Dirty Hari
A young British journalist’s lies were overlooked because he had all the right prejudices—especially when it came to Israel.
Jonathan Foreman 2011-12-01This year saw two major scandals in the British media. The one that received the most attention concerned cell-phone “hacking” by a private detective hired by the now-shuttered News of the World. Such illegal private espionage has been a practice of other tabloid newspapers—including the left-wing Daily Mirror and the paleoconservative Daily Mail—but the outcry focused on papers owned by Rupert Murdoch, whose Atlanticist, free-market, and populist ethos has long infuriated the British media and political establishment.
The second scandal involved the exposure of Johann Hari, the celebrated young columnist and media personality, as a plagiarist, fabricator, and user of Internet aliases to carry out smear campaigns against his enemies and to promote his own career. The Hari affair provoked less consternation—though it arguably offers as troubling a picture of the state of British journalism as the hacking scandal does. Indeed, the response to the scandal from Hari’s employers at the Independent and from much of the media establishment was arguably even more revealing of a deficit in the ethics of British media culture than were Hari’s original derelictions.
Like several rising stars in American journalism over the past three decades—the Washington Post’s Janet Cooke in the early 1980s, the New Republic’s Ruth Shalit and Stephen Glass in the 1990s, and the New York Times’s Jayson Blair in the early 2000s—Hari, now just 31, achieved his rapid success at a startlingly young age in large part thanks to his deceptions and fabrications. These went undetected for a long time because editors chose not to examine his work too closely. In Hari’s case (as in the case of Glass), his editors did not check his work because he skillfully played to their prejudices, in particular their anti-Americanism and loathing of Israel.
The reaction to his journalistic crimes stood in stark contrast to the American response to Glass and others. Hari’s sins were not greeted with the outrage, disappointment, and deep soul-searching of the sort that went on at all three American journalistic establishments—which led to editors being fired and new standards of exactitude being imposed—but rather with a blasé wave of the hand. In America, if a journalist is caught in repeated invention and deliberate dishonesty, his or her career ends. Not so in Britain. Hari was merely suspended from the Independent and is due to return to it after completing a journalism class in New York.
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Born in Glasgow, Hari was hired right out of Cambridge University as a 21-year-old by the New Statesman. He moved from there to the Independent and very quickly became its most talked-about writer after Robert Fisk, the infamous veteran Middle East correspondent (whose propagandistic reporting has problems of its own). Astonishingly prolific, Hari specialized in pithy, personal, no-holds-barred political and cultural diatribes, combining undeniable verbal brilliance and erudition with vituperation that could be savage even by the unrestrained standards of British journalism.
It was typical of Hari that in one of many articles vilifying Israel (a stance popular with readers and editors of the Independent) he wrote, “Israel, as she gazes at her grey hairs and discreetly ignores the smell of her own stale shit pumped across Palestine, needs to ask what kind of country she wants to be in the next 60 years.”
He also wrote about himself with what looked like unsparing if solipsistic openness. He told readers about his issues with his homosexuality, his struggles with his weight, and his battles with depression in articles that were often moving and thoughtful. Hari’s combination of vulnerability and viciousness apparently made it all the more difficult for editors and colleagues to confront him about his suspiciously unconvincing reporting.
His fans were not limited to Independent readers with an apparently insatiable hunger for anti-Israel and anti-American invective. Liberals, centrists, and conservatives also found themselves praising Hari’s columns for devastating attacks on the likes of Harold Pinter, Eric Hobsbawm, George Galloway, and other progressive darlings with soft spots for Stalinists and progressive dictators. Like Christopher Hitchens, whose friendship Hari cultivated, he seemed to bring impressive moral force and democratic convictions to his political writing.
Whether out of conviction or for careerist reasons (or both), Hari occupied a libertarian niche on the left that allowed him to identify with the left establishment while attacking multiculturalism, totalitarianism, “anti-imperialist” support for third-world tyrants, and politically correct blindness to the dangers of Islamofascism. Like Hitchens, he was a strong supporter of Western intervention in the Balkans and then Iraq,1 although he changed sides with snarling vehemence in 2006. This reversal only added to his celebrity. In 2008, he was awarded the prestigious Orwell Prize for political writing. George Orwell was surely spinning in his grave on the evening Hari rose to the dais to accept it.
Long before he ascended these heights, he had been dogged by whispers that the quotes in his articles and columns were too perfect to be real. While he was at the New Statesman, the magazine’s deputy editor, Cristina Odone, was so troubled by the quotations he used in a supposedly reported story that she asked to see his notebooks. He put off bringing them in, then claimed to have misplaced them. After discovering that Hari had been forced off the Cambridge student newspaper for allegedly unethical behavior while still an undergraduate, Odone finally went to the magazine’s editor, Peter Wilby, but without result. Odone subsequently found that her Wikipedia entry had been altered to include references to her alleged homophobia and anti-Semitism as well as other flaws. The changes were made by one D. Rose, of whom more later.
Wilby, like subsequent editors, seems to have felt that Hari’s possibly problematic methods were of lesser significance than his cleverness, his unusually humble background (Hari claims his mother worked as a cleaning lady), his ability to bring in a gay readership and, above all, his ideological soundness on subjects like Israel and America.
Hari left the New Statesman after a year or so and tried to get work at the highly respected, left-leaning Guardian newspaper with the assistance of Polly Toynbee, an elder stateswoman on the left whom he had assiduously cultivated. But the Guardian, which generally holds to serious, almost American standards of journalistic ethics, had suspicions about his methods. The Independent, with a much smaller staff and an increasingly tabloid sensibility, was not so scrupulous.
In Spring 2003, the satirical magazine Private Eye charged Hari with falsehoods in three New Statesman stories, including one in which he claimed to have spent a month reporting from Iraq when in fact he had gone on a two-week package tour of the country’s ancient sites. In another story, Hari claimed to have seen a demonstrator bleeding to death at the Genoa G8 summit. The Eye’s Hackwatch column stated: “As several witnesses can attest, Hari wasn’t there, having hailed a taxi to escape the scene some time before” the killing.
There were other questions asked on the Internet over the following years, but it was not until 2011 that Hari’s reputation was seriously challenged. It was a handful of left-wing bloggers who started the ball rolling this spring—bloggers who disliked his initially pro-war position on Iraq, or the vituperativeness of Hari’s attacks on figures like the ancient apologist for Stalin, Eric Hobsbawm.
Those bloggers pointed out that interviews Hari had conducted with writers such as Antonio Negri included quotations that looked like word-for-word lifts from earlier published writings by those interviewees.
The historian Guy Walters, writing for the New Statesman’s website, pointed out that Hari’s fawning May 2006 profile of Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez included quotations identical to those in a 2001 Jon Lee Anderson New Yorker piece.
Anderson’s piece read: “‘I realized at that moment that I was saying goodbye to life,’ Chávez said. ‘So it is possible that one has been a bit…imbued with that…ever since, no?’”
Here is Hari’s, five years later: “‘I realized at that moment that I was saying goodbye to life,’ he says, looking away. ‘So it is possible that, after surviving, one has been a bit imbued with that sense ever since, no?’” It is Hari’s use of the phrase “looking away” that exposes him—with its deliberate, dishonest implication that these are words Hari heard from the lips of the Venezuelan quasi-dictator.
The discovery that Hari had dishonestly “improved” what his interviewees had really said to him gave sudden credibility to the complaints by many interview subjects over the years that he had misrepresented their words. These included Noam Chomsky, who in December 2003 accused Hari of “idiotic fabrications” that were “beneath contempt.” Four years later Hari would claim he saw the light about the evil of the Iraq war as a result of communications with Chomsky, but his response to the claim that he was a fabricator at the time was devastatingly pithy: “If you want ‘idiotic fabrications,’ Professor Chomsky, I suggest you look to your predictions of a ‘silent genocide’ in Afghanistan if the U.S. intervened. Or perhaps your long-standing dismissal of the Cambodian genocide as ‘American propaganda.’”
Conservative bloggers soon joined in the pile-on. One of them, Guido Fawkes, found that one of the four pieces Hari had submitted to the organization that awarded him the Orwell Prize in 2008, entitled “How Multiculturalism Is Betraying Women,” was largely lifted from Der Spiegel. Too smart just to cut and paste, Hari had changed the odd word here and there and given made-up names to anonymous women interviewed by the German magazine.
If Hari’s attackers came from both the left and the right, his defenders tended to come from the media establishment and the liberal center. They included Caitlin Moran of the Times, a columnist equally celebrated for her youth and snark, and the Observer’s media columnist, Peter Preston, who wrote that the complaints against Hari were “ethically ludicrous.”
Those defenses began to sound hollow when article after article turned out to contain invented scenes or dialogue or characters. In a report from the Copenhagen Climate summit, Hari falsely claimed that a large globe erected in the city’s central square was “covered with corporate logos—the Coke brand is stamped over Africa,” alongside the logos of McDonalds and Carlsberg. The only McDonalds sign was on a restaurant across the square from the summit.
Hari won a prize for a story from Central Africa in which he rightly excoriated France’s role in the Rwanda genocide but also claimed—falsely, according to the aid agency that brought him to the region—that French soldiers told him “children would bring us the severed heads of their parents and scream for help, but our orders were not to help them.” The aid worker who was translating for him says that she never heard the French soldiers say anything of the sort.
Again and again Hari’s reportage boasted quotations that were too perfect to be believable and apparently too delicious for his editors to check. When other news organizations looked for people Hari had named as sources in articles reported from Dubai and Caracas, they couldn’t find them. Given the extent of his fabrications, it would be interesting to find out if there really was “a chatty, scatty 35-year-old Californian designer” named Hillary-Ann on the 2007 National Review cruise that Hari went on and wrote about—and if she has any memory of saying, as he claimed in the Independent, that “we need to execute some of these people…these prominent liberals who are trying to demoralize the country…just take a couple of these antiwar people off to the gas chamber for treason.”
Like so many frauds, Hari sometimes made such outrageous claims that you almost wonder if he unconsciously wanted to be caught. At the Independent he claimed in a piece about the dangers of robot weaponry that “the former Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi was nearly killed a few years ago after a robot attacked him on a tour of a factory.” It was completely untrue, but apparently no one at the paper thought to check.
Hari even lied in book reviews to damage the reputations of his personal or ideological enemies. In a review for Dissent of Nick Cohen’s book What’s Left, he claimed that Cohen, a left-wing supporter of the liberation of Iraq, had said the West was right to support Saddam Hussein when he was gassing the Kurds in the late 1980s. In fact Cohen’s book says the exact opposite. In an equally venomous and dishonest review of a book by the historian Andrew Roberts, Hari tried to smear Roberts as a racist, accusing him baselessly of “links to white supremacism.”
For the most part, though, complaints about Hari during the spring of 2011 were confined to the blogosphere and were ignored by the journalistic establishment. This continued until Nick Cohen wrote a column in the Spectator in July revealing that he had been the victim of pseudonymous vilification by Hari. Cohen and others had discovered that their Wikipedia entries had been altered to include libelous attacks by one David Rose, who claimed to be a Cambridge climate scientist—but who, a simple search demonstrated, happened to use a computer at the Independent and who also happened to write many website comments in praise of Johann Hari.
“David Rose” spent thousands of hours, often very late at night, obsessively promoting Hari’s reputation as an important intellectual figure and denigrating those with whom he disagreed. One attack by “Rose” on the conservative columnist Richard Littlejohn was posted at midnight on Christmas Eve. After initial denials, Hari admitted to being Rose and to having carried out the “sock-puppet” attacks on Cohen, his New Statesman editor Cristina Odone, and others.
It was at this point that the Council of the Orwell Prize decided to investigate the stories for which he been given the prize in 2008. However, the organizations that had given him the Amnesty International Journalism Award and the Martha Gelhorn Prize did not deign to do so.
And yet, even though it was plain as day that Hari had stolen other interviewers’ work and passed it off as his own, even after there was every reason to believe that his reporting was packed with bogus conversations with faked or suspiciously untraceable sources, and even after Hari had admitted to his malicious sock-puppetry, the Independent continued to back its young star. Simon Kelner, editor at the time, lobbied behind the scenes to save Hari’s Orwell prize and refused to supply the Orwell jury with documentation that it asked for.
Eventually the Independent was compelled to launch an official inquiry into the behavior of its star. The investigation was headed by the paper’s founder, Andreas Whittam Smith. Even though Whittam Smith had always presented himself as a kind of Gandhi of British journalistic integrity, in his inquiry he failed to contact editors who had worked with Hari or victims of Hari’s open or pseudonymous smear campaigns.
Hari returned the award just as the committee was about to rescind it. And he published a long quasi-apology in which he admitted to being “stupid” and “arrogant” but not to being dishonest. He blamed his errors on his youth and lack of formal journalistic training. He said he would be taking a leave of absence to study at a journalism school in New York City, where he would presumably be helped to understand the difference between truth and falsehood and why lying, even for some supposed greater good, is not acceptable journalistic practice. He hinted that his downfall had come at the hands of sinister “powerful people.”
The apology was fisked by the British journalist Toby Young, who gave Hari the kind of drubbing Hari had so often dished out to others: “The reason you’ve been put through the wringer by various bloggers and journalists isn’t because they’re the paid lackeys of the military-industrial complex,” Young wrote. “It’s because you’re a sanctimonious little prig.”
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To understand the Hari case, you have to appreciate the environment in which he worked. Hari’s reporting habits are far from unique in British journalism. Americans horrified by the ethical lapses in the journalism practiced in the UK have no idea how amoral and unprincipled British newspapers and magazines can be (though they’ve been given a dark glimpse of it in the voluminous coverage of the hacking scandal). That conduct, horrific though it was, at least had as its goal the collection of dark secrets. Hari is part of another tradition—a tradition that seems indifferent to the truth. The star correspondent of one broadsheet won a prize a few years ago partly for a story about the Taliban’s chief torturer. Afterwards the reporter had to admit that this person did not exist and was in fact a composite of several people. The admission had no effect whatsoever on the reporter’s career. The same was true of another habitually dishonest star reporter whose false claims of an Israeli massacre in the West Bank town of Jenin were disproven without question.
Still, it is worth wondering why, even given the looser journalistic culture in the UK, Hari was able to lie and cheat for so long and why his career is even now on hold rather than definitely over. Partly it is a matter of ideology. If he had been a journalist of the right, the Guardian and the BBC would have instantly assigned teams to go through his past work and his activities on the Internet. Instead, they left it to the blogs or implied that Hari was being persecuted for minor errors. It may also have had something to do with the fear he sometimes inspired thanks to the viciousness of his columns and his obsessive pursuit of his enemies on the Internet (Hari was an adroit early adopter of online social networks).
The main reason was almost certainly that Hari was so very, very good at expressing and justifying the prejudices expressed around North London dinner tables that he made them sound not only reasonable but noble. This was particularly so when it came to America and Israel.
There are many anti-Zionist writers in Israel-obsessed Britain; some of them, unlike Hari, are supporters of anti-Israel terrorism. But Hari brought a unique kind of credibility as well as rhetorical skill to the cause. Arguably this was why Peter Wilby and Simon Kelner, his viscerally anti-American and anti-Israel editor-mentors, overlooked the evidence of his dishonesty.
After all, Hari could not be further from the upper-class Arabists or dull dogmatic leftists who had been the primary anti-Israel voices in Britain. Hari had no orientalist fetish for Arab kings and tribesmen or sympathy for pro-“resistance” dictators like Syria’s Bashar al-Assad. He just hated Israel, and hated it while being proudly and overtly anti-Islamist, anti-tyranny, young, libertarian, gay, and hip. He both spoke to and represented a new, young generation of Israel-obsessives.
It was an obsession that became increasingly ugly. Hari exploited his reputation as a moderate, morally serious voice to promote pseudo-historians such as Ilan Pappe and the anti-Israel Holocaust revisionist Norman Finkelstein. (“I love Norman Finkelstein,” he once told an interviewer. “I love what he says about Elie Wiesel. I hate the mystification of the Holocaust and the attempt to turn it into a kind of quasi-religious thing.”2 Hari’s take on Israel’s history is typified by jibes about the centrist Israeli politician Tzipi Livni, whose parents were members of the nationalist Irgun movement in Palestine: “In theory…Livni should be in a strong position to understand nationalist ‘terrorists’ who have planted bombs on buses and in cafés—because she was raised by them.”
It is mainly because he specializes in this sort of rhetoric, pickled in bigotry and casuistry, that the Independent is so anxious not to lose him. Its new editor, Chris Blackhurst, has written that the British government opposed proposals for introducing Islamic banking in Britain because of “enormous pressure” from the “pro-Israel lobby.” Given repellent rhetoric like that, it is no wonder that Blackhurst “hopes to see [Hari] back in the not-too-distant future.”
