Today in 1967 was not a good day for fans of artistic freedom or the First Amendment, though the First Amendment applies to government against citizens and not the media against individuals.
Before their appearance on CBS-TV’s Ed Sullivan Shew, the Rolling Stones were compelled to change “Let’s Spend the Night Together …”
… to “Let’s Spend Some Time Together”:
The number one British album today in 1977 was ABBA’s “Arrival” …
Bernie Sanders is leading or near the top of most polls in the first two Democratic nominating states, Iowa and New Hampshire. He could plausibly win both, which would instantly transform the race into a desperate effort to Stop Bernie.
Sanders doesn’t exactly get good press. A lot of the punditry (understandably) wrote him off when Elizabeth Warren eclipsed him in the polls a couple of months ago and he had his health scare. Longer profiles have tended to be fond, while expressing skepticism that Sanders can build out his coalition. But the same people who have spent years worrying about norms — by which they usually mean things President Donald Trump says and tweets — express little alarm about Bernie’s campaign of jaw-dropping radicalism.
If he had his way, he’d fundamentally change the character of the country. He’d make the United States an outlier in the Western world, not in terms of its relatively limited government, but its sweeping activism. A Hellfire missile aimed right at the federal fisc, Sanders would make Barack Obama’s economic agenda look like the work of a moderate Republican.
In foreign affairs, he’d bring to the Oval Office a sympathy for America’s enemies not often heard outside academia or Noam Chomsky reading groups.
He’s the American Jeremy Corbyn, a socialist true believer whose fantastical agenda reflects the dictates of dogma. The difference is that Corbyn effectively promised a return to socialist-imposed stagnation in Britain, whereas Bernie is inviting America to experience it for the first time.
His domestic program, according to Brian Riedl of the Manhattan Institute, would cost nearly $100 trillion over the next decade. It would more than double federal spending and blow past Western European social democracies in government profligacy. What would ordinarily be considered ambitious spending plans — his proposed increased expenditure expansion on Social Security, infrastructure, housing, education, and paid family leave — are dwarfed by his gargantuan commitments to his “Medicare for All” proposal, his federal job guarantee, and his climate plan.
He’d fundamentally transform the relationship of the individual to the state, which, among other things, would ban people from owning their own health insurance.
Sanders pitches his health-care proposal as “what every other major country on Earth is doing,” but no other place is as sweeping or as generous. “There is not a single country in the world,” health-care analyst Chris Pope writes, “that offers comprehensive coverage with an unlimited choice of providers, fully paid for by taxpayers, without insurer gatekeeping, service rationing or out-of-pocket payments.”
Sanders would drastically increase taxes and still fall short of funding his program. As Riedl notes, he’d boost the top federal income-tax rate to 52 percent from 37 percent, and the payroll-tax rate to 27.2 percent from 15.3 percent, as well as impose a 62 percent investment-tax rate on upper-income taxpayers.
His foreign policy bears the stamp of soft spots for the Communist regimes in Nicaragua and the Soviet Union. He called the killing of General Qasem Soleimani an assassination. He condemned the ouster of Bolivia’s leftist autocrat, Evo Morales, who has called Sanders “brother.” He won’t call Venezuelan strongman Nicolas Maduro a dictator but slams Benjamin Netanyahu as a “racist.” He has said his vote to authorize the war in Afghanistan after the September 11 attacks was a mistake.
Sanders does indeed have his charms. He’s sincere, consistent, and inarguably himself. He now has a step on frenemy Elizabeth Warren in the leftist lane in the primaries because he’s not as painfully calculating as she is. But make no mistake: Sanders is a socialist continuing his takeover attempt of the Democratic party to forge what he aptly calls a political revolution. He may be more polite than Trump, but he’s wildly outside the mainstream and a clear and present danger to the public welfare.
And Comrade Bernie attracts these kinds of supporters, summarized in this tweet:
The number one British single today in 1960:
The number one single today in 1978:
The number one British single today in 1995 came from a Swedish group that did a wacky country-ish song:
In a previous life, I worked at a Catholic college whose core values included social justice.
While that term was not always well defined, I’m pretty sure when it was determined to be a core value, the term didn’t mean what it has metastasized into now.
Social-justice ideology is turning higher education into an engine of progressive political advocacy, according to a new report by the National Association of Scholars. Left-wing activists, masquerading as professors, are infiltrating traditional academic departments or creating new ones—departments such as “Solidarity and Social Justice”—to advance their cause. They are entering the highest rung of college administration, from which perch they require students to take social-justice courses, such as “Native Sexualities and Queer Discourse” or “Hip-hop Workshop,” and attend social-justice events—such as a Reparations, Repatriation, and Redress Symposium or a Power and Privilege Symposium—in order to graduate.
But social-justice education is merely a symptom of an even deeper perversion of academic values: the cult of race and gender victimology, otherwise known as “diversity.” The diversity cult is destroying the very foundations of our civilization. It is worth first exploring, however, why social-justice education is an oxymoron.
Why shouldn’t an academic aspire to correcting perceived social ills? The nineteenth-century American land-grant universities and the European research universities were founded, after all, on the premise that knowledge helps society progress. But social justice is a different beast entirely. When a university pursues social justice, it puts aside its traditional claim to authority: the disinterested search for knowledge. We accord universities enormous privileges. Their denizens are sheltered from the hurly-burly of the marketplace on the assumption that they will pursue truth wherever it will take them, unaffected by political or economic pressures. The definition of social justice, however, is deeply political, entailing a large number of contestable claims about the causes of socioeconomic inequality. Social-justice proponents believe that those claims are settled, and woe to anyone who challenges them on a college campus. There are, however, alternative explanations—besides oppression and illegitimate power—for ongoing inequalities, taboo though they may be in academia.
