Today in 1968, Jimmy Page, Robert Plant, John Paul Jones and John Bonham played together for the first time when they rehearsed at a London studio. You know them as Led Zeppelin.
No comments on Presty the DJ for Aug. 12
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We begin with a non-musical anniversary, though we can certainly add music:
On Aug. 11, 1919, Green Bay Press–Gazette sports editor George Calhoun and Indian Packing Co. employee Earl “Curly” Lambeau, a former Notre Dame football player, organized a pro football team that would be called the Green Bay Packers:
Today in 1964, the Beatles movie “A Hard Day’s Night” opened in New York:
Two years later, the Beatles opened their last American concert tour on the same day that John Lennon apologized for saying that the Beatles were “more popular than Jesus. … Look, I wasn’t saying The Beatles are better than God or Jesus, I said ‘Beatles’ because it’s easy for me to talk about The Beatles. I could have said ‘TV’ or ‘Cinema’, ‘Motorcars’ or anything popular and would have got away with it…”
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Hillary can’t say she didn’t warn us.
In a new 3,500-word essay on “The Weaponization of Loneliness” in the Atlantic, the former secretary of state and presidential candidate says her jejune 1996 book, It Takes a Village, forecast the country’s current crisis of loneliness and offered still-relevant solutions.
And, oh yeah, hapless lonely people exploited by authoritarian right-wingers basically kept her from the White House in 2016 (and here you thought it was Russia).
Now, social isolation is a real problem in America, as Hillary correctly recounts in her essay, and it has contributed to the Trump phenomenon. But that it has been uniquely weaponized against progressives, or that conventional progressive policies are the antidote to this deep-seated phenomenon, is as absurd and self-serving as you’d expect from a woman who managed one of the more shocking losses in U.S. presidential history and has been offering excuses ever since.
In her telling, an army of so-called incels, or involuntarily celibate men, organized by Steve Bannon is part of a growing threat to U.S. democracy. You can see the appeal of this gloss on our politics to someone who has long warned of the “vast right-wing conspiracy,” and uses the phrase, once again, in an essay otherwise devoted to warning about the threats of conspiratorial thinking.
Rather than shadowy forces, from Russian hackers to Bannon’s a-socialized acolytes, determining the course of the country, it is the middle of the electorate that remains crucially important, and it is open to persuasion on the big questions. Donald Trump fought Hillary to a draw among independents in 2016 and eked out a narrow victory, and lost them to Biden and was defeated in 2020.
To read Hillary, you might think that no one who supports the Democrats is ever lonely.
As it happens, Republicans are the party of married people. As Conn Carroll pointed out at the Washington Examiner, in the 2022 House races, Republicans won married men by 20 points and unmarried men by seven, and won married women by 14 points. The GOP, on the other hand, got wiped out with unmarried women by nearly 40 points.
This marriage gap has a connection to loneliness. According to a Gallup survey in 2020, 41 percent of single people reported being lonely the day before, whereas only 16 percent of people who were married or in a domestic partnership said the same thing. (This was in the midst of the pandemic, by the way — overall loneliness has declined since.) By region, New England has the highest rate of loneliness, and big cities are significantly more lonely than rural areas.
This means that Hillary forged a coalition of the lonely (or at least the more lonely) in 2016, and the worst thing that could happen to her party is more people getting married and living in small places with a stronger sense of community.
Of course, Hillary doesn’t offer either of those as potential solutions to the crisis of loneliness. No, but Joe Biden’s infrastructure program might help — as if people are disconnected because they can’t take high-speed rail to go see friends. She’s heartened, too, by parents protesting “book bans” and workers engaged in union organizing. Left-wing activism, apparently, is what can knit us all back together.
She invokes “the wisdom and power of the American village” and says “we have more in common than we think,” without ever giving any sense that she acknowledges the values of the other side, or even its legitimacy. If she doesn’t use her infamous word from 2016, “deplorables,” to describe her opponents, that’s clearly what she still thinks about them.
