent workers by raising the $600
threshold for all Form 1099 income. Six
hundred dollars makes little sense in
modern America. When the threshold
was established in the 1950s, $600
23
1/23/2024 10:00:57 PM
 represented about 14 percent of the me-
dian household income; today, it is about
0.8 percent.
The war on contracting and self-­
employment extends well beyond the
tax code. Democratic proposals such as
the Protecting the Right to Organize Act
attempt to reclassify many independent
contractors, from truck drivers to gig
workers, as employees. Doing so would
substantially raise labor costs for busi-
nesses while hurting workers, many of
whose positions would be eliminated.
Given that contractors overwhelmingly
prefer their current contracting arrange-
ments, it would be both economically and
politically wise, not to mention conserva-
tive, to protect them.
What the Right has often overlooked
in this debate is that the protection of
independent-worker status can be cou-
pled with a revamping of worker-benefit
options. Lack of benefits is frequently
cited as the main drawback of indepen-
dent work. Republicans could burnish
their pro-worker credentials, while pro-
tecting businesses from reclassification
and other draconian left-wing policies,
by proposing a flexible benefit setup for
contractors and gig workers that has fea-
tures similar to a SEP-IRA. It would use a
system of employer contributions while
giving workers the ability to make pre-
tax contributions of their own. The funds
could be used for benefits such as paid
sick leave, unemployment insurance, or
even health insurance, some of which
could be purchased through newly creat-
ed worker-benefit exchanges that act as
brokerages for the benefits.
Benefit-flexibility concepts can be
applied as well to retirement savings,
even those of noncontract workers.
The current system largely relies on
States as red as Alabama and as blue as
Massachusetts have limited noncompetes
in different ways, demonstrating the cross-
ideological nature of the issue.
24 NATIONALREVIEW.COM
0324_articles_pages24_25.indd 24
employer-­b ased retirement plans, but
many workers find it difficult to roll old
retirement accounts over to new jobs.
That has led to a proliferation of aban-
doned “orphan” accounts. Automatic
portability for retirement accounts would
make it possible for more workers to take
their accounts with them to new jobs.
Also due is a nuanced rethinking
of noncompete agreements in labor
contracts. While libertarian notions of
the freedom of contract have long led
right-leaning policy-makers to resist the
imposition of restrictions on contractu-
al arrangements, recent years have seen
more free-market proponents question
the efficacy of noncompetes with respect
to their impact on worker freedom and
earnings.
Noncompetes were once seen ex-
clusively as a practice of the corporate
C-suite, but they have proliferated to all
levels of the workforce. Just under 40 per-
cent of American workers have signed at
least one noncompete in their lifetime,
including one in ten workers earning less
than $40,000 a year. Such clauses ap-
pear to reduce wages, but their biggest
impact is on worker flexibility. They bind
workers to jobs that they otherwise would
seek to leave, or sideline them from the
workforce.
The government’s approach to this
issue has been misguided. The Federal
Trade Commission recently proposed an
across-the-board ban on noncompetes,
provoking broad opposition from the
business community and rightly raising
eyebrows about the proposal’s legality.
But more-nuanced policies are avail-
able. They include limiting the breadth of
noncompete agreements or permitting
them only for certain workers—for ex-
ample, back-end noncompetes that are
offered and signed by higher-wage work-
ers as they leave a job, or non­competes for
C-suite executives at public companies.
States as red as Alabama and as blue as
Massachusetts have limited non­competes
in different ways, demonstrating the
cross-ideological nature of the issue.
It’s also worth noting that courts usu-
ally enforce a noncompete agreement
only if it is “reasonable”—a murky legal
standard that makes noncompete litiga-
tion one of the least predictable areas of
law. Businesses value certainty and clar-
ity; the current system provides little of
either. Carefully drawn limitations on
non­competes could provide better bright-
line rules for businesses and in turn re-
duce litigation and compliance burdens.
A focus on flexibility for workers
could also lend greater predictability to
their nonwork activities, such as spending
time with family. Those in shift or hourly
employment would benefit especially.
One recent controversy among labor
advocates has been just-in-time scheduling,
the practice by which employers change
employee schedules on the spur of the
moment to accommodate fluctuations in
demand and keep workforce costs down.
Our current laws around overtime
likely encourage this practice. Overtime is
expensive and businesses usually want to
avoid it at all costs. In fact, that was its orig-
inal point: Overtime was created during
the Depression to act primarily as a penalty
that would incentivize employers to fill or
create more jobs rather than increase the
hours of their current workforce. The rate
of pay for an employee was now required to
rise sharply if he or she worked more than
eight hours in a day or more than 40 in a
week. This New Deal heritage persists even
though its rules about wages and hours are
mostly one-size-fits-all across industries
(with a few exceptions, of course, such as
those for airlines). This monolithic and uni-
form setup prevents both employers and
workers from pursuing arrangements that
are more flexible and dynamic.
Just-in-time scheduling and similar
strategies help employers avoid overtime.
A potential policy response is to tie com-
pensation and overtime rates to sched-
uling predictability. The George W. Bush
administration proposed that employers
1/24/2024 12:53:23 PM
 be allowed to average overtime over two
weeks. Businesses favored the plan because
it would have reduced overtime costs by
giving them the ability to spread an em-
ployee’s hours across two weeks rather
than just one. The proposal went nowhere,
however, because, although it would have
helped businesses, workers would have
gotten nothing in return.
A work-flexibility agenda could com-
bine a two-week overtime period with
a rule that employers must tell workers
their schedules well in advance. It could be
an opt-in system, in which workers would
be able to accept the diminished overtime
opportunities of two-week averaging in
return for greater scheduling predictabil-
ity. Alternatively, many workers—those
without families, for example—might
choose to remain in the current system
and reap the higher pay potential of the
traditional overtime threshold of 40 hours
per week. This type of bifurcated work-
force could allow employers to sustain
just-in-time scheduling where needed and
at the same time offer many employees
greater work–life balance.
While this idea may not fully resolve
every concern regarding just-in-time
scheduling, it could allow more flexibility
for many workers. In the end, scheduling
issues are best resolved industry by indus-
try. Allowing various sectors of the econo-
my to experiment with such a model would
do the most to help both workers and
businesses, by allowing them to find the
optimal solutions for their circumstances.
***
Americans’ priorities in the workplace
are changing. What is needed in response
is a pro-worker labor agenda that avoids
the far-left economic policies that most
labor unions—and the political Left writ
large—endorse. By embracing an agenda
of worker flexibility, conservatives can
empower individual workers and entre-
preneurial businesses without having to
abandon their traditional deregulatory,
market-based instincts.
This article was adapted from the winter issue
of National Affairs.
0324_articles_pages24_25.indd 25
ARTICLES
Natalism Is
Not Enough
Raising the birth rate will
require cultural change
BY PATRICK T. BROWN
The world’s richest man is also the world’s
leading proponent of natalism.
“Having children is saving the world,”
Elon Musk posted on X, the site he now
owns. He’s posted a periodic stream of
warnings about sub-replacement-rate
fertility levels and declining birth rates
around the globe. The Tesla mogul can’t
be accused of not taking his advice to
heart, having fathered at least eleven
children with three women. “Doing my
best to help the underpopulation crisis,”
he noted drolly. “A collapsing birth rate
is the biggest danger civilization faces
by far.”
Musk isn’t alone in his crusade.
­N atalism, as a movement, boasts an
eclectic range of backers in Silicon Val-
ley and at D.C. think tanks, and an espe-
cially high-profile champion in Hungary’s
­Viktor Orbán.
We’ve suffered through enough years
of “population bomb” propaganda. De-
cades of Malthusian warnings about pop-
ulation growth and declining resources
have failed to play out, and technological
progress belies the common suggestion
that a sustainable world requires fewer
people. A growing focus on the perils of
a depopulating world, or on what it says
that Western society seems increasingly
unwilling to reproduce itself, is welcome.
NATIONAL REVIEW / MARCH 2024
The natalists hear alarm bells that
­ aven’t yet sounded audibly for the main-
h
stream. In polls, concerns over falling
birth rates don’t rank very highly for vot-
ers, despite the additional stress that low-
er rates will put on our military readiness,
economic growth, and social safety nets.
The Pew Research Center even finds that
one-quarter of Americans say declining
fertility rates will have a positive impact
on America’s future—a nonsensical, anti-
human stance.
But the natalist movement, while
directionally correct, offers a distorted
vision of a healthy society. In their single-­
minded focus on raising birth rates, its
leading proponents misunderstand the
nature of the problem and offer solu-
tions that may be counterproductive to
their aims.
Anyone concerned about low fertility
needs to be concerned, first and foremost,
about the decline of marriage—not just be-
cause it is the social institution most likely
to lead to the creation of new children, but
because it is the one that provides those
children the best shot at success. Techno-
logical advancements sold as solutions to
our declining birth rate, such as broader
access to assisted-­reproduction tech-
niques, may amplify rather than resolve
cultural shifts away from family. To be suc-
cessful, natalism must focus on making it
easier to marry, bear, and raise children
and balance professional and financial sta-
bility with life at home.
25
1/24/2024 12:53:23 PM
 Some critics have opposed natalist
policies on practical grounds, arguing
that even if low birth rates are a concern,
there’s little evidence that governments
can do anything about it. That objection
has merit but is often overstated. There’s
evidence to suggest that direct cash trans-
fers to parents and child-care subsidies
can nudge birth rates upward, albeit at a
high cost to taxpayers. Hungary, the post-
er child for aggressive natalist policies,
has managed to arrest the nation’s plunge
in fertility but has yet to approach the
level necessary to prevent its population
from decreasing.
What the debate over tax incentives
largely overlooks is that nations can’t buy
their way out of a cultural shift. As econ-
omists Melissa Kearney, Phillip Levine,
and Luke Pardue wrote in a 2022 paper,
“the key explanation for the post-2007
sustained decline in U.S. birth rates is not
about some changing policy or cost factor,
but rather shifting priorities across cohorts
of young adults.” Having a child is costly,
but money alone doesn’t explain why fewer
young adults are having children.
We can see this priority shift in the
national data. In the wake of the Great
Recession in 2008, birth rates fell, just as
economic theory would predict—when
incomes go down, would-be parents are
less likely to procreate. But, breaking
with the prior pattern, fertility did not re-
bound as the economy recovered. In 2013,
­Jonathan V. Last wrote What to E ­ xpect
When No One’s Expecting, an under­
appreciated masterwork in identifying the
trends that matter and projecting them.
The following year, Jessica Grose, then
with Slate, called 2014 “the year having
kids became a frivolous luxury.” Even be-
fore the Covid-19 pandemic reached our
shores, with a thriving economy deliver-
ing sizeable wage growth to workers in the
bottom half of the income distribution,
fertility rates continued to fall.
The birth dearth is, in some sense, a
monkey’s-paw victory for conservatives
who have lamented the rise in single par-
enthood. Among unmarried women age
1544, the birth rate fell from 51.8 per 1,000
in 2007 to 37.8 last year. But that is not
being matched by more women getting
married or more births within marriage.
26 NATIONALREVIEW.COM
0324_articles_final.indd 26
If you’re concerned
about declining fertility,
you must be concerned
about declining
marriage.
All this coincides with a drop in the
number of marriages and the coinciding
falloff of religious practice—the “shift-
ing priorities” that Kearney, Levine, and
Pardue write about. As the Johns Hopkins
sociologist Andrew Cherlin noted a de-
cade ago, marriage has increasingly be-
come a “capstone” on successful young
adulthood rather than a course on which
young adults embark together. That cul-
tural shift builds on long-running legal
and economic changes that have made
marriage a greater financial risk for
working-class individuals who can’t be
certain their spouse won’t walk out on
them. Some 42 percent of women age 15–
44 were married in the year 2007; in just
15 years, that share dropped to 37 per-
cent. In other words, if marriage rates had
stayed at their 2007 levels, wedding bells
would have rung an additional 3.1 million
times over the past decade and a half.
That cultural shift is seen in people’s
expectations. Fewer young people now
anticipate getting married and having
children. According to the National Cen-
ter for Family & Marriage Research, the
share of teen boys who said that having
a good marriage and family life was “im-
portant” or “extremely important” hov-
ered around 75 percent up until about
a decade ago. Since then, it’s declined
sharply, reaching 57 percent in 2021. Teen
girls show a similar trend, falling from
a higher level. Among adults, about one
in four tell the Pew Research Center that
having children is “extremely” or “very”
important to a fulfilling life.
Part of this is driven by a decline in re-
ligious observance. In 2004, 40 percent of
young adults (age 22–39) told the General
Social Survey that they attended church
“less than once a year.” In 2021, the num-
ber was almost two-thirds. Religious
adults are much more likely to marry than
unaffiliated ones.
Even secular natalists should be con-
cerned about the empty pews, because
marriage remains a very strong predictor
of fertility. Among married women, fertil-
ity rates have remained largely stable over
the past two or three decades—the number
of births per 1,000 married women (age 15–
44) was 83.6 in 2021, lower than in recent
years but not historically low. If Americans
were getting married at the rates of prior
generations, it would make the decline in
the overall birth rate less steep.
A back-of-the-envelope calculation
helps us see what kind of impact that
would have had. Imagine if everything else
had stayed the same—the number of wom-
en in their reproductive prime, the fertility
rates of married and unmarried women,
the economic picture—but instead of con-
tinuing their downward slide, marriage
rates had stayed at the 2007 level. In this
admittedly simplified scenario, the stork
would have brought 1.6 million more ba-
bies to our shores over the past decade and
a half. This is because freezing the decline
in the marriage rate among young adults
at the 2007 level would have led to 3.2 mil-
lion more babies born to married parents
and nearly 1.6 million fewer born to single
parents. Additionally, two-thirds of these
hypothetical children would have been
born to two-parent households (up from
about six in ten in the real world).
Again, this is a simplified counter-
factual, but it illustrates a simple truth:
If you’re concerned about declining fer-
tility, you must be concerned about de-
clining marriage. Reshaping the cultural
narrative about marriage, and making
it financially easier and more cultural-
ly acceptable to marry earlier, will give
the most couples a better chance to have
more children. A natalism that under­
emphasizes marriage will fall short.
Marriage matters not just for the
creation of new babes but also for how
these children are raised. A natalism that
avoids making the normative claim that
the best place for children to grow up
1/23/2024 10:00:58 PM
 is in a household with their two parents
risks an acceleration of trends that are
driving birth rates down. For men, es-
pecially, growing up without a positive
male role model in the house is more
likely to result in criminality, loneliness,
and drug abuse—hardly conducive to
forming meaningful relationships with
would-be partners. A narrowcast natal-
ism has nothing to say about the neces-
sary role of men.
If good men are hard to find, per-
haps technology can step in. Many pro-
gressives, such as those who formed the
congressional “Family Building Caucus,”
push for expanded subsidization of as-
sisted reproduction for single adults. The
goal of many activists is to “deconstruct
the family” and decouple procreation
from marriage once and for all. As report-
ed in the New Yorker in 2019, some schol-
ars are pushing to legally define “social
infertility,” the idea that single adults or
same-sex couples are unable to reproduce
because of social factors. As with much
progressive doublespeak, this isn’t, strict-
ly speaking, infertility at all—it’s biology.
Individuals and same-sex couples cannot
produce a new life. “Social infertility”
implies that parenthood is an individual
right to be guaranteed by the state rather
than a natural occurrence.
The progressive Left’s embrace of as-
sisted reproduction has been met by some
on the natalist Right. (Not all prominent
natalist-inclined figures fall victim to
this trap—Italian prime minister ­Giorgia
­Meloni, for instance, has explicitly sought
to increase Italy’s birth rate while uphold-
ing her country’s traditional ban on most
technologically assisted reproduction.)
Many who pursue higher birth rates
have embraced gestational surrogacy
and dream of advances such as artificial
wombs. Silicon Valley money has gone
into new start-ups that purport to offer
would-be parents pursuing in vitro fer-
tilization the ability to select embryos for
probable intelligence and other desirable
traits via polygenic screening.
The result of a full-throated embrace of
unregulated assisted-reproduction tech-
nology would confirm the transformation
of the creation of human existence into a
consumer good for sale like anything else
0324_articles_final.indd 27
The best prescription
for our nation’s
declining birth rate
remains one that the
government cannot
easily write.
in the marketplace. Egg-freezing and oth-
er technologies are not only expensive but
can also give some women a false sense of
security despite uncertain odds of success,
as Yale anthropologist Marcia C. Inhorn
explores in her recent book ­Motherhood
on Ice: The Mating Gap and Why Women
Freeze Their Eggs. Relying on technolo-
gy to solve the problems of delayed mar-
riage or un­marriageable men won’t solve
the underlying problems pushing fertility
downwards—and could make it worse, by
leaving unaltered the fundamental trajec-
tory of a career model that prizes delayed
fertility.
It could also reduce political support
for actually pro-family policies such as paid
leave or a larger child tax credit. If having
a child were purely a matter of individual
consumption rather than a natural out-
growth of a couple’s commitment, why
should the state feel obligated to take on
any of an individual’s freely chosen respon-
sibilities? Shouldn’t prospective parents
wait until they are ready to educate and
clothe their young? Why shouldn’t our tax
code treat parenthood like any other con-
sumer behavior, such as buying a yacht?
This has ramifications for policy-­
makers. Requiring that insurers provide
individuals access to assisted reproduc-
tion, as some states already do, encour-
ages the idea that parenthood should be
a matter of pure individual consumer
choice. States could improve their pol-
icies by restricting fertility-coverage
mandates to married couples. A far better
agenda would include research money
to study the underlying causes of infer-
tility and incentivizing companies to be
NATIONAL REVIEW / MARCH 2024
more accommodating of young parents
through flexible work policies, on-site
child care, and paid parental leave. And
it would include a focus on making fam-
ily life more affordable—freeing up the
housing market, allowing meaningful
competition in health care, and passing
tax and fiscal policy that recognizes the
cost that parents bear in raising the next
generation. Laws that effectively require
helicopter parenting, like those that lead
to parents being arrested for letting their
children walk home from school, should
be repealed. Rejiggering the tax code to
smooth or eliminate marriage penalties,
which effectively subsidize cohabitation,
should be a priority. Natalists are not mis-
taken to emphasize these things.
Nor are they wrong to emphasize the
power of culture. Pundits, religious lead-
ers, colleges, and even electric-car mo-
guls should talk about making it easier
to have kids and making it possible for
couples to marry at younger ages. These
efforts must focus on making the decision
to have children feel less like an individ-
ual burden and more a communitarian
agreement to support families.
A world in which more families are
having children is one in which more par-
ents need time away from the demands
of the market economy—necessitating a
form of social conservatism that sees the
value of parenthood to be in tension with,
and sometimes outweighing, the pursuit
of economic growth. A world where it is
common for moms to step back from the
labor force after they give birth, and flex
back in as their children age, would be
more pro-natal and more socially con-
servative. Progressives committed to
unencumbered autonomy, as well as the
green-eyeshade types who see rising GDP
and higher wages as the cure to all social
ills, will have to make their peace with it.
A successful natalism will necessitate
a form of social conservatism that recog-
nizes that the institution of the family has
claims on society for which the state can
lay the preconditions. The best prescrip-
tion for our nation’s declining birth rate
remains one that the government cannot
easily write—go to church, walk down
the aisle, and get to work addressing the
under­population crisis.
27
1/23/2024 10:00:58 PM
 28 NATIONALREVIEW.COM

0324_features_final.indd 28 1/23/2024 10:31:19 PM

 The truth dies with it
by Sebastian Junger

It’s hard to know what to make of the internation-

al press corps. Overwhelmingly white and college-­
educated, most have presumably ignored professional
opportunities that pay orders of magnitude more mon-
ey than journalism—and generally don’t get them
killed. If you’re smart enough to tease the truth out of
the confusion, nuance, and outright propaganda of
most war zones—and most countries—you’re probably
smart enough to do pretty well on Wall Street. Or in the
restaurant business. Or flipping houses in Florida. And
yet, every year, idealistic and ambitious young people
troop off to make almost no money reporting on the
world’s tragedies and failures. I hardly have a friend in
the business who hasn’t been shot, kidnapped, blown
up, detained, or threatened with execution. And yet
they persist. I’ve lost one close friend and numerous
acquaintances to war.
If you ask my fellow journalists why they do it,
many will resort to the tired piety that someone must
bear witness to the world’s horrors, but let’s have some
honesty here. Journalism is one of the most important
ROMAN GENN

jobs in a democracy, and my involvement in the profes-

sion is a source of profound pride, but we don’t need
to pretend selflessness to have merit. No other