1 People therefore identified him with the briefly fashionable “Eustonite” left—so called after the 2005 Euston Manifesto (of which I am a signatory), whose supporters decried blanket anti-Western, objectively pro-Islamist, anti-Semitic, and pro-terrorist attitudes prevalent in the antiwar movement, and who proclaimed support for America, enlightenment values, and those fighting for democracy everywhere.
2 In the same interview, Hari claimed that the Palestinian town Rafah looked “like Hiroshima . . . a city of 100,000 has just been destroyed and people [are] living in absolute terror.”
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Of bureaucrats I have known, worked with, and couldn’t fire.
Tevi Troy 2017-01-13
M y first face-to-face encounter with the federal bureaucracy came on January 22, 2001. I was the deputy director of a “parachute team” for incoming president George W. Bush, and our job was to “secure the beachhead” at the Department of Labor on the first day of the new administration. (The political realm loves to borrow military metaphors.) That meant stopping the department from issuing guidance, rules, and statements that reflected the views of the departing Clinton administration. The most important tactical objective in this mission, we were told, was this: Secure the fax machine! (It was 2001, after all.) At that time, there was one specially designated fax machine used to send new regulatory language to the Federal Register, which publishes all newly minted regulations. There was a bureaucrat I’ll call Mitchell Sykes whose job it was to man that fax machine. We were to find Sykes and stop him from doing anything.1
We were barely in the door when the cultural differences between the federal bureaucracy and the rest of America became apparent. We arrived at 8 a.m. The vast majority of career officials, we learned, did not arrive at 8 a.m. So we had trouble finding Mitchell Sykes. We began asking around and were met with shrugs and unknowing looks. The director of the parachute team began to grow agitated. His face reddened, his voice rose, and he slammed the table once or twice. Finally, well after 10, more than two hours after we had first arrived, we were told that Mitchell Sykes was outside our office. With great anticipation, we looked to the door to catch our first glimpse of the all-powerful bureaucratic potentate, the man who controlled the entire Federal Register for the $12 billion, 17,000-strong behemoth called the Department of Labor. And in walked…a nebbish. Balding, bespectacled, with J.C. Penney slacks hiked up above his waist. In a somewhat high-pitched voice, he introduced himself: “Hi, I’m Mitchell.”
The parachute team director looked at him and hesitated a moment, wondering if this could really be the man we were seeking, then asked, “Are you Mitchell Sykes?”
“Yes,” he responded meekly.
The director said: “I want you to stop sending all regulations to the Federal Register right now.”
“OK,” Sykes squeaked.
This was my first introduction to the challenges of the federal bureaucracy. Trying to get anything done requires knowing the pulse points and the people—and then crossing your fingers that they can or will comply. Of course, as a conservative from the think tank world, I had heard tales of the liberal bias of career officials. The skepticism about the ideological motivations of career officials was a subset of a larger conservative skepticism about the administrative state. Steven Hayward sums up this attitude nicely in his new book Patriotism Is Not Enough: “That bureaucratic government is the partisan instrument of the Democratic Party is the most obvious, yet least remarked upon, trait of our time.”
Well over 99 percent of the 2 million-plus people working in the federal government are career officials. Even in the White House, where the president has far more say over personnel, career officials dominate: Of the 1,800 or so people who work for the Executive Office of the President, approximately two-thirds of them are career.Transition briefers had warned us of the practice of “burrowing in.” This term refers to the maneuver by political officials at the end of an administration to shift their jobs into the career civil service, thereby securing lifetime tenure and allowing them to advance their ideological agendas or simply impede needed reforms. Early on, we saw a shameless attempt at burrowing in at the Department of Labor in the person of the woman who had been Labor Secretary Alexis Herman’s chief of staff. She tried to convince us that she was sympathetic to the incoming administration. Knowing that I had worked for Missouri Senator John Ashcroft, she told me that they worshipped at the same church. I was unconvinced, as was the savvy Labor secretary for whom I worked, Elaine Chao, now Donald Trump’s nominee as secretary of transportation. Later, but not that much later, we saw that the attempted burrower had gone on to become chief of staff at the Democratic National Committee.
Another thing we learned about early on was the lifetime tenure rules–technically known as “civil-service protections.” These rules made it exceedingly difficult to fire even obstinate and uncooperative career officials. Walking through the building, we often saw people wearing “Bring Back Baxter” buttons. “Who is Baxter?” I asked. Apparently, Baxter was a career official at DOL. (He was also an officer with the local union for government employees.) During the Clinton administration, Baxter came to believe he did not have to work on departmental business in order to receive his taxpayer-funded paycheck. When he was challenged by Department officials, he threw a tantrum, became abusive, and continued to refuse to do governmental work. To their credit, President Clinton’s political appointees began the hard and painstaking work of building a case against Baxter that would enable them to fire him. (There are indeed mechanisms for dismissing federal employees, but they are arduous and subject to review and being overturned.) After a number of years, the Clinton Department of Labor brought the case and fired the man. Baxter and the local union ginned up protests, distributed the buttons, and filed an appeal. An arbitrator ruled against the Department, and Baxter returned to the office, secure in the knowledge that he would never have to do a stitch of work in exchange for his government paycheck. He was now truly untouchable, unaccountable, and bureaucratically invincible.
The appearance of the Baxter Buttons was also a message for the incoming political team. If the Democratic Clinton administration had failed to get Baxter, there was no way the Republican Bush administration would be able to pursue and win a similar case. As one of my colleagues, a senior political administrator, recalled, the ugly memory of the Baxter case continued to resonate, as his attempts to make personnel shifts were made more difficult by the fear of losing another Baxter-like battle.
Then of course there were the infamous stories of laziness or incompetence. Most everyone in the political world has heard about officials who never show up for work, who have full-time jobs at big-box stores while they are on the government clock, or who can be found most afternoons during the working day at the local pub. I cannot testify to whether these stories are true or not, only that political officials hear and share them all the time. The stories range from the appalling to the ridiculous. Sometimes it can be hard to tell which. One friend of mine named Susan regaled us with the tale of a career receptionist at the Department of Health and Human Services who never passed messages her way, because she was unaware that calls directed to “Sue” were indeed meant for Susan. Very patiently, Susan had her assistant write “Sue is short for Susan” on a sticky note and affix it to her desk. The calls finally began to flow.
Well over 99 percent of the 2 million-plus people working in the federal government are career officials. Even in the White House, where the president has far more say over personnel, career officials dominate: Of the 1,800 or so people who work for the Executive Office of the President, approximately two-thirds of them are career. The vast majority of people working at the largest offices within the EOP—the Office of Management and Budget, the National Security Council, and the U.S. Trade Representative’s office—are career officials.
Many are dedicated professionals who work long hours and are extremely knowledgeable in their areas. This is especially true in the White House, where career officials tend to be the best of the best, hard-working and talented. But it is also true among the highest echelons at most departments, the SES, or Senior Executive Service. Top career officials I worked with at HHS could have made vastly more money working in the private sector but chose to dedicate significant portions of their careers to public service. The political scientist John DiIulio has written a thoughtful book, Bring Back the Bureaucrats, arguing that we need more, not fewer, career officials, to accomplish all of the tasks that Congress has assigned to the administrative state. Regardless of whether you accept his argument, it is clear that career officials do dominate the federal government, and presidential administrations need to take that into account. To be a successful political appointee, you had best learn not only how to work with, but also how to get the most from, career officials.
As for the question of bias, which generally dominates Republican thinking on the question of career officials, it is true that career federal officials are more likely to be Democrats than Republicans. A 2015 poll found that 44 percent of federal employees were Democrats or Democratic leaning, as compared with 40 percent who were Republican or Republican leaning. Senior-level federal officials, with whom top politicals would have the most interaction, were even more Democratic-leaning, by a 48 to 40 margin. And of course, people in the D.C. metropolitan area tend to be even more liberal, meaning that D.C.-based career officials are coming from a more liberal pool of individuals. So it is safe to say that most of the career officials that politicals encounter will be more likely to be Democrats than Republicans. At the same time, the numbers also suggest that while the preference exists, it is not necessarily overwhelming.
In my experience, this likelihood of Democratic lever-pulling does not, however, mean that most career officials bring their political predilections into the carrying out of their duties at work. But some do, and they can do a lot of damage. Lois Lerner and her partisan allies at the Internal Revenue Service appeared all too eager (and able) to quickly execute the Obama administration’s bidding to withhold preferred tax treatment from conservative organizations. But this outrageous and infuriating series of incidents was such a big deal precisely because it was such a blatant example of what career officials should not be doing. And there are certain offices, such as the Division of Civil Rights at the Justice Department, that tend to openly collaborate with Democratic administrations and resist working with Republican administrations. This office covers some of the most contentious issues, including voting rights, hate-crime prosecutions, allegations of police bias, and transgender rights. The prospect of an incoming Trump administration has some officials musing in the press about a possible “exodus” of career staff from that challenging division.
O ffices like Lerner’s at the IRS or Civil Rights at Justice, I believe, are exceptions—troubling exceptions, to be sure, but not indicative of the overall relationship between politicals and careers government-wide. There have been many occasions when careers resist excessive action by Democrats and support proposals coming from a Republican president. They may like the Democrats better on the whole. Few would deny that. But to the extent that career officials display a bias in the transmission of their duties, it tends to be not in favor of their political parties but instead in favor of the prerogatives of their agency.What does this mean? Career officials do not want to see their agencies embarrassed and so will typically resist or argue against actions that can be seen to discredit or harm the reputations of their agencies. They do not want to see the power of their agencies diminished, so they will resist actions that favor another agency over their own. And they believe in the mission of their agencies, so they want the agencies to continue carrying out that mission.
This bias in favor of the prerogatives of an agency does have practical consequences. Someone who signs up to work for the Environmental Protection Agency is more likely to support robust regulation of coal production than, say, someone who works at a conservative think tank. But they also might be resistant to overly aggressive and costly regulations that might lead to criticism of the agency in the Wall Street Journal or, worse from their perspective, the Washington Post. Furthermore, while the EPA official may be more likely to be a liberal, the official at the Pentagon or the Department of Homeland Security might have a more Republican-friendly approach because of job-related insights into national-security threats. Some of these officials may be sympathetic to President Trump’s law-and-order views and tough-on-terror stance. They may also have been frustrated with Obama’s more weak-kneed approaches to these issues.
Donald Trump is a different kind of president from the type we have seen previously. He is blunter and brasher and generally more hostile to the way things are done in Washington. In addition, the opposition to Trump is more adamant, and even perhaps more unhinged, than at any point in the modern age.Above all, career officials have a healthy and realistic sense that Republican and Democratic administrations are different and bring different characteristics with them. I recall one career official in an agency security office who told me that the incoming Obama administration officials were likely to have sexual and narcotic histories that could make it difficult for them to obtain security clearances. When I responded with a knowing smile, he told me that I should not get too cocky: “You guys,” he said, referring to Republicans, “get tripped up for shady business practices.”
This sort of back-and-forth is typical during changes of administration. Career officials are savvy bureaucratic maneuverers. They understand that Republicans come into power looking to reduce the size of government, while Democrats seek to expand its regulatory reach. They have plans and option papers and briefing books on the shelf prepared for Republican administrations and for Democratic ones alike. They are happy to tell political appointees which ideas have been tried before, and why they failed, and perhaps even how they could be made to succeed. Certainly, some will leak, but so will some politicals. And some will cooperate more than others. But for the most part, experienced politicals know who careers are, what they do, and how to work with them. Some meetings of a political nature should of course be held without career officials in the room, but it’s a mistake to shut them out of all meetings. As imperfect and generally pro-Leviathan as the arrangement is, both careers and politicals typically know the score, and there is a generally understood détente among them.
The question for 2017 is whether this détente will hold.
D onald Trump is a different kind of president from the type we have seen previously. He is blunter and brasher and generally more hostile to the way things are done in Washington. In addition, the opposition to Trump is more adamant, and even perhaps more unhinged, than at any point in the modern age. This hostility to Trump may reshape the relations between career and political officials in a way that could affect the ability of Trump to carry out his ambitious agenda.There is some evidence for this notion that things may be different this time. A poll in February 2016 showed that one-quarter of career officials careers would consider quitting their jobs if Trump secured the presidency. Still, 67 percent said they would remain in place, which is not surprising given the lifetime tenure of these jobs. These positions are not given up easily. Furthermore, the promises of those who would consider quitting in the face of a political event they opposed should be taken with a grain of salt. The long line of cars driving north along the I-5 from Hollywood to Canada has not yet materialized, for example.
There were indications of bureaucratic resistance to the legitimately elected president during the transition period. In one Politico piece, career officials at HHS were disturbingly candid about their disdain for President-elect Trump, while at the same time protecting themselves in the veil of anonymity. One told reporter Dan Diamond that “it’s tough from the career staff side,” before asking, “Do you stay and try and be the internal saboteur?” Another called the Trump win “obviously shocking and upsetting,” a third “soul crushing.” One of the staffers quoted paid lip service to the fact that they “respect the need to have a peaceful transition of power,” but added that “it’s just frustrating to calmly hand over the keys when you know they’ll wreck the car.” Politico’s Blake Hounsell quoted one anonymous, presumably career, official lamenting the appointment of ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson at the State Department: “I’ve been resisting the urge to drink since 7 a.m., when I read the news.”
Diamond noted in his story that the older, more senior career HHS officials he spoke to were “more sanguine,” having seen transitions in the past. It’s possible, therefore, to say that the less judicious individuals were just venting and will come into line come the inauguration. But it’s also possible that these younger staffers may represent the new face of a more partisan career bureaucracy. First, the overtness of the career officials cited was alarming, especially given how careful they typically are. Second, Diamond points out that there are 1,000 HHS officials who “can trace their jobs back to Obamacare.” Presumably, these individuals will be most resistant to repealing and replacing Obamacare, the stated policy of the new president. And finally, the open speculation from a career official, even if anonymous, about serving as an “internal saboteur” should raise alarm bells among not only incoming political officials but also career employees, whose jobs are directly tied to their ability to work with, and generate the trust of, political appointees.
Another worrisome portent was open resistance to what should have been viewed as routine requests. Trump’s transition team posed a list of questions to different departments regarding the agencies’ activities in recent years. Such questions are standard operating procedure, and transition teams of both parties present them to agencies during transition as a matter of course. As part of this process, the Trump team asked which career staffers at EPA and the Department of Energy were involved in climate-change policy. These questions made their way into the press and led to hyperbolic headlines such as “Trump team’s demands fuel fear of Energy Department ‘witch hunt.’”
Something similar happened at the State Department, where a request to disclose teams working on gender issues led to similar hysterical headline. The State Department agreed to the request, only because the query asked for position titles, not names, of those involved. The Energy Department, however, actually refused to supply the names of the career officials involved in such activities. This decision was presumably made by political, not career, officials, and it called into question President Obama’s pledge of his full cooperation with the transition. It also sent a powerful message to the career officials: Their resistance to legitimate requests would be largely ignored, and possibly lauded, by the mainstream media.
One other potential difference between previous political-career interactions and the current one is the level of controversy regarding the issues Trump highlighted in his campaign. Candidate Trump ran on repealing Obamacare, combating political correctness, and law and order. Many career officials in these agencies have seen their mission in opposite terms—they were tasked with promoting the Affordable Care Act, maintaining speech regimes on campus, and creating new guidance on how to monitor allegations of racism by police officers. This discrepancy, coupled with then President-elect Trump’s calls to initiate a hiring freeze for federal workers, led to a Washington Post report about federal agencies rushing to fill any possible vacancies before the January 20th turnover. Presumably these new hires would not only get in before a hiring freeze, but also share the Obama administration’s perspective on these hot-button issues.
So it is fair to assume that the mistrust between politicals and careers will be higher in this new administration than in previous administrations. It certainly seems possible that the intransigence of the career officials could be more significant to efforts of the incoming administration than in previous changes of power. If so, the Trump team, already convinced of the hostility of the establishment, may be even warier than a typical GOP political team.
Should there be this kind of open dislike of the Trump politicals by career officials, how might that manifest itself? The careers have a number of tools they might employ. One is the leak. Career officials often have good ties to the media who cover their department, and they know how to get a message out. In addition, stories leaked against a Republican administration are often taken at face value and hyped by both the media and the opposition party. Sometimes leaked charges lead to investigations, many of which are spurious.
Leaking is noisome but ultimately not that effective. When I was serving at the Department of Labor, a particular Washington Post columnist had a knack for getting marginally embarrassing scoops about the international travel of political officials. After the second or third time it happened, it became pretty clear from which office the leaks were emanating. The solution was to limit access to people from that office. This might have the impact of keeping non-leakers out of the loop along with the actual perpetrator, but it was better than foolishly handing a hostile columnist more grist for his attacks. Career officials are generally not happy about being excluded from their official duties, and therefore will have an in-built incentive to put their own pressure on the leaker to knock it off.