Hillary may not be lonely, but she’s a case study in the myopic self-righteousness of the Left that is unjustified, high-handed, and off-putting. It’s no wonder that if Hillary’s “village” is the community on offer, millions of rational, well-adjusted, happy Americans want nothing to do with it.
You know what people are most unhappy? Those who obsess over politics. Imagine if Hillary had won the 2016 presidential election.
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Today, this would be the sort of thing to embellish a band’s image, not to mention provide material for an entire segment of VH1’s “Behind the Music.” Not so in 1959, when four members of The Platters were arrested on drug and prostitution charges following a concert in Cincinnati when they were discovered with four women (three of them white) in what was reported as “various stages of undress.” Despite the fact that none of the Platters were convicted of anything, the Platters (who were all black) were removed from several radio stations’ playlists.
Speaking of odd music anniversaries: Today in 1985, Michael Jackson purchased the entire Beatles music library for more than $45 million.
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“Like Trump, G.O.P. Rivals Feed Distrust in Vital U.S. Institutions” is the front-page headline over an alarmist New York Times news article, warning that “the tenor of the campaign rhetoric has reached new and conspiratorial levels.”
To its credit, the article notes low down, briefly, that “Casting doubt on the integrity of government is hardly limited to Republican candidates” and that “President Biden…has mused about his skepticism of the Supreme Court — ‘this is not a normal court,’ he said after the court’s ruling striking down affirmative action in college admissions.” Also, “Democrats have far more doubt about the Supreme Court and the police. (There is bipartisan distrust in the criminal justice system, with less than one in four voters expressing confidence in the system.)”
But the headline and the lead paragraphs of the Times news article are tilted to appeal to the prejudices of left-leaning Times readers—oh, those evil Republicans undermining trust in our vital institutions. Could it be that the institutions are distrusted because of their real failures, rather than because of conspiratorial rhetoric from Republican presidential candidates? The Times itself hasn’t exactly been innocent when it comes to fueling distrust in the Supreme Court, publishing several articles depicting the justices as basically corrupt.
Headlines and articles like this in the Times serve their own role in feeding public distrust in a vital institution—the media. Readers see through it. The idea that it’s okay for the New York Times to criticize institutions but that it’s “conspiratorial” for Republican politicians to do it, or that it’s okay for Democrats and the press to criticize the police and the Roberts-Alito-Thomas Supreme Court, but it’s not okay for Republicans to criticize the IRS and the Ivy League, just seems tendentious and partisan, rather than an example of the consistent application of a principle.
Remember when liberals said to question authority?
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Today should be a national holiday. That is because this group first entered the music charts today in 1969, getting three or four chart spots lower than its title:
That was the same day the number one single predicted life 556 years in the future:
Today in 1975, the Bee Gees hit number one, even though they were just just just …
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Bjorn Lomborg and Jordan B. Peterson:
The meaningful exchange of truly diverse ideas and perspectives has withered over recent decades.
Unorthodox thinking is increasingly trashed or disregarded, even as the chattering class’s fear- and force-predicated approaches repeatedly prove inadequate to cope with the true complexities and crises of the modern world.
We need instead to foster and promote critical thinking and constructive discussion.
We are making every effort to ensure that our new Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC), an international coalition of politicians, business leaders, public intellectuals and cultural commentators, will help ensure that a broader range of perspectives can be heard globally.
Consider the world’s response to the pandemic.
The meaningful exchange of truly diverse ideas and perspectives has withered over recent decades.
Unorthodox thinking is increasingly trashed or disregarded, even as the chattering class’s fear- and force-predicated approaches repeatedly prove inadequate to cope with the true complexities and crises of the modern world.
We need instead to foster and promote critical thinking and constructive discussion.
We are making every effort to ensure that our new Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC), an international coalition of politicians, business leaders, public intellectuals and cultural commentators, will help ensure that a broader range of perspectives can be heard globally.
Consider the world’s response to the pandemic.
A panic-stricken lockdown orthodoxy far too soon took hold, and those whose policy proposals deviated quickly were labeled “COVID deniers”.
Governments that went the farthest were feted by public intellectuals and in newspaper opinion pages.
