The appeal of "socialism"

This week's Democratic debates may refocus the President's mind on the threat of socialism, since they put Bernie Sanders back in the spotlight. Until someone finds a way to say that denouncing socialism is inherently racist, Donald Trump should be on safer ground targeting Sanders, though my feeling back in 2016 was that, had Sanders won the Democratic nomination, Trump's likely ranting against socialism during the general-election debates would have left him looking like the archetypal old man yelling at the cloud. It would have made Trump look irrelevant, since he would have seemed to be fighting Cold War battles that no longer mattered much to many people. I'm not sure that approach would strike people the same way in 2020, if only because, for good or ill, the socialism issue fuels the Trump narrative that opposition to himself and his causes is essentially un- or anti-American. "Socialism" may be what you trot out when you can't tell an old white guy to go back where he came from. How such a line of attack will play with younger voters remains unclear. There's been a lot of hand-wringing in recent years about young people's openness to socialist ideas. They're too young to see "socialism" in practice, some say, identifying "socialism" with the worst of the Soviet Union. That may be looking at the problem from the wrong angle. How much of the enthusiasm shown for Sanders and his rivals on the left wing of the Democratic party results from naivete about the history of Marxism, and how much is fueled by increased disdain for capitalism? For all intents and purposes the liberal Democratic ideal of capitalism -- the belief that if you worked hard, you would do well -- is dead. Fewer people are reconciled to the contingency of modern work. Many no doubt ask: why should my life depend on being useful to someone who doesn't have to give a damn about me? To the extent that they saw capitalism as a kind of social contract that delivered security in return for work, they want to make a similar deal, but preferably with the state or "the people" and with no profit motive involved. Refute Marx or any socialist thinker as thoroughly as you can and there'll still be a demand for an alternative to capitalism. Rail against socialism all you want, yet you won't get to the bottom of this widespread discontent. For that reason, an anti-socialist campaign can only have limited appeal, especially if the campaigner stakes everything on identifying socialism completely with Marxism and Leninism. A deeper argument will be necessary to reconcile people to the current economic order -- if that's your goal, that is -- whether by persuading them that no alternative is possible or telling them that their objections are immoral. I don't know if capitalism's most vocal defenders today are capable of that sort of deeper argument -- but then again, I don't know if that'll be necessary next year....

Hong Kong's long hot summer

The immediate provocation of this year's pro-democracy protests in the special autonomous region of Hong Kong is a proposed extradition law reportedly allowed for the transfer of local defendants to the mainland for trial. This was seen by opponents as a way for the Chinese Communist Party to deal with local dissidents on its own terms rather than those set by the treaty that transferred control of Hong Kong from Great Britain to the People's Republic. The treaty lets Hong Kong retain its own political and legal system, with extensive civil liberties absent on the mainland, until at least 2047. For all intents and purposes, Hong Kong dissidents are protesting, sometimes violently, against the inevitability of greater control by Beijing and its Communist regime. But if anything, the extent of the protests, which have included vandalism of the local legislature and demonstrations targeting mainland tourists -- who will probably get in trouble with their government merely for being victims of circumstances -- could hasten that day. 1989 taught the world that Beijing abhors "turmoil," and there's hardly a better word to describe what's been going on in Hong Kong. One person's turmoil, of course, is another person's dissent, and inevitably the Hong Kong protesters have had many sympathetic observers outside China. Even though the extradition bill is a creation of Hong Kong's own legislature, the protests are widely perceived to be against the mainland. That perception legitimizes them in many eyes, even though Hong Kong is at least theoretically a liberal democratic entity. One wonders whether all the Americans cheering on the protesters would cheer as loudly for demonstrations of similar size and intensity against some new policy of their own president or some new measure from their lower house of Congress. The simple answer is that some would and some wouldn't depending on who's being protested. Legitimacy is relative -- and meanwhile, foreign support for the actual protesters feeds the Chinese Communist narrative that the protests are, to use an American term, astroturfed, fueled by foreign money if not by foreign governments. None of this means outsiders should express solidarity with Hong Kong dissidents concerned over the ultimate loss of their civil liberties. But we had better understand that people power will not prevail there. Beijing doesn't care how repression might look to the rest of the world as long as the Communists control what their own subjects see of it. Hong Kong has no chance of becoming an independent state, and not even terrorism will deter Beijing from consolidating its power there when the time comes, if not before. China has experienced terrorism, and has answered with mass re-education camps. If people in Hong Kong want to escape that fate -- if they value their right to complain more than anything the mainland can offer them -- they should plan to be elsewhere in 2047, if a barricaded world will have them.