NATIONAL REVIEW / MARCH 2024 29

0324_features_final.indd 29 1/23/2024 10:31:20 PM

 A journalist is a person who is willing to report
the truth regardless of consequences to herself
or others. A journalist is a person who is focused
on reality rather than
profession—lawyer, logger, preschool teacher—bothers
to, so why should we? Journalists are some of the most
ego-driven people I know, as well as some of the most
principled, and they’re willing to risk their lives on both
counts. Their supposed addiction to adrenaline can be
thought of more accurately as an addiction to having a
life of great meaning and consequence. What’s addictive
is feeling different from everyone else, cut from a differ-
ent cloth. Which indeed many of them are.
I’d now like to take a moment to get a semantic issue
out of the way. Many people will tell you—or scream at
you—that objectivity is a myth and journalists are just
partisan hacks trying to advance their own agenda.
Fair enough—some are. But such people aren’t actually
journalists; they’re something else. News hosts who put
on enormous amounts of make-up to make enormous
amounts of money inflicting damage on our nation by
lying about reality are (thankfully) outside the scope of
this article. Now that that’s out of the way we can state
that a journalist is a person who is willing to destroy his
own opinions with facts. A journalist is a person who is
willing to report the truth regardless of consequences to
herself or others. A journalist is a person who is focused
on reality rather than outcome.
Truth-tellers are everywhere in our society because
we rely on them to survive. Trial judges, weather fore-
casters, safety inspectors, structural engineers, and
radio­logists all provide unvarnished opinions so that we
can lead safer, better lives, and the press is no different.
The liberal press was scathing about President Biden’s
pullout from Kabul even though he was “their” presi-
dent and dangerously wounded by their work. Likewise,
Megyn Kelly and Chris Wallace, then of Fox News, asked
uncomfortable questions and delivered unwelcomed
facts despite the anger they risked inciting in their con-
servative audience. When Fox News Decision Desk direc-
tor Arnon Mishkin shocked viewers and mortified Fox
30 NATIONALREVIEW.COM
0324_features_final.indd 30
executives by calling Arizona for Joe Biden during the 2020 election,
he was acting as any oncologist would while looking at a patient’s X-ray:
“I’m sorry, ma’am, but you have cancer. Telling you otherwise would be
a disservice to both you and my profession.”
One can tell the relative objectivity of a news organization (“in-
tegrity” may be a better word) by its willingness to report stories
that are unflattering—or even devastating—to its preferred candi-
date. Even a cursory examination of cable-news websites reveals who
ranks where in this regard. Why a society would need such radical
truth-­telling should be obvious, but the following anecdote from Af-
ghanistan makes the point nicely. I first went to Afghanistan in the
summer of 1996, when I saw part of the Taliban’s final conquest of the
country. After America’s entry into the war in 2001, I rushed back to
document the liberation of Kabul and the fall of the Taliban regime.
I was a “believer,” in a sense: I believed that after 9/11, America had a
legal and moral right to go after al-Qaeda, and that we could do a lot
of good for this poor, beautiful country that I had fallen in love with.
My belief in the mission, however, did not prevent me from calling
out American missteps and failures. I was a journalist, after all—not a
Pentagon press spokesman.
And then we invaded Iraq. Although I was drawn to the sheer mag-
nitude and drama of the war, I didn’t cover it because I was personally
so against our decision to invade that I didn’t think I could be objective.
I still had high hopes for Afghanistan, but my optimism didn’t survive
long. I spent a year embedded with a platoon from the 173rd Airborne
in the infamous Korengal Valley, and our outpost was attacked almost
daily. After one particularly fierce firefight, a special operator shook
his head and said, “We’re never going to win this war until we admit
we’re losing it.”
What he said shocked me: It was 2007, and questioning the war was
still considered unpatriotic heresy. If you didn’t believe America was
right and honorable in all things and would win any war it fought, you
were basically siding with the terrorists. And yet here was a highly ex-
perienced soldier questioning exactly that. And that is the proper role
of the press: to provide the kind of honest and brutal assessment that
generals, politicians, contractors, and second lieutenants can’t be-
cause they’ll lose their jobs. The simple truth is that if you’re against the
1/23/2024 10:31:20 PM
 working press, you’re against protecting American soldiers from faulty
weapons and bad decisions. No military or government will publicly ex-
amine itself for failures. Only the press—and internal whistleblowers—­
can do that.
Journalism is important because reality is important, and reality is
something that many generals and politicians have a complicated rela-
tionship with. The powerful do not willingly embarrass themselves, so
the press must do it for them. In 2004, as the Iraq War started to deviate
from the quick and easy success foreseen by President George W. Bush,
journalist Ron Suskind interviewed a senior administration official (ru-
mored to be Karl Rove) for the New York Times. Suskind wanted to know
why the Bush administration was refusing to acknowledge the setbacks
in Iraq, but the official just dismissed journalists as being stuck in the
“reality-based community.” “We’re an empire now,” he supposedly said,
“and when we act, we create our own reality.”
Watching reality refuse to conform to someone’s ideology would be
more gratifying if it didn’t involve over 7,000 dead American soldiers
and an estimated 350,000 dead Iraqis. (Most Iraqi civilians were killed
by insurgents, but the invasion unleashed a level of violence that U.S.
forces could not counter.) It fell to the press to inform the American
public about all this because the Bush administration could not be trust-
ed to do so, and the American public deserved to know every detail. It
was their tax dollars paying for it, after all; their sons and daughters
dying for it.
Democrats are just as bad as Republicans when it comes to covering
up failures; just listen to Biden officials on the disastrous Afghan with-
drawal. Journalists investigate such things not because they are for
or against a specific policy—though they might be—but because they
are generally against dishonesty and abuse of the public trust. That is
the very point of their existence, the entire rationale for what they do.
When journalists cite biology to refute the idea that gender difference
is merely a social construct, they are not standing up for cisgendered
Americans but rather for the idea that objective truth matters and will
come after us one day if we ignore it for too long. The same can be said
about the Mexican-border crisis, the national debt, climate change,
election denial, and anything else that threatens this great nation. Some
are conservative issues, some are liberal ones, but all deserve a fair and
unbiased accounting.
For better or ill, the press is the only place to get such a thing. Being
human, journalists have lied, plagiarized, distorted, and made mistakes,
just like the people they investigate, but their sins are generally inves-
tigated by the press itself. If there were a more reliable alternative to
the press, I would tell you to throw your arms around it and never let
go, but there isn’t. Small-town newspapers are particularly important
for public accountability, but they are dying out at an alarming rate,
and as they go, a certain ground truth about the American experience
goes with it. In fact, a Boston-based nonprofit called the GroundTruth
Project is dedicated to preserving our nation’s local press and seeding
“news deserts” with reporters and photographers.
“The crisis in local reporting has become a crisis for our democracy,”
says founder Charles M. Sennott. “In news deserts, three things occur:
Voter participation plummets, polarization surges, and bond ratings
drop as banks do not want to invest in communities where no one is
watching the store. And into the barren terrain, toxic misinformation
0324_features_final.indd 31
seeps into the soil and further divides an increasingly
uninformed population.”
Much of the blame can be laid on the internet, which
radically changed the economics of news reporting by
using algorithms to simply confirm peoples’ views and
biases rather than challenge them. This shift amounts
to a kind of intellectual death spiral in which true be-
lievers on both sides insist on self-serving opinions that
have no basis in fact and allow for no legitimacy on the
opposing side.
Journalists are easy to vilify in such a hyper-partisan
environment because they keep uncovering problematic
facts, but an America without any press at all is hard to
imagine. Or rather, it’s easy to imagine, but terrifying.
Think how much worse this tragedy would have turned
out without a functioning press: By 1967, American sol-
diers in Vietnam had been struggling for years with M16
rifles that jammed constantly and were utterly unreliable
in combat. The M16 was a new design, based on the civil-
ian AR15, and both the rifle and the new, smaller-­caliber
ammunition it used were ill suited to jungle combat.
Soviet-­made AK-47s, on the other hand, worked in al-
most any conditions and gave Vietcong fighters a signif-
icant firepower advantage over American soldiers. Over
and over, American soldiers were found dead next to
jammed rifles, often with the cleaning rod shoved down
the barrel in a desperate attempt to clear a shell casing
from the chamber. In some units, 30 or 40 percent of
rifles jammed within a few minutes.
According to C. J. Chivers, author of The Gun, Ameri-
can soldiers eventually took to carrying AK-47s taken off
dead Vietcong as backup guns. One Marine preferred to
go into combat with just a grenade launcher and a .38
caliber revolver that he bought off a man who was at the
end of his tour. A Marine commander told his men to fix
bayonets before firefights so that at least they could stab
the enemy. Before getting overrun and wiped out, one
unit had time to radio, “Out of grenades, all weapons
jammed.” The men’s bodies were found the next day,
the stocks of their guns smashed from having been used
as clubs.
Both the U.S. military and the manufacturer, Colt,
knew about the gun’s problems but refused to fix them
or even acknowledge the issue. “MACV told all infor-
mation officers . . . that the M16 was not a topic for dis-
cussion,” an information officer from the 25th Infantry
Division later testified. (“MACV” stands for “Military
Assistance Command, Vietnam.”) “Newsmen were not
to question soldiers about the weapon. No stories about
the rifle jamming or malfunctioning were to be writ-
ten. . . . At the same time the Army launched an
NATIONAL REVIEW / MARCH 2024 31
1/23/2024 10:31:20 PM
 all-out propaganda campaign to make GIs in Vietnam
more confident in the weapon they basically mistrusted.”
Finally, a young Marine lieutenant named Mike
­C hervenak borrowed a chaplain’s typewriter and,
along with his company commander, wrote a polite but
firm letter detailing the M16’s flaws. He sent one copy
of the letter to the Barnesboro Star in his hometown of
­Barnesboro, Pa., and another to the Washington Post.
A third copy went to Senator Robert F. Kennedy, and a
final letter went to Richard Ichord of the House Armed
Services Committee. Representative Ichord quickly con-
vened a subcommittee to investigate the problem, but
the military stonewalled him so shamelessly that it was
able to avoid any accountability whatsoever.
And then the Washington Post published Cherve-
nak’s letter. The Marine Corps was furious, launching
an immediate investigation into Chervenak himself, but
the ensuing uproar eventually forced Colt to fix the prob-
lems. By then, though, scores of American soldiers were
dead because of weapon malfunctions. The Washington
Post and one very brave lieutenant had accomplished
what the U.S. Congress could not: accountability at the
highest levels of the U.S. military.
I have no idea whether my own work has had such
a stark and immediate impact on my country—I doubt
it. Information moves in strange ways, though, and the
truth has a quiet ability to bear fruit many years later.
When I was 22, I drove around the country with my best
friend, John, in an old Subaru station wagon. I wanted
to be a journalist but had no idea how to go about that,
so I just wrote down anything that seemed significant.
Driving south from Miami one night, we stopped in Big
Pine Key to get coffee at a Circle K, and I went to use
the men’s room in back. The walls were covered with AFTERMATH OF THE OCTOBER 7 ATTACKS,
exceedingly ugly anti-immigrant graffiti—mostly di- KIBBUTZ BE’ERI, 2023

rected against Cubans—but a single anonymous re-

sponse caught my eye. I asked the cashier for a pen and
piece of paper and went back to write it down. “Thank
God the rest of the people in this country are warm and
caring and welcomed me in ’62,” the man had written.
“I fought in Vietnam for you to say that. I love you like Hope amid
a brother.”
The very worst things about America were on that
men’s-room wall, and the very best. The proper work
The Horror
of journalism is to remind us of both. That Cuban man
may still be out there somewhere, a decade older than
From Israel, stories
I am and maybe not even remembering that he stopped of survival and love
at a Circle K in Big Pine Key, Fla., in the mid 1980s and
wrote what he did on that bathroom wall. But a young by Michael M. Rosen & Danya Rosen
man who wanted to be a journalist thought it was im-
portant enough to copy onto a piece of paper that he
kept track of for the next 40 years. Maybe their work
is not done yet, those 34 words; maybe they have only
just now begun showing this country how truly great
we can be.

32 NATIONALREVIEW.COM

0324_features_final.indd 32 1/23/2024 10:31:20 PM

 “I want to dedicate this next song,” the Israeli pop megastar Eden Ben
Zaken is telling a crowd of hundreds of survivors of Hamas’s barbaric
attack, “to the mothers among you, the true heroes.” Ben Zaken then
caps off her unique concert—presented, gratis, on the fifth night of
Hanukkah in Eilat, a city to which thousands of Israelis living on the
border of Gaza have been evacuated—with her power ballad “Chayim
Sheli,” a term of endearment that means “my life.”
The song and its dedication represent both the tragedy and the
resilience of Israeli society in the wake of the murderous October 7
invasion: an assault on humanity, a reaction of heroism, a response of
determination, and a reaffirmation of life.
On that accursed day, thousands of terrorists punctured the border
PHOTOS COURTESY OF THE AUTHORS
wall and rampaged through kibbutzim, towns, and small cities, raping,
pillaging, murdering, decapitating, and mutilating more than 1,200
Israelis—the overwhelming majority of them women, children, and the
elderly—wounding thousands, and abducting more than 240. It was the
most vicious attack on Jews since the Holocaust.
We have spent the past months visiting and speaking with dozens
of Israelis directly affected by Hamas’s onslaught, witnessing firsthand
0324_features_final.indd 33
the physical remains of the terrorists’ depredations, and
recording the testimonies of the survivors, the heroes,
the hostages, their families, and those determined to re-
build their homes, their communities, and their country
bigger, stronger, and better than before. Rather than in-
terview government or military officials, we met with or-
dinary Israelis experiencing extraordinary events. Hope
springs eternal, especially in a country whose national
anthem translates to “The Hope.” Even in the wake of the
most brutal attack in Israel’s history, its people, against
all odds, remain optimistic. We are humbled to present
their stories.
The Heroes
It is difficult to describe the devastation suffered by
­K ibbutz Be’eri, a community of 1,150 inhabitants,
where, on October 7, nearly 100 Israelis perished, 29
were abducted, and 200 (out of a total of 380) homes
were destroyed. Terrorists penetrated the gates of
NATIONAL REVIEW / MARCH 2024 33
1/23/2024 10:31:21 PM
 the kibbutz, which sits two miles outside of Gaza, and
systematically breached home after home, butchering
residents in their sleep. When some kibbutzniks sought
shelter in their reinforced safe rooms, the assailants
rolled tires into their homes, ignited their gas stoves, set
their houses ablaze, and smoked them out, forcing the
suffocating residents to open their safe-room windows,
into which the terrorists tossed grenades. Some corpses
were burnt so badly that the ashes had to be sent to lab-
oratories abroad for DNA identification.
During our visit, exactly 75 days after the attack, the
scents were as powerful as the sights. We smelled burnt
rubber, wood, and ash, and the blackened remains of
houses, golf carts, and tricycles left little to the imag-
ination. If the burning—of homes, of cars, of people—­
represented a Holocaust in miniature, then Be’eri in its
current state resembled nothing so much as a living
­Holocaust memorial.
Yet despite the widespread destruction, Be’eri and
other communities like it also witnessed astounding acts
of heroism by everyday Israelis thrust into the arena. Or
Yellin is one of them, but he was reluctant to discuss his
actions, or the 14 hours he spent protecting others in his
safe room. Instead, he was eager to focus on the stories
of those he helped save. “This is [an IDF] cannon, don’t
worry,” he said, as he led us on a tour of the extensive
damage, punctuated as it was by Israeli artillery fired
from just outside the kibbutz at Hamas strongholds just
a few miles away. “My nervous system has collapsed, so I
don’t feel anything.”
Just a few minutes away from Be’eri sits Kibbutz Alu-
mim, where Ayal Young, 37 and a father of four, demon-
strated incredible heroism. During the early hours of the
morning, after leaving his wife and kids in the safe room,
Ayal and fellow members of the kibbutz’s readiness
squad heard gunshots near the fields. They knew they
were too late when they came upon the bodies of foreign
agricultural workers, who had been on their morning
break. “When we arrived at the scene, to our dismay we
found mostly casualties and a few injured,” Ayal told us.
“We did what we could to save the injured workers and
realized there were more to come.”
The group’s members patrolled the kibbutz and
steeled themselves for further incursions. “We heard
a huge blast coming from the surrounding fence and
spotted terrorists flooding into the kibbutz,” Ayal said.
“We decided to shoot in their direction to lure them away
from the residents and toward us.” Ayal and his partner
then came face-to-face with a terrorist who shot at them,
wounding his partner in the leg and grazing Ayal’s face.
Ayal shot and killed the attacker, not noticing a second
gunman behind him. “We didn’t get a chance to clear the
area, and suddenly I felt a very sharp pain in my back,”
Ayal recalled. “I fell, not able to move my body, barely
able to breathe.” When he was later taken to the hospital,
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0324_features_final.indd 34
doctors discovered he had been shot four times: twice in the back, once
in the lungs, and once in the face. Ayal has been in intensive rehab since
the injury.
When we spoke to him, Ayal deflected the praise cast in his direction.
“The true heroes,” he insisted to us, “are the families who remained
quietly in their safe rooms.” He singled out his wife, Reut, who kept
their four children safe, fed, and undetected for 26 hours. Some families
spent hours physically holding shut their safe-room doors, which could
not lock from the inside, while the terrorists on the other side sought
to pry them open.
We also spoke with Gal (he asked us not to use his last name), 21, who
was enjoying himself at the Nova Desert Music Festival when Hamas
descended upon them. “We kept dancing even after the rockets were
fired,” he told us, “until we heard gunshots.” Gal, his brother, and his
friend leapt into their car and came to a fork in the road. “Everyone who
turned left died,” he recalled. “Some of us who turned right survived.”
Their car escaped only because Gal pushed the driver’s head down to
avoid being hit by the intense cross fire. “With my dad on the phone,”
he said, “I navigated us out of the killing zone.”
The Survivors
Carmel Be’eri, 18, survived the October 7 massacre inside her safe room
in Kibbutz Alumim only through what she sees as divine intervention. “It
was a miracle,” the 18-year-old student told us. “The terrorists attacked
the ‘easier’ targets first, so by the time they got to us, our kibbutz’s read-
iness squad was prepared for them.” The squad fought off the rampaging
terrorists valiantly. She would later learn that her father was fighting
alongside Ayal Young, her neighbor.
Carmel considers herself fortunate that she was left physically un-
scathed. “I was literally spared from death,” she said. “We had an inter-
net problem and lost connectivity for about six or seven hours, which
caused panic. Only later, when I saw photos of the [other] kibbutzim, did
I appreciate how much worse it could have been at Alumim.”
Along with her family, Carmel was evacuated to a hotel in Netanya,
about 100 miles north. “People on the streets welcomed us in, waving
Israeli flags,” she recalled. Life as an evacuee has been hard. “In the
beginning it was a huge crisis,” she said. “The hotel was packed with
people, there was always noise.”
Ayal Young agreed, noting that while he and his family will be eter-
nally grateful for the hospitality they’ve received, they have “virtually
no privacy, or sense of family, living in a hotel, with four children shar-
ing a tiny room.” To provide some sense of routine and structure, they’ve
enrolled their children in a local school and have kept them busy with
extracurricular activities.
While things have settled down, Carmel is anxious—in both senses
of the term—to return home. “I really hope we go back,” she insisted. “I
want to.” But her parents are wary. “They won’t go back until they see
how the war ends, to make sure it’s really over,” she said.
Jonathan Dekel-Chen, 60, a resident of Kibbutz Nir Oz, whose son,
Sagui, was taken hostage on October 7 after courageously defending
his community from hundreds of invading terrorists, sounded a similar
note of caution. “It strains the imagination,” he told us, “that anyone
who experienced [the attack] would agree to go live there.”
Herein lies the big question: Will the kibbutzim ringing the border
with Gaza—the area known as the Otef Azza (the Gaza envelope)—return
1/23/2024 10:31:21 PM