Another tactic is “slow walking” policies to which career officials object. This can work for a time, and on certain projects, but it also becomes obvious fairly quickly what is happening. Political leaders have tools with which to combat intentionally dilatory behavior. Senior politicals do annual reviews for careers, and these reviews affect bonuses and salary increases. Politicals also have some say over assignments and placement. An obstinate employee can’t be fired, as we have seen, but can be offered a job at the same level in North Dakota or another distant state. This does not have to be done too often before the word spreads that the politicals know how to use the tools at their disposal and that they are willing to employ them.
A third tactic careers can use is resignation. This is of mixed utility. Politicals, especially in the Trump administration, may see the resignation of a resistant employee as an opportunity, both to get rid of a problem and to hire someone more cooperative. The civil-service rules may make it hard to fire someone unsympathetic to the president, but they do allow some leeway to hire people who are friendly. This ability to shape the incoming career hires may in fact be one of the reasons that, following eight years of Obama, many career officials may be resistant to the incoming administration. In addition, while one or two people might resign, organizing a mass resignation from civil-service jobs that effectively grant lifetime employment and generous benefits is unlikely. The truth is that some career folks may grumble, or leak, or privately seethe, but it is unlikely that they will be able to stop an administration from accomplishing its major administrative priorities.
What this account should reveal, beyond some minimal amusement, is that the career officials are just part of the playing field. They don’t make it impossible for Republicans to accomplish anything, and they don’t necessarily make it easy. They are a factor all incoming administrations need to deal with. Unwise administrations come in and go on hunts for burrowed-in officials, shut out careers from all decisions, and generally try to do the work of thousands of career officials with a handful of political appointees, many of whom have little experience with the agency in question. HHS has a workforce of 70,000, with only about 150 political appointees. It is impossible to get much done unless the politicals let the career officials do their jobs under the direction of the senior political leadership.
If a new political team is thoughtful and knows what it is doing, it can get a lot done. As a former senior political head of administration at a cabinet department told me, “When you get in, you take some time, you get rid of the bad apples.” This does not mean dismissing them, of course. The Baxter case described above demonstrates the folly of that approach. But there are tools wise administrators can use to elevate cooperative officials and move aside obstinate ones. This does not entail making the decisions based on ideology or partisan affiliation. It does mean looking at the willingness of the officials to do the legitimate tasks they are assigned to do.
If the Trump administration heeds these lessons, it can accomplish much in four or possibly eight years. Perhaps not as much as promised in the heat of a campaign—few administrations can—but still a great deal. But to do so requires coming to grips with what the career bureaucracy is, what is isn’t, and how an incoming administration can best deal with it.
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“ I first subscribed to COMMENTARY in 1973, as a recovering liberal who had invested four years of my young life in writing speeches for a constellation of McGovernite candidates and office-holders. Living in Berkeley at the time, I relished COMMENTARY as a guilty pleasure, feeling grateful that the magazine arrived each month discreetly disguised in a plain, brown wrapper that concealed its suspiciously neo-conservative content. In the militantly leftist community in which I functioned forty years ago, receiving regular monthly installments of the most degrading porn would have produced far less embarrassment than my growing devotion to the persuasive prose of Norman Podhoretz and Co. Yes, my personal journey from left to right-center involved the usual biographical factors, including the three P’s: paychecks, parenthood, and prayer. Paychecks, because they arrived with shocking subtractions in the form of onerous and incomprehensible taxes; parenthood, because responsibility for a new generation forced a longer-term perspective; and prayer, because my own growing Jewish observance led to the conclusion that my “idealistic” ’60s generation, with all its narcissism and preening self-regard, might not provide life’s ultimate answers after all. Fortunately for me, reading COMMENTARY with near-religious regularity helped to organize my onrushing insights and experience into a more coherent world view. In a dark time in our nation’s history, while surviving (temporarily) in the most unhinged corner of the continent, this incomparable publication persuaded me that I wasn’t alone. „
Michael Medved
“ Just as one begins to despair of hearing the strong voice of sanity and courage, leavened with charm and good humor, in our modern polity, COMMENTARY arrives, and once a month one can be reminded that there are indeed some clear-sighted and articulate people who seem actively to enjoy the battle for truth. „
Andrew Roberts
“ In a time of passion, COMMENTARY champions reason. Against lies, COMMENTARY speaks for truth. Confronting those who would doom to death the Jewish people, COMMENTARY is a magnificent continuing achievement of American Jewish life. „
David Frum
“ COMMENTARY has become my new go-to website for news analysis because it is measured, substantive, thoughtful, and written for news consumers of all shapes and sizes. When juggling all the issues of the day and thinking them through, I find myself going back to COMMENTARY again and again to see if there’s anything more that can help me add the ingredients needed to finalize an argument. I like the mix of foreign policy and national political news, as well as the discussions about America’s place in the world and what it should be. I’m a print subscriber and a frequent website visitor, and I follow all of the writers on Twitter. Thank you, COMMENTARY, for providing such consistently helpful content. „
Dana Perino
Subscribing to COMMENTARY gives you full access to every article, every issue, every podcast—the latest stories as well as over 70 years of archives, the best that has been thought and written since 1945.
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‘Everybody Says How Cool I Am’
Letter From Washington
Andrew Ferguson 2017-01-13
Well, not silence. It’s plainly difficult for Obama to stop talking. He is a verbal man if not an eloquent one. The Obama utterance that sticks stubbornly in my mind at the moment is of very recent vintage. I made a point of listening to all the “exit interviews” Obama granted over the last several months. There was a lot of overlap, of course; one of the keys to a successful politician is the ability to say the same thing thousands of times without hanging yourself in the next Comfort Inn. But the interviews did serve as a quarry from which the president pieced together his farewell address. Together they present a notable self-portrait of the man and the people who love him.
As the day of his departure neared he added a new riff to his repetitions, in an interview to two friendly reporters from the pro-Obama website Vox. (All the exit interviews were given to interviewers who, in their approach to the president, ranged from “sympathetic” to “bootlicking.”) One Vox reporter asked Obama a question about the Affordable Care Act. It was 12 minutes of monologue before the other reporter, like a man jumping onto a passing train, could ask another question. After 20 minutes the reporters had asked him a total of two questions. He was still talking.
And then, from this dog pile of verbiage, he drew a proposal that summarized much of what’s maddening about Obama’s performance as president.
“I’m saying to every Republican right now”—a steely gaze, a thrusting index finger—“‘if you can in fact put a plan together that is demonstrably better than what Obamacare is doing, I will publicly support repealing Obamacare and replacing it with your plan.’”
The Republicans could even call it TrumpCare if they wanted, the president said. It wasn’t about him! “I’d sign on to a Republican plan that would say, ‘We’re going to give more subsidies to people to make it even cheaper, and we’re going to have a public option.”
Here was the essence of Obama’s rhetorical style as chief executive: a feint toward common ground while pushing his opponents still further away. It was dramatic, delivered in an exasperated, put-up-or-shut-up tone. It was utterly insincere. It gave an impression of boldness where there was none. It limned a meaningless proposal to make him appear flexible and bipartisan while scoring a partisan point. And it displayed his sly understanding of how public policy should work. A “public option” in a national health-insurance program would bring us closer to the socialized medicine that Obamacare supposedly made unnecessary. And the way to make national health insurance “cheaper,” in the president’s view, is to make it cost more, by giving more people more subsidies.
The Vox audience, of course, lapped it up like hungry pups. One could just imagine the arguments spinning through the twittersphere and echoing down the halls of the Center for American Progress: Look, it’s very simple—Obama said he’s happy to repeal his own law if the Republicans find something that’s cheaper with more options . . .
By now Obama has refined his demagoguery so that it perfectly suits the modern partisan of the left—that is, a partisan who refuses to see himself as partisan. This isn’t the traditional populist demagoguery of William Jennings Bryan or even Lyndon Johnson, aimed at the unschooled, the unlucky, the desperate. This is demagoguery aimed at the well-to-do audience of Trevor Noah and Samantha Bee: the overschooled and undereducated, the self-certain and self-satisfied, who see ideological deviation as a moral lapse rather than a difference of opinion. It’s demagoguery with a graduate degree. It’s boob bait for pseuds.
Among whom are the readers of Vanity Fair, the celebrity slick that brought in Doris Kearns Goodwin to do an exit interview. To the editors, the choice of Goodwin must have been obvious: She, like most American writers, has written a book about Abraham Lincoln, and the parallels between the two presidents from Illinois have been a common theme for Obama’s partisans. When Goodwin asked him to comment on a Lincoln quote about personal ambition, the president feigned reluctance—“It’s always dangerous to amend the words of Abraham Lincoln”—before taking a header into what he evidently thought were deep waters.
“When you’re young,” he said, “ambitions are somewhat common—you want to prove yourself. It may grow out of different life experiences.” Some people—I’m greatly condensing the president’s word salad here, and you’re welcome—have an ambition to do one thing, some people to do another. But they all want to get ahead. “I do think that there is a youthful ambition that very much has to do with making your mark in the world,” Obama continued. “And I think that cuts across the experiences of a lot of people who end up achieving something significant in their field.”
At this point Goodwin could no longer contain herself. “Oh, well said, sir,” she cried through the clouds of vapor. “We can amend Lincoln.”
Most public men strive to please an audience. It has been Obama’s good fortune to surround himself with an audience that wants to please him. “Everybody likes to talk about how cool I was,” he said at the beginning of his chat with George Stephanopoulos, who tilted toward the “bootlicker” end of the spectrum. Later he drove the point home, without fear of contradiction: “People always talk about how cool I am.” To Doris Goodwin, however, he expressed a demurral: “I don’t buy the hype when everybody is saying how great I am.”
Just between us, I think he buys the hype. How could he not? He has been described, by the writer Michael Beschloss among others, as the “most intelligent man ever elected president.” Throughout his long exit, one jejune sentiment after another was greeted with solemn nods or giddiness from his interlocutors. As president, he visited the pyramids, he told one interviewer, and the thought occurred to him: Fame is fleeting. “Sometimes I carry with me that perspective,” he reflected. Our economy, he tells us, is more digitized than it was, and our news now lacks the traditional filters we once relied on, and the old ways of manufacturing are no longer relevant, and we can’t respond to technological change by sticking our head in the sand, and our country is undergoing big changes in terms of demography . . . and . . . and none dared point out that the smartest president in history has yet to make an observation that couldn’t be found in any back issue of the Economist.
“There is a big part of me that has a writer’s sensibility,” Obama said in one exit interview. “And so that’s how I think. That’s how I pursue truth. That’s how I hope to communicate truth to people.” Indeed, with his memoir, Dreams from My Father, 21 years ago, Obama proved he had a native gift for what words can do, how to use them intimately, to reveal layers of thought and feeling. This lends an almost tragic note to the self-debasement of these last years—the intellectual and verbal sloppiness that his adorers have let him get away with.
Then again, perhaps it was inevitable. He talked with Axelrod about his upbringing by a loving mother. “For all the ups and downs of our lives,” he said, “there wasn’t a moment that I didn’t feel as if I was special—that I was just this special gift to the world.”
Join us—you'll be in good company. Everyone worth reading is reading (and writing for) COMMENTARY:
“ There’s an enormous amount of shouting in the wild west of conservative media. That has its place, and is often a sign of the energy on the right. But amidst the cacophony there’s a special need for serious, considered, and compelling argument, presented in the hope of persuading, not just punishing. This is where COMMENTARY has always shined, perhaps more now than ever before. It aims to tackle the best arguments of its intellectual opponents, not just the easiest targets. It’s a journal I’ve read for nearly 30 years and I can’t think of a time when I’ve valued it more. „
Jonah Goldberg
“ There is more commentary in the world than ever before—whether in print, on the air, or on the Internet. But there is still a dearth of serious, informed commentary that reports, analyzes, and argues without ever stooping to name-calling or vitriol. If you further narrow down the segment of the commentariat that looks at the world from a conservative and Jewish perspective—well, you’re left with only one choice. The magazine you are now reading. COMMENTARY has changed over the years—for instance, it now publishes this blog—but one thing that has not changed is its steadfast commitment to providing the best analysis from the most informed writers of the most important ideas in the world, all written in clear prose that appeals to a general audience. There is nothing else like it. Never has been, never will be. „
Max Boot
“ Every month in print, and every day online, COMMENTARY somehow manages to pull off a dazzling balancing act: intellectual but unpretentious, serious but never boring, timely but not fleeting. On the leading questions of the day, it offers fresh and unfamiliar insights. And on the emerging questions that will dominate the years to come, it often sees things first and clearest. It is simply indispensable. „
Yuval Levin
“ In 1975 the Economist said of COMMENTARY: “The world's best magazine?” Take away the question mark and that statement still stands, thirty-eight years later. It's still the magazine America's liberals dread most, and the one America's enemies can't afford to ignore. It's the point of the conservative spear in the never-ending fight against the insanity of the left, whether it's in foreign policy or economic policy, social and cultural issues, or the arts—and no one does a better job standing up for Western culture and America's interests and those of its allies, including Israel. In fact, surviving the next three years—the Obama administration home stretch—and building the foundations for an American resurgence afterward will be impossible without reading COMMENTARY in print and online. „
Arthur Herman
“ For decades, COMMENTARY has opened its pages to the most serious uncompromising defense of the American creed—exemplar of ordered liberty at home, pillar of the free world abroad—in an era when it has been most under attack. From the exceptionally influential manifestoes of Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Jeane Kirkpatrick to today's counterattack against the empowered advocates of the entitlement state and of American decline, COMMENTARY remains what it has been for more than a generation: fearless, informative, indispensable. „
Charles Krauthammer
“ COMMENTARY isn’t just an important magazine. It’s an indispensable one. It’s been indispensable for half a century, and it is today. It’s indispensable for understanding the moment we live in, and it’s indispensable for laying out a path forward. The challenges we confront are great, but COMMENTARY is used to facing grave challenges without fearful cowering or wishful thinking. So we need COMMENTARY today as much as we ever have, and we need it to be as strong as it’s ever been. „
William Kristol
“ COMMENTARY’s writing is predictably engaging and edgy, but its content is anything but homogeneous. Center-right perspectives characterize contributions, but not predictably so. Jewish affairs are thematic, but not always. Controversies of the day are the usual subjects, yet offered only with reflection well apart from the frenzied 24/7 news cycle. Intellectual honesty and analytical rigor characterize COMMENTARY and that is why even its political critics concede that they are still enlightened by the very arguments they often oppose. „
Victor Davis Hanson
“ COMMENTARY is an indispensable read on the Arab Spring, the Afghan war, the future of American conservatism, and all the other crazy stuff out there. But you already knew that. What I really love about it is that it’s a full-service operation, and its back-of-the-book guys—the fellows who write about music, literature, and all the things that make life worth living as the world goes to hell—are the best in the business. There is an observation in a Terry Teachout piece on the wonderful singer Nancy LaMott about “Moon River” that has stayed with me for almost two decades. I fished it out from the back of my mind to impress a gal at a Goldwater Institute reception only the other day, and it worked a treat. So thank you, COMMENTARY! Likewise, my differences with the arts’n’culture crew unsettle me far more than the geopolitical ones: reasonable people can disagree on how large a nuclear arsenal those wacky mullahs should be permitted to own, but I’m still agog at the great Andrew Ferguson’s mystifying praise for the New York Times obituaries page a couple of issues back. That’s COMMENTARY for you—provocative to the end, on matters large and small. In these turbulent and dismaying times, we can all use a huckleberry friend waiting round the bend, in the mailbox each month and on the computer screen every morning. For any journal of opinion, as “Moon River” teaches us, there’s such a lot of world to see. COMMENTARY sees most of it with piercing clarity: it can’t know all the answers, but it asks all the right questions, and with great farsightedness. It deserves your wholehearted support. „
Mark Steyn
“ COMMENTARY has played an invaluable role in American political discourse for decades, offering thoughtful analysis on issues rather than sound bites or bumper stickers. Especially when it comes to U.S. foreign and defense policy, COMMENTARY has time and time again been ahead of the crowd, anticipating trends and developments that others react to only after the fact. I can't imagine not being a COMMENTARY subscriber. „
John Bolton
“ In the midst of today’s political rancor, COMMENTARY Magazine provides a rare venue for thoughtful discussion. COMMENTARY’s talented writers provide insightful analysis of foreign affairs, domestic policy, and the politics of the day. COMMENTARY is a treasure not only for conservatives, but for anyone looking for in-depth exploration of the issues that influence America’s public dialogue and shape the nation’s future. „
Karl Rove