Is individualism racist?

In the U.S., individualist thought is identified with a "conservative" economic and social policy, which prioritizes individual rights to property and free enterprise over so-called "social rights." The assumption is that upholding social rights -- positive entitlements owed to all human beings -- compromises individuals' freedom of action, or their ability to enjoy all the fruits of their labor. Although individualism also fits quite well with hedonist notions prevalent on the U.S. left, the constant appeals to individual liberty by corporate types and their Republican defenders have soured many leftists on individualism as the basis of rights in a democratic society. In the July 29/August 5 Nation, Greg Grandin praises Bernie Sanders for "waging practically a one-person crusade to legitimize social rights" and "striking at the core cultural belief that holds the modern conservative movement together." For Grandin, the concept of social rights dates at least as far back as the 18th century, when the pre-revolutionary French philosopher Montesquieu wrote that that states owed their citizens "a certain subsistence, a proper nourishment, convenient clothing, and a kind of life not incompatible with health."  For what it's worth, Montesquieu also wrote that the "spirit of trade and industry," as opposed to an indolence encouraged by some charitable entities, like the monasteries of pre-Reformation England, was a precondition for a state's ability to uphold those social rights. That's not inconsistent with the familiar Democratic argument for capitalism with regulations and taxes for the common good, but Grandin seems to have something more radical than that in mind.

Grandin affirms the premise, articulated by Franklin Roosevelt, that "necessitous men are not free." In other words, also FDR's, "true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence." However, economic individualism rationalizes efforts to thwart the achievement of mass "economic security" or liberate people from necessity. The ideology of individual liberty, Grandin fears, can't help but perpetuate the inequality that undermines "true individual freedom." In modern times, he argues, that ideology has become actively malevolent. His article -- in which he speaks presumably for himself and not necessarily for Sanders -- leaps from the assumption that individualism = inequality to the more explosive assertion that, through the words and deeds of modern Republican conservatives, individualism has become racialized to the degree that it serves as one of the many "dog whistles" that stir up the rednecks everywhere.  Unfortunately for Grandin, there's more assertion than proof in his article. He claims that American reactionaries began to identify "social rights" with racial equality after World War II, once international bodies increasingly demanded both. "As the 'darker nations' took up the fight to legitimize social and economic rights, the opposition intensified, with individual rights embodying whiteness and social rights exemplifying blackness," Grandin writes. This is too neat a package for its own good. It ignores the fact that during the Cold War, Marxism and communism weren't really identified with "dark" people, but with the Russians and decadent domestic intellectuals, the popularity of nonwhites like Mao and Che notwithstanding. Grandin's deductive reasoning seems to go like this: individualism perpetuates inequality; inequality is largely along racial lines; therefore individualism endorses racial hierarchy. He may as well say that individualists refuse to acknowledge their privilege. "It is impossible to extricate individual rights -- to possess and bear arms and to call on the power of the state to protect those rights -- from the bloody history that gave rise to those rights, from the entitlements that settlers and slavers wrested from people of color as they moved across the land," he insists.

"Individual-rights absolutism is the flywheel that keeps all the cruel constituencies of the modern right spinning," Grandin closes, "Break that wheel, and you break the movement." That would require convincing some of those constituencies that the individualist ideology is as contradictory and self-defeating (or self-serving) as he thinks it is. I don't see that happening soon. For one thing, the modern American right rejects the Rooseveltian premise Grandin admires; for them, the realm of necessity is the realm of freedom, in which no one is owed a living and freedom consists of being able to do what you have to do without interference. For another, a wider swath of American opinion is going to distrust arguments against "individual-rights absolutism" out of concern for an individual right Grandin doesn't discuss that nonetheless is the most important right for many people: freedom of expression. I'm sure Grandin sees very little conflict between "social rights" and individual expression, though he may contemplate more state action to prevent perceived inequalities of access to mass attention than others can accept comfortably. He more likely believes that guaranteeing social rights will allow greater freedom of expression for a wider range of people than the corporate-monopolized media currently allows. But you can't go around saying "individual rights are bad" without making people worry that babies might get thrown out with the bathwater of inequality.  In short, a lot of people will have a lot of different reasons, both good and bad, to balk at breaking the wheel, though they all may be written off as selfish, or worse, by people like Grandin. Inequality will have to grow much worse than it is already before enough people decide there's nothing in it for them in the American ideal of individual rights. That could very well happen, but I'd advise against Grandin holding his breath for too long.