A PIANO FOR ALON OHEL, A CAPTIVE IN GAZA,
AND A TABLE SET FOR ALL THE MISSING ISRAELI
HOSTAGES, IN HOSTAGES SQUARE, TEL AVIV
0324_features_final.indd 35
in all their glory? The stakes are high: Jonathan
characterized the region as “Israel’s breadbasket,”
and the truth of his statement was evident during
our time in the south, where verdant fields and or-
chards line every road. If residents cannot safely
and confidently return home, he said, the entire
country will suffer.
“There’s a future for the Otef,” Carmel stated
plainly. “It’s my home, and home to some of the
most beautiful sunsets in Israel.” When asked what
she sees as the fate of the afflicted kibbutzim, she
gives a hopeful response: “After the war, the rest
of the country will realize just how important the
Otef is for Israel, and I can’t wait to see it grow even
bigger and grander than before.”
Ayal Young also was warily optimistic. “Our as-
piration is to return home,” he said. “But it depends
on when and how the war finishes. If Hamas re-
mains on the other side of the fence, we won’t have
accomplished anything.” But he too is hopeful that
Alumim will be rebuilt even larger and stronger.
We asked Carmel what gives her strength. “My
family,” she said. “Knowing that they’re always by
my side grounds me.” Likewise, Ayal pointed to his
wife and children as his inspiration, proclaiming
“What really bolsters us is Israel’s spirit of unity.”
In the first few weeks after the war broke out,
one of us (Danya) helped establish and taught at
a makeshift school for children from the stricken
southern city of Sderot whose families had been
evacuated to Jerusalem. At first, the kids, unsur-
prisingly, were still in shock and reluctant to open
up to any of the staff. “I want to go home!” we over-
heard a young girl exclaim one day. “You don’t have
a home,” her friend responded.
But once Danya and her colleagues created a
safe space and structure for the kids, they were
gradually able to share their feelings. One day, a
seven-year-old, Noam, was peering out of a class-
room window at passing policemen on horseback.
After being asked why he was so interested in the
horses, he answered, “My father rides horses too.
He’s in Yamam”—an elite counterterrorist unit—
“and one day I want to serve there too.” He didn’t
know where his dad was at that moment: “I’m not
sure, but I hope he comes home soon.”
The Returnees
“Why do I get to be here, and they don’t?” Ofir
­Engel, 17, asked us in Kibbutz Be’eri. “They all have
to come back home now.” Ofir had returned for the
first time to the house from which Hamas terrorists
kidnapped him on October 7.
“Two men with guns, one with an RPG,” Ofir
recalled. “First thing, they shoot the door.
NATIONAL REVIEW / MARCH 2024 35
1/23/2024 10:31:22 PM
 Then they took me into a black car. The last thing I re-
member is being carried away and my girlfriend say[ing],
‘I love you.’ ” His weeks in captivity were worse than a
nightmare. “They abused us mentally,” he said. “They
told us that our families don’t want us to come back and
that we are going to stay in Gaza for more than a year.”
Unlikely as it may seem, Ofir is one of the lucky ones.
He came home in November as part of a deal in which
Israel returned hundreds of Palestinians, including con-
victed terrorists, in exchange for 105 women and chil-
dren. The Associated Press reported that at least ten of
the returned female hostages had suffered sexual abuse.
Hamas circulated videos that showed everyday Gazans
jeering at, beating, and throwing rocks at the captive
children, women, and elderly.
Clara Marman and her sister, Gabriela Leimberg,
and Gabriela’s daughter Mia, all dual nationals of Israel
and Argentina, endured an experience similar to Ofir’s.
Clara and Gabriela, their brother Fernando, Mia, and
Clara’s partner, Louis Har, were taken from Kibbutz Nir
Yitzchak, less than two miles from the Gaza border, after
sheltering in their safe room all morning. Clara’s daugh-
ter, Gefen Sigal Ilan, was in touch with her mother until
she and the other hostages were taken through the fence
surrounding the kibbutz. “Hamas seized them violently
and then used psychological abuse against them,” Gefen
said. “My mother didn’t receive the medication she need-
ed, let alone enough food.”
After weeks in captivity, Clara, Gabriela, and Mia
returned home as part of the November exchange. Gefen
told us that, even in the dark dungeons where they were
kept, the women dreamt of freedom. “While being held
hostage, they sat together and started planning their
future,” she said. “What they were going to do when they
were released, that was what gave them a lot of strength.”
But Fernando and Louis remain in Hamas’s hands.
Gefen has traveled throughout South America to ad-
vocate for them, even meeting with Javier Milei, the
newly elected Argentine president. “My uncle is due to
celebrate his 61st birthday,” Gefen says, “and I refuse to
believe that he won’t be here.”
The Hostages’ Families
“I’m standing here now in these clothes, barefoot,” said
Ella Ben-Ami, 22, clad only in shorts and a T-shirt on
a crisp December morning, “because my dad was kid-
napped from our home, barefoot in his underwear. I
don’t care if I’m cold,” she continued, “because my dad
is colder.”
Ohad and Raz Ben-Ami, Ella’s parents, both 57, were
savagely kidnapped on October 7 and separated in cap-
tivity. Ella escaped her parents’ fate only by sleeping
elsewhere in the kibbutz that night. Her father texted her
that morning while in hiding to tell her he was writing a
will on the computer in his safe room and to provide her
36 NATIONALREVIEW.COM
0324_features_final.indd 36
with the password. Ella didn’t believe him—until she received a final
text, reading “They’re here” and then “Shema Yisrael,” the most central
of Jewish prayers. Raz, blessedly, was returned to Israel in November
as part of the exchange, but Ohad remains in Hamas’s grasp. “My mom
came back from the lowest point in her life, as a hostage in captivity in
Gaza, to be a wife of a hostage in captivity in Gaza,” Ella said.
Nira Sharabi’s husband, Yossi, and brother-in-law, Eli, were also
seized from Be’eri; her daughter, Yuval, is Ofir Engel’s girlfriend.
Eli’s wife and two teenage daughters were slaughtered in front of
him. “One hundred and twenty-nine abductees still in Gaza,” she
said, “and the whole country is a hostage of Hamas.” Kibbutz Be’eri
reported on January 16 that Yossi Sharabi was murdered by Hamas
while in captivity.
A few miles away, in Nir Oz, Sagui Dekel-Chen, 35, an American
citizen, found terrorists roaming on October 7 and leapt into action to
defend his family and community. But after valiantly fighting off Hamas
militants, he was taken captive and remains in Gaza months later; one-
fifth of the kibbutz residents were seized. (Sagui’s mother, who was also
abducted by Hamas, managed to escape miraculously after an Israeli
helicopter shot at the vehicle taking her away.)
Sagui, like many residents of the Otef, had worked for peace and
coexistence between Jews and Arabs. The father of three daughters, in-
cluding one born while he has been in captivity, Sagui “is exactly the son
any father would want to have,” Jonathan, his dad, told us. “The world is
a much better place with him in it, and Palestinian Arabs are better off
with Sagui doing what he’s meant to do in the world.”
Indeed, Jonathan has worked tirelessly since the attack and made
multiple visits to the United States to secure the release of his son and
the other hostages. “I’ve found wall-to-wall support for the fate of the
hostages,” he told us, “having met with nearly 100 elected officials,” from
the most conservative members of Congress to Democratic Socialists.
“For me as an American,” he said, “it’s been affirming that America has
been a light on the hill of justice and liberty.” In November, Jonathan
walked with his wife at the head of a miles-long march in Sarasota, Fla.,
in solidarity with the hostages.
Jonathan said the attack could serve as a jolt to young progressives,
a forceful reminder of “a basic truth” that is “so evident that it can no
longer be avoided or ignored”: “Israel has been faced during its entire
existence with enemies that are committed entirely to killing Jews and
annihilating the state, period.” He’s hopeful that, worldwide, we can
battle “blind hatred, whether it’s racial, ethnic, or national.”
Finally, our cousin Alon Ohel, 22, a promising young pianist, was
seized on October 7 at the Nova Festival. “He hid with many others in
a roadside shelter,” his mother, Idit Rosen Ohel, told us, “until Hamas
began throwing grenades inside.” The terrorists then extracted four
survivors—including another American, Hersh Goldberg-Polin, a family
friend (Israel is a small country indeed), part of whose arm the grenades
had blown off—loaded them onto the back of a Toyota Hilux, and carted
them off into Gaza. They haven’t been heard from since.
“Wherever Alon goes,” Idit related, “he’s like a magnet, raising peo-
ple up.” Before the attack, Alon was beginning to earn acclaim as a
musician and had just returned from a lengthy trip to Southeast Asia.
“When he moves, he moves with music,” Idit said. After the abduc-
tion, his parents placed a piano in the center of the renamed Hostages
Square in Tel Aviv, where families have gathered for support and to raise
1/23/2024 10:31:23 PM
 awareness. Every day, different musicians, from well-known
Israeli artists to well-meaning amateurs, take turns playing
on the piano, on which sits a block-letter sculpture reading
alon—you are not alone.
In general, the families of the hostages have found hope
in one another, striving to envision a happier future. “My
mother has been suffering from a serious illness for 15 years,”
Ella Ben-Ami told us. “Whenever you would ask her how
she’s doing, she would always answer, ‘Everything’s fine.’
Corresponding
Even if she was in pain or had just come out of surgery, ev-
erything was ‘fine.’ I learned optimism from her.” While Raz,
Ella’s mother, still cannot bring herself to return to Be’eri,
she’s improving day by day. Ella draws strength from Ohad
even while he is in captivity. “From my father,” Ella said, “I
from Ukraine
learned to smile and to always be sure to act sensibly. My A talk with Yaroslav Trofimov,
dad inspired a sense of self-confidence, and it completely of the Wall Street Journal
gives me hope.”
Gefen Sigal Ilan also credited her mother, thankfully
freed from captivity, for her resilience, even as Fernando by Jay Nordlinger
and Louis remain in Hamas’s hands. “I think it’s the glass-
half-full ideology that my mother raised me with,” Gefen
said. “What gives me hope is thinking of the hug that I’ll give
them when they return, and the feast we’ll have as a reunited
family at last.”
And Idit Rosen Ohel emphasized the importance of
asking for help and taking ownership. “We think we don’t
have control, but we do,” she said. We may not be able to In the Ukraine war, there has been a great deal of ex-
control our fate or how others treat us, but we can own our cellent reporting. And brave reporting. Many journal-
thoughts and emotions. “I don’t know when Alon’s going to ists have been killed. I think of Vira Hyrych, a Ukrainian
come home, or how he’s going to come home,” she confided. who worked for RFE/RL (that combination of Radio Free
“But I have control over what family, what house he’s going Europe and Radio Liberty). I think of Brent Renaud, an
to come home to, and I can make sure it’s a strong, healthy, American documentary filmmaker. And others.
positive one.” A lot of us have relied on Yaroslav Trofimov, the
chief foreign-affairs correspondent of the Wall Street
­Journal. He is a veteran war correspondent. “I’ve been
doing mostly wars and mayhem since the beginning of
The resilience and hopefulness we observed over the past the century,” he tells me. Trofimov has been in Afghan-
months appears to be reflected in the data, not just the an- istan, Iraq, Lebanon, Georgia, Somalia, etc. Even when
ecdotes. A recent survey conducted by the Israel Democracy he has not been in a war zone, he has witnessed violence.
Institute found that optimism about Israel’s future rose by In 1995, he was ten steps behind Yitzhak Rabin when that
more than ten percentage points immediately after the war Israeli leader was murdered.
began, with 80 percent of respondents praising the army’s Along with his countless dispatches, Trofimov has writ-
execution of the campaign. In addition, 83 percent of those ten several books. Two of them are about the Middle East.
surveyed assessed their fellow Israelis’ level of resilience as The latest, just published, is Our Enemies Will Vanish: The
“quite high” or “very high.” When you’re fighting for your Russian Invasion and Ukraine’s War of Independence.
lives, or for your captive relatives, or for your very way of This war has been different from all the others
life, you have no choice but to be strong. ­Trofimov has covered—different for him personally, that
“We love death like our enemies love life,” Hamas leader is. He was born and raised in Ukraine (or in that part of
Ismail Haniyeh is fond of proclaiming. While this crystalli- the Soviet Union, if you like). He is from Kyiv.
zation of the jihadist philosophy is meant to denigrate the So, as he tells me, “missiles have fallen on the hospital
Israeli mind-set, it actually flatters it. As the heroes, the sur- where I had my childhood exams. And the park where I
vivors, the returned hostages, and their families have shown had my first kiss.” And so on.
the world, we do indeed love life, we affirm it, and we fight He was born in 1969, making him 21 when the S ­ oviet
for it with every fiber of our being, no matter the cost. It’s Union dissolved. His father was a professor of statis-
the only option. tics; his mother was a piano teacher. I ask Trofimov
about identity, one of the great themes of today

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 YAROSLAV TROFIMOV IN RUSKA LOZOVA, KHARKIV REGION, UKRAINE, IN MAY 2022
(and always): How did he feel? Ukrainian, Russian, So-
viet? Some blend of those? He felt Ukrainian, he says.
Like most people in Kyiv, the family spoke Russian
at home. But Trofimov went to an art school. There, the
language was Ukrainian. Teachers and others were de-
termined to preserve Ukrainian culture, and resist Sovi-
etization, or Russification.
Young Trofimov aspired to be a painter. But
journalism—­war correspondence, in particular—it was
to be. Along the way, incidentally, he has acquired a slew
of languages: Polish, English, Hebrew, Arabic, Spanish,
Italian. He is an Italian citizen. He got French early on,
when his parents lived for a few years in Madagascar. The
breadth of Trofimov’s experience is unusual.
He served for a year in the Soviet army—barely being
spared a tour in the Afghan war. He was a spokesman for
the Ukrainian independence movement.
Did he ever think it was possible? The end of the
­Soviet Union, followed by Ukrainian statehood? It was
a dream, he says, and the dream came true. For many
Russians, he continues, it was a nightmare: the end of
their empire. “That’s a trauma they are still dealing
with,” he notes.
He cites the examples of Vladimir Putin and Sergey
Lavrov. (The latter is Russia’s foreign minister.) Putin was
a rising officer in the KGB; Lavrov was a rising diplomat.
They were part of a superpower. Yet, in mid career, when
they were about 40, their world collapsed. Russia was
just another impoverished country (with nukes). This
gave them a deep and furious grievance.
38 NATIONALREVIEW.COM
0324_features_final.indd 38
It’s amazing that Ukraine is still standing, almost two years after
Russia began its full-scale assault. “Miraculous,” says Trofimov. “It’s a
real David-and-Goliath story.”
Putin and his men badly misread Ukraine, Trofimov explains. “They
didn’t think Ukraine was a proper country, with a proper army. They
didn’t think Ukrainians were capable of competent resistance.” But
then, others had their doubts too. “The U.S. government shut down its
embassy in Kyiv and withdrew all personnel.” The Americans offered
only token military help, on the assumption that Ukraine would fall
within days or weeks.
In his book, Trofimov quotes a remark made to him by Volodymyr
Zelensky, the president of Ukraine. Referring to Putin, Zelensky said,
“He opened his mouth like a python and thought that we were just
another bunny. But we’re not a bunny, and it turned out that he can’t
swallow us.”
That said, the Ukrainians are at a critical, terrible juncture: They
are running out of weapons, cut off by the U.S. Congress. This has given
­Goliath the upper hand. “Russia is outgunning Ukraine on the battle-
field,” says Trofimov. “The Russians are firing two, three, five shells for
every shell that the Ukrainians are able to fire. And, in an artillery war,
that’s probably the most important metric.”
What’s more, Ukraine is running out of personnel—of human beings.
For Russia, that’s no problem. They have any number of bodies, expend-
able. The Kremlin “doesn’t care about casualties,” as Trofimov says. He
further says, “Russia has emptied its prisons and sent tens of thousands
of inmates to the front lines.” The upshot: “Ukraine is losing its best, very
often, while Russia is losing its worst.”
MANU BRABO
Both sides are motivated, Trofimov says—Russian soldiers, by fear.
“The Russians follow orders. People are more afraid of the state than of
dying.” And the Ukrainians?
1/23/2024 10:31:23 PM