“ It's notorious, and true, that government officials hardly read anything. Memos, sure; nowadays, emails and tweets as well. But magazines? People barely have time to eat lunch or see their kids, so how can an intellectual monthly affect public affairs? The question is a good one. How did COMMENTARY do it? The answer is that officials, like all citizens following American foreign policy, need a way to understand the world around them. When prevailing theories fail, when conventional wisdom is clearly at variance with what they see before their eyes, the outcome for senators and congressmen and White House officials is what the shrinks call cognitive dissonance. They may say one thing but believe another, or simply be unable to square previous beliefs and policies with the clear effects of U.S. conduct. They've lost the ability to explain the world. And then came COMMENTARY, offering month after month of piercing, bracing analysis—and value judgments of right and wrong, and clear writing about American gains and losses. Here was an insistence on looking reality in the face. Here was plain argument, seeking no quarter intellectually and giving none. And it mattered. It shamed some people, and emboldened others; COMMENTARY demanded that we conform policy to the opportunities and dangers that really faced America. In years of confusion and obfuscation, that striking clarity changed policies, and changed American conduct, because it changed the way we understood the world. „
Elliott Abrams
“ For more than 60 years, COMMENTARY has been a go-to source on matters of the greatest importance to our nation and our civilization. Today, its full-throated defense of the United States and freedom is as eloquent as it was a half-century ago, and no less urgent. Issues of the day will change, news cycles come and go, but COMMENTARY remains an indispensable authority in the battle of ideas that help to shape our world. Its continued success is both an indication, and source, of the country’s intellectual health. „
Donald Rumsfeld
“ COMMENTARY is America's most important monthly journal of ideas, period. For nearly seven decades it has published the best and most exciting writing from the most important thinkers: Saul Bellow and Lionel Trilling; Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Jeane Kirkpatrick; Paul Johnson and Ruth Wisse; Cynthia Ozick and—of course—Norman Podhoretz and Midge Decter. Is there anything remotely like it? No. It is the lamp by which America, and Israel, and the Jewish people, may find their way to safety. I'm proud to be published in its pages. „
Bret Stephens
“ Irving Kristol once called COMMENTARY the most influential magazine in Jewish history. Certainly, no publication had a greater influence on me as I evolved from adolescent reader (arguing over its articles with my father and older brother) into a “frequent contributor” who made it my intellectual home. The magazine did not exploit American freedom to escape from civilizing duty but rather activated the intertwined responsibilities of citizens and members of a group. American Jewry can boast of many contributions to the welfare of this country and the Jewish people, but few as fortifying as COMMENTARY. „
Ruth R. Wisse
“ Edward Shils noted that there are four means of education in the modern world: the classroom, bookstores (especially used-bookstores), the conversation of intelligent friends, and intellectual magazines. For me intellectual magazines were more important than any of the other three, and no magazine among them more so than COMMENTARY. I first happened on COMMENTARY as a student browsing in the University of Chicago Bookstore in 1957. I have not missed an issue since. The magazine spoke to my intellectual interests and passions, and still does. As a reader and as a writer, I should be lost without it. „
Joseph Epstein
“ Why does COMMENTARY matter? Since 1945, no other monthly magazine has so consistently published serious, provocative argument and analysis. No other monthly magazine has viewed America and the world through such a wide angle, encompassing economics, politics, society, culture, religion, and diplomacy. No other monthly magazine has published such a celebrated and wide-ranging list of editors and contributors. Cerebral, critical, and committed, the point of view found in its pages is as unique as it is formidable. And in a world of Iranian nukes, rising anti-Semitism, radical Islam, American disarmament, bipartisan neo-isolationism, and disintegrating institutions, reading COMMENTARY is more than a pleasure. It is a necessity. „
Matthew Continetti
“ COMMENTARY has long been an unmissable landmark on the American intellectual landscape. These days it shapes debate, propels argument, and explains society with renewed vigor and force. It is one of the small group of essential reads for anybody engaged in politics, Judaism, foreign policy, national manners, and morals. „
David Brooks
“ Anyone looking for a definitive exposition of a significant historical moment—whether UC Berkeley's Free Speech Movement, say, or the battles over "general education" at Harvard—has at his fingertips an inestimable gift: COMMENTARY's archives, which contain countless gems of reporting and analysis. Today's generation of COMMENTARY writers is building an equally invaluable store of knowledge for future researchers and scholars. „
Heather Mac Donald
“ I first subscribed to COMMENTARY in 1973, as a recovering liberal who had invested four years of my young life in writing speeches for a constellation of McGovernite candidates and office-holders. Living in Berkeley at the time, I relished COMMENTARY as a guilty pleasure, feeling grateful that the magazine arrived each month discreetly disguised in a plain, brown wrapper that concealed its suspiciously neo-conservative content. In the militantly leftist community in which I functioned forty years ago, receiving regular monthly installments of the most degrading porn would have produced far less embarrassment than my growing devotion to the persuasive prose of Norman Podhoretz and Co. Yes, my personal journey from left to right-center involved the usual biographical factors, including the three P’s: paychecks, parenthood, and prayer. Paychecks, because they arrived with shocking subtractions in the form of onerous and incomprehensible taxes; parenthood, because responsibility for a new generation forced a longer-term perspective; and prayer, because my own growing Jewish observance led to the conclusion that my “idealistic” ’60s generation, with all its narcissism and preening self-regard, might not provide life’s ultimate answers after all. Fortunately for me, reading COMMENTARY with near-religious regularity helped to organize my onrushing insights and experience into a more coherent world view. In a dark time in our nation’s history, while surviving (temporarily) in the most unhinged corner of the continent, this incomparable publication persuaded me that I wasn’t alone. „
Michael Medved
“ Just as one begins to despair of hearing the strong voice of sanity and courage, leavened with charm and good humor, in our modern polity, COMMENTARY arrives, and once a month one can be reminded that there are indeed some clear-sighted and articulate people who seem actively to enjoy the battle for truth. „
Andrew Roberts
“ In a time of passion, COMMENTARY champions reason. Against lies, COMMENTARY speaks for truth. Confronting those who would doom to death the Jewish people, COMMENTARY is a magnificent continuing achievement of American Jewish life. „
David Frum
“ COMMENTARY has become my new go-to website for news analysis because it is measured, substantive, thoughtful, and written for news consumers of all shapes and sizes. When juggling all the issues of the day and thinking them through, I find myself going back to COMMENTARY again and again to see if there’s anything more that can help me add the ingredients needed to finalize an argument. I like the mix of foreign policy and national political news, as well as the discussions about America’s place in the world and what it should be. I’m a print subscriber and a frequent website visitor, and I follow all of the writers on Twitter. Thank you, COMMENTARY, for providing such consistently helpful content. „
Dana Perino
Subscribing to COMMENTARY gives you full access to every article, every issue, every podcast—the latest stories as well as over 70 years of archives, the best that has been thought and written since 1945.
Join the intellectual club, today.
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In the Future, Everyone Will Be Dead for 15 Minutes
The Way We Live Now
Christine Rosen 2017-01-13
uring the last few weeks of 2016, some celebrities died. Every year celebrities die, of course, but for some reason the deaths of the pop singer George Michael, the actress Carrie Fisher, and Fisher’s mother, Debbie Reynolds, was a trifecta too crushing for humanity to bear. Soon, #f—k2016 was trending on Twitter as people expressed their disbelief and sadness at the death of so many beloved famous people, as well as a more general disgust for the year that had just elapsed. A panicky South Carolina man even launched a GoFundMe page to “Help Protect Betty White from 2016,” which raised $2,000 to keep the Grim Reaper from slaying the beloved Golden Girl. (On the advice of Ms. White, who remains alive and well at age 94, he donated the money to charity.)
Why has the reaction to celebrity death become more intense and more personalized in recent years? More often than not, people act as if the loss of a 1980s pop icon or an aging movie star is a personal affront and feel moved to proclaim their grief on social media in ways that previous generations would have found maudlin and embarrassing.
One reason might be the simple fact that there are too many celebrities. Years ago, in The Frenzy of Renown, the historian Leo Braudy noted that the “expansion of the possibility of fame” had transformed an earlier era’s understanding of what qualified as genuine celebrity and thus altered our standards for judging fame. Today, when Kim Kardashian catches a cold, we read about it; when a contestant who lost on Survivor: Gabon ten years ago dies unexpectedly, the tabloids carry the story right next to news of the latest terrorist attack.
It seems that although we know intuitively that death is the great leveler and that no number of sycophants in your entourage or followers on Twitter or plastic surgeons on speed dial can prevent it, we believe that celebrities are immune to it. Our worship of fame has always been in part an envy of the wealth and control that the famous supposedly enjoy. With social media granting us real-time access to the lives of celebrities, and on-demand entertainment services that provide an endless library of actors’ past film and TV shows, our celebrities (even our B- and C-list celebrities) seem always and ever available to us and immune to the ravages of aging. No wonder their deaths take us by surprise.
Never mind that this conceit allows us to avoid some uncomfortable truths about our heroes, such as the fact that many of the celebrities who died “too soon” in 2016 (Prince, David Bowie, Fisher, Michael) had been or were currently serious substance abusers whose drug use might have had something to do with their foreshortened lives.
The meaning and power of celebrity have also changed in recent years, thanks in large part to reality television and social media, which have permanently obliterated the distinction between performance and reality. As Donald Trump’s recent election victory suggests, you’re only faking it if you don’t win. Our new reality is a world where presidents can hire people like Omarosa Manigault, a former contestant on Trump’s Celebrity Apprentice reality show whom he thrice fired on TV, as “public liaison leader” in his White House. Omarosa (who, like Cher and Madonna, feels she has earned the right to be known by her first name) is a veteran of more than 20 other reality shows. Surely the West Wing will prove a worthy playing field for such cutthroat skills.
The notion that 2016 was an especially awful year was not limited to counting up the deaths of celebrities and demi-celebrities, however. Various memes—such as the plaintive “Dear 2016: Y U No End Soon?”—were popular online in the waning months of the year. And at the end of December, the New York Times editorial board took to the fainting couch to assess the previous 12 months: “Let’s pretend we’re in some cosmic therapist’s office, in a counseling session with the year 2016,” the Times editorial began. (Oh yes, let’s!) “We are asked to face the year and say something nice about it. Just one or two things. The mind balks. Fingers tighten around the Kleenex as a cascade of horribles wells up in memory: You were a terrible year. We hate you. We’ll be so glad never to see you again. The silence echoes as we grope for a reply.” Evidently at the Times, “fake news” is bad, but self-indulgent pap masquerading as publishable writing is fine.
A few lone voices urged perspective. In an opinion piece in the Times, Charles Nevin noted that as bad as the year was, he was still happier living in 2016 than “fiddling nervously with one’s toga while awaiting the arrival in Rome of the Visigoths (in 410) or the Vandals (in 455).”
But most news outlets endorsed the suffering its readers were enduring and offered advice on how to get through the next 12 months. “Those who feel miserable and afraid have plenty of justification,” the Times’s editors wrote. “For many it was the election of a president unfit for the job. He seems to want to run the country like some authoritarian game-show host, but we don’t really know what he’ll do, and uncertainty worsens the sickening feeling.” (Imagine those words beings written in the wake of Obama’s election in 2008.)
The future isn’t fake news. It’s emotionally manipulative “news” that deliberately blurs the boundary between reality and performance. In the early weeks of the new year, Kim Kardashian, who had sworn off social media for a brief moment after being robbed in Paris, returned to social media with a professionally crafted “home video” meant to quell rumors of trouble in her marriage. The montage featured images of Kim somehow managing to play with her children while wearing stiletto heels, tasteful shots of toddlers gamboling around luxurious yet suspiciously pristine modern houses, and Kim kissing her husband, Kanye West, all while Jeremih’s treacly song “Paradise” plays in the background. The Potemkin Kardashian video is as compelling as it is manipulative. “Welcome to Kardashian Kamelot,” New York magazine wrote.
In his 1984 book, The Minimal Self, historian Christopher Lasch observed an American tendency toward “emotional retreat” in times of crisis. He described a people notable for “our protective irony and emotional disengagement, our reluctance to make long-term emotional commitments, our sense of powerlessness and victimization, our fascination with extreme situations and with the possibility of applying their lessons to everyday life, our perception of large-scale organizations as systems of total control.” Lasch was writing about possible crises such as global thermonuclear war, but today, on the left, Trump’s election is pretty much considered equivalent.
But unlike Lasch’s time three decades ago, the problem today isn’t emotional retreat; it’s emotional excess. The eagerness to compare 2016 to a plague year is more than just a brief moment of collective cultural narcissism. 2017 might be the year The Feelings Economy finally comes into its own, and emotions become the governing force in how we interpret events: On college campuses, undergrads say they feel unsafe when they hear views that don’t mirror their own—so it must be true. People claim that Trump’s victory makes them feel as if their lives are at risk—so it must be true.
In 2017, fake news will not be the problem; emotionally manipulative news will be. A culture that interprets world events as personal traumas will not be prepared to tackle the serious challenges the world faces in the years to come, from economic instability to terrorism. We need less Twitter-moaning and more tough-mindedness, less emotional wallowing and more rational action. And if you absolutely must temporarily quell your anxieties with reality television, at least watch Deadliest Jobs, not Too Fat to Transition.
Join us—you'll be in good company. Everyone worth reading is reading (and writing for) COMMENTARY:
“ There’s an enormous amount of shouting in the wild west of conservative media. That has its place, and is often a sign of the energy on the right. But amidst the cacophony there’s a special need for serious, considered, and compelling argument, presented in the hope of persuading, not just punishing. This is where COMMENTARY has always shined, perhaps more now than ever before. It aims to tackle the best arguments of its intellectual opponents, not just the easiest targets. It’s a journal I’ve read for nearly 30 years and I can’t think of a time when I’ve valued it more. „
Jonah Goldberg
“ There is more commentary in the world than ever before—whether in print, on the air, or on the Internet. But there is still a dearth of serious, informed commentary that reports, analyzes, and argues without ever stooping to name-calling or vitriol. If you further narrow down the segment of the commentariat that looks at the world from a conservative and Jewish perspective—well, you’re left with only one choice. The magazine you are now reading. COMMENTARY has changed over the years—for instance, it now publishes this blog—but one thing that has not changed is its steadfast commitment to providing the best analysis from the most informed writers of the most important ideas in the world, all written in clear prose that appeals to a general audience. There is nothing else like it. Never has been, never will be. „
Max Boot
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Yuval Levin
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Decisions and Revisions That a Moment Will Reverse
How Democrats and liberals will now say exactly the opposite of what they said during the Obama years.
Noah Rothman 2017-01-13
William Yeomans, a columnist for Reuters, even sought to discredit anyone preemptively who questioned the legitimacy of the Electoral College if Barack Obama lost the popular vote in 2012: “In the unlikely event that Obama should be reelected without carrying the popular vote, however, there will surely be members of the opposition irresponsibly hurling that fact around as reason to reject the president’s second-term agenda,” he prophesied. Strangely, Yeomans declined to shame Democrats for obsessing over the political ramifications of Hillary Clinton’s 2-million-vote lead over Electoral College victor Donald Trump.
All this has been unceremoniously discarded down the memory hole. At the dawn of the Trump era, Democrats are reacquainting themselves with the virtues of life in the opposition. In the minority, matters that were of little or no consequence to liberals during the Obama era—or issues the raising of which would cause liberals to accuse conservatives of acting in bad faith—will almost certainly take center stage in their indictments of President Trump.
Return of the Hamburger Flippers:
When it comes to the economy, watch for two metrics Democrats dismissed offhand during the Obama era to become matters of great public urgency in the Trump era: underemployment and the labor-force participation rate.
At 62.4 percent in September 2015, the labor-force participation rate—the degree to which potential workers are either employed or are trying to find a job—was at its worst point in nearly 40 years. Though it has since ticked up slightly, that number has continued to languish. Obama critics have, from the beginning of the economic recovery after the 2008–09 recession, combined the labor-force rate with the “underemployment” rate—the category known as U6 that measures workers who are employed in occupations that do not optimize their skill sets or availability—to question the strength of the revival.
Now that Trump has inherited this malaise, liberals will suddenly turn around and blame him and Republicans for it. This means that Democrats who once argued that the labor-force participation rate was artificially low as a result of the surge in retiring baby boomers will probably forget they made this argument. No longer will nonworking students who haven’t yet joined the workforce as skilled laborers represent the light at the end of the tunnel for the economy. Liberals are sure to rediscover the tragedy of the long-term unemployed discouraged workers and involuntary part-time laborers, and in very short order. And the horror of the working conditions under which people are finding jobs.
We saw this in 2003 under George W. Bush. After a double-dip recession in 2001 (the first began six weeks after Bush took office, the second after 9/11), the economy had gotten back on a firmer footing. Job growth was relatively strong. How, under such conditions, could the opposition party convey that the Bush economy was substandard? Their answer was to call into question the value of the jobs being created. To illustrate the “crisis,” Democrats settled on dubbing the jobs created under Bush soul-sucking, unfulfilling drudgery.