The obvious downsides to universal lockdowns were ignored by those striving to garner credit for simple-minded immediacy of response.
Thus, we saw increases of inequality in income distribution and wealth, widespread loss of employment, substantive declines in spending and general deterioration in economic conditions; serious declines in mental health and wellbeing, delayed and diminished access to healthcare and record high levels of domestic violence.
The education of children was particularly affected: School closures on average robbed children of more than seven months of education.
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Two anniversaries today demonstrate the fickle nature of the pop charts. This is the number one song today in 1960:
Three years later, the Kingsmen released “Louie Louie.” Some radio stations refused to play it because they claimed it was obscene. Which is ridiculous, because the lyrics were not obscene, merely incomprehensible:
Today in 1969, while the Beatles were wrapping up work on “Abbey Road,” they shot the album cover:
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Paul Mirengott on a New York Times opinion that veers between self-awareness and tone-deaf condescension:
The wandering mind of David Brooks crosses into enemy territory in this attempt to explain, in non-demonic terms, the thinking of Donald Trump’s core supporters. We saw pieces like this right after the 2016 election when the liberal commentariat was still stunned. But, it quickly rallied the troops, defaulted back to the “deplorables” explanation, and turned its attention to the alleged Russia collusion thing.
Thus, Brooks’ analysis, coming at this time from a Trump-hating liberal, seems fresh.
Brooks asks his fellow Trump haters to consider that they may be the “bad guys” in our politics. Why? Because ever since the 1960s, “the ideal that we’re all in this together [has been] replaced with the reality that the educated class lives in a world up here and everybody else is forced into a world down there.”
This sinister feat was accomplished thanks to America’s “meritocracy.” Brooks writes:
We built an entire social order that sorts and excludes people on the basis of the quality that we possess most: academic achievement. Highly educated parents go to elite schools, marry each other, work at high-paying professional jobs and pour enormous resources into our children, who get into the same elite schools, marry each other and pass their exclusive class privileges down from generation to generation.
The elites impose policies that benefit themselves and hurt the less educated:
Armed with all kinds of economic, cultural and political power, we support policies that help ourselves. Free trade makes the products we buy cheaper, and our jobs are unlikely to be moved to China. Open immigration makes our service staff cheaper, but new, less-educated immigrants aren’t likely to put downward pressure on our wages.
At the cultural level:
We change the moral norms in ways that suit ourselves, never mind the cost to others. For example, there used to be a norm that discouraged people from having children outside marriage, but that got washed away during our period of cultural dominance, as we eroded norms that seemed judgmental or that might inhibit individual freedom.
After this social norm was eroded, a funny thing happened. Members of our class still overwhelmingly married and had children within wedlock. People without our resources, unsupported by social norms, were less able to do that. As Adrian Wooldridge points out in his magisterial 2021 book, “The Aristocracy of Talent,” “Sixty percent of births to women with only a high school certificate occur out of wedlock, compared with only 10 percent to women with a university degree.” That matters, he continues, because “the rate of single parenting is the most significant predictor of social immobility in the country.”
Therefore:
It’s easy to understand why people in less-educated classes would conclude that they are under economic, political, cultural and moral assault — and why they’ve rallied around Trump as their best warrior against the educated class. He understood that it’s not the entrepreneurs who seem most threatening to workers; it’s the professional class. Trump understood that there was great demand for a leader who would stick his thumb in our eyes on a daily basis and reject the whole epistemic regime that we rode in on.
Brooks gets a lot right in his column, but I think he misses some key points. In the end, moreover, he, like Trump, patronizes what he calls the “less-educated classes” by over-emphasizing their victimization and downplaying their agency.
One important point that Brooks understates, nearly to the point of discounting, is the degree to which the resentment of Trump supporters is rooted in cultural issues — the product of the “educated class” trying to shove its non-traditional values down their throats. Upper class kids have always had the advantage when it comes to admission to top colleges (more so before the 1960s than since). I doubt this has ever fueled much resentment.
What fuels resentment is having one’s religion and one’s values mocked and over-ridden. This, the modern professional class does with a vengeance.