‘I think people ought to know that
Russia seeks to wipe out Ukraine.
Russian plans for Ukraine haven’t
changed.’
“They have seen what happens when the Russian state takes over.
They have seen Bucha, near Kyiv, where 450 people were slaughtered
by the Russians—pretty much for fun. They have seen what happens to
the cities that the Russians capture, such as Mariupol. So it’s not like they
can stop fighting. The long history of Ukraine suggests that, if Ukraine
surrenders, much worse things will happen, and many more people will
die or suffer.”
In the West, including the United States, a variety of myths about
Ukraine are believed. One of them is that Russian-speakers in the east
of the country want to be ruled by Moscow. Addressing this belief,
­Trofimov is patient. “In Ireland,” he notes, “you don’t have to speak
Irish to be an Irish nationalist or patriot.”
Zelensky is certainly a Ukrainian patriot—probably the leading sym-
bol of the country. “He grew up in Kryvyi Rih,” Trofimov says, “where
pretty much everyone spoke Russian at the time. The TV show that made
him famous was in Russian. He built his career on Russian television in
Moscow.” So what?
Trofimov recalls the words of the mayor of Kharkiv, Ihor ­Terekhov.
The two of them were speaking in a bunker as the city was being
shelled. “He told me that the most ferocious enemies of Russia are the
Russian-speakers in the East, because they are the ones who find them-
selves on the wrong end of Russian guns, they are the ones whose cities
are being destroyed, whereas people in western Ukraine mostly watch
the war on TV.”
Where I live, there are people who regard Zelensky as a hero—
a Churchill for our time—and people who paint him as an outright vil-
lain. How would Yaroslav Trofimov assess him? He begins by speaking
MANU BRABO
about Afghanistan.
“I was in Kabul on August 15, 2021, as the city fell to the Taliban. The
evening before, I had watched President Ashraf Ghani rally the troops,
0324_features_final.indd 39
saying, ‘We will fight to the last soldier, we will never sur-
render.’ Twelve hours later, he flew off to the St. Regis in
Abu Dhabi. And the Taliban were marching past my hotel.”
Zelensky? “I was in Kyiv when Russia invaded and
I had in the back of my mind that Zelensky might do
the same.” But “when the war began, he showed steely
courage.”
The British prime minister, Boris Johnson, invited
Zelensky to set up a government-in-exile in London—the
site of many governments-in-exile as Hitler and Stalin
were conquering Europe. Zelensky said no, asking for
weapons instead. He made a video on the street, sur-
rounded by close advisers and cabinet members: “We
are here, our soldiers are here, the citizens of our country
are here.”
“This had a colossal effect on the war,” says ­Trofimov.
“The Russians were about to surround Kyiv, and ­Zelensky
knew that he would be executed if the Russians took over.
His courage in that moment saved Ukraine.”
Trofimov adds, “Lots of Ukrainians don’t necessarily
like Zelensky. But this is not a fight for Zelensky. It’s a
fight for Ukraine. It’s a fight to hang on to independence.”
War correspondents such as Yaroslav Trofimov are
pretty battle-hardened. Still, what they see and expe-
rience must take a mental toll. Trofimov says he does a
good job of holding his feelings in check while he goes
about his work. But sometimes, feelings catch up with
you—in unexpected moments.
He was in Kyiv on the first anniversary of the full-
scale invasion. In a park, he met a young mother,
­Anastasia Lisnychenko, pushing her daughter in a stroll-
er. He asked how things were going. She had had a “good
war,” relatively speaking. Her family was intact. But she
had something interesting—and not uncommon—to tell
the reporter.
“You know, the really bad thing is that I really hate
the Russians now. I never hated anyone in my life. And
now I just can’t stop. I wish them the worst because of
what they have done to us.”
Says Trofimov, “I just looked at her and all of a sud-
den we both started crying.”
Before we part, I ask Trofimov a cliché of a ques-
tion, but not a bad one. “Is there anything else you’d
like to say? Anything you think people ought to know?”
­Trofimov answers: “I think people ought to know that
Russia seeks to wipe out Ukraine. Russian plans for
Ukraine haven’t changed. It’s eliminating the elites
physically. Eliminating language. Eliminating culture.
Basically genocide. This is what Medvedev, the former
president of Russia, says openly, and what Putin says
more or less openly. And if the Ukrainian army collapses,
it will happen.”
And “the cost to the West will be much, much higher
than the cost of sustaining Ukraine now. Because an em-
boldened Russia—a Russia that takes over Ukraine—will
not stop there.”
NATIONAL REVIEW / MARCH 2024 39
1/23/2024 10:31:24 PM
 LIA THOMAS (LEFT), EMMA WEYANT, ERICA SULLIVAN, AND BROOKE FORDE AT THE NCAA DIVISION I WOMEN’S
SWIMMING AND DIVING COMPETITION, MARCH 17, 2022
A Sporting Chance for Women
Why male athletes should not compete with females
by Riley Gaines
I n 2022, no college-sports fan could have missed
the banners, commercials, and exuberant cel-
ebration of “Title IX at 50.” As a senior at the
University of Kentucky on a full scholarship for
swimming, having set Southeastern Conference
records and achieved All-American recognition twelve
times, I certainly did not. Title IX, part of the Education
Amendments of 1972, has dramatically improved oppor-
tunities for women, myself included.
In 1970, only 8 percent of women held college de-
grees, and only 15 percent of college athletes were
women. Today, almost 40 percent of women have col-
lege degrees, and we make up 44 percent of college
athletes. High-school-sports participation tells a sim-
ilar story. During the 1971–72 school year, fewer than
300,000 girls participated, but by 2018–19 almost 3.5
million girls did (while opportunities for boys increased
as well).
This is a good thing. Swimming has given me friend-
ships with teammates, leadership skills, and confidence
that I will carry for a lifetime. Girls who play sports have
higher self-esteem and lower rates of depression. We
are less likely to have an unintended pregnancy, on av-
erage we get better grades, and we learn teamwork that
helps us in the workplace—80 percent of the female
40 NATIONALREVIEW.COM
0324_features_pages42_45.indd 40
executives at Fortune 500 companies identified themselves as former
sports-­playing “tomboys.”
Despite the boon that Title IX has been for female athletes, the Biden
administration, the NCAA, and various governing bodies threaten to dis-
mantle it by pursuing policies that discriminate against women. The Biden
administration, for its part, is pursuing an illegal administrative rewrite
of Title IX that would substitute the law’s demand for equal opportunity
between the two sexes with sports participation based on (undefined)
“gender identity,” except when this would undermine an (undefined) “im-
portant educational objective,” a category that presumably includes safety
and fairness in competition. This entirely subjective test would discourage
schools from having single-sex sports at all, lest a bureaucrat disagree with
the school’s fairness determination and cut off the school’s funding.
This proposed rule therefore would place the entire burden of “in-
clusivity” on women. Rather than request that men’s teams be more
welcoming or that schools create coed opportunities, or ask anything
of trans-identifying athletes, it would require women to give up roster
JUSTIN CASTERLINE / GETTY IMAGES
spots, playing time, scholarships, and dignity.
The Biden administration is merely playing catch-up with the NCAA,
however. The NCAA in 2010 announced that men could participate in
women’s sports as long as they had undergone a year of testosterone sup-
pression. In 2022, it amended this announcement to permit sport-specific
policies, but it in fact reiterated the testosterone-level criterion.
Enter Will, now Lia, Thomas. Will Thomas swam at the University of
Pennsylvania, ranking 554th nationally in the 200-yard freestyle and
1/24/2024 1:20:53 PM
 65th in the 500-yard freestyle. After a year of testosterone suppression,
Lia Thomas won the 500-yard-freestyle NCAA championship outright,
this time against women. I too competed against Thomas, and, against
all odds, we tied. But the NCAA awarded the trophy to Thomas, signaling
loud and clear that a pharmaceutically altered man is not only equiva-
lent to a woman but better than one. I asked officials why Thomas should
be given the trophy over me. They responded that it was crucial that
Thomas hold the trophy when photos were being taken.
On top of federal and NCAA changes come policies from sports-­
governing bodies. USA Boxing, for example, permits men to literally
beat women up, so long as the men have been sufficiently drugged. The
International Powerlifting Federation, USA Cycling, and other groups
have similar policies.
This is madness, and these policies are unfair. A woman is not a hand-
icapped man.
Without fairness, what are competitive sports? Every athletic divi-
sion and category is designed to create an even playing field. Eighteen-
year-olds can’t compete in the twelve-and-under league. Able-bodied
Olympians can’t compete in the Paralympics. Heavyweight athletes can’t
fight featherweights. These divisions have nothing to do with ageism,
ableism, or fatphobia—instead they protect competition and safety.
The same practice should apply to the sexes.
The report “Competition: Title IX, Male-Bodied Athletes, and the
Threat to Women’s Sports” by Independent Women’s Forum details the
unfairness that results when sex differences aren’t acknowledged. Men
are on average 30 percent stronger than women of equal stature, punch
30–162 percent harder, accelerate 20 percent faster, and jump 25 per-
cent higher. Testosterone suppression doesn’t solve the problem. As the
report explains, not only do sex-based differences such as bone density,
bone size, lung volume, heart size, muscle size, strength, endurance,
and speed persist despite hormone impairment, sports associations’
guidelines do not generally require that males who wish to compete with
women have testosterone levels comparable to those of females. For ex-
ample, the normal, 95 percent reference range for healthy menstruating
women under 40 years of age is 0 to 1.7 nanomoles of testosterone per
liter, but USA Boxing permits male boxers with up to 5 nanomoles per
liter to compete in the female category.
This is a matter of not just fairness but safety. Take Payton McNabb,
whose dreams of playing volleyball at the collegiate level were shattered
after a head injury that left her unconscious. A male athlete had spiked
a ball so powerfully in her face during a girls’ high-school volleyball
game that it became her last. She still suffers from memory loss, vision
impairment, and partial paralysis on her right side almost 18 months
after the incident.
Or consider the young field-hockey player in Massachusetts whose
teeth were knocked out and whose jaw was permanently damaged after
she was hit in the face with a ball slung by a male player. Her teammates
JUSTIN CASTERLINE / GETTY IMAGES
couldn’t bear to look as she shrieked in pain. The male went on to score
the only two goals of that game and was praised for his performance.
Such disasters happen at an alarming rate. Of course, injuries can
and do happen in female-only contests, but allowing males to play wom-
en’s sports increases their likelihood and severity. Moreover, women who
play coed sports accept the risks that attend them. Women who play
women’s sports, however, do not consent to having a volleyball spiked
in their face by a man.
0324_features_final.indd 41
S o where are the feminists? The National
Organization for Women (NOW) calls itself
the largest organization of feminist grass-
roots activists in the United States. It was
founded in 1966, right before Title IX took
form. Things have changed. Protecting women’s spaces
and opportunities no longer makes its list of priorities,
but “fighting discrimination based on gender identity”
does. NOW “particularly thank[s] the trans community
for their contributions to the feminist movement” and
vehemently opposes sex-based sports. This androgynous
brand of fourth-wave feminism does not prioritize the
unique struggles of women but calls for their erasure;
it’s a demand to eliminate “men” and “women” and ren-
der them always potentially interchangeable. Corporate
America, academia, the medical field, the media, and
churches have taken similar stances.
But not all hope is lost. For one, the majority of the
public believes that sex-based protections are neces-
sary, especially as they pertain to sports. Public opinion,
when impassioned, is a powerful tool. As of this Janu-
ary, 24 states have passed legislation prohibiting males
from participating in women’s sports. These bills permit
trans-identifying individuals to play sports, but in the
sex-based categories that would make competition fair
and safe. This should not be controversial.
Some think that the number of males attempting to
play women’s sports is too small to warrant concern. And
yet in every statehouse, at every rally, and in too many
casual conversations to count, parents have informed me
that their daughters have been forced to change in front
of and compete against males in sports from swimming to
tae kwon do. Gender ideology has pervaded youth culture
(consider that “#trans” on TikTok has almost 70 billion
views). More than 5 percent of young adults now say they
are trans or non-binary, almost an eightfold increase from
the 0.66 percent who said so in 2016. How many girls must
be injured before they are deemed worthy of safe com-
petition? How many must be exposed to males in locker
rooms? How many must lose opportunities for which they
have worked their entire lives to undeserving males?
The legislative battle isn’t the final front, unfortunately.
Bills protecting “women’s” sports aren’t worth the paper
they are printed on if society loses sight of what a woman
is. In 2022, the advocacy groups Independent Women’s
Law Center, Women’s Liberation Front, and Independent
­Women’s Voice created the Women’s Bill of Rights to help
state governments and courts define and apply common-
sense terms such as “woman,” “man,” “girl,” “boy,” “moth-
er,” “father,” “male,” and “female.” It has been adopted in
four states: Kansas, Tennessee, Oklahoma, and Nebraska.
Such legislation should not be necessary—“woman” does
not need a technical definition—but welcome to 2024.
The Women’s Bill of Rights does not call for new legal
rights for women or place new legal requirements
NATIONAL REVIEW / MARCH 2024 41
1/23/2024 10:31:24 PM
 on the state. Nor does it prevent any laws that would provide
benefits to trans-identifying individuals. In fact, the legisla-
tion does not contain the word “transgender” at all. But that
does not stop the media from blasting biologically accurate
definitions as anti-trans.
While thousands of us are working every day to turn the
tide, no movement can be successful without the public. Here
are three suggestions:
Don’t wait. I waited until I was personally affected be-
fore I stood up for women, and I regret it. By the time I was
adversely affected, it was too late for me. But it doesn’t have
to be too late for all girls and young women.
Consider your language. Initially, I adhered to the
preferred-­pronoun game because I wanted to be “respect-
ful.” It was wrong. It’s not respectful to lie, deceive, or affirm
delusions. A similar point applies to the term “biological
female.” I myself used this term, trying to distinguish my-
self from Thomas in terms we’d all understand. But through
my words I was implicitly conceding that a non-biological
alternative to maleness or femaleness should enter into
discussions of women’s sports. It shouldn’t. I am a wom-
an and therefore biologically female. It should go with-
out saying, and when it doesn’t, women can be harmed or
disadvantaged.
Look beyond the slogans. Those who are undermining
Title IX often do so under the banner of “inclusion” or “eq-
uity” or “women’s rights.” But slogans are not policies. Title
IX was meant to protect and celebrate women. But how can
we protect and celebrate what we cannot define? A life-
long liberal made this point to me, and it has stuck with me
ever since.
It is up to us, the people, to hold our leaders accountable.
If they can’t find it in themselves to defend girls and women,
then we should elect new leaders.
I owe thanks to Lia Thomas. Never would I have imagined
that I, a 21-year-old NCAA swimmer from Tennessee, could
be empowered to fight for future generations of female ath-
letes. Thomas—supported by the NCAA, the University of
Pennsylvania, and other powerful institutions—­perfectly
exposed the injustice against women that had so often been
ignored. I quickly understood how it devalues female ath-
letes to consider them interchangeable with chemically al-
tered men, and I have worked to fight against this absurd
equivalence ever since.
Women are being asked to deny their uniqueness and
nature to cater to males who infringe on their opportunities
and spaces. But women are not the problem. Women are
not doing anything wrong by affirming their biology and
advocating to protect their rights. To believe that women
deserve privacy, safety, fairness, and equal opportunity is
not anti-trans. It is pro-woman. It is pro-truth. And truth is
worth fighting for.
This essay is sponsored by National Review Institute.
42 NATIONALREVIEW.COM
0324_features_pages42_45.indd 42
How Wokeness
Prevailed
What the civil-rights revolution
has wrought
by Thomas F. Powers
T
he revolt against “wokeness” is an impres-
sive achievement of the popular mind. To
complete the thought, though, we will need
to take the risk of naming the real source of
the unease wokeness inspires: the forceful
interventions of anti-discrimination poli-
tics that gained the backing of the law from
the 1970s through the 1990s and then irra-
diated corporate culture and higher education.
Consider five key features of wokeness. What is
resented first and foremost is a species of pedantic
moralizing that often takes the form of official or semi-
official teaching or “training.” Second, while wokeness
certainly seems (somehow) political, it is most clearly
pressed upon us not by government but by the efforts
of our fellow citizens acting as individuals—bosses, co-­
workers, the folks in HR, teachers, students. Somehow
enforcement of our preachy political order’s mandates
has been privatized. It is thus also everywhere—invasive,
pervasive, imperialistic. Third, wokeness is characterized
by hypersensitivity to perceived insults, slights, and in-
dignities aimed at groups protected by the law—and by
hypervigilance in confronting them. What happened to
tolerance, to live and let live? Fourth, the woke mentality
is emphatically punitive and, as a result, often angry;
its moral center is a form of corrective or retributive
justice and its most visible and forceful consequences
are penalties that sting—above all, firing. Finally and
most obviously—and the result of all of the above—is
the tendency to silence and censor in behalf of protected
groups. Cancel culture and political correctness are not
the whole of wokeness, but they are obviously related
phenomena.
We need to see better than we do how all of this
may be traced back to the civil-rights regime and, in
1/24/2024 1:37:57 PM
 particular, to the laws of the new order as they have de-
veloped and expanded in the years since the 1960s.
Most prominent attempts to explain the emergence of
these phenomena have emphasized intellectual history,
the universities, the influence of bad ideas. Bad ideas
certainly abound. Intersectionality, multiculturalism,
diversity, microaggressions, trigger warnings, and safe
spaces belong to a new and perplexing social and po-
litical world. Heterosexism, homophobia, cisnormativ-
ity, transexclusionarity, and myriad other accusations
presume a revolutionary understanding of gender and
sexuality. A whole new constellation of terms of moral
and psychological import—“identity,” “inclusion,” “rec-
ognition,” “respect,” “equity,” “social justice”—competes
with an older roster of terms from the liberal tradition
(“freedom,” “representation,” “interest,” “toleration,”
etc.). There are indeed many new concepts and catego-
ries here, bewildering and confounding, a kind of foreign
language.
Oddly, those who attack woke ideas have almost noth-
ing to say about the anti-discrimination revolution. What
they do say indicates that they see civil-rights politics in
wholly uncritical terms. Yet no amount of criticism of
woke ideas will defeat them if the institutional and legal
underpinnings of the new order remain unexamined and
unchallenged. For the foreseeable future, understand-
ing ourselves will require that we examine closely the
civil-rights regime and the laws that make it so powerful.
The “center” of anti-discrimination law is Title VII
of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, as it came to be expanded in
subsequent decades. The many expansions of Title VII
took place mostly out of sight (in guidance documents
from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission
and in federal-court decisions), but what they achieved
created our woke world. These developments were piv-
otal because they defined key terms for other areas of
civil-rights law and pioneered its most effective enforce-
ment strategies.
Initially discrimination meant “disparate treatment”
by employers: employment decisions (hiring, firing,
promotion, etc.) made deliberately for discriminatory
reasons. Discrimination was greatly magnified when
it was redefined under Title VII to include stereotypes.
Now what people thought about members of protected
classes became relevant. Then it was expanded again
to include harassment. Like the ban on stereotypes,
prohibitions on “hostile environments” required an
effort to alter our opinions and beliefs. But they also
reached beyond that to consider relationships, and
not just company–employee relationships. Employers
became responsible for interpersonal interactions in-
volving everyone operating anywhere in their sphere
of influence: not just managers and supervisors, but
also co-workers, contractors, suppliers, and customers.
Discrimination broadened out in a different direction
0324_features_final.indd 43
when the existence of inequalities among groups was
likewise deemed “discrimination”—­“disparate impact”
as opposed to “disparate treatment.”
Once stereotypes, harassment, and disparate impact
became entrenched tools of anti-discrimination law, em-
ployers found themselves liable for a much larger catego-
ry of offenses. Lawsuits with settlements in the tens and
even hundreds of millions of dollars—and a lot of bad
publicity—started to become part of the picture.
Not surprisingly, employers wanted a way to protect
themselves, to find some legal “safe harbor.” The EEOC
and the courts offered a partial solution in the form of
another big expansion of Title VII. Now employers were
expected to take “preventive and corrective measures”
on their own. Employers would need to craft policies
echoing the demands of the law, designate special offices
and officers to police them, teach the lessons of the law to
their employees, and take decisive corrective—which is
to say punitive—measures to ensure that everyone paid
attention and adhered to the law’s commands.
In 1998, in its unjustly unheralded “Ellerth-Faragher
test,” the Supreme Court put its seal of approval on this
internally coherent and manifestly powerful regime of
employer enforcement of anti-discrimination law, sanc-
tioning what the lower courts and the EEOC had worked
out over the previous two decades. Lawyers then passed
the word along to employers, who in turn strived, very
effectively, to build a “culture of compliance.”
I
t is this powerful if opaque combination of reg-
ulations and norms that provides the central
nervous system—and backbone—of what we
call “woke capitalism”: lawsuits undertaken
by private parties with help from the EEOC;
redefinition of discrimination to include both
stereotypes and hostile-environment harass-
ment; liability rules holding employers respon-
sible, like some secular providential intermediary, for
the deeds, words, and thoughts of everyone under their
care; and, finally, an extensive and vigorous system of
preventive and corrective measures to bring everyone
to heel. Universities went through similar changes under
the auspices of Title IX, which is itself built on the terms
of Title VII.
These legal developments led directly to the features
of democratic life to which anti-woke sentiment has
drawn our attention.
First, pedantic moralizing is a necessary, obvi-
ous, and essential feature of the new order. Anti-­
discrimination law seeks very directly to alter the
hearts and minds of citizens. The EEOC has always held
education to be one of its two main aims (the other be-
ing “law enforcement”). Today, the EEOC Training
NATIONAL REVIEW / MARCH 2024 43
1/23/2024 10:31:25 PM
 Institute offers civil-rights instruction to the public and
private sectors alike—as do other offices in other agen-
cies of the federal government. Multicultural educa-
tion, backed by state laws and accreditation policies,
has been a requirement of teacher-education training
since the 1970s. The most visible effort of moral and
civic education associated with anti-discrimination is
of course diversity training delivered in the workplace
and, through Title IX and other legal requirements, in
our schools and universities. There is even a Supreme
Court decision that stands for diversity training. In
Kolstad v. American Dental Association (1999), Jus-
tice Sandra Day O’Connor stressed that “the purposes
underlying Title VII are . . . advanced where employers
are encouraged to . . . educate their personnel on Title
VII’s prohibitions.”
Second, the intrusion of our fellow citizens acting to
enforce the imperatives of anti-discrimination in every
domain of life is a direct consequence of the law. This is
visible in the new offices and officers that
were needed to carry out the mandates
of the new order. Offices of equal oppor-
tunity (or, today, of diversity, equity, and
inclusion) and myriad other institutions
To be woke is perhaps above all to be alert
(diversity task forces, bias-incident re- to myriad injustices. This is partly the broad
sponse teams, workplace-responsibility
committees, equity teams) work under
consequence of a welter of laws that recognize
the supervision of necessary agents of and reward—financially, morally, civically—
the new order (equal-opportunity and
DEI officers, Title IX officers, the “chief
complaints of interpersonal injury and offense.
diversity officer”). When organized in
the bureaucracy of some large employ-
er or educational institution, the work
that is done here certainly looks—and in some sense
is—­“official”: formulating and publicizing internal pol-
icies, assessing the status or climate of the institution
and those operating within it, monitoring bias-reporting
systems, fielding discrimination and harassment claims,
conducting investigations, keeping records, and meting
out consequences. But while the agents of this large ef-
fort wield considerable authority, they operate in only
a semiofficial capacity that makes distinguishing public
from private very difficult.
Third, these laws have made us hypersensitive and
hypervigilant. To be woke is perhaps above all to be
alert to myriad injustices. This is partly just the broad
consequence of a welter of laws that recognize and
reward—­financially, morally, civically—complaints of
interpersonal injury and offense. But other contribu-
tions of the law are not so indirect. Before there was
diversity training, there was (in the 1980s and ’90s)
“sensitivity” training. Every effort of anti-stereotype
or anti-harassment training (also anti-bullying and by-
stander training) cannot but aim to heighten sensitivity
to the different kinds of offense and insult that can be
44 NATIONALREVIEW.COM
0324_features_final.indd 44
perceived as discrimination. Moreover, any person who
confronts his or her accuser in this context is guilty
of “retaliation” and banned and punished under anti-­
discrimination law. Reporting requirements—where
failure to adhere can have serious consequences, es-
pecially for managers or other persons in positions of
responsibility—mean that we are all our brothers’ and
sisters’ keepers (and accusers), responsible for their
actions and beliefs as well. The decent citizen of the
anti-discrimination regime, the person who has taken
its lessons to heart, is precisely someone on the lookout
for discriminatory injustice and ready to confront the
doer of the unjust deed and report him to the proper
authorities.
Fourth, wokeness’s punitive spirit is fully institu-
tionalized in the law. The crucial legal tool here, cor-
rective firing, is widely feared and hated, and therefore
a vital source of anti-woke anxiety. “Corrective firing”
is my term for anti-discrimination law’s most powerful
coercive instrument. The EEOC emphasized the need
for corrective measures as early as 1980; its guidance
documents of the 1990s, subsequently embraced by
the courts, leave nothing to the imagination. “Disci-
plinary action against the offending supervisor or em-
ployee, ranging from reprimand to discharge, may be
necessary.”
Finally, there is censorship. Recent battles over
free speech tend to highlight “private” efforts rather
than the doings of government: on campuses, policing
micro­aggressions, creating safe spaces, insisting upon
trigger warnings and diversity statements; on internet
platforms, corporate censorship in various guises. But
these limitations of speech are all in fact entrenched in
the law.
By far the most important of these censorship
measures derives from the anti-stereotype and anti-­
harassment measures of Title VII (and their extension
through Title IX) summarized above. These lay the firm
basis for the seemingly “private” efforts of censorship we
see all around us, and they come armed with real power
to enforce—retraining, corrective firing, etc. There was a
1/23/2024 10:31:25 PM
 brief moment in the 1990s when defenders of free speech
had second thoughts about this. But such doubts were
dismissed at the time as “collateral censorship,” to use
law professor Jack Balkin’s chilling phrase. A dozen other
important anti-discrimination policies likewise police
speech in myriad ways. The Supreme Court has never
truly faced the free-speech implications of all of these
developments taken as a whole.
Today’s cancel culture is the offspring of such cen-
sorship coupled with corrective firing, which magnifies
the effects of censorship through the law’s punitive mea-
sures. The internet gatekeepers now silencing people act
on their sense, established for a quarter century, of what
the law already requires.
In the 2000s, as the demands of the law were insti-
tutionalized, they imprinted themselves on the minds
and hearts of people operating within the realm of their
authoritative reach. A new mind-set and sensibility
took hold in many large corporations, a world of woke
When woke internet mobs called
for people to lose their jobs
or to be canceled in other ways, they
were only imitating features of the
law and the behavior it encouraged.
e­ mployees led by woke CEOs answering to woke cor-
porate boards to serve sometimes-woke customers. But
without the earlier developments in the law, these later
changes in corporate culture would not have had the
backing of fear and force that made them powerful and
sustained them for the long haul.
When they burst onto the scene in the 2000s, internet-­
based social media accelerated wokeness by creating
a new social space where offensive speech became a
problem that anti-discrimination law had to confront in
front of everyone. But here too censorious responses to
anything that might be interpreted to be in the ballpark
of a “hostile internet environment” were anchored in the
law. The silencing that was undertaken by internet and
social-media companies borrowed from anti-harassment
and other policies that these corporate behemoths, em-
ployers all, already had on the books. When woke internet
mobs called for people to lose their jobs or to be canceled
in other ways, they too were only imitating features of the
law and the behavior it encouraged.
In the next decade the civil-rights revolution itself was
reignited. The Supreme Court’s gay-marriage decisions
0324_features_page45_2.indd 45
of 2013 and 2015 seem, like Brown v. Board of Education,
to have sparked a wildfire of new civil-rights activism.
The Ferguson protests of 2014 and the Black Lives Matter
movement made the term “woke” a rallying cry. Trump’s
2016 victory no doubt played a role. In 2017 the Me Too
movement (a name taken from “me-too evidence,” a term
of sexual-harassment law) added moral energy to these
developments—as did the murder of George Floyd in
2020. All of these events provided new motivation and
opportunities for the expanded Title VII regime to be put
to work, but the energies they unleashed were channeled
through that preexisting legal architecture.
T
he great wisdom of today’s
anti-woke ire is to be found
in its dawning awareness of
troubling aspects of the fight
against discrimination. In its
ambiguity, the term “woke”
is useful because it permits
criticism where criticism
seems forbidden. But this means that the
price we pay for the work it does is a certain
obscurity or lack of clarity that may keep
us from facing the central issues squarely.
The civil-rights revolution, which be-
gan in earnest in 1964, is here to stay. And
its basic achievements are most worth-
while and should not be undone. But we
must face the fact that not everything it
brought about has been for the good. It
has unattractive, unlovely, perhaps unhealthy features.
This begins to come to sight in a general way when
we note that anti-discrimination politics—civil-rights
politics—­now challenges our liberal-democratic tradi-
tion in fundamental ways. Consider only the five features
of wokeness I have highlighted. None of them is consis-
tent with the liberal tradition; all of them fly in the face
of one or another important assumption or practice of
liberal politics—the tradition of toleration, the morality
of individual freedom, the separation of public and pri-
vate, the idea that legislating morality is wrong.
We are in the grip of a moral-reform effort that mod-
ern democracy undertook with the best of intentions. But
moral reform, when equipped with political force and
the generalizing power of law, can become overzealous,
incapable of self-criticism, and unwilling to see political
life in all its complexity. That is the deepest teaching of
anti-woke anxiety, one we will need to heed if it is to lead
to meaningful reform.
This essay is adapted from his recently published book American
Multiculturalism and the Anti-Discrimination Regime.
NATIONAL REVIEW / MARCH 2024 45
1/24/2024 5:19:56 PM

When Clothes Made the Man
Missing the traditional
menswear store
by Peter Tonguette
To recognize the crisis in American menswear requires nothing more than
a pair of eyes and a bit of historical context. Take a look inside any office
building, restaurant, theater, or department store, or down a city street
at any time of day: Where once you would have seen men in suits and ties,
dress shoes and overcoats, even morning coats and top hats, you now see
a parade of dress shirts without ties, puffer jackets, denim jeans, denim
jackets, and all manner of inappropriate footwear. Casual wear itself has
been degraded—from Shetland sweaters and duffle coats to universal sweat-
pants. It is not simply in the hinterlands that people dress this way, but also
in the corridors of power: Many were rightly aghast when, in deference to
the slovenly dress habits of Senator John Fetterman, the majority leader
terminated the chamber’s dress code, only for the full Senate to reinstate it
unanimously after an outcry.
Or consider that instantly infamous photograph taken around Memo-
rial Day in which Joe Biden met with congressional leaders in the White
House. Although all of those pictured were wearing suits, the sins against
good taste on display were numerous: from the sneakers and striped socks
worn by then–House speaker Kevin McCarthy and House Minority Leader
­Hakeem Jeffries to the president’s perennially too-tight jacket with too-
short, too-skinny slacks. (Since trends in women’s fashion are beyond the
purview of this article, I will merely mention without comment the Space
Age–style pantsuit worn by Kamala Harris.)
The sartorial confusion among men in positions of power raises a
question: Is the dearth of well-dressed men the consequence of a dearth
of good menswear stores? To be sure, our governing class cannot plausibly
invoke this excuse since they, as part-time or full-time inhabitants of the
nation’s capital, have access, at minimum, to the Washington, D.C., location
of J. Press, the menswear store that, for over a century, was the preferred
clothier for the Ivy League set and therefore wielded great influence on
how society’s movers and shakers presented themselves. J. Press maintains
a robust internet presence, and its trio of brick-and-mortar stores (it also
operates in New York and its home base of New Haven, Conn.) remains
46 NATIONALREVIEW.COM
0324_features_final pp46-48.indd 46
vibrant, but it does not extend, in physical
form, from sea to shining sea. Thus many men
who might ordinarily dress acceptably, aided
by the selections at J. Press, have to make do
with Macy’s or Men’s Wearhouse or, at best,
Jos. A. Bank.
In the middle of the last century, the situation
was far different. While stores like J. Press
and Brooks Brothers remained the national
standard-­bearers for Ivy League dress, nu-
merous other local stores sprang up, or shift-
ed gears, to specialize in Ivy-like menswear.
An article in the November 22, 1954, issue of
Life magazine was perhaps the first to take
note of the trend. In “The Ivy Look Heads
across U.S.,” two gentlemen are pictured on
their home turf. Alex Dearborn, an insur-
ance broker in Houston, is photographed
petting a horse beside a split-rail fence,
while ­William Magill, an airline executive
in Atlanta, is shown near an airport hangar.
Both are wearing natural-shouldered three-­
button suits of the sort favored by people like
Averell ­H arriman, Elliot Richardson, and
George H. W. Bush (not to mention the found-
er of the magazine you hold in your hands).
Not only were such suits no longer ex-
clusive to the Eastern elite, Life noted, but
allegedly “cut-rate clothiers,” including
S. Klein, an advertisement for which high-
lighted all the salient features of the Ivy
League aesthetic, were getting in on the ac-
tion: “The popularity of the natural-looking
suit has widened quickly in the last two years
as men became dissatisfied with pale bulky
suits and flashy ties left over from their post-
war splurge.”
To confirm the historical record, I called
up one of the few men on the planet who
would know for certain: Richard Press, the
grandson of J. Press founder Jacobi Press
and the most enthusiastic and well-informed
exponent of the style that his family’s store
helped popularize. It turns out that Life had
it right. “At that time, there was at least one
Ivy League shop in most of the major cities
coast to coast, and certainly in college towns,
and there were Ivy departments in many de-
partment stores throughout the country,”
Press told me. “I mean, if you were living
in ­Steubenville, Ohio, and the president of
the bank and the country club,” you were
1/24/2024 12:08:17 PM
 probably an Ivy graduate. “And you want-
ed to dress like the big shots.”
As it turns out, even J. Press once had
to compete for the business of the Yale
faculty, administration, and students
who wanted to look sharp. “The J. Press
competitors in New Haven in 1955 were
the Yale Co-Op, which had the lower
price, Fenn-Feinstein, White’s, Gentree’s,
­Arthur M. Rosenberg,” Richard Press said.
“I can go on and on and on. And Saks
Fifth Avenue had a collegiate department
that was very Ivy League–oriented.”
One could live far from the geograph-
ical terrain of the Ivy League, then, and
still dress as though one were on one’s
way to a dinner at the Porcellian Club. Yet,
even during the heyday of the Ivy-style
stores, the customer base was fairly nar-
row. “If you had your Ivy shop in, let’s say, A BROOKS BROTHERS DISPLAY
Dayton, Ohio, or Boise, Idaho,” Richard
Press said, “the only ones that really ad-
opted the style were the college kids, who
were trying to copy the Ivy . . . mode of dress, or the corporate leadership Although I was born too late—in 1983—to see
of all of those towns, many of whom were alumni of the Ivy League.” the peak of these stores’ proliferation, I have
This is a welcome dose of realism. While most men in the 1950s wore strong secondhand proof of its occurrence.
suits when the occasion called for them—which was nearly all the time My father, who was born in 1937, dressed
except when at home, mowing the lawn, or changing the oil in the station impeccably and very traditionally his entire
wagon—that doesn’t mean the suits they chose had any relationship to life thanks to the ubiquity of these stores. He
the aesthetic preferred by Bush, Buckley, and my father. By way of exam- was raised in Marion, Ohio, which despite
ple, Press contrasts the natural-shoulder suits worn by Jimmy Stewart being the hometown of the underestimated
(Princeton ’32) with the square-shoulder suits worn by William Holden Republican president Warren G. Harding
(dropped out of Pasadena Junior College) and Gary Cooper (dropped out was not then, nor is it today, a magnet for Ivy
of Grinnell). “Ronald Reagan [Eureka College ’32] was about as non-Ivy League imitators. Even so, he did not have to
as you can get,” Press said. “Actually, Ronald Reagan in the ’40s and ’50s travel far to acquire the navy blue blazers,
was the true American fashion of the business class. It wasn’t Ivy.” button-down shirts, and gray flannel trou-
Yet eventually the walls closed in on all traditional menswear, Ivy sers he sought: In the nearby college town
style or otherwise. “It reached its height from the mid ’50s through of Delaware, Ohio, once stood a store by the
post-Kennedy through maybe ’65, when Vietnam and all the protests be- quirky name of Wilson’s, C.J. of Course, and
gan,” Press reflected, with a touch of melancholy. Of course, the decline it was one of the area’s classic traditional
and fall did not happen all at once. In 1980, when Lisa Birnbach brought clothiers. After my father moved to the state
out the deadly accurate parody The Official Preppy Handbook, there capital of Columbus to begin his career as
were enough Ivy-style stores around the nation to fill a page and a half a banker, he started to shop at Woodhouse
of shopping recommendations. J. Press and Brooks Brothers were there, Lynch Clothiers, one of the great regional
but so were a panoply of lesser-known stores: the Bermuda Shop on traditional menswear stores. Columbus had
Madison Avenue, Country Store of Concord in Massachusetts, Hillhouse enough men who needed or wanted to dress
in Providence, R.I., and Sousa & Lefkovits in, of all places, Southern Cal- traditionally—state-government employees,
ifornia. Several of these stores have hung on as themselves—including executives, white-collar workers, and the ac-
GREGG D e GUIRE / GETTY IMAGES