Liberalism in one sentence?

Albany Times Union editor Rex Smith writes in today's paper: "Dissent is more patriotic than attempting to squelch it." He writes, of course, in response to the President's insinuation that people who "hate" America -- that is, those who oppose his administration -- should find another place to live. The problems with Donald Trump's line of thinking have been widely discussed already. For the sake of argument, let's look at Smith's statement more closely. It reads like an epitome of modern liberalism, for which freedom of expression is among the highest priorities, if not the highest priority. It echoes classical liberalism, which conservatives will recall and embrace again once they're out of power. For Americans in general, the sine qua non for a free society is the right to complain, to the point where some go out of their way to find something to protest, in order to reaffirm their freedom. Appropriately, Smith's statement is unconditional. It recognizes no point at which "dissent" can become less than patriotic. That's probably because "dissent" is by Smith's definition -- which is the consensus definition -- not seditious. Sedition, however, is as much in the eye, or ear of the beholder as it is a legal category.

Most Americans, whether they admit it or not, recognize broad categories of informal sedition -- "dissent" that isn't actionable under the letter of the law but seditious or treasonous on some moral level. These forms of dissent, or counter-dissent, strike many hearers as betrayals of American ideals, culture or identity that require a strong response, be it denunciation, shaming, shunning or worse. The problem with defining anything as "un-American" in order to suppress it is that American ideals, culture and identity remain perpetually open to debate. Having rejected a secular American fundamentalism based on strict fidelity to the Founders' values, no faction can expect to claim to represent the "true" America without challenge; they'll have even less luck claiming a right to squelch dissent that seems to betray the "true" America. Liberalism simply assumes that no idea articulated by an American can be an un-American idea. It can be a bad idea, possibly, but no idea is so bad that it can't be aired out safely for public scrutiny. So, at least, went a liberal consensus still familiar to us, but not necessarily still in effect. Liberals themselves, or at least the harder leftists in their midst, are constantly accused of squelching forms of dissent, particularly dissent aimed not so much at the political order but at a socio-cultural order still seen as under liberal dominance. Those who bristle at anyone characterizing their opinions as un-American are perfectly willing to describe opposing views that way. There's evidence of that in Rex Smith's column, which cites a poll in which 59% of respondents describe Trump's recent comments on the "Squad" as "un-American." It may seem hypocritical for one side to say, "don't ever call us un-American" while saying, "you're the real un-Americans," but at least the majority in the poll isn't telling the other side, as far as we can tell, to go live somewhere else. That might be the one point on which today's self-styled liberals have the moral high ground. They might occupy that ground more securely if they affirmed the essential patriotism of a wider range of dissent more consistently, but that may grow more difficult as the privileging of an inviolable category of theoretically harmless "dissent" comes increasingly under question from all sides.

"Love it or leave it"

One of the few places in the U.S. where you can't call someone a racist is the U.S. Capitol Building -- or at least the congressional chambers there. The Speaker of the House was rebuked by a member of her own party earlier this week for making the commonly-heard assertion that the current President of the United States is a racist. That's because congressional rules dating back to the time of Thomas Jefferson forbid personal attacks on the President and other politicians. It  likewise forbids our representatives and senators from calling the President (or each other) a traitor, and it presumably also discourages disparagement on the basis of ethnicity, religion, gender, etc. We may assume that, were Donald Trump a congressman, he would be ruled out of order for telling the four women known as "The Squad," in effect to go back where they came from. The remark that started the current trouble really demonstrates Trump's ignorance of detail more than anything else, if he made it on the assumption that all four women, not only one of them, are immigrants. The President has since revised his opinion, falling back to the typical reactionary position that people who, in his opinion, hate this country (and Israel, apparently) should leave it. On this ground the "ideas" idealized by ideological Republicans become the unalterable "culture" revered by populist Trumpists.