From the pages of major metropolitan newspapers to the floor of the United States Congress, liberals mocked the decline of what New York Times reviewer Elissa Schappell dubbed the Rust Belt’s “slide into obsolescence” under Bush—“from ‘union proud’ to McJob servitude.” What Democrats once called Bush’s “jobless recovery” was now a false revival typified by the creation of the wrong kind of jobs. “No disrespect to our hamburger flippers in America,” said then Illinois Representative Rahm Emanuel, protesting a controversial memo to the president that recommended reclassifying food-service work as manufacturing labor. “They work and do a good job, and we are outperforming Japan and Germany and China in the hamburger-flipping business.”
This flippant political contortion was itself recycled from the Reagan years—the last period of genuinely explosive economic growth. “By destroying many high-paying factory jobs, are high-tech production techniques going to turn the United States into a nation of $50,000-a-year systems managers and $3.50-an-hour janitors and hamburger flippers?” bemoaned Walter Cronkite in September 1984.
Concern over the quality of “McJobs” always seems to be directly proportional to the GOP’s political fortunes. In the Obama presidency, the value of service employment was never an issue. Rather, the burning questions were whether employers could be made to pay a “living wage.” Now, in a new period of GOP dominance, the low aesthetic and supposedly mindless quality of this kind of employment will once again preoccupy liberal minds, especially if the unemployment rate remains.
They might have a problem pinning it on Trump, though, since his entire campaign accepted the “hamburger-flipper” argument in his insistence on reviving the manufacturing sector to “make America great again.” He used it to great effect against Obama and Hillary Clinton.
How Now, Dow Jones:
Democrats are also likely to rediscover the evils of a surging stock market in the Trump era if the Dow Jones Industrial Average continues along its present trajectory. For a glimpse of this coming reversion to a comfortable mean, Americans need look only to how the stock market’s performance was derided as a symptom of a societal sickness under Ronald Reagan.
“When politicians and pop culture impresarios refer to ‘the eighties,’ they usually mean the vapid, hedonistic, amoral years of America’s new gilded age, when yuppies reigned and greed was good,” writes the historian Gil Troy in Morning in America: How Ronald Reagan Invented the 1980’s. For the other half, Troy noted that Reagan’s America was one characterized by drugs, crime, failing schools, socioeconomic breakdown, “selfishness, even hard-heartedness,” and an America in which the wealthy benefited disproportionately.
In July 1984, the Census noted an increase in the number of Americans living in poverty under Reagan. That finding was dubbed “the smoking gun of Reagan unfairness” by House Speaker Tip O’Neill. With inflation and unemployment down, GDP growth up, and the so-called misery index reaching its lowest point since 1972, Democrats had no choice but to bemoan the way economic performance was unfairly benefiting the wealthy and connected under Reagan. The rising tide on Wall Street (the 25-year bull market began in 1983) provided the grist for their mill. This is an argument that is almost certain to be resurrected to tarnish Trump.
It will be hard for Democrats and liberals to advance this one with a straight face, but one can expect them to shoulder on nonetheless. During a depressingly sluggish post-recession recovery in Obama’s two terms, Democrats lacked criteria by which they could declare the recession over and the liberal program a success. Their best case: The performance of the stock market.
The Implicit New Powers Trump will inherit from the outgoing president are staggering. The constitutional-law professor in the Oval Office routinely asserted the unilateral authority to act on his policy preferences based on the founding charter’s penumbras and emanations solely because Congress would not.By October 2012, the Dow had gained nearly 70 percent from its low point in September 2008. The S&P had risen 80 percent over the same period. “For a president who is supposedly bad for business, Barack Obama has been surprisingly good for business,” wrote the Atlantic’s Derek Thompson on the eve of Obama’s reelection. Citing the market’s performance, Millsaps College historian Robert McElvaine urged Americans to judge Obama not against any Republican president of the last 80 years but against President Herbert Hoover. This was the most overt effort in a campaign to convince Americans to judge Obama on events that did not occur—in this case, the non-occurrence of a new Great Depression.
Donald Trump had not yet even taken office before the market’s performance was deemed of suspect value. “Greed is back on Wall Street after Trump’s win,” the headline in a report via CNN’s Paul R. La Monica blared just 10 days after Trump’s victory. By comparing the performance of bonds versus stocks, the CNN analyst devised an index by which he could measure the market’s level of greed. “The rapid shift in overall market momentum is another sign of Extreme Greed in our index,” La Monica observed. That’s, after all, fitting. “Trump first became famous in the ‘Greed is Good’ 1980s decade,” he wrote. The Third Gilded Age is upon us.
Caesar, Thou Art Mortal:
We can also expect the Democrats to be, all of sudden, alarmed, preoccupied, and horrified with executive overreach—thanks entirely to the unilateral expansion of executive authority by Obama, about which they were oddly silent when it mattered.
The portfolio of implicit new powers Donald Trump will inherit from the outgoing president is staggering. The constitutional-law professor in the Oval Office routinely asserted the unilateral authority to act on his policy preferences based on the founding charter’s penumbras and emanations solely because Congress would not. As a result, Trump will not only have the power to repeal existing executive orders, as have all of his predecessors, but is also being bequeathed “executive actions” that already have questionable legal authority.
Trump has been provided by immediate precedent with a new set of tools to try out when he sees fit. He might, say, delay the implementation of laws regardless of their legislative terms, because Barack Obama did just that when it came to the implementation of ObamaCare. If he wants to amend existing law and encounters a recalcitrant Congress, Trump can simply order executive agencies or department to issue waivers or statutory interpretations (i.e., the birth-control mandate that somehow was found to arise out of ObamaCare) that are in conflict with the letter of the law but comport with his personal preferences.
Democrats may also find themselves interested in the virtues of executive modesty when it comes to direct interference with the private marketplace. For his part, Trump harbors no ideological misgivings about such interference. He demonstrated this before taking office with the announcement of a deal to preserve a handful of jobs at an Indiana-based air-conditioning plant run by Carrier. By providing Carrier’s parent company, a defense contractor, with “inducements” in the form of taxpayer-provided benefits in exchange for meeting hiring and capital investment quotas, the Trump administration showed anti-laissez-faire colors. “The free market has been sorting it out, and America’s been losing,” lamented Vice President Mike Pence in December 2016. “Every time,” nodded President Trump. “Every time.”
To some Democrats, the Carrier deal represented a brand of what the Huffington Post dubbed “authoritarianism”—but it’s the kind of authoritarianism they are not sure they should oppose. In an interview with the Huffington Post, New America Foundation Open Markets Program Fellow Matt Stoller warned that the “incentives” represent leverage over Carrier’s owner, United Technologies, which Trump may use to impose Washington’s will on the private firm. “‘Do what I say, or else,’ is not a good way to run a country,” Stoller said. The New Yorker’s John Cassidy noted that liberals had rightly chided Trump for offering Carrier a “bribe” in exchange for a positive headline, even though this kind of “economic nativism and nationalism” has its constituencies.
It wasn’t all that long ago that Americans were told that it was the worst kind of pitiless capitalist excess to let a legacy industry like American automobile manufacturing go bankrupt. That argument won the day when the outgoing Bush administration extended emergency TARP funds to General Motors and Chrysler in December 2008 amid what CBS News described as “urgent requests” from President-elect Barack Obama and Congress. Most of those federal funds went to paying off the two troubled car firms’ debts and securing United Autoworkers union members’ pensions. While union members had their livelihoods bolstered in the form of an agreement from GM to preserve their existing wage rates, nonunion members of GM’s family saw their pensions eliminated. In the end, GM did turn to bankruptcy in 2009, which decimated the investments of small bondholders. One wonders how the Huffington Post might view this kind of politically expedient “authoritarianism” with the benefit of hindsight.
The Democratic Party’s rediscovery of the separation of powers and the problems of executive overreach will actually be salutary, even if the motivation will be grossly political.How will the legislative branch respond to what are sure to be challenges to its authority from the next administration? For Democrats in the minority, dissent will once again become patriotic. Under Barack Obama, the standard issue foot-dragging expected of a minority party was branded “obstructionism” of a special kind that betrayed an ugly and personal acrimony toward President Barack Obama often attributed to secret racism. Because such acts were deemed illegitimate, every effort to counter them was justified. It was because of this contorted logic that Democrats managed to convince themselves that their pique was a species of righteousness, and, holding fast to this delusion, they eliminated the Senate filibuster in 2013 for all executive appointments but those to the Supreme Court.
Now, staring down the barrel of a GOP administration and Republican majorities in Congress, Democrats are indulging in a little wistful regret. “I, frankly, think many of us will regret that in this Congress, because it would have been a terrific speed bump, potential emergency break, to have in our system to slow down the confirmation of extreme nominees,” confessed Delaware Senator Chris Coons mournfully. Even incoming Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer tried to rewrite history by contending recently that he privately lobbied Democrats to pass on eliminating the filibuster in 2013, but he related that he “didn’t prevail.”
Schumer’s position on the nuking of the filibuster is a weathervane that shifts direction along with the winds. He was by no means an opponent of a proposed rules change when he told the audience of a March 2013 dinner that Senate Democrats would “fill up the D.C. circuit one way or the other.” “If the opposition was not to the person but just to filling the position, that was where we would draw the line,” Schumer told Think Progress on the eve of nuclear Armageddon. “This is getting close to that.”
The Democratic Party’s rediscovery of the separation of powers and the problems of executive overreach will actually be salutary, even if the motivation will be grossly political. And it will represent a healthy challenge to congressional Republicans, who were up in arms about Obama’s conduct but will now have to face an angry president of their own party if they make a stink about the matter.
Getting and Spending:
Democrats are about to turn into debt hawks. The Pavlovian liberal response to Republican governance was ably demonstrated by Nobel Prize–winning economist and New York Times opinion writer Paul Krugman. In a January column, he warned that the GOP was set to blow up the federal budget deficit “at almost precisely the moment that deficits were starting to matter again.” His column is replete with road-worn admonitions about the GOP’s alleged commitment to making the “rich richer” while conceding that deficit spending and government borrowing “competes with the private sector for a limited amount of money.” While railing against alleged GOP hypocrisy on the matter of budgets, Krugman appears unwavering in his determination to ignore his own.
The national debt was of little concern to Krugman and his fellow travelers as it nearly doubled from $11 trillion to $19 trillion over the course of the Obama presidency. But as Krugman demonstrates, Trumpian debt expansion will instantly be deemed wildly irresponsible and dangerous. Trump has promised a variety of big-ticket spending items as part of his agenda, including the extension of unemployment benefits to new mothers as a form of maternity leave and an approximately $1 trillion spending and public-works proposal. Unlike Obama’s 2009 stimulus, the Trump administration will supposedly seek to structure this plan in a way that maximizes public-private partnerships. Nevertheless, Congress would still be effectively writing a 13-figure check. Moreover, the desired effects of Trump’s infrastructure proposal are virtually identical to Obama’s American Recovery and Reinvestment Act: Keynesianism, but in this case without the crisis that supposedly necessitates such extraordinary measures.
“Sometimes you have to prime the pump,” Trump told Time, echoing the central tenet of John Maynard Keynes’s prescriptions for growth amid times of economic adversity. But where is the depression-level calamity Trump seeks to address? There are, at present, no recessionary pressures on the economy. There is no liquidity crisis. There is no credit crunch. The GDP grew at a respectable 3.2 percent in the third quarter of 2016. Unemployment is relatively low, and the Dow is riding high. Only a prevailing sense of personal economic crisis among a segment of the voting public to which Trump feels indebted could possibly justify such fiscal illiteracy. But this is not just terrible policy; it’s also progressive in exactly the way Democrats are progressive. Will Democrats suddenly embrace frugality just to oppose a Republican? Will they become the callous wretches they have for so long opposed in the name of parsimony?
Rise Up:
In early 2009, at the nadir of their political relevance, Republicans discovered enthusiasm for the conservative cause that they desperately needed in the spontaneous rise of the Tea Party. The passionate opposition displayed by average citizens to the prospect of unsustainable government spending proved to be a boon to the GOP. It provided the boost Republican candidates needed for their races in 2010. It created new recruiting and fundraising tools, and crowds who promised to take their anxieties with them into the voting booth.
The zeal the Tea Party brought to the table overshadowed its nastier elements: those within the movement who were not ideologically conservative but merely anti-Obama, some of whom harbored the suspicion that this new black president was secretly a Kenyan Muslim interloper. More fatefully, it led conservative Republicans to disregard surveys that found this populist movement was composed primarily of disaffected political refugees, including a large number of Democrats and independents who had little use for the conservative governing agenda.
Tea Party envy among Democrats isn’t new. The highest echelons of the party, including Barack Obama and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, were quick to embrace the nascent Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011 in hopes it would serve as their own grassroots uprising even as their version of it came to be typified by acts of anti-social violence. This was the Democratic Party’s response to a midterm drubbing that cost the Democrats control of the House. How will the party respond now, in the middle of its darkest winter in nearly 100 years?
If history is any guide, the prospect of renewing public enthusiasm for the Democratic Party will overcome any prudent objections to unseemly or even violent tactics. We’ve gotten a taste of this in the deference Democrats and the White House displayed toward an aggressive, riotous, and ignorant group of agitators who made a bloody stand against a stretch of oil pipeline at the Standing Rock Reservation in late 2016.
The activist left is convinced that it now constitutes an underground resistance, the final bulwark against the fascist aims of an illegitimate Vichy regime. That may sound overly dramatic to outside observers, but it will prove to be a powerful organizing tool for a movement with no ability at present to get at the levers of power in Washington—and little attachment to conventional notions of civic propriety. This group of underground Democrats is, for now, a small band. It has the potential, though, for aggressive expansion with the right amount of incubation by imprudent members of a party out of power.
In performing as any opposition party must, Democrats appear ready to demonstrate that most of their so-called principled objections to Republican tactics in the Obama years were mere postures. There is no question that many voters are apprehensive about Donald Trump, but, owing to their many hypocrisies, Democrats are going to find thwarting his agenda a difficult task. They have only themselves to blame.