Brooks also over-emphasizes the significance of elite dominance of certain professions. He focuses primarily on his profession, journalism, pointing to a 2018 study that found more than 50 percent of the staff writers at the New York Times and The Wall Street Journal attended one of the 29 most elite universities in the nation.
Again, I doubt that the educational backgrounds of reporters at the Times and the Journal matter at all to under-educated American males. I suspect the jobs they worry about most are the manufacturing ones their fathers made a decent living performing but that are no longer available to them. They don’t want to work for the New York Times, but might like to work a high-paying assembly line job — or at least a job in which they can earn as much as their wife or girlfriend.
Brooks is aware of this, and he addresses it when he mentions trade policy. He’s on target here. Free trade policies, pushed by elites, have meant that fewer manufacturing jobs are available to Americans.
But this isn’t the only shrinking sector of the job market. Jobs for journalists are disappearing, too. Even op-ed writers should worry. Artificial intelligence can already produce columns equal in quality to those written by many op-ed writers, though not yet by Brooks.
The point is that time marches on. There is no God-given right to work at a newspaper just because you got good grades at one of America’s 29 most elite universities. Nor is there a God-given right to work on an assembly line like your father did.
“Under educated” Americans need to adapt, either by learning new skills or becoming better educated. Many are learning new skills, but these folks tend to be women — which is one reason why men often don’t earn as much as their wives and girlfriends. Some on the right mock the saying “learn to code,” but coding is one of the skills displaced workers should be learning if they want to work at an okay paying job.
Most of the lost manufacturing jobs aren’t coming back — not even in another Trump presidency.
Trump’s message that the elites have wrought an “American carnage” that “only I can fix “is one, simultaneously, of despair and false promise. If the deck is stacked and middle America has been hollowed out, why not just hang out on the street corner (or whatever the 2020s equivalent is) and get high.
Trump’s message is not a recipe for making America great again. America won’t regain greatness if a large chunk of its population concludes that, as Brooks phrases it, they have been “forced into a world down there” to the point that that their only hope is an Orange Knight.
Brooks also overstates the degree to which the deck is stacked against less-educated Americans who want to become better educated. Of course, these groups are at a disadvantage compared to the sons and daughters of the elites.
But that’s always been the case. And the educational disadvantages faced by the offspring of less-educated Americans these days is no greater than that encountered (and overcome) by the sons and daughters of poor immigrants over the many decades (and, indeed, today).
Nor is meritocracy to blame. I doubt there’s ever been a more merit-based education system in the U.S. than the New York City public schools and free colleges of yesteryear. But a great many sons and daughters of impoverished immigrants become well educated through that system, with many going on to highly-successful and rewarding careers, even though the Ivy League colleges of the time discriminated against many of them.
What’s needed to overcome the comparative disadvantage faced by the sons and daughters of the less educated is straightforward: parental guidance (or at least something resembling a functional family structure) and individual drive and determination. If these elements are present, even kids of average intelligence can usually get enough education to get decent-paying work. Those at the higher end will even have a shot at journalism — if that’s the poison they pick.
Brooks has an answer to this argument. He says the deck is stacked against the sons and daughters of the less educated because their parents’ status militates strongly against the kind of parenting needed (in many cases) for them to succeed. (Recall his stat: Sixty percent of births to women with only a high school certificate occur out of wedlock, compared with only 10 percent to women with a university degree.)
Brooks has a point. But social pathologies have always been much more prevalent among the lower classes.
Moreover, whatever the statistics show, “women with only a high school certificate” are still free agents. The decision whether to have a birth out of wedlock is still theirs to make. So is the decision whether to take school seriously; the decision whether to learn a skill with value in the contemporary job market; and the decision whether to abstain from drugs that take away one’s drive and threaten one’s life.
Conservatives often make “personal responsibility” arguments like this when discussing black America. The arguments should not be off-limits when discussing the portion of Trump’s base that Brooks has in mind.
I don’t want to commit a fallacy parallel to Trump’s (and Brooks’). I don’t want to deny that policies imposed by our elites are hurting less-educated Americans. I don’t want to absolve these policies from their deleterious effects or argue against modifying some of them.