Dissenters hold that the nation's guiding ideas can and sometimes should change; they deny that the nation would be less "America" as a result. While the right debates whether "ideas" or "culture" define the country, some on the left take a more populist position, to the extent that their first loyalty is to "people" rather than ideas. They argue for the people's right to define the nation's ideas  without constraint from existing ideas or culture. To them, there's no such thing as an "un-American" idea -- except, paradoxically, for those bigotries some see as originally and damningly American. To them it's almost the greatest insult to be told you should leave the country for wanting to change it. They would deny that wanting to change the country, however fundamentally, means that they hate it. At the same time, of course, the other side would deny that making a "love it or leave it" demand, or even a "go back where you came from" demand of dissenters is hate speech.

Few people define themselves as haters, but just about everyone, it can seem, is seen as a hater by someone else. If you oppose Trump you hate the country. If you support him, you hate humanity, or at least large portions of it. All of this predates Trump and will persist after him. It's the slow death of a certain kind of liberalism embodied in that quaint congressional rule, which expects political differences not to be grounded in hatred. That liberalism assumes, perhaps naively in the final analysis, that the stakes in politics aren't high enough to justify hate or offensive name calling. Too many people feel differently now, and many chafe under the old rules of civility where they still apply. They may deplore a rule that seems to forbid speaking "truth" to power, but how many are ready to hear every asserted "truth?" Each of us may assume that his ideas are true, but not all truths are equally self-evident. That may grow only more apparent over time.

Culture vs Ideas

Michael Gerson is a neocon who was an advisor to the George W. Bush administration. He's a champion of American exceptionalism, which fuels his opposition to President Trump. He dislikes that Trump sees the United States as, in Gerson's phrase, a "normal" nation. Listening to the President's July 4 address, Gerson laments that "Trump presented America as a strong country, but not a country with a special historical role that grows out of certain moral commitments....He seems to love America because it is his country and a powerful country, but not because it is a country with a calling." Is a country without a calling not worth loving? Gerson probably wouldn't go that far, but such a country is only a "normal" country and limited by that normalcy. A true American patriot, Gerson implies, believes that "America somehow embodies the best and highest of human aspirations -- separate from culture and ethnicity." He traces the familiar line separating "blood and soil" nationalism from patriotism based on ideas, but also draws a sharper distinction, perhaps more crucial at this moment, between "culture" and "ideas" "Normal" nations are defined by culture in a way that makes them closed systems. As Gerson writes, a "normal nation" sees itself as "united by a common culture [that is] diluted by outsiders and weakened by diversity." But a nation defined by ideas offers "hope of mutual progress" for natives and newcomers alike.

This distinction begs a question: what's the difference between "ideas" and "culture?"  Do the principles or values we identify as American fall into one category or the other? I suspect not. The "blood and soil" and "idealist" camps almost certainly share many values and principles, but they may disagree over where these come from. Leaving out those racists who may think that certain people are incapable of comprehending, let alone embracing American values, the real disagreement may be over how those values are inculcated. Yet when Gerson favorably quotes George W. Bush's assertions that "Every child must be taught these principles" and "Every immigrant, by embracing these ideals, makes our country more, not less, American," he doesn't seem to be saying anything the "blood and soil" school might dispute -- unless, again, some of that school are racists. Yet Gerson cites Bush's sayings as implicitly opposite to Trumpian "cultural" conservatism. He does so, I think, because he assumes that the "culture" camp believes that values are transmitted to newcomers or new generations by means other than education in schools -- through families, churches, or even social media -- or acquired by means other than reason. He may assume this because he's familiar with right-wing distrust of the public school system, but the other side most likely believes that, if public schools have any role, it's to inculcate American values. From their perspective, the problem today is that immigrants are not embracing the crucial ideals, that children aren't learning them -- or, worse, teachers aren't teaching them. This is the familiar complaint against a perceived refusal to assimilate, compounded by suspicions of treachery within a decadent educational system. The complaint has a factual basis in opposition to some ideals, once considered uncontroversial but now seen as essentially "white," "male," "straight" and, above all, self-serving.

To an extent, the "cultural" backlash we see today is a response to the postmodern idea that "American" values actually aren't universal, as neocons like Gerson insist, but culturally specific to an oppressive degree. What's actually going on, arguably, is a vetting of American culture to preserve whatever is seen as good while eliminating the bad. Disagreement over what should go is inevitable, especially when one side assumes that the other rejects such simple yet fundamental ideas as "the world doesn't owe you a living." Is that an idea based in reason that can be taught, or is it a cultural meme one accepts on faith or as a matter of custom? In the complexity of this historical moment, it actually may be in transition from one state to the other. As a Republican, Gerson probably sees it as an eminently reasonable idea, but when some people seemingly refuse to listen to reason, it's unsurprising for others to begin to see it as something some will never get, no matter how educated they think they are. The distinction between "ideas" and "culture" may not be as stark as Gerson assumes, and it's likely to grow murkier, not clearer, in the immediate future.