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Charles Krauthammer
“ COMMENTARY isn’t just an important magazine. It’s an indispensable one. It’s been indispensable for half a century, and it is today. It’s indispensable for understanding the moment we live in, and it’s indispensable for laying out a path forward. The challenges we confront are great, but COMMENTARY is used to facing grave challenges without fearful cowering or wishful thinking. So we need COMMENTARY today as much as we ever have, and we need it to be as strong as it’s ever been. „
William Kristol
“ COMMENTARY’s writing is predictably engaging and edgy, but its content is anything but homogeneous. Center-right perspectives characterize contributions, but not predictably so. Jewish affairs are thematic, but not always. Controversies of the day are the usual subjects, yet offered only with reflection well apart from the frenzied 24/7 news cycle. Intellectual honesty and analytical rigor characterize COMMENTARY and that is why even its political critics concede that they are still enlightened by the very arguments they often oppose. „
Victor Davis Hanson
“ COMMENTARY is an indispensable read on the Arab Spring, the Afghan war, the future of American conservatism, and all the other crazy stuff out there. But you already knew that. What I really love about it is that it’s a full-service operation, and its back-of-the-book guys—the fellows who write about music, literature, and all the things that make life worth living as the world goes to hell—are the best in the business. There is an observation in a Terry Teachout piece on the wonderful singer Nancy LaMott about “Moon River” that has stayed with me for almost two decades. I fished it out from the back of my mind to impress a gal at a Goldwater Institute reception only the other day, and it worked a treat. So thank you, COMMENTARY! Likewise, my differences with the arts’n’culture crew unsettle me far more than the geopolitical ones: reasonable people can disagree on how large a nuclear arsenal those wacky mullahs should be permitted to own, but I’m still agog at the great Andrew Ferguson’s mystifying praise for the New York Times obituaries page a couple of issues back. That’s COMMENTARY for you—provocative to the end, on matters large and small. In these turbulent and dismaying times, we can all use a huckleberry friend waiting round the bend, in the mailbox each month and on the computer screen every morning. For any journal of opinion, as “Moon River” teaches us, there’s such a lot of world to see. COMMENTARY sees most of it with piercing clarity: it can’t know all the answers, but it asks all the right questions, and with great farsightedness. It deserves your wholehearted support. „
Mark Steyn
“ COMMENTARY has played an invaluable role in American political discourse for decades, offering thoughtful analysis on issues rather than sound bites or bumper stickers. Especially when it comes to U.S. foreign and defense policy, COMMENTARY has time and time again been ahead of the crowd, anticipating trends and developments that others react to only after the fact. I can't imagine not being a COMMENTARY subscriber. „
John Bolton
“ In the midst of today’s political rancor, COMMENTARY Magazine provides a rare venue for thoughtful discussion. COMMENTARY’s talented writers provide insightful analysis of foreign affairs, domestic policy, and the politics of the day. COMMENTARY is a treasure not only for conservatives, but for anyone looking for in-depth exploration of the issues that influence America’s public dialogue and shape the nation’s future. „
Karl Rove
“ It's notorious, and true, that government officials hardly read anything. Memos, sure; nowadays, emails and tweets as well. But magazines? People barely have time to eat lunch or see their kids, so how can an intellectual monthly affect public affairs? The question is a good one. How did COMMENTARY do it? The answer is that officials, like all citizens following American foreign policy, need a way to understand the world around them. When prevailing theories fail, when conventional wisdom is clearly at variance with what they see before their eyes, the outcome for senators and congressmen and White House officials is what the shrinks call cognitive dissonance. They may say one thing but believe another, or simply be unable to square previous beliefs and policies with the clear effects of U.S. conduct. They've lost the ability to explain the world. And then came COMMENTARY, offering month after month of piercing, bracing analysis—and value judgments of right and wrong, and clear writing about American gains and losses. Here was an insistence on looking reality in the face. Here was plain argument, seeking no quarter intellectually and giving none. And it mattered. It shamed some people, and emboldened others; COMMENTARY demanded that we conform policy to the opportunities and dangers that really faced America. In years of confusion and obfuscation, that striking clarity changed policies, and changed American conduct, because it changed the way we understood the world. „
Elliott Abrams
“ For more than 60 years, COMMENTARY has been a go-to source on matters of the greatest importance to our nation and our civilization. Today, its full-throated defense of the United States and freedom is as eloquent as it was a half-century ago, and no less urgent. Issues of the day will change, news cycles come and go, but COMMENTARY remains an indispensable authority in the battle of ideas that help to shape our world. Its continued success is both an indication, and source, of the country’s intellectual health. „
Donald Rumsfeld
“ COMMENTARY is America's most important monthly journal of ideas, period. For nearly seven decades it has published the best and most exciting writing from the most important thinkers: Saul Bellow and Lionel Trilling; Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Jeane Kirkpatrick; Paul Johnson and Ruth Wisse; Cynthia Ozick and—of course—Norman Podhoretz and Midge Decter. Is there anything remotely like it? No. It is the lamp by which America, and Israel, and the Jewish people, may find their way to safety. I'm proud to be published in its pages. „
Bret Stephens
“ Irving Kristol once called COMMENTARY the most influential magazine in Jewish history. Certainly, no publication had a greater influence on me as I evolved from adolescent reader (arguing over its articles with my father and older brother) into a “frequent contributor” who made it my intellectual home. The magazine did not exploit American freedom to escape from civilizing duty but rather activated the intertwined responsibilities of citizens and members of a group. American Jewry can boast of many contributions to the welfare of this country and the Jewish people, but few as fortifying as COMMENTARY. „
Ruth R. Wisse
“ Edward Shils noted that there are four means of education in the modern world: the classroom, bookstores (especially used-bookstores), the conversation of intelligent friends, and intellectual magazines. For me intellectual magazines were more important than any of the other three, and no magazine among them more so than COMMENTARY. I first happened on COMMENTARY as a student browsing in the University of Chicago Bookstore in 1957. I have not missed an issue since. The magazine spoke to my intellectual interests and passions, and still does. As a reader and as a writer, I should be lost without it. „
Joseph Epstein
“ Why does COMMENTARY matter? Since 1945, no other monthly magazine has so consistently published serious, provocative argument and analysis. No other monthly magazine has viewed America and the world through such a wide angle, encompassing economics, politics, society, culture, religion, and diplomacy. No other monthly magazine has published such a celebrated and wide-ranging list of editors and contributors. Cerebral, critical, and committed, the point of view found in its pages is as unique as it is formidable. And in a world of Iranian nukes, rising anti-Semitism, radical Islam, American disarmament, bipartisan neo-isolationism, and disintegrating institutions, reading COMMENTARY is more than a pleasure. It is a necessity. „
Matthew Continetti
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David Brooks
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Heather Mac Donald
“ I first subscribed to COMMENTARY in 1973, as a recovering liberal who had invested four years of my young life in writing speeches for a constellation of McGovernite candidates and office-holders. Living in Berkeley at the time, I relished COMMENTARY as a guilty pleasure, feeling grateful that the magazine arrived each month discreetly disguised in a plain, brown wrapper that concealed its suspiciously neo-conservative content. In the militantly leftist community in which I functioned forty years ago, receiving regular monthly installments of the most degrading porn would have produced far less embarrassment than my growing devotion to the persuasive prose of Norman Podhoretz and Co. Yes, my personal journey from left to right-center involved the usual biographical factors, including the three P’s: paychecks, parenthood, and prayer. Paychecks, because they arrived with shocking subtractions in the form of onerous and incomprehensible taxes; parenthood, because responsibility for a new generation forced a longer-term perspective; and prayer, because my own growing Jewish observance led to the conclusion that my “idealistic” ’60s generation, with all its narcissism and preening self-regard, might not provide life’s ultimate answers after all. Fortunately for me, reading COMMENTARY with near-religious regularity helped to organize my onrushing insights and experience into a more coherent world view. In a dark time in our nation’s history, while surviving (temporarily) in the most unhinged corner of the continent, this incomparable publication persuaded me that I wasn’t alone. „
Michael Medved
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Andrew Roberts
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David Frum
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Fair Is Foul and Foul Is Fair
During the Trump years, expect the left to reverse course on foreign policy.
Abe Greenwald 2017-01-13
Trump’s offending tweet had praised Vladimir Putin. The Russian president had just said he would not retaliate against the United States after President Barack Obama expelled 25 Russian diplomats from the U.S. and imposed new sanctions on Russia. “Great move on delay (by V. Putin),” Trump tweeted, “I always knew he was very smart!” Trump’s effusive admiration for the man who was behind the 2016 hacking attacks on the Democratic National Committee and John Podesta’s email account was worrisome, offensive, and un-presidential. But it wasn’t in the same neighborhood as treason. It wasn’t even on the same continent.
The Constitution defines treason as “the levying of war against the United States” and the giving of “aid and comfort” to America’s enemies. If we were to stretch the meaning of “aid and comfort” to include social-media compliments, we would find Twitter fairly overrun by traitors who routinely praise America’s adversaries. But what’s most interesting about the left’s overreaction to Trump’s tweet is that it condemned a stance on Russia that Barack Obama himself had maintained for the lion’s share of his two terms as president. And that stance was widely praised by Obama’s supporters. If we believed in the new definition of treason provided by these sudden Russia hawks of the left, Barack Obama’s previous interactions with Putin would have landed him in the dock years ago.
There was, for example, that time in March 2012 when a microphone in Korea picked up the 44th president telling Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev that he, Obama, would be more accommodating to Putin’s demands for reduced American missile defense in Europe once he got reelected and could drop his harsher pose toward Russia. (This was the moment that featured Medvedev’s immortal response, “I will transmit this information to Vladimir.”)
That was but one instance of Obama’s long, dogged (and failed) effort to make nice with a revanchist Russia by dealing with Putin almost entirely on Putin’s terms. In March 2009, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton implemented Obama’s “Russian reset” policy, presenting Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov with a symbolic red “reset” button. As the Obama administration’s own fact sheet explained: “President Obama sought to reset relations with Russia and reverse what he called a ‘dangerous drift’ in this important bilateral relationship. President Obama and his administration have sought to engage the Russian government to pursue foreign policy goals of common interest—win-win outcomes—for the American and Russian people.” Outcomes soon proved, however, to be win-lose. Obama reneged on U.S. missile-defense promises to Poland and the Czech Republic in order to becalm Putin. But Putin went on the offensive, eventually annexing Crimea in 2014. Putin also failed to honor new nuclear agreements between the U.S. and Russia, oversaw years of cyberattacks against the United States, and waged an air war on U.S.-backed rebels in Syria that continues to this day.
Even as rapprochement with Putin was failing, Obama and his supporters remained enthusiastic about the policy. When 2012 Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney described Russia as America’s “No. 1 geopolitical foe,” the president and his defenders mocked Romney ruthlessly. “The 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back because the Cold War’s been over for 20 years,” Obama said during a debate with Romney. The New York Times editorial board saw Romney’s position as dangerous: “Two decades after the end of the cold war, Mitt Romney still considers Russia to be America’s ‘No. 1 geopolitical foe.’ His comments display either a shocking lack of knowledge about international affairs or just craven politics. Either way, they are reckless and unworthy of a major presidential contender.” The editorial defended Obama’s missile-defense betrayal in Eastern Europe and closed on a note that now sounds remarkably Trumpian: “There are real threats out there: Al Qaeda and its imitators, Iran, North Korea, economic stresses. Mr. Romney owes Americans a discussion of the real challenges facing this country and his solutions to them.” Consider that a year ago, Trump defended his approach to Russia thus: “I’m not saying Russia is not a threat. But we have other threats. We have the threat of terrorism.”
What’s the difference, then, between the Russian reset of 2009 and its 2017 iteration? What makes the first good and the second bad? Why, the man doing the resetting, of course. For the New York Times and other liberal entities, foreign-policy positions that were considered brilliant under President Obama are now deemed subversive in the hands of President Trump. The reset policy is one example; there will be many more to come. For on several key issues, Trump represents more of a continuation than a refutation of Obama’s approach to foreign affairs. But don’t expect to see the kind of support Obama enjoyed for taking similar steps.
Vladimir Putin isn’t the only bad actor with whom Trump is seeking cooperation or understanding. He also sees Syrian dictator—and Putin ally—Bashar al-Assad as a potential partner in fighting ISIS. Although Assad has killed hundreds of thousands of Syrian citizens and many see his removal as key both to ending the Syrian civil war and draining the appeal of ISIS, Trump has no interest in helping to bring down the current Syrian regime. “If they ever did overthrow Assad,” he has said, “you may very well end up with worse than Assad.” He’s also praised Assad as “much tougher and much smarter than [Hillary Clinton] and Obama.” What’s more, Trump’s interest in working with Putin militates against his causing any grief for Putin’s Syrian client. For his part, Assad has described President Trump as a “natural ally” in the fight against terrorism.Trump’s critics on the left will surely view this as repellent cynicism. And they would be correct in their assessment. But where were they when Obama was engaging Assad with great enthusiasm? When Obama came to office, he worked tirelessly to warm relations between the U.S. and Syria, reestablishing diplomatic ties, hinting at eased sanctions on the regime, and smoothing Syria’s way into international trade bodies. And, as now, Assad was keen on friendly relations with a U.S. president. He even invited Obama to Syria. Then-Senator John Kerry was passionate about what he saw as a great opening. Assad “wants to engage with the West,” Kerry told Seymour Hersh. “Our latest conversation gave me a much greater sense that Assad is willing to do the things that he needs to do in order to change his relationship with the United States. He told me he’s willing to engage positively with Iraq, and have direct discussions with Israel over the Golan Heights—with Americans at the table. I will encourage the Administration to take him up on it.” Hersh, and the rest of the liberal commentariat, ate it up. “Obama Has Syria’s Assad Right Where He Wants Him,” announced a 2010 Newsweek headline atop an editorial about Obama’s engagement policy.
Despite Donald Trump’s well-earned reputation for bluster, he is actually following the Obama line on talks without preconditions. He’s eager to work with Putin, Assad, and others toward what he believes are common goals.It is true that Obama’s engagement push came before Assad launched a brutal campaign against his own people. In 2009, his defenders might argue, there was still a chance of appealing to Assad’s better angels and inspiring reform. But massive slaughter is not the only indication of an irredeemably dangerous regime. When Obama sought to engage Assad, the Syrian dictator’s monstrous credentials were well established. He had sanctioned a flow of jihadists into Iraq to kill Americans fighting in the war. Syria was the closest ally of Iran, a terrorist state bent on the destruction of Israel and the United States. His was a terrorist regime, a Baathist regime, and an oppressive dictatorship beyond rehabilitation. Moreover, even after the Syrian civil war began, the Obama administration tried time and again to cajole Assad into reform or compromise.
For all the above reasons, many conservatives were outspoken in opposing engagement with Assad from the start. But this time round, as Trump attempts to work with Damascus, liberals are sure to take great offense.
Then there is the matter of talking to rogue regimes more generally. When Obama ran for president in 2008, his vow to talk to Iran (and other regimes) “without preconditions” became an election focal point. Conservatives pounced, pointing out that American diplomatic engagement can itself be a valuable “win” for bad regimes hoping to raise their profile. As such, it shouldn’t be granted lightly. Moreover, summitry can succeed only if it involves parties hammering out the details of a goal they already share.
Those on the left were either quick to defend Obama as breaking courageously with George W. Bush’s “cowboy diplomacy” or quick to amend his comments so that they seemed a harmless verbal slip-up. Obama, of course, did pursue such talks and those talks produced the dangerous and immoral policy hash that is the Iran nuclear deal and the fruitless normalization of relations with Cuba.
Despite Donald Trump’s well-earned reputation for bluster, he is actually following the Obama line on talks without preconditions. As discussed, he’s eager to work with Putin and Assad toward what he believes are common goals. He was also asked by Reuters if he would be willing to talk directly to North Korean leader Kim Jong Un about halting the isolated nation’s nuclear program. “Absolutely,” Trump said. “I would speak to him, I would have no problem speaking to him.”
Will the left see this as a brave turn away from the failed stubborn policy of the past? Not likely. Instead, we’re probably going to hear more about what Hillary Clinton adviser Jake Sullivan characterized as Trump’s “bizarre fascination with foreign strongmen like Putin and Kim.”
Donald Trump’s stance on American alliances is hard to discern. As he’s done on most issues, Trump has spoken in contradictory terms about the future of NATO. Trump is on record calling NATO “obsolete,” telling ABC’s Jonathan Karl that he considered it “extremely expensive for the United States, disproportionately so.” Additionally, he said, “it can be trimmed up and it can be reconfigured and you can call it NATO, but it’s going to be changed.” Similarly, he told the New York Times’s David Sanger: “If we cannot be properly reimbursed for the tremendous cost of our military protecting other countries . . . Then yes, I would be absolutely prepared to tell those countries, ‘Congratulations, you will be defending yourself.’” In speaking to Sanger, however, he also said he believed that NATO membership was a matter of “mutual interest,” and he dismissed as “fools and haters” those who say he seeks to shirk alliances. For the most part, then, Trump has indicated his disapproval of NATO’s current configuration and hinted at an inchoate plan to shake it up.His strange bitterness on this issue is wrongheaded and worrisome. As we weather the current global surge of illiberalism, maintaining old and trusted alliances becomes all the more important. But if Trump’s actions turn out to be less hostile than his rhetoric, as seems the case in other policy areas, he might very well end up adopting a position similar to the one held by President Obama. As the reversal on missile defense demonstrates, Obama had little problem denying our NATO allies what they desperately sought. Sounding not unlike his successor, Obama complained of ungrateful allies to the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg only a few months ago. “Free riders aggravate me,” he said. He even told British Prime Minister David Cameron that if Britain did not spend at least 2 percent of its GDP on defense, the “special relationship” between the two countries would be special no more. Later in the interview with Goldberg, Obama blamed the failings of the 2011 U.S. intervention in Libya in part on, as Goldberg paraphrased it, “the passivity of America’s allies.”
Obama’s coolness toward longstanding allies went mostly unremarked-upon in the liberal press. Progressives saw these compromised relationships as an acceptable price to pay for making supposed progress with antagonists such as Russia. Neglected alliances were contextualized as the tough but necessary work that peace demands. But we should expect no such pass to be given to Trump if he manages our relations with allies in a similar fashion. In his case, we’re likely to hear much talk of abandoned allies and to see the left rediscover the maintenance of international democratic ties as a foundational principle of American foreign policy. To be clear, Obama was wrong to let important ties with democracies whither, and Trump would be just as mistaken to follow suit. When the United States broadcasts its reluctance to stand by allies, bad actors become emboldened and soon make their moves. That was more or less the story of Obama’s presidency.
In broad terms, Trump and Obama share a reluctance to challenge American adversaries or risk American lives for the sake of friends or principles. Both men believe deeply in their talent for persuasion and hope that their skills at negotiation will obviate the need for rougher measures. In Obama, his supporters saw this alternately as an expression of progressivism or foreign-policy realism. He was either an idealist who put his faith in dialogue or a calculating realist who understood the perilous temptation of overreaction. In Trump, similar actions will surely be attributed to darker motives.It must be said that Donald Trump has given Americans, left and right, very little reason to respect his judgment or sympathize with his intentions. He speaks from unprecedented ignorance for someone occupying his office. And he’s overtly hostile to calls for transparency. For that and other reasons, it behooves conservatives to avoid becoming mirror images of their progressive counterparts. We would do great harm on the right if we began to champion Obama-era policies that now come in Trump dress. And there are some worrying signs of conservatives doing just that. Fortunately, however, leading Republicans are already pushing back on the most egregious of these—namely, Trump’s interest in befriending Putin. That kind of internal disagreement is a sign of political health the likes of which one can’t easily find on the left. Liberals and leftists marched in virtual lockstep behind Obama as he executed his failed policies. On the left, conservative infighting during Trump’s rise through the GOP was a source of amusement. But it’s the ability to oppose one’s own that keeps a party honest.