A great many manufacturing jobs aren’t coming back here no matter what, but this doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be more protective of American jobs. Displaced workers should make more effort to learn new skills, but this doesn’t mean our trade policies should be oblivious to their concerns.
But it’s fallacious and self-counterproductive (unless you’re a demagogue) to treat under-educated Americans as helpless victims of a rigged system designed to perpetuate privilege. It’s also demeaning to these Americans.
It assumes less-educated Americans lack what it takes to overcome their disadvantages without a savior. This seems like a case of what George W. Bush’s speechwriters called “the soft bigotry of low expectations.”
I think it’s also a manifestation of elitist contempt for an entire class of Americans. Remember, both Donald Trump and David Brooks are members of the American elite.
Margaret Thatcher once said the facts of life are conservative. Feelings do not trump reality. You cannot, for instance, spend more money than you have and escape eventually ruining your life. You cannot get good outcomes from bad decisions. The elites seem to not grasp this.
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National elections should be about contrast and choice — and those choices should offer the clearest opportunity for parity in the candidates and the parties. If the polls are to be believed, the 2024 election as it stands now, before any debates or primaries, does not offer that. Instead the country currently faces the prospect of two senior citizens clashing, both with low approval ratings, personal and legal baggage and questions of mental acuity.
There is a side debate forming, however, between Florida governor Ron DeSantis, a declared candidate for president in 2024 and the only polling alternative to Donald Trump at the moment, and California governor Gavin Newsom, an all-but-declared candidate running a standby campaign, should Joe Biden decide to step aside and Kamala Harris be found unviable (as her own polls would suggest).
This week, while appearing on Hannity, DeSantis accepted a debate offer from Newsom, with Hannity moderating, possibly to happen in the fall. It’s an unorthodox move by a presidential candidate to appear in a debate with a non-candidate, and it carries risk for DeSantis. It also carries a huge reward as he continues to poke Newsom into declaring against Biden, where he would certainly be viewed as a serious alternative to a president whose own party is concerned about both his age and stamina for another five years in office.
All the grandstanding and politicking by governors and candidates aside, there could not be a better debate for this country coming out of the pandemic. As we are still attempting to navigate a post-pandemic world, there’s an profound contrast between the current extreme progressive model of California Democratic policy versus the hyper-wartime conservatism on offense of DeSantis and Florida. The country has yet to have an open policy debate about the fallout of Covid policies that saw record numbers of Californians pack up their homes and move out of state, with approximately 500,000 of them landing in Florida in 2020.
Noah Rothman adds:
California governor Gavin Newsom has been spoiling for a fight on the national stage. “Freedom is under attack in your state,” the governor said in a television spot he cut to be aired exclusively in Florida last year. He urged Floridians to rise up and “join the fight” for the kind of freedom that he alleged was under attack in the Sunshine State — “freedom of speech, freedom to choose freedom from hate, and the freedom to love.” The ad was clearly intended to make Ron DeSantis into a foil, raising Newsom’s own national profile in the process. DeSantis wouldn’t take the bait, however, and the challenge was soon forgotten.
But during a Fox News Channel interview in June, Newsom threw the gauntlet down again. And on Wednesday, DeSantis accepted the challenge.
Every indication suggests this is real. Newsom’s office has proposed two dates in early November on which the debate might occur, with Fox News host Sean Hannity serving as moderator. He has also proposed some ground rules concerning the format, the timeline, how it will air (live), and whether there will be an audience (there won’t be). The terms are reasonable, and DeSantis seems inclined to accept.
It might have been a publicity stunt when Newsom demanded a debate. DeSantis’ willingness to participate in this contest at this stage of his presidential campaign is almost certainly an extension of his desire for the attention of the Republican-primary electorate. But this is not a waste of the public’s intellectual energies. This spectacle wouldn’t just raise the profiles of both participants; it would also treat America to a substantive political debate with high stakes for the future of the American civic compact.