Politicians and anti-social media

An appeals court has ruled that the President of the United States has less rights, in at least one respect, than ordinary citizens. The court ruled that President Trump violated the First Amendment whenever he blocked Twitter users from commenting on his own account. While you or I might block a troll from defacing our own accounts with obnoxious comments, the court holds that the President's account has an official, public character -- he sometimes uses it for the first announcement of new policies, for example -- and thus should be a public forum, with no restrictions, apart from those imposed by Twitter itself, on other users' ability to comment. This is not the first such ruling against a politician, and it certainly won't be the last judicial opinion on the subject, since the Justice Department plans to appeal. I suspect that the appeals process ultimately will deliver Trump a favorable ruling, and not just because the Supreme Court has a Republican majority. While I sympathize with the thinking behind this latest ruling, I'm not sure it can withstand constitutional scrutiny. It's widely understood that the current President uses Twitter as his primary medium of direct communication with his supporters. His account is widely perceived as a propaganda platform. It's obviously feared that, by blocking critics, Trump can create an illusion of overwhelming if not unanimous agreement with his opinions and policies. Civil libertarians may think that a public official, when expressing opinions ex cathedra, as it were, has no more right to block critics from posting comments than the President has to drive peaceful protesters from the White House fence. They may insist that Twitter is actually the most direct and peaceful way for dissidents to get in the President's face. But none of this necessarily explains why the President, or any other elected official, should have less right to block people than anyone else. If that proposition depends entirely on the idea that the President's Twitter account is official, then it has to be explained what makes it so. Trump's account predates his presidency; it was not assigned to him after his election. He has issued no executive order making it "official;" nor has Congress. It may be nothing but a propaganda platform, but in this country propaganda itself has rights. The President has no more obligation to grant "equal time" on his account to his opponents than he would to reserve part of the time his campaign committee buys for advertising for opposing points of view.  In short, politicians have as much right to use their social media accounts to make themselves look popular as private citizens have. This, I suspect, is how the ultimate court will rule, but such a ruling will fall well short of silencing the President's critics. If they still want to get in Trump's face, or in the faces of his fans, there are any number of hashtags that can be employed to get their attention -- and it wouldn't surprise me if Trump himself checks all of them.

Authoritarianism in America?

President Trump's voter base appears to consist of about 40% of the voting population, according to many polls. Some measurements detect a hard core within that base, making up as much as a quarter of the electorate, that shows a few alarming authoritarian tendencies. As always, we should be mindful that questions shape responses, but there's little ambiguity to the findings of the Ipsos poll cited in a recent local editorial. It asked whether people agreed with the idea that the President should have the power to "close news outlets that engaged in bad behavior." 26% of respondents agreed, including 43% of those identifying themselves as Republicans. On one hand, this is an understandable plea for accountability in the face of constant accusations of "fake news." On the other, this is advocacy of executive usurpation of what should, under any circumstances, be a judicial responsibility. To be fair, the question is inevitably vague about how the President should go about closing news outlets, buy even granting the executive the initiative is worrisome. More worrisome are the 13% of poll respondents who agreed with the specific proposition that "President Trump should close down mainstream news outlets, like CNN, the Washington Post and the New York Times." The question suggests no specific reason for Trump to do so, but the implicit reason is that these entities spread "fake news" and perpetuate various "witch hunts" against the President. At this point, too, we must concede that the question doesn't suggest that Trump seek legal redress. We can assume instead that this hardest core -- which also includes 8% of self-identified Democrats -- would be perfectly happy if Trump could shut down these institutions by executive fiat. You can still say that they simply want some form of justice for presumed liars and slanderers, but you can also say with some safety that they want something closer to dictatorship than most Americans as yet are comfortable with. Even closer to home, in blue New York, a local poll has found that a quarter of respondents are, in the editor Rex Smith's words, "somewhat in accord" with the proposition that "it is un-American to protest against the actions of the government." It's more un-American to say such a thing, obviously, but it may seem that way only to those who see loyalty to America as loyalty to the Constitution first. Others, we can be fairly certain, define loyalty to America differently. They may be the authentic authoritarians in our midst.

Are liberals moderates?