H. Stockton in Atlanta—while others have become bastardized self-­ ademic community employed by Ohio State
parodies (L.L.Bean and Lands’ End). Most, though, have gone the way of University—to sustain a 36-year run, from
the dodo. These days, there’s a mere smattering of independent Ivy-style 1972 to 2008.
stores, and if you shop for this type of clothing (or order by phone or The co-founder, Thomas Lynch, died in
online) you know what and where they are: Cable Car Clothiers in San 2022, but I got in touch with his widow, Mary
Francisco (which made the Preppy Handbook 44 years ago), O’Connell’s Lou Lynch. She dates the peak of the store to
Clothing in Buffalo, N.Y., Ben Silver in Charleston, S.C. sometime in the 1980s.

NATIONAL REVIEW / MARCH 2024 47

0324_features_final.indd 47 1/23/2024 10:31:26 PM

 “He never got into the trends,” Mary Lou Lynch told me. “It was
always the classics. The types of sports jackets and suits that he sold in
1980, the style of them, you still see people wearing now. They call it the
clothing of presidents.” Her husband wrote out orders by hand, and he
maintained a card file of each customer’s purchases. “He would know
what they bought on March 10, 2001—they bought a gray worsted suit or
something like that,” Mary Lou said. “He’d go through the file, and then
he’d contact them and say, ‘You know, that gray worsted you bought is
now ten years old. It’s time for you to come in and look at something
else.’ And they would.”
Lynch’s purpose was, then, to outfit a customer over the long haul. In
my closet hang ties that once belonged to my father and that bear the la-
bel of Woodhouse Lynch; each is close to 50 years old and yet eminently
wearable, enduring both in style and condition. But the ties that mat-
tered most weren’t the sort worn around one’s neck—they were between
Tom and his clients. “He always loved talking to people,” Mary Lou said.
“Being located where he was, it was easy for the bankers, the attorneys,
and the people down there in those buildings to come in at noontime or
come in the afternoon or on their way to the Athletic Club to work out.
To tell you the truth, when I first started coming up and visiting him, I
said, ‘Your store is like Cheers with clothes.’ People would come in just
to talk. They didn’t feel like they
had to buy anything.”
With the gradual shuttering
of all but the biggest names in Ivy
style, we must come to terms with
‘I said, “Your store is like
the decline not only of a kind of Cheers with clothes.” People
dress habit but also of the unique
and intimate relationship it made
would come in just to talk.
possible between business own- They didn’t feel like they had
er and customer. Those of us who
keep our closets stocked with
to buy anything.’
Oxford cloth shirts ordered from
Brooks Brothers, Shaggy Dog
sweaters ordered from J. Press,
and the occasional indulgent item ordered from ­O’Connell’s or Ben
Silver are maintaining standards in menswear but missing the plea-
sure of patronizing physical stores: picking things out, trying them
on, striking up conversations, and being validated in one’s c­ hoices or
encouraged to make different ones. Maybe the reason people look so
lousy today is that they don’t have a Tom Lynch or a Richard Press to
advise them.
On a bright, mild, mid-November day, in search of a glimpse of what
shopping for traditional menswear was like in my father’s time, I took
a drive to the nearest store that approximated a Woodhouse Lynch:
Cuffs Clothing in Chagrin Falls, a suburb of Cleveland about two and
a half hours from where I live, just outside of Columbus. For some, its
claim to fame is its status as an Hermès boutique, but when I walked
into the two-story Colonial-style red-brick building perched on the
banks of the Chagrin River, I might as well have been in New Haven in
1950: Instantly I was confronted with a pleasant abundance of beauti-
ful, largely traditional garments—stacks of sweaters, shelves of shirts,
48 NATIONALREVIEW.COM
0324_features_final pp46-48.indd 48
a huge table of ties, drawers of bowties,
racks of trousers.
Blissfully, I made my way from one small
room to the next, overseen from afar by an
unobtrusive but knowledgeable salesman.
A picture of Winston Churchill hung near
the crackling fireplace; sports memorabilia,
much of it related to Cleveland, was incon-
spicuously placed among the goods. Once or
twice, I drifted into the ladies’ section—all
those scarves and such from Hermès—but it
was a realm distinct from the masculine fla-
vor of the rest of the store. Upstairs, rooms
held fabric for the store’s made-to-measure
business—a fantasy for another day. After
much picking up and putting down, I de-
cided on an early Christmas gift for myself:
a beautiful light-pink cable-knit cashmere
sweater by Ralph Lauren. It was the sort of
item I could have bought online but with-
out the thrill of discovery, the sense of oc-
casion, even the slight feeling of
clubbiness—the idea that other
like-minded good dressers were
shopping in the store at the same
time I was—combined with the
very un-clubby feeling of relief:
I wasn’t the only one left who
prized these things.
Walking out with the sweat-
er, I knew what I had been miss-
ing all my life—and what so
many other men, in their logo
T-shirts and cargo pants, have
been missing, too. The national
chains like Brooks Brothers fill a need, but
they’re not enough. I have to believe that if
more men could shop at a Cuffs around the
corner, men everywhere would be better
dressed. Some percentage would always
resist, such as the defiant Fetterman, for
whom dressing like a slob despite access
to fine clothiers inside the Beltway is part
of his brand. But many others, those who
simply aren’t familiar with the principles of
dressing well, would have a world opened
up to them, with trained salespeople there
to help them correct their mistakes. Perhaps
eventually they’d stride into the office and
the bar and impress their colleagues and
friends. And nattiness would catch on, for
what is widely worn is copied. Isn’t that how
fashion works in any generation? Yes, mine
is an “if you build it, they will come” argu-
ment, but it’s worth a shot.
1/24/2024 12:46:21 PM
 BY JAMES LILEKS
Athwart
That’s a Wrap
I
had two tabs open on my browser: a 1944
newspaper front page, and Google News.
The former had a banner headline: “REDS
SLAUGHTER 16,000 NAZIS.” You had to ad-
mire the honesty and concision. It suggest-
ed there was someone going around with
a clicker after the battle, counting up the
corpses. How about that, 16,000 on the nose.
The headline on the Google News page was from today:
“Why Taco Bell Discontinued Its Chipotle Ranch Grilled ­Chicken
Burrito.”
I would rather live in an era when the latter was the news of
the day, but I had questions. Why was the burrito canceled? It
couldn’t have liked a Trump tweet. I could think of two possible
reasons.
1. The name gave people headaches and blurred vision.
­“Chipotle Ranch Grilled Chicken Burrito” could be one of 17
random combinations of words the Taco Bell mainframe produc-
es on its daily run. It’s the usual gibberish. The computer could
spit out Los Carnitas Serrano Queso Diablo Chilitos, and they’d
test it out in selected markets and people would love it. But La
Chilita Flame-Seared Diablo Carnitas al Serrano—same thing,
more or less—would flop. You never know with Taco Bell. It’s a
crapshoot. Or a crap shoot, with some of these.
No, that can’t be it. Another possible reason:
2. Some people liked it, but sales were insufficient to justify
continued production. A.k.a., capitalism.
Yes, I think that might be it. Let’s check the article: “The
reason for its retirement isn’t particularly comforting to griev-
ing fans. According to a statement from Taco Bell, the Chipotle
Ranch burrito just didn’t make the cut.”
That’s not an explanation. That’s a restatement of the fact of
its demise. But I glean from the pith of the gist of the article that
it did not sell, despite the bleats of dismay from six shut-in ­Reddit
users who DoorDashed a burrito delivery four times a week.
It is a testament to the ingenuity of our fast-food sector that
such ridiculous mad-lib combos are being created all the time.
The market is not satisfied with a piece of chicken deep-fried and
slathered with high-fructose corn syrup flavored with mustard-­
simulating chemicals. The market wants it in a wrap. Then the
market wants it on a bun. A brioche bun, please. Then it wants
0324_Lileks_final.indd 49
it in a burrito, which is like a wrap, but
tucked in on the end. Whatever could
be next? The chicken fragment could be
served in a soft taco! Which is like a wrap,
except open on top, not on the end. And
that has made all the difference in the
world, as the poem said.
On the other hand, innovation seems
to be confined to new forms of pseudo-­
food. Television ploughs the same dry
furrow—cooking shows where G ­ ordon
Ramsay yells at people, cop shows
where strong, fierce women cops subdue
250-pound men. The streaming services
all look the same. Cars come in three col-
ors. The advances in phones seem to be
confined to the camera—this year’s model
can zoom in on the Mars rover, but next
year’s model will be able to see the con-
dition of its tire treads!
You don’t want to go the Bernie
­Sanders route, complaining that there are
57 different types of deodorant when we
should have just one, preferably odorless,
provided by the government, ineffective,
likely to break into unusable chunks,
and later found to be contaminated with
uranium. No, we want 57 different types!
That’s innovation! That’s America!
What we did not expect was that they
would all be behind locked plastic doors
in the drugstore because the socialists
had normalized shoplifting, but that’s
another matter.
If there is innovation, it’s where we
need it the least: We now have more
genders than Taco Bell has menu items.
Chipotle Ranch Grilled Chicken Burrito
might strike you as a sign of capitalism at
its most energetic and inventive, or of a
culture flailing around in a frivolous fren-
zy before it collapses from exhaustion. Or
both. I still think that a culture capable of
having 127 different taco combinations
available to anyone with three dollars in
their hand is more likely to go to Mars and
develop fusion and feed the planet, but I
sometimes wish for simpler times. Why,
I remember when you could walk in and
get a grilled-chicken burrito. None of this
chipotle, none of that ranch.
You had two sauces, hot and mild. No
Diablo extra-hot, but we did make it to
the moon.
NATIONAL REVIEW / MARCH 2024 49
1/23/2024 10:06:58 PM
 OUR SPACIOUS SKIES OUR SPACIOUS SKIES

Slipping the Surly Bonds

On learning to fly

by Sarah Colleen Schutte

PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY CONTRIBUTOR

All three wheels hit the runway so
hard, my teeth rattled. Determined
not to cry, I taxied the Cessna
back to the ramp in stony silence
punctuated only by a calm, loaded
question from my instructor in the
right seat: “Why’d you do that?”

50 NATIONALREVIEW.COM

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 What could I say? I’d been trying and failing misera-
bly at short-field landings for weeks, my primary instruc-
tor was leaving for the major airlines after this lesson, I
was overwhelmed with ground-school material, and my
self-confidence was almost nil. One year, hundreds of
hours, and thousands of dollars into flight training, was
I about to trip before the finish line?
What exactly planted in my head the idea of flying a
plane is a mystery. It could’ve been all the plane rides I
took between New York City and Ohio when I was living
in the Big Apple. It could’ve been getting to know the two
Air Force pilots-to-be who joined our Dayton community
while studying for their master’s degrees. Or maybe it
was just growing up in Dayton, breathing the same air
as the Wright Brothers. Whether it was one of these or
all three, it was compounded by a strange, sudden need
for a challenge, and I signed up for a discovery flight in
June 2022.
I had researched the idea of becoming a pilot in only
a few cursory Google queries and some general-info calls
to my local flight school. Perhaps this was for the best,
because if I’d known the extent (and eventual cost) of
the endeavor, I might’ve balked. As it was, a mixture of
­stubbornness and curiosity drove me on, and despite
feeling terribly nauseated during that initial flight, I de-
cided to pursue the training in earnest.
There are two main components of flight training:
ground school and flight instruction. Ground school
consists of, well, everything. Aerodynamics, mechanics,
weather, flight-planning, charts, weight and balance,
emergency procedures, human factors, electronic sys-
tems, regulations, airport schematics—these topics and
PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY CONTRIBUTOR
many others filled my mind, whether I was waking or
asleep (yes, I’d dream about them). Flight instruction
also follows a curriculum, wherein you learn how to pre-
flight (fun), taxi (a struggle), take off (thrilling), and land
(yikes) while also mastering a set list of maneuvers over
the practice area. In true Karate Kid fashion, I was baffled
for a while about why we’d want to practice stalling out a
plane—until I realized it was preparing me to correct for,
or just not make, critical errors while taking off or land-
ing. This was just one revelation among many I had, cir-
cling high (well, at 3,500 feet MSL) over southwest Ohio.
Ground-school and flight-training milestones are crit-
PHOTOS COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR
ical, and each one passed gives you a new sense of accom-
plishment. My first major milestone was the initial solo
flight. November 10, 2022, was a gorgeous day, and there’s
nothing quite like the feeling of your instructor endorsing
your logbook and getting out of the plane so that you can
taxi out and shoot up into the sky by your lonesome.
Flight training slowed down after my solo because
of bad winter weather, but ground school picked up.
0324_features_final.indd 51
The next milestone was my written exam, and I couldn’t
make any cross-country solos until I’d passed it. (These
“cross-countries” aren’t to be taken literally—I didn’t fly
to California, but as an overawed student pilot, I rather
felt like I had.) This FAA-regulated written test consists
of 60 questions, all multiple choice, on which you have
150 minutes (120 minutes since April 2023) to score 70
percent or higher. In a rare moment of bravado, I told
my instructor I planned to get a 93. He simply smiled
and said nothing.
With this test scheduled for the beginning of Febru-
ary 2023, I spent January submerged in practice exams.
But no matter how hard I studied, I couldn’t crack that
70. I quit all my usual choral activities that month and
studied harder. My scores improved, but low 80s still
wasn’t going to satisfy me.
If you ever hear a pilot joke that, to get her license,
she had to become a doctor, a lawyer, a mechanic, an
engineer, and a meteorologist, know that she’s only half
kidding. I walked into that testing center full of trepida-
tion and random weather facts. Who knew a thunder­
storm has three stages? And that so many types of fog
exist? Just under an hour later, I emerged, shaking a
bit, and walked to the front desk for my results. The test
proctor kindly tried to put me at ease and then glanced
at her computer—her eyes widened.
I’d scored a 93.
One of the instructors from my school walked by
right in time to see me crumple onto the counter in
shock—it was all I could do not to shout with joy.
After this thrilling moment, my flight training pro-
gressed steadily and uneventfully. There’s a long, de-
tailed set of requirements that must be met in order to
take that exam of all exams: the check ride. These includ-
ed night flights with my instructor, multiple dual and solo
cross-countries, solo landings, at towered airport, and
more. Aviation spilled over into my leisure time. I attend-
ed local air shows; became a member of EAA (the Experi­
mental Aviation Association), AOPA (Aircraft Owners
and Pilots Association), and WAI (Women in Aviation In-
ternational); and devoured each issue of Flight Training
magazine. I listened to aviation podcasts, watched hours
of aviation content on YouTube, and dreamed of going
to EAA’s AirVenture (an aviator’s mecca in Wisconsin).
And then I hit my training wall.
There are three types of landings you must demon-
strate during your check ride: normal, soft-field, and
short-field. Normal had taken me a little while, but
soft- and short-field were proving impossible.
NATIONAL REVIEW / MARCH 2024 51
1/23/2024 10:31:27 PM