What prompted Newsom to cast himself as DeSantis’ most potent political foe in the summer of 2022 was the Florida governor’s alleged “bullying” of the Special Olympics, which DeSantis threatened to fine if it imposed a Covid-19 vaccination mandate on its athletes. “He did something that tipped me very directly,” Newsom confessed. “I had an emotional response to that.”
Newsom’s irritation notwithstanding, DeSantis’s threat alone convinced the Special Olympics to scuttle its proposed vaccination mandate, allowing hundreds of special-needs athletes to compete. California’s governor should be made to explain why his ideal vaccination regimen should have robbed these athletes of that opportunity. Moreover, Newsom should say if he still believes that mandate is necessary, since the epidemiological conditions that prevailed in June 2022 still largely pertain today.
Likewise, Newsom deserves to be confronted over why he believes his state’s model provides its citizens with a better way of life than Florida’s. Is it California’s rising violent- and property-crime rates? Is it the fact that a majority of the state’s public-school students cannot meet basic English and math standards? Maybe it’s the rolling blackouts — ahem, “rotating outages” — that are allegedly necessary to meet the state’s energy needs?
Newsom appears to define “freedom” to mean uninhibited access to abortion services at almost all stages of a pregnancy and preserving minors’ uninterrupted access to pornographic illustrations in publicly funded institutions. But does Newsom believe the “freedom from hate” Californians experience and Floridians do not includes freedom from state-sponsored racial discrimination? If he does, he’ll have to explain why California’s legislature attempted to strike from the state constitution language prohibiting discrimination on the basis of race, gender, sexual orientation, and ethnicity. That project, which was designed to legalize anti-racist discriminatory practices, was only narrowly averted by a revolt of the state’s citizens.
Newsom might also have to make sense of why Californians similarly rose up against an effort to artificially boost labor-union rolls by decimating parts of the so-called “sharing economy” like ride-sharing services. If Californians are so satisfied with their circumstances, why do they so often erupt in protest against Sacramento? And when they’re not voting in droves against the state’s latest exercise in social engineering, why are they leaving?
Roughly 400,000 Californians left the state for greener pastures between July 2021 and July 2022. Last year, the state’s population declined to fewer than 39 million people for the first time since 2015. By contrast, Florida’s growth is uninterrupted and shows no signs of abating. Florida gained nearly as many residents as California lost in almost the same time period, and is for the first time since 1957 America’s fastest-growing state. Are all these people making horribly ill-informed or malign decisions for themselves and their families?
When Newsom first began trolling DeSantis in the hopes of engaging directly with the governor, I wrote about why that contest could prove immensely salutary to America’s politics:
This contest, if we should be so fortunate to be privy to it, would be beneficial to America’s civic consciousness. A debate over the theories of social organization being tested at the state level is exactly what the Founders intended for us.
The California model and the Florida model are wildly distinct theories of how to balance economic optimization against the need to maximize human happiness. They are in competition already, and it would be valuable to hash out those distinctions in plain terms on a debate stage. If these two governors can respectfully advocate their respective philosophical approaches to governance, it would greatly clarify the stakes of the coming presidential contest. Indeed, such an engagement would likely prove vastly more informational than one defined by two aged, cantankerous bloviators whose highest aspirations for the country are to ensure that it doesn’t put them or their loved ones in jail.
Of course, a DeSantis–Newsom debate could also devolve into bickering, point-scoring, and competing one-liners. If this debate becomes a contest of personalities, DeSantis’s deficiencies in that area could prove fatal. But if Hannity could keep the participants in this deliberation focused on arguing their competing theories of societal organization, it wouldn’t just be a far healthier political exercise than any to which Americans have been privy for many years; it would also showcase the superiority of the conservative model of state governance. And it might go a long way toward convincing the voting public that Florida’s state-level experiments deserve to go national.
Governors are potentially superior presidents (Reagan, Clinton, George W. Bush) because they actually have to accomplish something, such as enacting a balanced budget, instead of, say, plagiarizing (this means you, Joe) or voting “present” (this means you, Barack). I wouldn’t vote for Newsom because I will never vote for a Democrat again for any office anywhere, but hearing his answers to the questions posed here would be instructive, assuming he would actually answer them.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 