Join us—you'll be in good company. Everyone worth reading is reading (and writing for) COMMENTARY:
“ There’s an enormous amount of shouting in the wild west of conservative media. That has its place, and is often a sign of the energy on the right. But amidst the cacophony there’s a special need for serious, considered, and compelling argument, presented in the hope of persuading, not just punishing. This is where COMMENTARY has always shined, perhaps more now than ever before. It aims to tackle the best arguments of its intellectual opponents, not just the easiest targets. It’s a journal I’ve read for nearly 30 years and I can’t think of a time when I’ve valued it more. „
Jonah Goldberg
“ There is more commentary in the world than ever before—whether in print, on the air, or on the Internet. But there is still a dearth of serious, informed commentary that reports, analyzes, and argues without ever stooping to name-calling or vitriol. If you further narrow down the segment of the commentariat that looks at the world from a conservative and Jewish perspective—well, you’re left with only one choice. The magazine you are now reading. COMMENTARY has changed over the years—for instance, it now publishes this blog—but one thing that has not changed is its steadfast commitment to providing the best analysis from the most informed writers of the most important ideas in the world, all written in clear prose that appeals to a general audience. There is nothing else like it. Never has been, never will be. „
Max Boot
“ Every month in print, and every day online, COMMENTARY somehow manages to pull off a dazzling balancing act: intellectual but unpretentious, serious but never boring, timely but not fleeting. On the leading questions of the day, it offers fresh and unfamiliar insights. And on the emerging questions that will dominate the years to come, it often sees things first and clearest. It is simply indispensable. „
Yuval Levin
“ In 1975 the Economist said of COMMENTARY: “The world's best magazine?” Take away the question mark and that statement still stands, thirty-eight years later. It's still the magazine America's liberals dread most, and the one America's enemies can't afford to ignore. It's the point of the conservative spear in the never-ending fight against the insanity of the left, whether it's in foreign policy or economic policy, social and cultural issues, or the arts—and no one does a better job standing up for Western culture and America's interests and those of its allies, including Israel. In fact, surviving the next three years—the Obama administration home stretch—and building the foundations for an American resurgence afterward will be impossible without reading COMMENTARY in print and online. „
Arthur Herman
“ For decades, COMMENTARY has opened its pages to the most serious uncompromising defense of the American creed—exemplar of ordered liberty at home, pillar of the free world abroad—in an era when it has been most under attack. From the exceptionally influential manifestoes of Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Jeane Kirkpatrick to today's counterattack against the empowered advocates of the entitlement state and of American decline, COMMENTARY remains what it has been for more than a generation: fearless, informative, indispensable. „
Charles Krauthammer
“ COMMENTARY isn’t just an important magazine. It’s an indispensable one. It’s been indispensable for half a century, and it is today. It’s indispensable for understanding the moment we live in, and it’s indispensable for laying out a path forward. The challenges we confront are great, but COMMENTARY is used to facing grave challenges without fearful cowering or wishful thinking. So we need COMMENTARY today as much as we ever have, and we need it to be as strong as it’s ever been. „
William Kristol
“ COMMENTARY’s writing is predictably engaging and edgy, but its content is anything but homogeneous. Center-right perspectives characterize contributions, but not predictably so. Jewish affairs are thematic, but not always. Controversies of the day are the usual subjects, yet offered only with reflection well apart from the frenzied 24/7 news cycle. Intellectual honesty and analytical rigor characterize COMMENTARY and that is why even its political critics concede that they are still enlightened by the very arguments they often oppose. „
Victor Davis Hanson
“ COMMENTARY is an indispensable read on the Arab Spring, the Afghan war, the future of American conservatism, and all the other crazy stuff out there. But you already knew that. What I really love about it is that it’s a full-service operation, and its back-of-the-book guys—the fellows who write about music, literature, and all the things that make life worth living as the world goes to hell—are the best in the business. There is an observation in a Terry Teachout piece on the wonderful singer Nancy LaMott about “Moon River” that has stayed with me for almost two decades. I fished it out from the back of my mind to impress a gal at a Goldwater Institute reception only the other day, and it worked a treat. So thank you, COMMENTARY! Likewise, my differences with the arts’n’culture crew unsettle me far more than the geopolitical ones: reasonable people can disagree on how large a nuclear arsenal those wacky mullahs should be permitted to own, but I’m still agog at the great Andrew Ferguson’s mystifying praise for the New York Times obituaries page a couple of issues back. That’s COMMENTARY for you—provocative to the end, on matters large and small. In these turbulent and dismaying times, we can all use a huckleberry friend waiting round the bend, in the mailbox each month and on the computer screen every morning. For any journal of opinion, as “Moon River” teaches us, there’s such a lot of world to see. COMMENTARY sees most of it with piercing clarity: it can’t know all the answers, but it asks all the right questions, and with great farsightedness. It deserves your wholehearted support. „
Mark Steyn
“ COMMENTARY has played an invaluable role in American political discourse for decades, offering thoughtful analysis on issues rather than sound bites or bumper stickers. Especially when it comes to U.S. foreign and defense policy, COMMENTARY has time and time again been ahead of the crowd, anticipating trends and developments that others react to only after the fact. I can't imagine not being a COMMENTARY subscriber. „
John Bolton
“ In the midst of today’s political rancor, COMMENTARY Magazine provides a rare venue for thoughtful discussion. COMMENTARY’s talented writers provide insightful analysis of foreign affairs, domestic policy, and the politics of the day. COMMENTARY is a treasure not only for conservatives, but for anyone looking for in-depth exploration of the issues that influence America’s public dialogue and shape the nation’s future. „
Karl Rove
“ It's notorious, and true, that government officials hardly read anything. Memos, sure; nowadays, emails and tweets as well. But magazines? People barely have time to eat lunch or see their kids, so how can an intellectual monthly affect public affairs? The question is a good one. How did COMMENTARY do it? The answer is that officials, like all citizens following American foreign policy, need a way to understand the world around them. When prevailing theories fail, when conventional wisdom is clearly at variance with what they see before their eyes, the outcome for senators and congressmen and White House officials is what the shrinks call cognitive dissonance. They may say one thing but believe another, or simply be unable to square previous beliefs and policies with the clear effects of U.S. conduct. They've lost the ability to explain the world. And then came COMMENTARY, offering month after month of piercing, bracing analysis—and value judgments of right and wrong, and clear writing about American gains and losses. Here was an insistence on looking reality in the face. Here was plain argument, seeking no quarter intellectually and giving none. And it mattered. It shamed some people, and emboldened others; COMMENTARY demanded that we conform policy to the opportunities and dangers that really faced America. In years of confusion and obfuscation, that striking clarity changed policies, and changed American conduct, because it changed the way we understood the world. „
Elliott Abrams
“ For more than 60 years, COMMENTARY has been a go-to source on matters of the greatest importance to our nation and our civilization. Today, its full-throated defense of the United States and freedom is as eloquent as it was a half-century ago, and no less urgent. Issues of the day will change, news cycles come and go, but COMMENTARY remains an indispensable authority in the battle of ideas that help to shape our world. Its continued success is both an indication, and source, of the country’s intellectual health. „
Donald Rumsfeld
“ COMMENTARY is America's most important monthly journal of ideas, period. For nearly seven decades it has published the best and most exciting writing from the most important thinkers: Saul Bellow and Lionel Trilling; Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Jeane Kirkpatrick; Paul Johnson and Ruth Wisse; Cynthia Ozick and—of course—Norman Podhoretz and Midge Decter. Is there anything remotely like it? No. It is the lamp by which America, and Israel, and the Jewish people, may find their way to safety. I'm proud to be published in its pages. „
Bret Stephens
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The Cautionary Tale of Samantha Power
Every day she has to wake up knowing she became what she despised
Seth Mandel 2017-01-13
It’s not that Power was wrong. Bashar al-Assad’s regime has been able to continue to carry out its slaughter thanks to Russian airpower (and diplomatic cover) and reinforcements from Iranian terror proxies. But the key part of Power’s speech came a few lines earlier, when she said: “Aleppo will join the ranks of those events in world history that define modern evil, that stain our conscience decades later. Halabja, Rwanda, Srebrenica, and, now, Aleppo.”
The line makes for a fitting epitaph for Power’s own time in President Barack Obama’s Cabinet. The problem is that she spoke these words on December 13, 2016, five weeks before the end of the Obama presidency—and three and a half years into her tenure as America’s UN ambassador. Before she entered Obama’s service in 2009, she had devoted her meteoric career to heaping shame on America’s history of standing aside, hands in pockets, as mass murders occurred. She has famously and publicly called out individual officials as “bystanders to genocide” while lauding those who resigned in protest of the same.
Power, who at 42 became America’s youngest-ever ambassador to the UN, has now become that bystander. It is her particular contribution to genocide scholarship that illuminates the frustration and despair engendered by her toleration of Obama’s dithering. “It is daunting to acknowledge, but this country’s consistent policy of nonintervention in the face of genocide offers sad testimony not to a broken American political system but to one that is ruthlessly effective,” she writes in A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, which won a Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction in 2003. “The system, as it stands now, is working. No U.S. president has ever made genocide prevention a priority, and no U.S. president has ever suffered politically for his indifference to its occurrence. It is thus no coincidence that genocide rages on.”
The story of how Samantha Power sought to break—or at least reform—that system, and ended up a cog in its efficient forward march, is a cautionary one.
Born in England but raised in Ireland, Power, at 9, moved with her mother, younger sister, and her mother’s partner to the United States in 1979 (her father stayed behind in Ireland). She became a huge baseball fan and hoped, she told the New Yorker’s Evan Osnos in 2014, to be “the next Bob Costas.” That changed when, as a rising sophomore at Yale in 1989, she watched a live feed of China’s Tiananmen Square crackdown. After graduation, the real education of Samantha Power began.While interning at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Power forged a press-credential request on Foreign Policy magazine letterhead so she could cover the Bosnian war. She was in her element. She learned Bosnian; filed stories for the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, and US News & World Report; and earned the respect of her peers in the war zone. New York Times columnist Roger Cohen said in 2013 that a vodka-drinking contest with a Russian official left him passed out in the street—until Power carried him back to the Sarajevo Holiday Inn.
Her unflappability was key. The Bosnian conflict was part of an extraordinarily gruesome process of state collapse. Yugoslavia, a confederation of Communist satellites, was led by Josip Broz Tito until his death in 1980. Though an authoritarian, Tito kept enough distance from Stalin to receive Western aid during the Cold War. After Tito’s death, ethnic tensions suppressed for years bubbled up to the surface, aggravated by decentralizing reforms that unintentionally put the states on the path to independence. Slobodan Milosevic took advantage of the strife not only to become president of the Yugoslav republic of Serbia but to agitate for the rights of Serb minorities in other Yugoslav states. The resulting evaporation of Yugoslavia was a bloodbath, with Milosevic at its center. He died in 2006 while on trial at the International Criminal Court for genocide and other war crimes.
Still on trial for similar crimes is Ratko Mladic. A general who led Serbia’s army, Mladic headed the Serb onslaught on Srebrenica, a town in Bosnia that had been declared a “safe zone” by Dutch UN peacekeepers. With Mladic’s troops closing in, Dutch commander Colonel Thomas Karremans requested NATO air support. It didn’t come in time. Demanding the Muslim population’s surrender, Mladic promised that those who turned over their weapons and complied would be spared. The meeting was videotaped. “Your people need not die,” Mladic said. “Not your brothers or your husbands or your neighbors. You can survive or you can disappear . . . . Allah can’t help you, but Mladic can.”
During law school, she wrote a paper on military intervention in conflict zones that turned into her book-length treatment of humanitarian intervention to prevent genocide.The Dutch stood aside. The Serbs put women and children on buses headed out of the war zone. The Bosnian Muslim men remained. “I thought that even the Bosnian Serbs would not dare to seize a patch of land under UN guard,” Power writes in A Problem from Hell. On July 10, she wandered into the Associated Press house, surprised to find “complete chaos around the phones. The Serb attack on Srebrenica that had been ‘deteriorating’ for several days had suddenly ‘gone to hell.’ The Serbs were poised to take the town.” When she finally got a free phone line, she called her editor at the Washington Post, who told her that when Srebrenica falls, it’s a story. The next day, it was. And the day after that, the Serbs began a mass execution of the male population of the town—about 8,000 of them—in what would be the largest mass murder in Europe since World War II.
Two weeks later, Power filed a piece for the Boston Globe. Without sharing a byline this time, she had the stage to herself and showed flashes of the lyrical nonfiction writer she would soon become: “Up to 17,000 Muslims now huddle in the 150-square-kilometer Zepa valley, an area of dark green ferns, white minarets, and marble bridges that seems more suited to ‘Hansel and Gretel’ than to warfare . . . . It is a remote area coveted only by those told they cannot possess it. In the last war, the Nazis tried, and limped home bloodied; in this war the Serbs are hoping their third try will be the charm.”
In a 2010 interview as part of the organization Campus Progress’s national conference, Power explained why she had gone to the Balkans. It wasn’t to report, but to witness:
Bosnia was on fire. The Serbs had set up concentration camps. There were, [yet] again, emaciated men behind barbed wire in Europe. . . . The Holocaust museum was just opening up here on the Mall in Washington, Schindler’s List had just come out—I just couldn’t reconcile the tension between the “Never Again” culture, which had rightly evolved, and then what was actually happening in Bosnia. I became completely consumed with what was going on, so I decided to go and try to do something for Bosnia.
In 1995, back from covering the war, she enrolled in Harvard Law School. That year, NATO began heavy bombing of Serb military targets in Bosnia. Power “rejoiced,” according to Osnos. She told him: “Your average journalists knew that they should not admit that was their longing. But you see that much terrorization of people and you’re just a human being in that context, and people were rooting for that outcome and that intervention.”
During law school, she wrote a paper on military intervention in conflict zones that turned into her eventual book-length treatment of humanitarian intervention to prevent genocide.
But it was not her first major treatment of the subject. In the September 2001 issue of the Atlantic, she published an article called “Bystanders to Genocide.” It was compelling, well-sourced, heartrending, and terrifying.
And unsparing. The subject was not the former Yugoslavia, but the Clinton administration’s handling of the Rwandan genocide in 1994. The Clinton administration was not merely excoriated as a mass of indifference. It was dissected. Everybody looked bad—everybody. The policymaker who came out looking the worst was Susan Rice, at the time a National Security Council staffer who eventually became Obama’s national-security adviser (and who would have been his secretary of state after Hillary Clinton if Obama had had his druthers). According to Power, Rice said the following at an interagency teleconference during the first month of the genocide: “If we use the word ‘genocide’ and are seen as doing nothing, what will be the effect on the November [congressional] election?”
Rice claimed to have learned her lesson. She told Power in an interview for the article, “I swore to myself that if I ever faced such a crisis again, I would come down on the side of dramatic action, going down in flames if that was required.” Twelve years later, Power would take over as UN ambassador from none other than Susan Rice—who had sought to shame Russia at the Security Council for the role it was playing in the war in Syria while continuing to represent a president who refused to act. Just as Power would do.
A fter the Atlantic article, Power was interviewed in 2002 on a public-access show hosted by University of California professor Harry Kreisler. She was asked a hypothetical question: “Without asking you to address the Palestine–Israel problem, let’s say you were an adviser to the president of the United States. How, in response to current events, would you advise him to put a structure in place to monitor that situation, lest one party or another be looking like they might be moving toward genocide?”Power’s response was, in a word, bonkers. And it was bonkers on so many levels that it debunks the popular conception of Power as a formidable debater and premier intellectual.
She began by suggesting the question was not merely hypothetical: “Well, I don’t think that in any of the cases, a shortage of information is the problem. And I actually think in the Palestine–Israeli situation, there’s an abundance of information, and what we don’t need is some sort of early-warning mechanism there.”
She then made clear that in this hypothetical, the Israelis are the aggressors, and that moneyed American Jews are influencing U.S. foreign policy by waving their checkbooks: “What we need is a willingness to actually put something on the line in service of helping the situation. And putting something on the line might mean alienating a domestic constituency of tremendous political and financial import.”
After saying the U.S. should invest vast sums of money “not in servicing Israel’s military, but actually investing in the new state of Palestine,” she cut right to the chase: We should invest “the billions of dollars it would probably take also to support what I think will have to be a mammoth protection force, not of the old Srebrenica kind or the Rwanda kind, but a meaningful military presence.”