Nothing I did went right, and making matters worse, my home airport
has a short, narrow runway sitting in the bend of a river and requires
you to come in over a levy to land.
Which brings us back to that horrible landing. It’d been an awful
flight all around, and it was all I could do to put on a smile and thank
my instructor for all his help—he really had done so much! He was the
reason I could fly in the first place. Off he went to the major airlines, and
off I went to another teacher (recommended by my old one), hopeful
that we could work out a plan.
Work out a plan we did, and by the grace of God, and Bill’s patience,
I began nailing my landings—every type. It took 48 laps around the
pattern, but by golly, I could do it. My confidence inched up.
Then he tested my ground-school knowledge, because, as nothing is
simple in aviation, the check ride has two portions: oral and practical.
Though I’d been studying for the first part, Bill found my prep sadly
lacking and sent me home with a better study guide. I took notes, an-
swered quiz questions, and verbalized responses until I was blue in the
face. And then I went and tabbed sections of the FAR/AIM (Federal Avi-
ation Regulations/Aeronautical Information Manual) and highlighted
portions of the PHAK (Pilot’s Handbook of Aeronautical Knowledge)
until I was cross-eyed.
Check rides, no matter how prepared you are or how nice the exam-
iner is, are exhausting. The designated pilot-examiner (DPE) follows
the Airman Certification Standard (ACS) and grills you on every aspect
of flying contained therein. And even though you have your reference
materials close at hand, it’s very much a closed-book test. Once you’re
good and tired from explaining flight-plan details, restrictions on flight
after scuba diving, and your hydraulic braking system, you go fly the
plane. But you won’t turn back now, because you’re determined to prove
yourself a safe pilot.
52 NATIONALREVIEW.COM
0324_features_final.indd 52
Despite a few minor slipups, I passed
the oral portion strongly; and even
though I blanked for a terrifying mo-
ment on how to perform an emergency
descent on the flight portion, I eventu-
ally worked my way to it and satisfied
the DPE.
Now, heading back to the airport,
there was only one box left to check: the
short-field landing.
I made my approach calls.
Parallel to the runway, I called the downwind leg.
The base and final turns went smoothly.
Then, as I was lined up and on a stable final approach,
I saw the other plane.
I’d seen him during my earlier legs, but he’d had plen-
ty of time to move. Or so I thought. Alas, the radio-less
Cub puttered along the runway, seemingly oblivious to
the Cessna fast approaching his rear. So I did the most
sensible thing I could do: I went around.
The second approach was not as lovely, nor was my
landing where I wanted it, but it was within standards—
cue a massive sigh of relief. Moments later, I’d taxied off
the runway and parked the plane, and the DPE shook my
hand, a knowing smile on his face.
Four hundred eighty-seven days, no blood, a lot of
sweat, and not too many tears later, I’d done it. All the
late-night studying, freezing-cold preflights, frustrat-
ing mechanical issues, and irritating schedule conflicts
had not beaten me. I still don’t know why God opened
this door. If He wanted me to gain confidence, it was an
expensive—­albeit effective—manner of achieving it.
Maybe I won’t know for many years, but I do know I’ve
discovered an incredible world in aviation. Yes, it has
plenty of dangers, but what activity doesn’t?
So if you’ll excuse me, I must go. I’m off to the airfield
where, God willing, I’ll find a trusty Cessna 172 or a zippy
Piper Pilot. Exactly what I need to turn some liquid fuel
into noise, up there in the wild blue yonder.
1/23/2024 10:31:28 PM
 VOLUME LXXVI, NO 3 / SPONSORED BY NATIONAL REVIEW INSTITUTE
BOOKS, ARTS & MANNERS
BOOK REVIEW
Grand New Coalition
GEORGE HAWLEY
Party of the People: Inside the Multiracial
Populist Coalition Remaking the GOP, by Patrick Ruffini
(Simon & Schuster, 336 pp., $30)
Especially since Donald Trump entered the political arena,
progressive politicians, celebrities, media figures, and aca-
demics have relentlessly told the country that the Republican
Party has become the party of the far Right, a party bent on
whipping up white racial anxieties and antagonisms to eke out
a few more electoral wins before the multicultural “coalition
of the ascendant” takes power. This narrative is often built on
the bad behavior of a few small groups or individuals, or on the
former president’s most recent outrageous remarks.
Fortunately for all of us, this narrative is false. The relevant
data give scant indication that the typical Republican voter has
ROMAN GENN
“radicalized” or has suddenly become committed to a white-­
supremacist agenda. In fact, under Trump, the party made
unprecedented gains among minority voters. Although it was
NATIONAL REVIEW / MARCH 2024
0324_books_final.indd 53
quickly overshadowed by the insanity of
January 6, the decline of racial polariza-
tion in voting patterns was one of the most
important developments in the 2020 elec-
tion cycle.
This is not esoteric knowledge. It was
plainly demonstrated by the exit-poll data.
Yet this development has received shock-
ingly little attention—probably because
it does not align with the stories people
want to believe about the state of U.S.
politics. Fortunately, Patrick Ruffini has
done us all a great service by explaining
the very important but underexamined
trends occurring among working-class
voters of all races and ethnic groups.
Ruffini is a respected Republican poll-
ster with a long career in politics. He has
credibility on these issues, and although
his new book, Party of the People, is
dense, it is extremely readable. It also of-
fers an optimistic message in an era when
doomsaying is the norm.
For a generation, progressives have
assured themselves that a new era of
Democratic dominance is right around
the corner. After all, the groups that lean
toward Democrats (non-whites, unmar-
ried women, those with college degrees)
are growing, whereas most shrinking
groups (whites, Christians, people with
less education) tend to vote Republican.
The math is undeniable.
And yet, the stable, long-term Dem-
ocratic majority never seems to emerge.
President Obama’s big Democratic ma-
jority in Congress ended after the 2010
“Tea Party” election. Hillary Clinton was
defeated. President Trump came surpris-
ingly close to securing reelection. What
happened?
One important development, which
Ruffini notes, is the surging support for
Republicans among white voters without
college degrees—many of whom voted
twice for President Obama. The Repub-
lican ceiling on this vote turned out
53
1/24/2024 11:31:59 AM
 BOOKS, ARTS & MANNERS
to be higher than many analysts expect-
ed, and their shift to the right put many
Democratic states (especially in the Mid-
west) back in play. Progressives could still
hold out hope that this development was
a mere speed bump on the path to domi-
nance. After all, the white working class
is also a shrinking demographic.
The more interesting development,
which is potentially more important for
long-term voting patterns, is the shift
among non-whites to the Republican
Party in recent election cycles. In 2020,
as Ruffini notes, “in most of America’s
non-white communities—especially those
filled with first- and second-generation
immigrants—Trump did better than he
had in 2016.” Trump made impressive in-
roads among Hispanic voters, especial-
ly in Texas and Florida. President Biden
won in large part because he significantly
outperformed Clinton among whites with
college degrees.
There is no question that the fastest-­
growing groups have tended to vote Dem-
ocratic recently, but it is also true that
Republican gains among those groups
are offsetting the Democratic advantage,
consistently pushing back the day when
demographics alone crushes the GOP.
Like Ruffini, I responded optimistical-
ly to the 2020 exit-poll data. My concern
was that this apparent shift toward Re-
publicans among certain minority groups
would prove to be ephemeral. If this
change is occurring because these voters
find the Republican platform increasingly
compelling, the party is in good shape.
But what if these new Republican voters
are attracted to Trump primarily for his
intangible characteristics—his humor
and charisma, his combativeness, etc.?
Those will be harder traits for future can-
didates to replicate, and those Republi-
cans who try to mimic Trump’s rhetorical
style rarely enjoy similar levels of support
and enthusiasm.
According to Ruffini, however, there
are signs that recent Republican gains
among Hispanics, Asians, and working-­
class whites will prove durable and that,
with a sound policy agenda and proper
54 NATIONALREVIEW.COM / SPONSORED BY NATIONAL REVIEW INSTITUTE
0324_books_final.indd 54
messaging, they have room for further
growth. Although the 2022 midterms
were disappointing for the GOP, “Repub-
licans had their best midterm ever with
Hispanic voters.” African Americans re-
main the toughest demographic group
for Republicans, but even here support
for Democrats may be wavering. Repub-
licans also made modest gains among
blacks in 2022.
Ruffini uses multiple methods to make
his argument, which is one of the book’s
greatest strengths. He visited and inter-
viewed people in some of the most polit-
ically interesting regions of the country.
Ruffini is especially impressed with po-
litical developments in Florida, calling it
“the model for the Republican multiracial
future, a rising Republican bastion where
non-white voters will be close to the major-
ity in 2036 and where Hispanics vote close
to how the state as a whole does.” His dis-
cussion of the Rio Grande Valley in ­Texas
‘Wokeness’ is politically toxic if you are trying
to appeal to culturally conservative working-
class voters of all races, and Republicans are
benefiting from progressive overreach.
was especially fascinating, and it provides
a useful reminder that we should not sim-
ply assume that Hispanics are single-­issue
voters on immigration—or that they even
agree with the Left on that issue.
Ruffini notes that, as the Democratic
Party has become the party of the college-
educated, it has moved sharply to the left
on cultural issues. This alienates cultur-
ally conservative working-class voters of
all races. “Wokeness” is politically toxic
if you are trying to appeal to them, he
suggests, and Republicans are benefiting
from progressive overreach.
Ruffini is an expert in quantitative
analysis, but readers with no knowledge
of polling or statistics will be able to fol-
low his arguments with ease. He is genu-
inely enthusiastic about the prospect of a
more inclusive and multicultural Repub-
lican Party, but he is not just a Republican
partisan. He looks forward to an era of
diminished racial and ethnic polarization
in politics, something all patriotic Ameri-
cans should work to facilitate.
Republicans will find this a very en-
couraging book. But they will be making
a mistake if they take it for granted that
current trends will continue indefinitely.
Furthermore, even if all the data Ruffini
provides are accurate and portend fu-
ture Republican wins, the GOP’s gains
among the working class may prove to be
a ­Pyrrhic victory.
Ruffini is a pollster and an election
strategist, and this book aligns with his
expertise and interests. It would be un-
fair to complain that he did not write an
entirely different book. As he knows, how-
ever, there is more to politics and policy
than counting votes. On Election Day, one
person’s vote counts just as much as any-
one else’s. When it comes to real-world
political influence, though, true equality
is not a realistic aim. We should there-
fore consider which party’s coalition is
likely to be effective at pursuing political
and policy goals and avoiding internal
dysfunction. Based on the trends Ruffini
documents in his book, I predict an ad-
vantage for Democrats, despite the many
difficulties they face in satisfying their di-
verse constituencies. The GOP’s vanishing
support from college-educated voters is a
major problem for the party.
A college degree is not compelling
evidence that someone is smart, nor does
it indicate that someone is a superior
democratic citizen. Higher education in
the United States needs serious reform,
and we should make it clear that there are
other paths to economic and social suc-
cess in this country. Those caveats aside,
college degrees are a useful proxy for a
party’s human capital.
1/23/2024 7:00:08 PM
 The party of the college-educated will
have an advantage in finding competent,
public-spirited people to take positions as
congressional staffers and bureaucrats. It
will be the party with more sympathetic
coverage from journalists. It will enjoy
high-dollar donations from the econom-
ic and cultural elites. Its values will be
promoted by the popular media and the
educational institutions.
It is great for the GOP to make inroads
among blue-collar workers in the Rust
Belt. Republicans should be delighted to
welcome Latino Evangelicals who reject
progressive cultural values. I hope the
GOP follows Ruffini’s advice and promotes
policies that improve their lives. But these
are probably not the people who will de-
termine the nation’s long-term trajectory.
In a democracy, a party that appeals only
to the elites will not be successful. Yet a
party with very little support from elites
will also face major challenges.
This is a tricky period for both parties.
Elements of the Left are very uncomfort-
able sharing the Democratic Party with
wealthy, influential moderates. As long
as Wall Street is a major player in the
Democratic Party, significant economic
redistribution is probably off the table.
For Republicans, their new status
as a lowbrow, economically downscale
party may make them permanently un­
attractive to Americans who like to think
of themselves as cultural or economic
elites. This problem may sometimes be
just as aesthetic as substantive. The MAGA
movement can be criticized for many
things, but its tackiness and crudity alone
may be sufficient to keep many people
away. Yet returning to a stodgier variety
of GOP conservatism could repulse many
working-­class newcomers.
Ruffini’s insightful book will prove
valuable for Republican strategists,
and I hope he is right that working-class
voters of all races will continue shifting
toward the party. Republicans should
not be complacent, however. They face
today an important challenge: To win
the future, they must consolidate and
grow their support among the groups
Ruffini discusses, while simultaneously
clawing back enough elite support to
effectively govern.
0324_books_final.indd 55
BOOK REVIEW
Dream On
DOMINIC PINO
Ours Was the Shining Future: The Story of
the American Dream, by David Leonhardt
(Random House, 528 pp., $32)
In the introduction to his new book about
the American dream, David Leonhardt
writes, “The economy is not as compli-
cated as it sometimes seems or as experts
often make it appear.” Leonhardt, a jour-
nalist at the New York Times, writes that
though the economy is complex, he also
believes that “the biggest forces guiding
the economy are accessible to people
who do not have any formal training in
the subject.”
The rest of the book demonstrates
that he does not really believe that to
be true.
If most people can understand the
basics of economics, it should follow that
they can be trusted to make most of the
economic decisions in their lives. But al-
most everywhere Leonhardt looks in the
American economy, he sees the need for
someone else to step in between individ-
uals and their choices—preferably some-
one who agrees with Leonhardt.
Unions are necessary to increase
workers’ power, Leonhardt writes. Left
to themselves, workers will be trampled
by businesses. Voluntary unionism, or
the “open shop,” is merely “an effective
rhetorical tool because it seemed to of-
fer workers a choice.” Leonhardt instead
supports some form of sectoral bargain-
ing, in which unions have industry-wide
collective-­bargaining powers.
By and large, American businesses
can’t be trusted to make good decisions.
Leonhardt admires a few businessmen
from the past, such as George Romney
of American Motors and Paul Hoffman
of Studebaker, who pursued forms of
mid-20th-century corporate social re-
sponsibility. But in general, Leonhardt
NATIONAL REVIEW / MARCH 2024
thinks of businesses and businessmen
as tax-dodgers who, left to their own de-
vices, pursue short-term gains at the ex-
pense of long-term prosperity.
To solve that, he thinks the govern-
ment should take a greater role in di-
recting investment. Private investors
are too profit-oriented for Leonhardt’s
liking. “The government can make these
investments because it can take the long
view,” he writes. Based on the histori-
cal examples of the computer industry
and defense spending, he believes that
government investment can spur eco-
nomic growth and the invention of new
products.
Hoffman is one of Leonhardt’s good
guys because he “became an evangelist
for a corporate America that was less
self-interested and more concerned with
the national interest.” Along with leaders
of other major corporations, he formed
the Committee for Economic Develop-
ment, which Leonhardt argues represent-
ed a new corporate consensus that shifted
away from laissez-faire in favor of closer
cooperation with government and labor.
Romney and other top executives at the
time “viewed themselves as a benevolent
elite,” and CEO pay was not as far out of
proportion with the median income as it
is today.
Leonhardt writes from the left as an
admirer of the New Deal and believes that
the progressive movement has lost its way
by focusing too much on campus politics.
To give you an idea of where he sits on
the left wing of the political spectrum, he
writes “White” and “Black” with capital
letters but uses “Latino,” not “Latinx.”
He thinks America had it just right in the
period after World War II until the 1960s,
when both parties were run by moder-
ates who forged a consensus on economic
policy. Unions were powerful, businesses
were consolidated, and both were close
to government.
Leonhardt calls what he wants “demo-
cratic capitalism.” If he simply meant that
he wants democracy and capitalism, that
would be one thing, but he has something
more specific in mind. He says capital-
ism is clearly better than socialism but
that it needs some help. To Leonhardt,
democratic capitalism is “a system
55
1/23/2024 7:00:08 PM
 BOOKS, ARTS & MANNERS
in which the government recognizes its
crucial role in guiding the economy.”
When the government doesn’t guide
the economy, that’s “rough-and-tumble
capitalism.” Leonhardt presents demo-
cratic capitalism and rough-and-tumble
capitalism as opposites, but “democratic”
and “rough-and-tumble” are not oppo-
sites. In fact, democracy is a pretty rough-
and-tumble system of government, and
voters sometimes demand that govern-
ment step back.
But Leonhardt presents moves toward
less government control as big-business
plots that overturned the big-­government
will of the people. The best example is
his discussion of the Wagner Act: That
1935 New Deal law supercharging unions
was democratic capitalism, but the
Placing more economic decision-making in
the hands of powerful union bosses, genteel
business­men, and all-knowing bureaucrats
is not the American dream. That’s David
Leonhardt’s dream.
Taft-­Hartley Act of 1947 amending the
Wagner Act was the big-business backlash.
He never mentions that in the after-
math of World War II, millions of workers
went on strike, creating massive disrup-
tions in the economy. Voters were sick
of the overpowered unions and, for the
first time in 14 years, elected a Republi-
can majority to the House and Senate.
The Taft-Hartley Act was the fruit of this
popular backlash and became law de-
spite Harry Truman’s veto and a union-­
bankrolled national campaign calling it
the “slave labor act.”
Leonhardt chronicles some business-­
backed efforts to stop unionization, such
as the Citizens’ Alliance in the 1930s in
Minnesota. But because of the Wagner
Act, millions of Americans had received
the most effective form of anti-union
education possible: personal experience
56 NATIONALREVIEW.COM / SPONSORED BY NATIONAL REVIEW INSTITUTE
0324_books_final.indd 56
with a labor union. Leonhardt himself
acknowledges that he was “frustrated”
with the New York Times union he was a
member of, saying its leadership “seemed
more interested in getting their own pay-
checks and reaching retirement than
helping their members.”
Most American workers feel similarly
about unions. Today, only 10 percent of
workers are unionized, and the unioniza-
tion rate has continued its decline from its
zenith in the 1950s no matter which party
has been in power. Even at organized la-
bor’s height, about two-thirds of Amer-
ican workers were not union members.
Like many other journalists,
­Leonhardt refers to recent Gallup poll-
ing that shows popular opinion of labor
unions around a record high, but he
doesn’t report that the same poll asked
respondents whether they personally
would be interested in joining a union.
In 2022, 58 percent said they were not in-
terested at all. Only 11 percent said they
were extremely interested. People think
unions are a good idea—in the abstract,
and for someone else.
The Reagan Revolution definitively
broke the bipartisan economic consen-
sus Leonhardt approves of and ushered in
an era of “rough-and-tumble capitalism”
that we are still living through today, in
his telling. Reagan was pretty up front
about his plans to cut taxes and regula-
tions, and, in response to the malaise of
the 1970s, voters gave him a mandate in
1980. They liked what they saw in his first
term, and 49 of the 50 states went for
­Reagan four years later.
But that wasn’t democratic capital-
ism, because Leonhardt disagrees with
it. He points to the ’80s as the time when
income inequality began to take off.
He favorably cites work on rising inequal-
ity by economists Thomas Piketty and
­G abriel Zucman that many economists
have started to question.
Phillip Magness of the Independent
Institute and Vincent Geloso of George
Mason University have written papers
over the past several years challenging
the rising-­inequality hypothesis. In 2022,
Phil Gramm, Robert Ekelund, and John
Early wrote a book calling rising inequal-
ity a “myth.”
The study that is now catching econo-
mists’ attention, published in the Decem-
ber 2023 issue of the Journal of Political
Economy, is from Gerald Auten of the
Department of the Treasury and David
Splinter of the Joint Committee on Tax-
ation. They used the same data Piketty,
Zucman, and others have used and found
that the share of after-tax income going
to the top 1 percent of earners has hardly
changed since the 1980s.
According to a cover story for the
Economist in April 2023, Americans
­a ren’t just making more money than
people in other developed countries; they
are pulling away. In 1990, U.S. average in-
come, adjusted for purchasing power,
was 24 percent higher than in Western
Europe and 17 percent higher than in
­Japan. Today, it’s 30 percent higher than
in Western Europe and 54 percent high-
er than in Japan. The poorest U.S. state,
Mississippi, has a higher average income
than France, and “a trucker in Oklahoma
can earn more than a doctor in Portugal.”
Leonhardt, and many others, would
downplay those numbers by saying U.S.
inequality rose as well, which he argues
has damaging societal effects that the
statistics miss. But if, as more research is
showing, inequality hasn’t risen by nearly
as much as Leonhardt and others believe,
that significantly undercuts his argument
that the American dream is failing.
Walter Williams would often say
that good economics is applied com-
mon sense. Most people really can grasp
basic economics on their own. Placing
more economic decision-making in the
hands of powerful union bosses, genteel
business­men, and all-knowing bureau-
crats is not the American dream. That’s
David Leonhardt’s dream.
1/23/2024 7:00:08 PM