Like many a writer for The Nation, historian David A. Bell is impatient with self-described liberals who seem to hesitate at some of the radical measures proposed by self-described progressives within the Democratic party. Reviewing a new book by Adam Gopnik in the July 1/8, Bell presents him as a representative specimen who exemplifies the problem with liberalism. Historically, but perhaps more than ever now, liberalism as described by Gopnik and Bell is more a temperament than an ideology. That temperament is cautious and increasingly centrist in an increasingly polarized political environment. Liberals, according to Bell, have a bad habit of staking out a middle ground between perceived extremes, with the implication that opposite extremes are equally bad in some important ways. To Bell this is "false equivalence," resulting in misguided attempts at "balance." This is the crucial liberal failure in the reviewer's opinion; by substituting the superficial category of "extreme" for rigorous analysis of conditions, liberals mistake "extremism" for the real crisis for which, Bell insists, "both sides" are not equally to blame.

For Bell, the real crisis is that the American political order has been broken by an oligarchic drive for power that relies on right-wing media, unlimited campaign spending, and lumpen prejudices to thwart genuine democracy in America. Progressives argue that the crisis requires radical remedies, possibly to the point of breaking the current system, to prevent their populist-oligarchic nightmare from becoming a reality.  While insinuating this, Bell tries to remind Gopnik that the remedies proposed by today's leading progressives, from "Medicare For All" to the "Green New Deal," actually are relatively moderate compared to the measures taken, for example, by the British Labor party when they first took power in 1945. Why, then, should they disturb liberals like Gopnik? According to Bell, it's because Gopnik, at least, still believes the system can achieve egalitarian goals, while progressives strike the author as absolutist, historically uninformed and, worst of all from a liberal perspective, uncompromising. Liberals, to the extent that they promote moderation, promote compromise. To that extent they're typically American, but progressives worry that liberals make a fetish of compromise when conditions should not require equal concessions from either "extreme." It can be argued that they fall easily into a peculiar trap that leaves them demanding more compromise from progressives the more the oligarchs refuse to compromise. If anything infuriates progressives about liberals, it's the assumption that the burden of compromise falls on progressives more than on the oligarchs. This is mainly because liberals and progressives are engaged in a debate over the future of the Democratic party, in which liberals, acting as moderates, insist that progressives compromise to make Democratic candidates more electable among presumably centrist swing voters. But it's also because liberalism really is a matter of temperament. American liberalism is concerned more with means than ends -- liberals are the ones most likely to say that ends don't justify means -- and tends to see compromise as a means that is an end unto itself. As noted here often, liberalism also abhors the very idea of crisis because it drives people to put emergency ends ahead of conventional means, raising the specter of unconstrained power. Their reluctance to acknowledge crises or emergencies makes liberals appear increasingly detached from reality from the vantage point of left-wing progressives and right-wing populists alike. The right condemns liberals for failing to perceive and respond appropriately to a different set of crises. If they offend both camps, liberals will of course be tempted to assume they must be doing something right. Whether you identify as progressive, rightist, populist or other, Bell's review article should give you an intellectual basis for challenging that perhaps-characteristic liberal complacency.

Moderates and markets

For David Brooks, to be a moderate is to embrace the free market. In his latest column Brooks contrasts the moderate favorably with the economic nationalists who support President Trump and the "progressives" who threaten to dominate the Democratic party. He spends most of his space attacking progressives, who allegedly want to "create a government caste that is powerful and a population that is safe but dependent." They're too willing to "coddle" people, while moderates "want to help but not infantilize." Progressives, as ever, seek to centralize things, while moderates "are always aiming to make responsibility, agency and choice as local as possible." These comparisons may leave you wondering what makes Brooks' heroes moderates rather than conservatives. His own answer would be that moderates support "a bigger role than before" for government in preparing citizens for a competitive global economy. Yet these moderates can't help looking conservative from the progressive standpoint, since they accept a number of premises about the world that progressives challenge. Progressives certainly would protest Brooks's use of (to them) pejorative terms like "coddle" and "infantilize" when they most certainly see themselves as liberating people so they can become their true selves, and not what the market demands them to be. Whether  Brooks is moderate or conservative, he presumably uses these words because he suspects progressives of poorly preparing people for conditions that are subject to neither debate nor a vote. Opponents of 21st century progressivism argue that the world simply can't be the way progressives want. Historically, that's been a conservative argument, but when self-styled conservatives in the Trump movement also seem to want a world that can't be, the moderate may well be the person who rains on both parades. If the 21st century moderate is primarily a realist, and not someone simply seeking the middle ground between extremes, he may have a useful contribution to make, but he will have to explain and defend his overall view of the world more forcefully than Brooks does here.