Now, an informed person, then and now, might have asked and might ask why, at a time when the terrorist anti-Semite Yasser Arafat was leading the Palestinians, we would assume that the government of Israel would be the more likely genocidaire. The answer, according to Power, is that Arafat and then-Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon were birds of a feather: “It’s essential that some set of principles becomes the benchmark rather than a deference to people who are fundamentally, politically destined to destroy the lives of their own people. And by that I mean what Tom Friedman has called ‘Sharafat.’ I mean, I do think in that sense that both political leaders have been dreadfully irresponsible. And unfortunately, it does require external intervention.”
To sum up: Ariel Sharon and Yasser Arafat are the same person, the Jews are tilting the balance of power in the area to Israel, and an external force needs to intervene to protect the Palestinians from Israeli mass murder.
A nd now to Iraq. In her Security Council speech, Power compared Aleppo to Srebrenica, Rwanda—and Halabja. This referred to Saddam Hussein’s campaign of ethnic cleansing of the rural Iraqi Kurdish population. In several waves in 1987 and 1988, after declaring that Kurds should be treated as an insurgency, Hussein’s forces gassed and executed about 100,000 Kurdish men, women, and children, and forced the rest into designated residential areas. The U.S., believing Iraq’s counterweight to Iran kept a measure of stability in the region, was disinclined to confront Hussein or recognize the genocidal campaign for what it was, at least until late 1988. Both the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations opposed sanctions on Saddam. Power’s conclusion: “Special interests, economic profit, and a geopolitical tilt toward Iraq thwarted humanitarian concerns.”But Power went further. Hussein’s increasingly aggressive behavior was the result, she wrote in A Problem from Hell, of Bush’s coddling. And she blamed America’s refusal to cut ties with Iraq for Hussein’s development of weapons of mass destruction: “U.S. government-guaranteed loans had totaled $5 billion since 1983. The credits had freed up currency for Hussein to fortify and modernize his more cherished military assets, including his stockpile of deadly chemicals. American grain would keep the Iraqi army fed during its occupation of Kuwait.”
You might think, then, that Power would follow on this line of thought consistently. After the first Gulf war and throughout the 1990s, Saddam violated various elements of the cease-fire agreement and fired at U.S. planes patrolling a no-fly zone while the West—especially via Power’s beloved United Nations—helped him avoid the financial sting of sanctions. He continued to oppress the Kurds and signaled his resuscitation of Iraq’s WMD development, which Power had found so concerning.
Yet Power was critical of the George W. Bush administration’s decision to invade Iraq in 2003. She admitted to MSNBC’s Chris Matthews at the time that the war would probably improve the lives of Iraqis. But she refused to say it was a just war. And she knocked its supposed unilateralism: “It legitimates the go-it-alone approach, and it sort of reinforces the impression of us as an outlaw nation, which is ironic because, of course, Saddam’s regime is far more an outlaw nation than ours.”
In a 2008 Slate piece, she said war and occupation should be used only as a last resort: “In my view this consequentialist test was passed in Bosnia and flunked in the run-up to the 2003 war in Iraq.” She went further in a 2003 piece in the New Republic, using Iraq as a touchstone to understand Bush’s “illiberal” power projection. “U.S. foreign policy has to be rethought,” she wrote. “It needs not tweaking but overhauling. We need: a historical reckoning with crimes committed, sponsored, or permitted by the United States.”
But the Bush administration’s decision to settle in for a lengthy occupation instead of merely decapitating the Iraqi regime was made in large measure with protection of the Kurds and other non-Sunni Iraqis in mind—to prevent the kind of genocide Power had warned against in A Problem from Hell. The Bush administration wanted to avoid the mistakes of the first Bush presidency, which Power had so harshly criticized.
The Iraq war had one more strike against it for Power: It resulted in the tragic death of her hero, Sergio Vieira de Mello. The Brazilian-born Vieira de Mello started his three-decade UN career as an anti-American Marxist and developed into something of a realist along the way, as he got to know the real world. Power met him in 1994. Always humanitarian-minded, Vieira de Mello did peacekeeping tours in many of the world’s conflict zones, and she praised his work and his life in her biography, Chasing the Flame.
Vieira de Mello’s career path took him, finally, to Iraq. The Bush administration asked him to be the UN’s envoy to Iraq. If anyone could handle the stress and chaos, officials thought, it was he. On August 19, 2003, he was killed when al-Qaeda bombed the UN’s Baghdad headquarters.
Chasing the Flame is filled with lessons for the reader from Vieira de Mello’s life—lessons she herself did not heed once she became a policymaker rather than a critic. One of them, which Vieira de Mello returned to time and again, was the fact that the UN, when it comes to taking action, is taking orders. When you’re upset about UN inaction, you’re really upset about the inaction of individual states. So, yes, Power was right to rage at Russia over Syria in 2016—but she might have heeded Vieira de Mello’s words about Bosnia: “If the United States and Europe wanted a muscular peacekeeping operation here, they would insist on adding muscle. If they really wanted to stop the Serbs, they would have done so long ago.”
If Power would station troops in Israel because she worries the Palestinians could plausibly be victims of genocide in the near future, what could she possibly say about Syria?If the United States had really wanted to stop Assad’s forces, the government Power represented at the UN would have done so long ago, before she took up her post in Turtle Bay. Power’s entire career has been predicated on the assertion that talk is cheap and is a way of avoiding necessary action. Refugee-resettlement activist Kirk W. Johnson told the New Yorker’s Osnos: “The reason that people like us are so animated about Samantha is that if she disappears into this system, if she gets ground up in Washington, with that knowledge of the history of bad policy, that’s a really dispiriting thought.”
And that’s exactly what happened.
T here are two situations in the world that should shame Power, the anti-genocide activist. The first, and less obvious one, is Burma. The Obama administration cites this country as one of its foreign-policy successes, because the ruling junta took steps toward liberalization in return for lifting some sanctions against it. But then everybody seems to have forgotten about it, and in doing so forgot about the Rohingya, an ethnic Muslim minority currently being subjected to an unmistakable genocide—among the clearest examples ever to emerge in real time. This is genocide on Power’s watch, and we don’t hear a peep about it.The other, of course, is Syria. Whether or not the Assad regime has fully crossed over the line to having committed genocide, America’s inaction already flunks Power’s test. As longtime Levant correspondent Michael Totten has written, we’ve seen the warnings. The first was Assad’s use of chemical weapons, a chilling callback to Saddam’s gassing of the Kurds. Another was the credible reporting of Shiite Iranian militias’ ethnically cleansing Sunni Arabs in core cities, atrocities that were then repeated in other strategic areas.
If Power would station troops in Israel because she worries the Palestinians could plausibly be victims of genocide in the near future, what could she possibly say about Syria? Well, she’d likely say, “We tried.” President Obama declared that Assad’s use of chemical weapons would be a “red line” that, once crossed, would earn American military intervention. When it became public that Assad had deployed chemical weapons, Obama put the word out: As the Germans used to say during World War II, the Amis are coming.
Power herself made the case for action in Syria. “Some have asked, given our collective war weariness, why we cannot use nonmilitary tools to achieve the same end,” Power told a gathering at the Center for American Progress in August 2013. “My answer to this question is: We have exhausted the alternatives.” Why did the use of chemical weapons, as opposed to conventional weapons, constitute a red line? “These weapons kill in the most gruesome possible way,” Power said. “They kill indiscriminately. They are incapable of distinguishing between a child and a rebel. And they have the potential to kill massively.”
Power then explained that failing to act in this case would send a very dangerous message to other rogue regimes: “We cannot afford to signal to North Korea and Iran that the international community is unwilling to act to prevent proliferation or willing to tolerate the use of weapons of mass destruction.”
So, according to Power, we had no choice but to act. But there’s always a choice, and Obama made a different one as soon as Russia gave him an excuse to back out. Moscow suggested that the two countries team up to find a way to remove the remaining chemical weapons to which Assad’s forces retained access. Though they failed even to do that, Obama had his escape hatch. Right then, when Obama did all the things Power had accused Reagan, H.W. Bush, Clinton, and W. Bush of doing, was the moment Power faced her own choice. She could have resigned—and stayed true to the person she wants to see every morning in the mirror. Or she could have completed her bureaucratic conversion and kept her plush pad at the Waldorf Astoria.
“Some believe that you are the conscience of the administration,” veteran newsman Charlie Rose told Power on his eponymous program in May 2015. “That that’s part of the role you play. Are they right?”
Power began to respond, but Rose cut her off: “Because of your background, because of your experience, because of what you wrote, because of what your life has stood for, that on these very important questions, where so many civilians are dying, you’re the conscience of the administration.”
Power suggested that Obama brought on a diverse team of advisers because he “grapples with” the human cost of decision-making. “I’m even in the mix. I was not a born bureaucrat, and certainly not a born diplomat,” Power says, laughing.
Rose cuts in: “That’s why we’re all curious about this, you understand that.”
Power said she understood that, and she returned to the idea that she was just one voice “in the mix,” that Obama wanted to have someone like her on board because she’s seen the effects of these atrocities close up, that she’s interviewed survivors.
“Exactly,” Rose interjects, as though declaring checkmate.
It’s not just the gruesome irony that she made her name and her reputation trashing the moral compasses of others who didn’t act when they had the power to do so—and then did exactly as they did. It’s worse.
In October 2008, she published the last post on her personal blog before beginning her public career on Obama’s National Security Council. The post was an announcement that she had made Esquire magazine’s list of the “75 Most Influential People of the 21st Century.”
Where did that influence go when it was finally called upon to show itself? What would Power say to the woman who wrote A Problem from Hell? How would she explain herself to herself? Well, look, she might say, you have to understand—like I told Charlie Rose, I was not a born bureaucrat. To which the Samantha Power of yore might respond: Coulda fooled me.
After all, she wrote the book.
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“ In the midst of today’s political rancor, COMMENTARY Magazine provides a rare venue for thoughtful discussion. COMMENTARY’s talented writers provide insightful analysis of foreign affairs, domestic policy, and the politics of the day. COMMENTARY is a treasure not only for conservatives, but for anyone looking for in-depth exploration of the issues that influence America’s public dialogue and shape the nation’s future. „
Karl Rove
“ It's notorious, and true, that government officials hardly read anything. Memos, sure; nowadays, emails and tweets as well. But magazines? People barely have time to eat lunch or see their kids, so how can an intellectual monthly affect public affairs? The question is a good one. How did COMMENTARY do it? The answer is that officials, like all citizens following American foreign policy, need a way to understand the world around them. When prevailing theories fail, when conventional wisdom is clearly at variance with what they see before their eyes, the outcome for senators and congressmen and White House officials is what the shrinks call cognitive dissonance. They may say one thing but believe another, or simply be unable to square previous beliefs and policies with the clear effects of U.S. conduct. They've lost the ability to explain the world. And then came COMMENTARY, offering month after month of piercing, bracing analysis—and value judgments of right and wrong, and clear writing about American gains and losses. Here was an insistence on looking reality in the face. Here was plain argument, seeking no quarter intellectually and giving none. And it mattered. It shamed some people, and emboldened others; COMMENTARY demanded that we conform policy to the opportunities and dangers that really faced America. In years of confusion and obfuscation, that striking clarity changed policies, and changed American conduct, because it changed the way we understood the world. „
Elliott Abrams
“ For more than 60 years, COMMENTARY has been a go-to source on matters of the greatest importance to our nation and our civilization. Today, its full-throated defense of the United States and freedom is as eloquent as it was a half-century ago, and no less urgent. Issues of the day will change, news cycles come and go, but COMMENTARY remains an indispensable authority in the battle of ideas that help to shape our world. Its continued success is both an indication, and source, of the country’s intellectual health. „
Donald Rumsfeld
“ COMMENTARY is America's most important monthly journal of ideas, period. For nearly seven decades it has published the best and most exciting writing from the most important thinkers: Saul Bellow and Lionel Trilling; Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Jeane Kirkpatrick; Paul Johnson and Ruth Wisse; Cynthia Ozick and—of course—Norman Podhoretz and Midge Decter. Is there anything remotely like it? No. It is the lamp by which America, and Israel, and the Jewish people, may find their way to safety. I'm proud to be published in its pages. „
Bret Stephens
“ Irving Kristol once called COMMENTARY the most influential magazine in Jewish history. Certainly, no publication had a greater influence on me as I evolved from adolescent reader (arguing over its articles with my father and older brother) into a “frequent contributor” who made it my intellectual home. The magazine did not exploit American freedom to escape from civilizing duty but rather activated the intertwined responsibilities of citizens and members of a group. American Jewry can boast of many contributions to the welfare of this country and the Jewish people, but few as fortifying as COMMENTARY. „
Ruth R. Wisse
“ Edward Shils noted that there are four means of education in the modern world: the classroom, bookstores (especially used-bookstores), the conversation of intelligent friends, and intellectual magazines. For me intellectual magazines were more important than any of the other three, and no magazine among them more so than COMMENTARY. I first happened on COMMENTARY as a student browsing in the University of Chicago Bookstore in 1957. I have not missed an issue since. The magazine spoke to my intellectual interests and passions, and still does. As a reader and as a writer, I should be lost without it. „
Joseph Epstein
“ Why does COMMENTARY matter? Since 1945, no other monthly magazine has so consistently published serious, provocative argument and analysis. No other monthly magazine has viewed America and the world through such a wide angle, encompassing economics, politics, society, culture, religion, and diplomacy. No other monthly magazine has published such a celebrated and wide-ranging list of editors and contributors. Cerebral, critical, and committed, the point of view found in its pages is as unique as it is formidable. And in a world of Iranian nukes, rising anti-Semitism, radical Islam, American disarmament, bipartisan neo-isolationism, and disintegrating institutions, reading COMMENTARY is more than a pleasure. It is a necessity. „
Matthew Continetti
“ COMMENTARY has long been an unmissable landmark on the American intellectual landscape. These days it shapes debate, propels argument, and explains society with renewed vigor and force. It is one of the small group of essential reads for anybody engaged in politics, Judaism, foreign policy, national manners, and morals. „
David Brooks
“ Anyone looking for a definitive exposition of a significant historical moment—whether UC Berkeley's Free Speech Movement, say, or the battles over "general education" at Harvard—has at his fingertips an inestimable gift: COMMENTARY's archives, which contain countless gems of reporting and analysis. Today's generation of COMMENTARY writers is building an equally invaluable store of knowledge for future researchers and scholars. „
Heather Mac Donald
“ I first subscribed to COMMENTARY in 1973, as a recovering liberal who had invested four years of my young life in writing speeches for a constellation of McGovernite candidates and office-holders. Living in Berkeley at the time, I relished COMMENTARY as a guilty pleasure, feeling grateful that the magazine arrived each month discreetly disguised in a plain, brown wrapper that concealed its suspiciously neo-conservative content. In the militantly leftist community in which I functioned forty years ago, receiving regular monthly installments of the most degrading porn would have produced far less embarrassment than my growing devotion to the persuasive prose of Norman Podhoretz and Co. Yes, my personal journey from left to right-center involved the usual biographical factors, including the three P’s: paychecks, parenthood, and prayer. Paychecks, because they arrived with shocking subtractions in the form of onerous and incomprehensible taxes; parenthood, because responsibility for a new generation forced a longer-term perspective; and prayer, because my own growing Jewish observance led to the conclusion that my “idealistic” ’60s generation, with all its narcissism and preening self-regard, might not provide life’s ultimate answers after all. Fortunately for me, reading COMMENTARY with near-religious regularity helped to organize my onrushing insights and experience into a more coherent world view. In a dark time in our nation’s history, while surviving (temporarily) in the most unhinged corner of the continent, this incomparable publication persuaded me that I wasn’t alone. „
Michael Medved
“ Just as one begins to despair of hearing the strong voice of sanity and courage, leavened with charm and good humor, in our modern polity, COMMENTARY arrives, and once a month one can be reminded that there are indeed some clear-sighted and articulate people who seem actively to enjoy the battle for truth. „
Andrew Roberts
“ In a time of passion, COMMENTARY champions reason. Against lies, COMMENTARY speaks for truth. Confronting those who would doom to death the Jewish people, COMMENTARY is a magnificent continuing achievement of American Jewish life. „
David Frum
“ COMMENTARY has become my new go-to website for news analysis because it is measured, substantive, thoughtful, and written for news consumers of all shapes and sizes. When juggling all the issues of the day and thinking them through, I find myself going back to COMMENTARY again and again to see if there’s anything more that can help me add the ingredients needed to finalize an argument. I like the mix of foreign policy and national political news, as well as the discussions about America’s place in the world and what it should be. I’m a print subscriber and a frequent website visitor, and I follow all of the writers on Twitter. Thank you, COMMENTARY, for providing such consistently helpful content. „
Dana Perino
Subscribing to COMMENTARY gives you full access to every article, every issue, every podcast—the latest stories as well as over 70 years of archives, the best that has been thought and written since 1945.
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