BOOK REVIEW
Feeding the Beast
LEAH LIBRESCO SARGEANT
Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened
Culture, by Kyle Chayka
(Doubleday, 304 pp., $28)
The animating ethos of the internet is
Paul’s lament in the Letter to the ­Romans:
“What I do, I do not understand. For I do
not do what I want, but I do what I hate.”
The genius of the internet’s algorithmic
feeds is the way they make choosing in-
visible, defusing the culpability of both
the user and the Big Tech behemoth,
offering just one more thing to look at,
without the responsibility of a click.
For technology and culture writer
Kyle Chayka, the author of Filterworld:
How A ­ lgorithms Flattened Culture, the
key question is how we can reintroduce
friction and deliberate choice in the face
of a culture of autoplay and absence. In-
creasingly, when people read or watch
something on the internet, it’s not the re-
sult of the user’s active choice. Algorith-
mic feeds rely on a user’s previous actions
to decide what to show him or her next—
an endless buffet without the burden of
filling your own plate.
When Facebook, Instagram, and the
artist formerly known as Twitter shifted
from chronological feeds to algorithmic
ones, the change was framed as a response
to users’ failure to choose. If you follow
too many people, it’s impossible ever to be
“caught up.” You always might be missing
the thing you most want to see. The algo-
rithm was intended to do the filtering that
users couldn’t quite bear to do—you’d nev-
er have to explicitly unfollow someone,
but the content you were least engaged by
would eventually vanish from your feed,
and you wouldn’t note its absence.
The algorithmic feed promised per-
sonal customization, but that curation
would be invisible. The user shouldn’t
do very much work under the hood,
0324_books_final.indd 57
specifying what he or she would like to see
less or more of—the website would learn
and tune the feed to keep the user happy.
Of course, “happy” was hard to measure,
so, as a first approximation, it would mean
the user stayed on the site, still scrolling or
watching, actively if shallowly engaged.
Chayka was curious about invisible
curation and aesthetic convergence,
especially because he was beginning to
notice how, wherever he went, it felt like
his arrival was anticipated. Something of
a digital nomad, Chayka found that all
over the world, new hipster coffee shops
were opening like tiny embassies—home
turf for him, complete with cortados,
reclaimed wood, and industrial light-
ing. He termed the aesthetic “AirSpace”
and was unsettled by his own longing
for the comfort of sameness: “I fit in in
these non-places, . . . but identifying with
a literally empty symbol was a strange
exercise.”
You don’t have to assume that the internet is
operated by literal demons to be worried that
its prevailing currents carry us far from our own
best intentions.
In Chayka’s analysis, the end state of
an algorithm-driven, competitive media
environment is a yearning for oblivion.
Burn out the dopamine circuits for long
enough and “our natural reaction is to
seek out culture that embraces nothing-
ness, that blankets and soothes rather
than challenges or surprises, as powerful
artwork is meant to do.” This endgame was
anticipated by C. S. Lewis more than 80
years ago, when in his Screwtape ­Letters
he had a senior devil instruct a junior
tempter to lead his “patient” into some-
thing that sounds a lot like doomscrolling:
You no longer need a good book,
which he really likes, to keep him
from his prayers or his work or his
sleep; a column of advertisements in
yesterday’s paper will do. . . . You can
make him do nothing at all for long
periods. You can keep him up late
NATIONAL REVIEW / MARCH 2024
at night, not roistering, but staring
at a dead fire in a cold room. All the
healthy and outgoing activities which
we want him to avoid can be inhibited
and nothing given in return.
In the end, Lewis’s devil says, the
patient will realize that “I spent most of
my life in doing neither what I ought nor
what I liked.” You don’t have to assume
that the internet is operated by literal
demons to be worried that its prevailing
currents carry us far from our own best
intentions. Sometimes, the algorithmic
feed coarsens us by interspersing violent
images from wars around the world with
light jokes for ’90s kids. Other times, we
ingrain bad habits when our clicks teach
the feed to show us the dumbest, most in-
furiating thinkers on the other side of a
political divide.
But, frequently, what I find myself re-
sisting is the way the algorithm tempts
me to let a lower good eclipse a higher
good. Once you face the infinity of the
global content stream, there’s enough
low-­quality but decent material out there
to fill up your whole day. There’s nothing
wrong with a Twitter feed of jokes about
the cast of ­F rasier playing D&D, but the
supply of quirky humor exceeds my at-
tention budget. I need to aggressively and
actively choose the best, not just passively
consume the okay.
But the best operates contrary to
the way the algorithms monitor our
satisfaction. We pause, close the app,
contemplate. Something worth our
time provokes friction and demands si-
lence. All of that looks like failure to an
uncurious app. Algorithmic feeds are
risk-averse. It is easier for them to keep
recommending more of what you find
satisfying enough than to take a chance
with a risky suggestion. You liked
57
1/23/2024 7:00:08 PM
 BOOKS, ARTS & MANNERS
that Tiny Desk Concert by a Broadway
cast, so can I interest you in this one?
When I interact with an algorithmic
feed, I seldom feel that the program is
genuinely testing its hypotheses about
me or trying to show me something it ex-
pects I don’t like, to double-check that its
model is correct. I take on a little more of
that responsibility myself, trying to get
engaged by some works that don’t feel
like natural fits, so I have the chance to
stretch a little and surprise myself. (Sorry
it didn’t work out, Jon Fosse; I hope the
Nobel is a consolation.)
For readers and watchers, the algo-
rithm is a source of suggestions; for cre-
ators, it’s a tricky-to-please switchboard
operator. Chayka is curious about how
the flattening nature of algorithmic feeds
affects business and artists. He concludes
that the context collapse of algorithm-­
driven feeds means that artists have little
ability to present their art as they intend
it. For members of the band Galaxie 500,
speaking through the algorithm feels like
losing their voice. As one of the members
tells Chayka, it’s troubling that one of the
songs they think sounds least like them
is their most popular song on Spotify.
The (very minimal) streaming royalties
don’t seem like much compensation for
making such a skewed first impression.
For everyone but those with locked-down
social-­media accounts, the first impres-
sion you give is similarly framed through
your most viral posts—which are likely to
be your most inflammatory ones.
Relying on multiple untrustworthy
algorithm partners to reach your audi-
ence means that it’s hard to communi-
cate only along your chosen channel.
If you’re an author, it would be ideal if you
could also develop a visual aesthetic that
could fill up an Instagram grid, or get a
ring light and a breathy, intimate voice
for confessional, five-hours-of-taping-to-
appear-­appropriately-spontaneous vid-
eos on TikTok. All businesses need to have
some level of marketing savvy, but rather
than placing an ad in a local paper, you’re
sending out messages-in-a-bottle into a
global maelstrom.
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0324_books_final.indd 58
In response, services such as Substack
(which I use) don’t just offer a smoother
user interface or better revenue-sharing.
What Substack is selling is the promise to
fade into the background, to be more of a
utility pipe than an active curator. Authors
have ownership of their own email lists—
no algorithm tweak leaves them trying to
find a way to reappear in the feeds of fans
who have already said they want to hear
from them. It limits spontaneous-feeling
discoverability and returns to word of
mouth. You have to convince your read-
ers to recommend an essay to a particular
friend, rather than being retweeted into
the world at large or boosted because you
pleased the Ineffable Algorithm.
When it comes to curbing the sites
that remain algorithm-driven, Chayka’s
proposed solutions don’t seem to match
the magnitude of the problem he’s de-
fined. He’s excited about the idea of strip-
ping Section 230 speech protections from
online-­media companies that rely on al-
gorithmic feeds. Once you use weightings
to decide which posts to show a user and
in what order, you’re not a pipe, you’re a
publisher, he argues. Removing the Sec-
tion 230 protections from algorithmic
feeds would make them so legally hazard-
ous for their purveyors that they’d quick-
ly be withdrawn, or, Chayka speculates,
become populated with a limited range of
white-listed, pre-screened content.
His other proposal is to extend the
logic of the Children’s Television Act to
the internet, so that all content provid-
ers would be obliged to show us some-
thing good along with whatever sludge
we and the algorithm choose together.
But the intent of the Children’s Television
Act wasn’t to get adults to watch Mister
Rogers (as much as they might have ben-
efitted from it); it was to force television
channels to help provide a public good.
These feeds aren’t breaking the law,
but they are breaking the culture. The
most plausible way to treat Big Tech is as
a sin industry, like porn, cigarettes, and
gambling. The state can increase the fric-
tion of consuming where it can, through
age-gating, small fees, and encouraging
public schools to ban phones, but we also
need to make deliberate cultural shifts in
our homes and social gatherings. If you
wouldn’t put out ashtrays for a party by
default, maybe consider setting up a box
for everyone to check their phone when
they arrive. Saying no to the thin gruel of
the feeds is easier when you set the social
table with something more robust and
nourishing.
BOOK REVIEW
Equal in Dignity
ALEXANDRA DeSANCTIS
Pity for Evil: Suffrage, Abortion, and Women’s
Empowerment in Reconstruction America,
by Monica Klem and Madeleine McDowell
(Encounter Books, 328 pp., $34.99)
Who is most at fault when a woman ob-
tains an abortion? What does it say about
a society if its women seek abortions be-
cause they feel they have no other choice?
In the 19th and early 20th centuries, these
questions lay at the heart of the cultural
conversation over abortion, as activists
and reformers grappled with how best to
create social conditions that would sup-
port women and protect unborn children.
More than a century later, such a con-
versation is nearly impossible, not least
because many Americans are convinced
that there is nothing wrong with abortion
at all. No one is to blame when women seek
abortion, and nothing needs to be done
to prevent it, the thinking goes, because
abortion is neither undesirable nor even
especially concerning. Instead, many now
see it as the obvious solution—indeed, the
laudable choice—when women find them-
selves pregnant and wish not to be.
In their new book, Pity for Evil:
­S uffrage, Abortion, and Women’s Em-
powerment in Reconstruction America,
scholars Monica Klem and Madeleine
McDowell present a richly documented
demonstration that this wasn’t always the
case, and that our country was better for
it. A century ago, nearly everyone
1/23/2024 7:00:08 PM
 THE BOOKSHELF
N E W AN D U P C OM I N G R E L E AS E S
by Katherine Howell
“At almost no time during the year did most
Americans seem to be voting for someone or
something. They almost always seemed to vote
against,” writes Luke A. Nichter in his rigorously
researched and revelatory The Year That Broke
Politics: Collusion and Chaos in the Presidential
Election of 1968 (Yale, 396 pp., $37.50). His
book brings to mind many parallels with our own
chaotic presidential-election year. In 1968, there
was turmoil at home and abroad; destabilizing
international and domestic events unfolded faster
than they could be comprehended; the American
people were bitterly divided and disillusioned
with their leaders; and the parties’ post-war
political coalitions were coming apart. Nichter’s
portrait of the campaign—a three-way contest
between Hubert Humphrey, Richard Nixon, and
George Wallace—is a historian’s challenge to the
conventional wisdom cemented by journalists
and interested parties at the time. Among the
arguments in his revisionist case are that Nixon’s
“Southern strategy” was not the key to his election;
President Johnson wanted Nixon, rather than his
own vice president, to win; and Wallace’s appeal
reached far beyond simple anti-segregation
sentiment. Nichter’s dispassionate analysis
provides both a welcome respite from our current
politics and an enlightening perspective on it.
Lewis E. Lehrman has lived a remarkable American
life, which is recounted with clarity, wisdom, and
gratitude in his new autobiography, The Sum of
It All (Lyons Press, 464 pp., $34.95). Lehrman, the
grandchild of immigrants, has been a successful
businessman, a philanthropist, a politician, a scholar,
and a leading supporter of conservative causes.
William F. Buckley Jr. was a friend and an admirer of
his and published him in the pages of this magazine.
The author of books on Abraham Lincoln and
Winston Churchill, Lehrman received the National
Humanities Medal in 2005. In 1982, at age 44, he
was the Republican nominee for governor of New
York in a contest with Mario Cuomo, to whom he lost
0324_books_final.indd 59
narrowly. It was, as Lehrman said in his concession
speech, a “campaign of ideas” that, notwithstanding
his defeat, helped set the Republican Party on a
more conservative path nationally. Lehrman’s great
passions, around which he organizes his book,
are his beloved wife and family, the Founders and
American history, and the gold standard. His case
for reviving the last rests on his belief that without
it inflation—the enemy of prosperity and national
confidence—is inevitable. About the future, he
remains optimistic: “We should have no doubt about
the ultimate victory” of “the American way of life—
the faith of our fathers—living still.”
In Flannery O’Connor’s Why Do the Heathen Rage?
A Behind-the-Scenes Look at a Work in Progress
(Brazos, 192 pp., $24.99), Jessica Hooten Wilson
presents previously unpublished fragments of the
novel that Flannery O’Connor left uncompleted
when she died of lupus at 39 in 1964. Wilson does
not attempt to fashion them into anything like a
finished work—she admits that “if O’Connor had
lived, she would certainly have altered this material
substantially.” O’Connor, whose comfort zone was
the short story, labored over her novels for years,
as she put it,“like a squirrel on a treadmill.” But
Wilson thinks that the unfinished manuscript tells
an interesting story in itself: It “deals with political
and social controversies, the civil rights movement,
euthanasia, and poverty in ways O’Connor seems
not to have attempted in her earlier fiction.”
(The plot involves a young white Southern man
pretending to be black in his correspondence
with a white social activist.) Wilson’s book is
clearly a labor of love, and she takes the reader
along companionably in her literary sleuthing,
interspersing episodes and character sketches
from the work with her commentary on them. She
cautions that she is largely offering only “guesses
and possibilities” about what O’Connor would
have ultimately made of these passages; even so,
O’Connor devotees won’t want to miss them and
will find an engaging guide in Wilson.
NATIONAL REVIEW / MARCH 2024 59
1/23/2024 7:00:09 PM
 BOOKS, ARTS & MANNERS
did consider abortion a problem, no mat-
ter who they believed bore the lion’s share
of responsibility.
Pity for Evil introduces readers to key
figures in the post–Civil War and pre–19th
Amendment women’s-rights movement
who focused their advocacy on the inter-
related topics of marriage, sex, repro-
duction, and abortion. The authors don’t
offer much guidance as to how their book
might assist us as we confront these same
topics in a country utterly transformed by
technological changes and shifts in mo-
res. Nevertheless, much of the history they
present will help informed readers think
more deeply about today’s conversations
surrounding feminism and abortion.
Judged purely by its contributions
to the historical record, Pity for Evil has
Pro-woman activists understood that, in
addition to being immoral, abortion failed
to alleviate the unequal burdens society
placed on women.
much to offer. The book examines ma-
jor events and institutions of the early
women’s-­rights movement, giving readers
a deeper understanding of how leaders at
the time conceptualized male–female re-
lationships and encouraged social change
for the sake of equality and justice. The
authors marshal substantial evidence
that many of the period’s most prominent
women’s-rights advocates believed that
abortion was immoral not only because
it killed unborn children but because it
harmed women and perpetuated unjust
social dynamics.
Klem and McDowell survey, for exam-
ple, notable cases in which pregnant moth-
ers died as a result of botched abortions,
some of which were performed against
their will. In other cases, they consider
stories of women who were punished for
engaging in prostitution or seeking abor-
tions, while the men involved—­including
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0324_books_final.indd 60
abortionists—evaded censure. In this re-
gard, Pity for Evil might be compared to
another recent book, The Story of Abor-
tion in America: A Street-Level History,
1652–2022, by Marvin Olasky and Leah
Savas, which likewise established a his-
torical record of abortion’s grave risks to
women and the unequal societal standards
to which women were held.
The suffragists and other early anti-­
abortion advocates whose speeches and
writings fill Pity for Evil didn’t confine
their criticisms of abortion to its destruc-
tion of unborn life or to the way in which
it harmed maternal health. They also
lamented that abortion functioned as an
escape hatch for irresponsible fathers and
furthered what Klem and McDowell call the
“sexual double standard,” by which society
demanded virtuous behavior and chastity
of women while largely ignoring the equal
responsibility of men to act virtuously.
Women were expected to be sexual gate-
keepers, resisting male advances outside of
marriage and taking the full share of blame
when the customs of the time were violat-
ed. This fostered a climate in which only
women were stigmatized for participat-
ing in various forms of sexual dissolution,
while men generally could evade conse-
quences, including and especially in the
event of pregnancy outside of marriage.
In such a landscape, pro-woman ac-
tivists understood that, in addition to be-
ing immoral, abortion failed to alleviate
the unequal burdens society placed on
women. In contrast with modern femi-
nists, they regarded abortion as a failure
of society to address the real, often un-
derstandable reasons that women sought
abortion in the first place. They advocat-
ed the adoption of new societal standards
that would require the same level of virtue
and chastity from men and women and
offer women opportunities to restore their
standing after violating sexual norms.
The authors quote spiritualist and
women’s-rights advocate Mary Fenn
­Davis on this point: “Davis . . . put forward
resolutions on ‘the homeless and unpro-
tected condition of those upon whom, by
misfortune or crime, is laid the burden of
unlegalized maternity.’ Davis’s resolutions
decried the sexual double standard that
left such women ‘bereft of social position
and debarred from all opportunity to re-
trieve their error and to rise to honor and
preferment in respectable communities.’”
Far from being a step in the direction
of greater equality and justice for women,
abortion placed yet another unequal bur-
den on their shoulders, offering pregnant
women in less than ideal circumstances a
tempting yet immoral and physically dan-
gerous method of escaping social shame
and the responsibility of child-rearing.
This thorough exploration of the sex-
ual double standard is perhaps Pity for
Evil’s most helpful contribution to our
present debates over sex, female equal-
ity, and abortion. The women’s-rights
advocates they survey sought to promote
equality and dignity for women within
the context of the biological realities of
sex and pregnancy, a striking contrast
with those who bill themselves as defend-
ers of women’s rights today.
Aided by the advent of fairly effective
oral contraception, second- and third-wave
feminists have argued that there is no lon-
ger any inherent connection between sex
and pregnancy—indeed, that it would be
unfair to regard conception as a natural
outcome of sex and to require women to
continue gestating an already conceived
child. This has resulted in a model of female
emancipation that considers consequence-­
free sex a basic element of human flour-
ishing and demands legal abortion as a
backstop when pregnancy occurs.
This intellectual shift has produced
a pro-abortion movement inclined to ar-
gue that pro-lifers want to force mother-
hood upon unwilling women. “Banning
abortion is forcing pregnancy” is how
the American Civil Liberties Union put
it when Roe v. Wade was on the chopping
block. During the Supreme Court oral
arguments in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s
1/23/2024 7:00:09 PM
 Health Organization, the legal team op-
posing Mississippi’s pro-life law made a
similar claim: “For a state to take control
of a woman’s body and demand that she
go through pregnancy and childbirth,
with all the physical risks and life-altering
consequences that brings, is a fundamen-
tal deprivation of her liberty.”
But laws against abortion don’t force
women to become mothers against their
will; they prohibit women who are already
mothers from exercising lethal violence
against their children in the womb. This
essential distinction is lost on those who
believe that pregnancy has no natural
connection to sex because, thanks to wide-
spread acceptance of contraception, the
conception of an unwanted child is some-
thing like a violation of the terms of service.
Consent to sex, in other words, is no longer
viewed as consent to the possibility of preg-
nancy and parenthood. From this mind-set
follows the belief that taking abortion off
the table renders women unequal, unable
to participate in sex with the same irre-
sponsibility that men can exercise owing
to the nature of their role in reproduction.
The activists whom Klem and Mc-
Dowell study surely would have been
appalled by so vicious and shallow a vi-
sion of female equality. Indeed, Pity for
Evil explores a wholly different use of the
term “forced maternity,” which invoked
a woman’s right to decline sex when
pregnancy was undesired. “It was not
surprising that women sought abortions
when their husbands pursued contra-
dictory ends—the at-will satisfaction of
sexual desire and the curtailing of family
size—with similar insistence, and with-
out discussing ‘this subject of deepest and
most vital interest’ with their wives,” the
authors write, quoting activist Matilda
Joslyn Gage. “Both women and children
were the losers in this scenario: ‘Enforced
motherhood is a crime against the body
of the mother and the soul of the child.’”
The pro-woman leaders showcased
in the book realized that the connection
between sex and pregnancy required an
effort to restructure society in support
of women, who bear unique responsibil-
ity to the child in the womb as a result
of their very biology. Far from rejecting
marriage or demanding abortion, these
0324_books_final.indd 61
thinkers believed that society should em-
brace a vision of marriage as a partner-
ship between a man and a woman with
equal dignity and equal rights, a context
in which husband and wife could share in
the responsibilities of child-rearing—and
childbearing women could depend on the
social protection of marriage to provide
necessary male support.
As Americans in a post-Dobbs coun-
try continue to debate whether there is a
place for abortion in our society, Pity for
Evil reminds us that ending abortion will
ultimately require establishing cultural
conditions that make abortion unappeal-
ing to women, including a return to virtue
and a renewal of marriage.
BOOK REVIEW
The Man Who
Invented Italy
M. D. AESCHLIMAN
Alessandro Manzoni’s great novel,
The Betrothed, had a profound
and lasting impact
The shrewd, worldly Austrian statesman
Prince Klemens von Metternich notori-
ously asserted in 1849 that Italy is only “a
geographical expression”—that is, that
it had never been a single nation and
never would be one. (At the time, the
Austrian empire occupied a large part of
it.) Seventy-­five years earlier, the great
­S amuel Johnson argued that a person
“who has not been in Italy is always con-
scious of an inferiority, from his not hav-
ing seen” what a person should see to be
cultured. (Johnson never got there.) We
might well say that centuries of foreign
conquerors—and of domestic tyrants,
high and petty—wanted too much to be
in Italy, wanted to own and exploit it to
the detriment of the vast majority of its
residents, from Sicily to the Alps.
NATIONAL REVIEW / MARCH 2024
And the task of unifying Italy was not
only the need to expel foreigners and put
down competitive homegrown tyrants.
It was also the need to unify the country
politically, culturally, and economical-
ly, from Sicily and the south to the very
different northern worlds of Rome to
­Florence to north of the Apennines. With-
in this arena of cultural, linguistic, and
geographical variety (and great wealth
and beauty), there was cultural and class
division of the masses of people from the
elites—aristocrats, merchants, profes-
sional men, writers, ecclesiastics—whose
ornament, badge, and tool was Latin and
the classical heritage to which it was
the key.
The man who truly unified Italy on
several levels was neither a conqueror
nor a king nor a politician, but a writer,
­Alessandro Manzoni; and he did a great
deal more even than “make” Italy. He
wrote one of the profoundest and most
influential works of the literature of the
world. Forty years ago, the English liter-
ary scholar Martin Seymour-Smith wrote
that Manzoni’s vast novel The Betrothed
(I promessi sposi) “is one of the greatest
books ever to come from a human brain”;
it is a true valuation.
I taught Manzoni’s novel to under-
graduate students in the U.S. in the 1980s
and ’90s and was astonished that many
of them loved this forbiddingly vast work
(720 pages in Bruce Penman’s 1972 Pen-
guin translation). There is now a new
English translation of The Betrothed,
by Michael F. Moore (Modern Library),
which I have not read. What I have read
recently is a fine historical and literary-­
critical work by the Italian historian
Roberto Bizzocchi, Romanzo Popolare:
Come i Promessi ­sposi hanno fatto l’Ita-
lia (2022)—­“ Popular Novel: How The
Betrothed Made Italy.” ­Bizzocchi’s clev-
er title puns fruitfully: The novel is a
romance in the sense of a love story; in
Italian, the word for novel is also “roman-
zo.” The plural “the betrothed”—the nov-
el’s two romantic partners and its three
different editions—are here alleged to
have “made Italy.”
Manzoni finished the first edition in
September 1823; the others appeared
in 1827 and 1842. Much more than
61
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 BOOKS, ARTS & MANNERS

his other writings, earlier and later,

these three versions, on which he spent
20 years, both revealed and ultimately
shaped Italy with a force, significance,
and impact comparable only to Dante’s
Divine Comedy. The only other works
of literary imagination equal to The
­Betrothed in modern Western literature
are the novels of Dickens, Dostoevsky, and
Tolstoy. (A comparison to Shakespeare
would not be strained or irrelevant.)
All four of these great 19th-century
novelists were Christians who used a
“Providential aesthetic.” They attempt-
ed to use language and literature as a
means not only or mainly of self-expres-
sion, communication, or representation
(art as mirror of reality) but of convey-
ing and making credible, and lovable,
the moral universe itself (art as lamp of
metaphysical-­moral truth).
Writing in 1781 of Milton’s epic
­P aradise Lost (1667), Samuel Johnson
said: “His purpose was the most useful
and the most arduous: ‘to vindicate the
ways of God to man’; to show the reason-
ableness of religion, and . . . of obedience PORTRAIT OF ALESSANDRO MANZONI (1841), BY FRANCESCO HAYEZ
to the Divine Law.” After Milton’s own
youthful visit to Italy in 1638–39, and part-
ly inspired by it, in 1642 he articulated his Lombardy—during the Spanish occupa- has some of the dramatic pathos of an-
hope for his great future literary project tion and governance from 1628 to 1631, other contemporary writer, the historian
to be a work “doctrinal and exemplary and they develop the same characters Thomas Carlyle, whose 1837 history of the
to a nation,” which is what Paradise Lost and plotlines, with important differences French Revolution was the inspiration for
became. The phrase also felicitously de- that Bizzocchi learnedly discusses. Writ- A Tale of Two Cities. Victor Hugo’s Les
scribes Manzoni’s achievement in a quite ing 200 years later, under the Hapsburg Misérables (1862) is a work of compara-
different genre a century and a half later. Austrian dominance of the same area, ble moral documentation and protest in
The Betrothed is still the one modern Manzoni is scathing in his depiction of the French-speaking world.
literary work that all Italians to some the gross and pervasive oppression and Manzoni’s personal history and de-
extent know: A current, standard upper- exploitation of the masses of Italian peo- velopment have in fact a great deal to
high-school/college edition, edited by ple by their foreign overlords, but also of do with the French-speaking world and
Corrado Bologna and Paola Rocchi, runs the collaborating vanity, snobbery, law- the French Revolution and its aftermath.
to over a thousand pages, with the famous lessness, and incompetence of the local Born privileged in 1785 into the decadent
original illustrations by Francesco ­Gonin. Italian elites. Italian but Francophile and Francophone
The novel goes far above and beyond the Despite its frequent comic interludes aristocracy of northern Italy, with an old-
DEA / M. CARRIERI / GETTY IMAGES

aims and achievements of Sir Walter
Scott, whose once-famous historical nov-
els were a major inspiration for Manzoni:
Though Scott was a noble and gifted man,
Manzoni is, as Seymour-Smith says, “an
infinitely subtler and deeper novelist.”
The three editions of Manzoni’s novel
all depict life in northern Italy—Milan and
and touches, and especially by means
of its magnificent recurring irony, The
Betrothed paints a terrible picture of
human nature and turpitude. The English-­
language reader will think of Dickens’s de-
scriptions of exploitation and abuse in A
Tale of Two Cities, Oliver Twist, and Hard
Times, and Manzoni’s historical account
er, remote father who was almost certain-
ly his father in name only, Manzoni was
initially educated in austere classical-­
Catholic boarding schools in Lombardy,
grew increasingly skeptical and libertine,
and at age 20 went to Paris to join his
mother, who had absconded there years
before with her aristocratic Italian lover.