Hillary's curse

The consensus seems to be that two women, Senators Harris and Warren, did the best at last week's panels of Democratic presidential candidates, but columnist Michelle Goldberg warns against a pessimism about female candidates that could hurt their chances in primary season. Numerous women have told Goldberg that they like Harris or Warren best of all the many candidates, but don't think a woman can be elected President in 2020. Goldberg traces this pessimism to a perception that voters in swing states in 2016 rejected Hillary Clinton because she was a woman. "The more you think that misogyny undermined Clinton, the less inclined you might be to support another female challenger," she writes. If that's the case, it should be imperative to refute the misogyny narrative, yet Goldberg can't bring herself to do this. "Without the handicap of sexism, Clinton probably would have won a race that was essentially decided by a rounding error," she opines.

Loyalty to a woman whose political career is over could sabotage the candidacies of arguably more viable female candidates. To insist that general misogyny rather than specific criticisms and suspicions about a specific woman undermined the Clinton campaign in crucial places is to invoke a potentially paralyzing handicap that may not even exist. Feminists like Goldberg do the women of 2020 no favors by continuing to portray Clinton as a victim rather than a failure.

Since Goldberg regards Harris and Warren as, presumably, the best potential presidents, she encourages voters to overcome the perception that misogyny will cripple any woman candidate. In doing so, she adds a twist to the 2016 narrative, suggesting that Clinton fell short in part because people felt inhibited about supporting her openly. "Voters passionate about Clinton but wary of online harassment hid in private Facebook groups, which made it seem like there was no real enthusiasm about her candidacy," Goldberg writes, "countless women who voted for Clinton ... regret their failure to be public in their zeal." She then says, "It's hard to imagine that Warren or Harris would have this problem in 2020." But why should it be hard if the problem was misogyny. If misogyny drove the online harassment of Clinton supporters in 2016, why shouldn't misogynists in 2020 treat supporters of Harris or Warren the same way? Goldberg doesn't say, apart from observing that "most women don't want Trump to be president," but it's the closes she comes in this column to acknowledging that there was something different about Hillary Clinton that wasn't just a matter of misogynist perception.

The treason of the evangelicals?

Every few months, it seems, Michael Gerson publishes a column bemoaning what he perceives as increasingly uncritical support for President Trump among evangelical Christians. This time, at least, Gerson performs a sort of public service by reminding us that Ralph Reed is alive. The columnist takes Reed's recent remark that no President has "defended us" or "fought for us" more than Trump as proof that evangelicals have become "primarily concerned with the respect accorded to their own religious community" at the expense of a historic commitment to "the oppressed and vulnerable." Their embrace of Trump as their defender threatens to stigmatize them as "old, white Christians who want to restore lost social status through political power," but at the expense of Christianity itself, as Gerson understands it. As a reminder, Gerson is a Republican, and something of a neocon, who sees Donald Trump as a depraved bigot. Neither Trump nor his supporters match Gerson's ideal for Republicanism. But in appealing to an idealized past for both Republicans and evangelical activists, Gerson engages in selective history, or else he exposes his own blind spot. If he's trying to say that evangelicals never indulged in bigotry or chauvinism before Trump, he can't be taken seriously. At the same time that evangelicals cited admiringly by Gerson agitated against slavery, other evangelicals -- and in some cases, almost certainly, the very same evangelicals -- took a very Trumpian position on immigration. Who were the Know-Nothings of the 1850s, after all, but evangelical Protestants fearful of a suspected Catholic takeover of the United States through unlimited immigration from Europe? If anything, evangelical Trumpism is consistent with a historic evangelical tendency to see themselves as the authentic American people. The major difference between then and now is that many Catholics today take the same side as these evangelicals, now that both see ethnicity rather than sectarianism as a threat to American identity. This is all very un-Christian and historically inconsistent to Gerson, but it may not seem so to those with a clearer view of American history. Gerson warns that by embracing Trump evangelicals risk alienating themselves from a younger generation that is growing less religious according to the measure of church attendance. Perhaps Gerson risks alienating himself from that younger generation by insisting that some sort of Christian renaissance is the solution to Trumpism.