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 He lived in postrevolutionary, Napoleonic
Paris for five years, initially in the “free-
thinking,” libertine milieu of the left-wing
aristocratic intelligentsia.
In Paris, Manzoni married an earnest
young French-Swiss Protestant woman,
Henriette Blondel, whom he deeply loved,
and the two of them ended up converting
to Catholicism. The story is surprising
and complex, for Manzoni did not become
either a tepid Catholic conformist or a
“throne and altar” Catholic reactionary
but instead proved to have resources of
education, insight, character, and moral
imagination that were developed into one
of the commanding literary-ethical intel-
ligences of the past 200 years.
Manzoni critiqued many of the most
alluring intellectual, ideological, and po-
litical temptations of the modern period.
Italians who read his novel in one or both
of its last two editions realized—and still
realize—that it was written in defense
of the Christian idea of the equal worth
of all persons, whatever their ethnicity,
class, occupation, or sex. Bizzocchi argues
that the heart of Manzoni’s vision is the
principle of the equality of human be-
ings, announced first by Saint Paul in the
­Epistle to the Galatians.
And Manzoni’s Italian patriotism
had a universalist core: He insisted that
the Christian gospel was transnational,
in fact cosmopolitan. If the dominant
Spaniards of The Betrothed are unjust,
self-interested, and pompous, few of the
Italians—including churchmen—are any
better. If Christianity has a transcenden-
tal core rooted in and ultimately oriented
to another world, that does not absolve
us from persistent ethical striving in
this one.
The mature Manzoni has a ballast
and wisdom that none of his influential
French predecessors, contemporaries,
or successors manages, even opponents
of the Jacobins and Napoleon such as
DEA / M. CARRIERI / GETTY IMAGES
Sismondi, Madame de Staël, or Benjamin
Constant. Like explicitly social-political
thinkers such as Burke and Tocqueville,
he saw Rousseau, Robespierre, and the
Jacobins as abstract fanatics committed
to the pernicious utopian illusion of a rap-
id perfection of the conditions and moral
status of humanity.
0324_books_final.indd 63
Yet as much as any Protestant,
­ anzoni was aware of and disgusted by
M ­European legacy of self-reflective aes-
the frequently corrupt and demoralizing
history of the papacy. In a long life, he
never visited Rome, despite being a chief
intellectual architect of the new, unified
Italian state that finally took Rome as
its capital in 1871. On the occasion of his
death in 1873, that of the greatest Catho-
lic layman in Italy and the most import-
ant modern intellectual influence in the
strengthening and deepening of the Cath-
olic spirit of its people, the pontificate of
Pope Pius IX had nothing to say.
It is gratifying and revealing to note
the veneration in which prominent
contemporaries and successors held
­Manzoni. In 1838 the great English Chris-
tian statesman William Ewart Gladstone
sought out and met Manzoni near Milan,
conversed with him in Italian, and subse-
quently corresponded with him (in Ital-
ian). Even before meeting Manzoni, the
great operatic composer Giuseppe Verdi
admired him and called The Betrothed
“not only a book, but a consolation for
humanity.” He composed his great Requi-
em for Manzoni’s soul. René Girard (1923–
2015), the distinguished French literary
critic, anthropologist, and member of the
Académie Française, had Manzoni’s novel
read to him as a youth in Avignon by his
learned Catholic mother and never forgot
it; his adult reconversion to Catholicism
in the U.S. entailed a profound rejection of
the French literature of libertine subjec-
tivism, preening aestheticism, and neo-
philia whose earlier forms Manzoni had
rejected and to which his work is such a
contrast. The current pope, Francis, has
often mentioned Manzoni’s novel as a
formative influence and recommended
it publicly.
But it is Manzoni’s concern with and
advocacy of the Italian language and of
the “common” masses of Italian people
that are most noble and noteworthy.
His life project was a vindication of the
Italian vernacular and, one can argue,
even of the medieval Christian piety
of Saint Francis and Dante (and the
rationalism of Saint Thomas Aquinas)
against the classicizing elitism—cultural
and political—­that grew to characterize
the incipiently pagan and aristocratic
NATIONAL REVIEW / MARCH 2024
Renaissance and its domestic and
theticism. Professor B ­ izzocchi shows
conclusively that Manzoni heroically
shed and attacked the deep, tragic snob-
bishness that saw in the common peo-
ple of Italy and ­Europe mere workers,
“hands,” or “base mechanicals.”
Assessing the stylistics and implica-
tions of the New Testament and Dante,
the polymathic intellectual historian
Joseph A. Mazzeo of Columbia Univer-
sity wrote nearly 50 years ago that the
“Christian vision of reality opened the
imagination to a new relation between
the Supreme Reality and everyday reality,
so that no social class or occupation or
condition in life was without that eternal
reference, whether for good or evil.”
To the extent that we are still civi-
lized, we live in the light and ambiance
of that vision, and we are nourished by
its trajectory and residual momentum.
­Alessandro Manzoni’s book is one of its
greatest products.
FILM REVIEW
Three’s Company
ROSS DOUTHAT
Alexander Payne’s 1970s-set prep-school
movie reveals the artistic attractions of the
pre-smartphone era
Is Paul Giamatti the ugliest man to be-
come a major movie star? His turn in The
Holdovers, a small pleasure dropped
amid the various historical epics and
biopics of this year’s awards season, is
probably an unfair place to start that con-
versation, because it’s a part for which
Giamatti has uglied himself up. His char-
acter suffers from strabismus, better
known as walleye, a drifting of the gaze
in one eye but not the other—an effect
achieved in the movie through some sort
of unobtrusive eye prosthetic, less
63
1/23/2024 7:00:10 PM
 BOOKS, ARTS & MANNERS
controversial than the nose extension
Bradley Cooper donned to play Leonard
Bernstein in Maestro but more effective
as a subtle unsettlement.
As if that weren’t enough, Giamatti’s
character also suffers from trimethyl-
aminuria, a metabolic condition that
makes the body give off a fishy odor that
worsens as the day wears on. There is no
smell-o-vision to convey this to the audi-
ence, but to the extent possible the actor
manages to make it palpable nonetheless:
He moves and speaks and conducts him-
self like a man who has a negative halo, a
personal wasteland that he carries with
him through the world.
The character is a teacher of the
classics, Paul Hunham, who instructs
the sons of privilege at a fictional acad-
emy, the Barton School, in the year of
our Lord 1970. A proud miserabilist, he
mixes a snob’s affections for the school
and its traditions with a class warrior’s re-
sentment of its actual students, and so we
meet him explaining to the headmaster
why he simply had to fail a senator’s son,
thus denying him his ideal college place-
ment, and then flunking a classroom full
of grumbling preppies on the day before
the Christmas holidays begin.
Those holidays give the movie its title
and its plot. Hunham is maneuvered by
a colleague into occupying the unhappy
role of babysitter for those students un-
lucky enough to be stuck on campus for
the season. (And why not, since he lives
on campus and passes a seemingly friend-
less existence anyway?) The motley crew
includes five boys, but a deus ex machina
involving a rich dad and a ski trip soon
reduces the list of holdovers to just one:
Angus (Dominic Sessa), a smart, angular,
and extremely difficult kid who thought
he was headed to a tropical vacation only
to have his mother and stepfather ditch
him for the sake of their own relaxation.
So Angus is stuck with Mr. Hunham,
with additional company supplied only
by the school’s African-American cook,
Mary Lamb (Da’Vine Joy Randolph),
who is mourning her own son, a recent
Barton graduate who was admitted to
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0324_books_final.indd 64
DA’VINE JOY RANDOLPH, PAUL GIAMATTI, AND DOMINIC SESSA IN THE HOLDOVERS
Swarthmore, couldn’t afford tuition, and
instead died in Vietnam.
Mary’s trauma is right there on the
surface; for Angus and his teacher, the
movie is a slow unveiling of the ­forces
warping their young and older lives,
with revelations waiting at the end of the
various peripatetic misadventures—an
injury, a local Christmas party, a trip to
Boston—that are the stock-in-trade of the
director, Alexander Payne. Waiting just
beyond those revelations is the moral-­
juridical dilemma, the judgmental head-
master and uncomprehending parents,
that you expect from the prep-school-
movie genre. And then the movie is shot
and framed and titled in the style of the
period in which it’s set, giving you three
genres for the price of one: It’s a Payne
road-trip movie à la Sideways, crossed
with a school-days movie à la Scent of
a Woman, crossed with, let’s say, Five
Easy Pieces.
The movie is consistently engaging,
mostly because Randolph and Sessa more
than hold their own against Giamatti, but
the layers of genre and ’70s homage made
me wonder if it might have been more am-
bitious and interesting to set the story in
the present day. You would have lost the
Vietnam backdrop and the heightened
emphasis on the consequences of class
and race divides, but that’s the most
heavy-handed, unsubtle aspect of the sto-
ry. (And also the most implausible, since
I strongly suspect an elite New England
boarding school with a brilliant black stu-
dent would have found a way to get him a
college scholarship to escape the draft.)
The real reason for the Nixon-era
setting, I suspect, follows from a recent
observation from the liberal writer Matt
Yglesias: “People in the movie business
think smartphones are not cinematic
and would rather depict life from the
pre-smartphone era.” That helps explain
why the current revival of cinematic am-
bition is so focused on historical char-
acters and incidents, but even in The
Holdovers you can see the artistic attrac-
tion that the pre-smartphone era holds: A
missed phone connection plays a crucial
role in keeping Angus stranded while the
other kids escape, and more generally the
absence of the internet enables a certain
kind of secret-keeping that’s important to
the delayed revelations of the plot.
Thinking about it this way makes the
’70s setting more artistically understand-
able; Payne’s story would have to be told
differently to work in 2023. But still the
effort might have been worth it. We have
plenty of cinematic portraits of unhap-
FOCUS FEATURES
py privilege set in a WASPier and now
quite distant past. The present and its
dis­contents need more illumination.
1/23/2024 7:00:11 PM
 BY RICHARD BROOKHISER
City Desk
Be Fazed
I was aware of the noise, loud bass pops,
before I wondered what it was. At first it
sounded like percussion, machinery, or
backfires, but irregularity or duration
ruled each out. A drummer would be
rhythmic, a contraption consistent; an op-
erator would turn a suffering engine off.
I went outside to see what was going on.
The sound came from the avenue, one of the broad uprights
of the city’s grid. It was wintry early evening, the sidewalks fleck-
ed with people, the streets with traffic. There was a fire truck and
a police car on the far side of the avenue, and passersby looking
back in the direction of our building. About two-thirds of the
way up the block in the near, downtown lane was a manhole
cover. Steam poured from the pick holes, and the sound issued
from thence too, muffled but loud. There were firemen walking
up and down or standing, as if waiting to be told what to do. I
had a conversation with a delivery guy. It seemed there was an
electrical fire below the surface of the avenue. Nothing had been
done yet but officialdom was on the case.
Back in our apartment, we began to smell it. We are on the
superstition-christened 14th floor, and there are nights when the
wind moans in the side panels of the window air conditioners
like the damned. But the quantity of steam being ejected was
too prodigious to be dispersed; the noxious taste of it invaded
our space. Impossible to cook in the kitchen or eat at the dining-­
room table, which both face the avenue. We retreated to the
other bedroom, my wife’s psychoanalytic den, and cleared a
space for plates and forks.
There are two places across the avenue at which we are take-
out regulars, and two others at which we are not. The world lay
all before us. Phoned an order to the Italian place and went down
again in half an hour to pick it up. The event, whatever it was, had
meanwhile grown in scope and chiaroscuro. Steam now hissed
from a second manhole cover, and there were flames shooting
up out of the first. A young man with whom I did not share a glot
FOCUS FEATURES
said something which I did not catch the first two times, but
turned out to be, “Godzilla awakens!” Cinema, the universal
language. I crossed the avenue to go to the Italian place. Cops
had closed off the downtown lanes, where the fire was, but cars
0324_books_final.indd 65
still cruised uptown. As I passed the Thai
place, our second regular spot, the owner,
a kindly older man, stepped outside, took
my arm, and warned me to be careful. I
moved up the block. At the Italian place
the order was not yet ready, so I stood
watching the flames out the window.
A child noticed the ruckus, no one else
seemed to. But the prize for unfazed went
to two adults outdoors. Even in winter the
Italian place sets out a double row of ta-
bles and synthetic wicker chairs. There,
in the 30-degree temperature, a few
yards from hellmouth, sat a couple enjoy-
ing their dinner. A waiter brought them
martini glasses on a tray. I took our order
home, where we ate more comfortably if
less defiantly. At some point the thump-
ing stopped, and the steam stink. Then,
just as we were going to bed, the lights
went out. This was part of the cleanup
sequence. The fire department had been
unable to quench the fire until the utility,
which owns the malfunctioning cables,
gave them the go-ahead. Once the fire was
out, the cables had to be repaired. So the
power coursing through that portion of
the lines was cut. When it was restored, at
3 a.m., all our lights flashed on. And then,
after a grumble, peace at last.
Gotta love the city and city-dwellers.
We take it, we move on. Godzilla? Invite
him to join the Thanksgiving Day pa-
rade, he requires no assembly. But that
attitude also makes us inattentive. We are
bursting with migrants, SJP (Students for
­Judenrein Palestine) closes bridges and
tunnels at whim, we have forgotten that
ubiquitous graffiti sucks. Sometimes you
have to notice.
NATIONAL REVIEW / MARCH 2024 65
1/23/2024 7:00:11 PM
 BY BRYAN A. GARNER
Garner the
Grammarian
Disabling Ableism
A s a teenager, I was confined to a wheel-
chair for six weeks or so after having
surgery on both feet to remove bone
fragments. It took a while to learn to walk
again. Then there was the time I almost
blinded myself playing with cement pow-
der: The doctors thought for more than a
week that I might not regain my eyesight. (I did.) A few years
ago, I broke my left humerus, resulting in a radial-nerve pal-
sy: My left hand was in a curled-up position for more than a
year, until I had corrective (and miraculous) surgery at Johns
Hopkins.
I know what it’s like not to be able-bodied. When suffering
from the hand problem, I called myself crippled for a while,
but people didn’t like it. Perhaps I was being insensitive to their
feelings.
So I wouldn’t claim that these experiences have made me
any more empathetic than the average thinking American. But
who knows? When writing chapter 5 of The Chicago Manual of
Style, on grammar and usage, I was asked to deal with avoiding
biased language. Here’s part of what I wrote for the current,
17th edition (2017): “Comments that betray a writer’s conscious
or unconscious biases or ignorance may cause readers to lose
respect for the writer and interpret the words in ways that
were never intended. . . . Avoid irrelevant references to per-
sonal characteristics such as sex, race, ethnicity, disability,
age, religion, sexual orientation, transgender status, or social
standing.”
That holds up pretty well, but it doesn’t deal much with
ableism, which has recently come to the fore with initiatives
related to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). You’re doubtless
familiar with these programs. For some years, corporate Amer-
ica has been devoting time and energy to DEI seminars. On the
linguistic side, they’ve made a lot of people more sensitive to
what they say and how they write.
If you’re a public speaker, and you’re relatively thoughtful,
you might recoil if you found yourself saying “Don’t be blind
to the problem” only to look down and see a blind person in
the first row. You’re using blindness in a metaphorical way, but
directly in front of you is someone who is literally blind.
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0324_books_final.indd 66
That’s the issue that many in the DEI movement
have: using metaphors about various disabilities.
“The manager was deaf to the staffers’ complaints.”
Some DEI trainers would have you avoid such ableist
metaphors altogether: “The manager ignored the
staffers’ complaints.”
People are being warned to stop using all sorts
of ableist language: “fall on deaf ears,” “turn a
blind eye,” “lame argument,” “dragging your feet,”
“dumb,” “stupid,” “crazy,” and so on.
But where do we stop?
True story: Late last year, a friend of mine went
through a compulsory corporate session in which at-
tendees were told they should no longer say “feel free
to reach out to our team.” They should say connect
instead of reach out on grounds that not everyone
can reach with their arms.
They were warned against ever saying something
about “standing up for someone’s rights.” Not every-
one can stand up. (Believe me: I know that.)
They were cautioned not to talk about “looking
up” personnel on the website. Not everyone is phys-
ically capable of looking up.
They were exhorted not to “walk back” injudi-
cious comments. It was said to be a painful expression
to hear for those unable to walk.
And try to avoid “running late” or “running
meetings.” Think how hurtful that might be to
those who can’t even walk, much less run. I’m told
the trainers said nothing about jogging people’s
memories.
Who knows what this training might do for sales
of Sheryl Sandberg’s book Lean In. Participants were
actually told not to use that catchphrase anymore.
Not everyone can do it.
They were urged to stop saying “Work is killing
me”—not because such negativity hurts morale but
because it shows insensitivity to what’s going on
in the Mideast and with natural disasters around
the world.
1/23/2024 7:00:12 PM
 Don’t you see? Oh yes, that was an-
other one to avoid. They were instructed
even to stop saying “I hear you.”
I could go on, but I don’t want to
strong-arm with examples.
It all starts to seem like a parody. What
begins as a good idea gets distorted into
a monstrous doctrine that is almost cer-
tainly devoid of contributions from the
marginalized groups we’re trying so hard
to avoid stigmatizing.
If you look at websites on the subject
of ableist language, you’ll find confusing
messages. Some will recommend “differ-
ently abled” over “disabled,” but others
argue that the former (a euphemism)
callously suggests that there’s something
wrong with the latter. One commentator
urges us to use the word disability be-
cause (1) “it is accurate” and (2) “it helps
normalize the presence of disability in
our world.”
That seems right, and yet I’m sure
there’s nothing like unanimity on the
point—even among those with disabilities.
Please don’t take from this column the
idea that all this linguistic concern is mis-
placed. It isn’t. As we’ve seen in past col-
umns, language is constantly changing.
People’s perceptions of language are for-
ever evolving. Calibrating your language
is an ongoing process.
If you hope to understand better,
you might try having conversations on
everyday subjects with disabled people.
Most of us feel uncomfortable speaking
to someone in a wheelchair or someone
who is blind. You might make a con-
scious effort to treat them as you would
anybody else, wherever you might
be. If you’re standing in line, where
you might speak about the weather to
some other stranger, do the same with
a person with a disability. “Lovely day,
isn’t it?”
And keep it normal: Avoid callow
compliments like “You’re such an inspi-
ration to me.” Disabled people aren’t here
to inspire those without disabilities. Just
have a regular conversation.
I know I’d have appreciated that when
I was in a wheelchair. Most people either
averted their eyes altogether, or else they
gawked. They certainly made me feel any-
thing but normal.
0324_books_final.indd 67
Disabled people aren’t here
to inspire those without
disabilities. Just have a
regular conversation.
POEM BY WILLIAM W. RUNYEON
Angel in the Garden
Soon after my wife’s brother died,
I came home from work to find
a half-dozen large boxes
sitting unopened in the foyer;
she had purchased garden statuary,
online, in the deep, dark cold
of a winter’s night;
we opened them
as an in-house memorial,
until the first warm afternoon,
when they were placed
in the garden, with solar light
illumination, for the darkness;
over the years, they were carried
in and out, private spirits of hope,
with only one, the peacock, broken;
but the wings-spread angel
was always the center;
as evening descended,
the light came upon her,
and one could not but think
of what brought her here,
and of the affirmation;
bringing the angel in the house
for the winter, or re-placing her
each spring, a little ritual
with its edge of sadness;
remember, the force is in her wings;
really, in the thought of them
always rising at the moment
of illumination.
NATIONAL REVIEW / MARCH 2024 67
1/23/2024 7:00:12 PM
 BY DAVID HARSANYI
suggests—is a payment that goes beyond
the agreed-upon price and express-
Happy Warrior
­meritocratic act. A reward. Instead, we’ve
The 0 Percent Solution
Y
ou decide to treat yourself. You stop at the
local ice-cream shop and order two scoops
of the absurdly expensive salted caramel
on a waffle cone. It’s freezing outside, so no
one else is in the shop. The aloof twenty-
something behind the counter spends—if
we’re being generous—a total of four min-
utes pulling together the order. Before you
even get your hands on the stuff, she points
to the credit-card reader. You attempt to
pay but, before you can, the machine prompts you for a tip.
And, for your convenience, it has pre-tabulated the suggested
amounts—at 20 percent, 25 percent, 30 percent.
The most convenient amount for me is 0 percent. And I feel
no guilt.
It’s basically impossible to walk into a store today without
someone behind a counter trying to shake you down for a few
extra bucks simply because your paths happen to have crossed
for a few fleeting moments.
These days, the Overton window has a tip jar in front of it.
For a couple of years there, I had been lulled into mechani-
cally hitting the highest-percentage tipping option whenever a
machine asked. Why not help hardworking folks in the service
industry? It got so bad, I am ashamed to admit, that I think I
was unconsciously seeking out people to tip. “Hey, Siri, how
much do you tip the dental hygienist?” When maintenance
men appeared at my home, I’d scramble to locate loose bills
to hand them, even though I hadn’t carried cash around since
the last time I bought a movie on VHS. I’d end up apologetically
shrugging.
No worries, one HVAC technician assured me; but did I have
CashApp?
No. Not anymore, I don’t.
Lest anyone think I’m predisposed to being cheap: I’ve al-
ways been a generous tipper. It’s a habit I picked up in my 20s,
after a stint as a waiter. Caring for the needs of fussy strangers is
the most thankless job I’ve ever held. It’s not easy. I get it. Unless
a waiter is rude or ignores my requests, which is almost never
the case, I’ll tip well.
What about the guy who scribbles my name on a recycla-
ble cup, walks that cup five feet from the coffee machine to a
counter­top, and then yells for me to come and pick it up? Well,
he’s abused the privilege.
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0324_backpage_final.indd 68
A gratuity—as the root of the word
es gratitude for the effort put forth by
the server. Tipping is, or should be, a
created a moral hazard. The entire incen-
tive structure is shot.
With it the word “service,” too, which
has been stretched beyond recognition.
Today, eateries have no problem asking
for a tip before you pick up your food.
Which is to say, before you even know
what level of satisfaction, if any, you
might feel about the interaction.
That tip jar sitting on the ledge of the
drive-through window? No, thank you.
You’ll get a tip when you drive the burg-
er to me.
Do I really need to tip the dry cleaner?
How about the owner of the rustic booth
with overpriced vegetables at the farm-
ers’ market? According to news accounts,
there are unmanned point-of-sale kiosks
in fast-food joints around the country
that prompt consumers with tip requests.
It’s a racket.
It wasn’t always this way. Appar-
ently, tipping, imported to the United
States from Europe in the mid 1800s, was
deemed corrosive to work ethic, an as-
sault on republican virtue, and beneath
the dignity of the American worker. In
the book Tipping: An American Social
History of Gratuities, early chapters are
titled with quotes from Americans relay-
ing their anger about the trend: “Illegal
and Un-American,” “Democracy’s Deadly
Foe,” “Our Daily Bribe,” “Public Nuisance
Number One.” It wasn’t until the 1950s, it
seems, that tipping our servers at restau-
rants became a norm.
“I don’t tip because society says I have
to,” Mr. Pink famously explained in his
meditation on gratuity in Reservoir Dogs.
Now, perhaps I have a touch of opposi-
tional defiant disorder myself, because
it isn’t really the imposition, or the cost
of the extra 20 percent, that grinds my
gears as much as it’s the expectation of
gratitude for doing the minimum.
And please spare me your class-warfare
guilt trips. If you want a few extra dollars,
go the extra mile. Because in the real world,
we don’t get tipped for doing our job.
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