A social-justice agenda, therefore, is a political commitment, and politics is not disinterested. Indeed, it is often tribal. Such tribalism caricatures political opponents and whitewashes political leaders, ignoring facts along the way, as shown both by the frenzied hostility to Donald Trump on the left and by his elevation to status of wise statesman and paragon of truth-telling by his most enthusiastic supporters, including in the conservative intelligentsia.
In his 1918 lecture, “Science as a Vocation,” Max Weber criticized the conflation of intellectual work with political action: “Whenever the man of science introduces his personal value judgment, a full understanding of the facts ceases.” The primary task of a teacher, Weber said, is to help his students recognize what Weber called “inconvenient” facts—inconvenient, that is, to the students’ party opinions. And for every party opinion, Weber observed, some facts are extremely inconvenient. Our political understanding of the world is partial; we will emphasize certain aspects of reality that buttress our values and deemphasize other aspects that contradict those values. According to Weber, when an academic pronounces on how one should act, he becomes a prophet or demagogue, neither of whom belong on the academic platform.
Weber adduced another reason for abjuring politics in the classroom. Amusingly—an adverb that does not usually modify the great sociologist—it has been rendered completely irrelevant by twentieth-century education trends. A professor should not inflict his politics on his students, Weber said, because those students may not challenge his authority: “It is somewhat too convenient to demonstrate one’s courage in taking a stand where the audience and possible opponents are condemned to silence.” To which one can only respond: if only! Leave aside such student abuse of the adults in charge as the scourging of Nicholas Christakis at Yale, of Bret Weinstein at Evergreen State College, and of Allison Stanger at Middlebury College, among others. The goal of the ordinary classroom today is to get ignorant students babbling about whatever idle thoughts pass through their heads without showing any intellectual deference to their professor. The number of professors who deserve such deference, however, is by now depressingly low, thanks to the triumph of social-justice ideology.
Of course, many people on college campuses today are still “condemned to silence”—not out of any respect for faculty authority but because they disagree with the premises of victim politics. Conservative Harvard law students, a professor there recently told me, refrain from challenging the regnant dogmas in class, terrified that their remarks may end up on social media and thus jeopardize their careers. This unwillingness to air inconvenient facts—facts such as the connection between family breakdown and poverty—is precisely the shrinking of intellectual freedom against which Weber warned. And if a Harvard law student, occupying the closest position to riches, power, and prestige that a university can guarantee, nevertheless feels acutely vulnerable in his dissent from the orthodoxies, what is a lowly undergraduate or even post-doc to do?
How bad is academic politicization? It is overt and unapologetic. At a recent law school seminar on race and the law, the teacher proudly announced at the beginning of the class session: “We are training social-justice warriors here.” Had the professor said: “We are training justice warriors here,” there would have been no problem. Justice warriors seek to realize one of the great aspirations of Western history: to be ruled by neutral principles, rather than tribal partisanship.
In the courtroom, justice warriors pursue this rule of law through the adversarial process, in which both sides are given equal opportunity to advance facts and arguments in their defense. Social justice, however, is opposed to procedural justice. In a year of ever more strident victim rhetoric, one of the most disturbing auguries for the future was the protests at Harvard and Yale law schools against the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. Hundreds of students from our most influential legal academies marched under the #MeToo rallying cry: Believe Survivors, meaning: any self-professed victim of sexual assault is entitled to automatic belief before any evidence is presented to, and sifted by, a neutral tribunal.
A disproportionate number of these elite law students will end up as federal judges, including on the Supreme Court. If they carry their “Believe Survivors” commitment to the bench, due process is doomed. Many criminal law professors have given up teaching rape law, since female students claim to be traumatized by the very thought of a criminal defense in a rape case. Moot court has been similarly constrained; many law students are no longer willing to take on the role of advocate for even an imaginary political incorrect defendant. Harvard’s dean of students, meantime, fired law professor Ronald Sullivan from his job as an undergraduate dorm master this year because of Sullivan’s legal representation of accused sexual assailant Harvey Weinstein. Students and administrators alike deemed this representation an existential threat to the safety of female students in Sullivan’s dorm. We will pass over in silence the maudlin theatrics of such a claim. Its substance is a triumph for social justice, but it is a dagger in the heart of justice. For Harvard’s dean to declare that representing a politically unpopular client renders someone unfit to supervise students betrays the university’s educational mission, which should be to teach students the preciousness of such cultural legacies as the presumption of innocence.
Social-justice pedagogy is driven by one overwhelming reality: the seemingly intractable achievement gap between whites and Asians on the one hand, and blacks and Hispanics on the other. Radical feminism, as well as gay and now trans advocacy, are also deeply intertwined with social-justice thinking on campus and off, as we have just seen. But race is the main impetus. Liberal whites are terrified that the achievement and behavior gaps will never close. So they have crafted a totalizing narrative about the racism that allegedly holds back black achievement.
The aforementioned race-and-the-law professor, after announcing the class’s social-justice commitments, added: “We engage in race talk here.” That was an understatement. “We talk about white fragility,” the professor explained. “What is the purpose of white fragility? What does it mean to live in a white culture, with white norms and a white power structure? What does it mean that we are in a culture dominated by white folks?”
A more pertinent question would be: What does any of this have to do with legal training? Living in a Western culture dominated by whites simply means that, if one is not white, one is in a minority; conversely, in Uganda, say, someone who is not black is in a minority. If being in a racial minority in a majority-white country is so inimical to one’s flourishing, plenty of places exist where a nonwhite person would be in the racial majority. Non-whites the world over are beating down the doors to get into Western countries, however, with no comparable corresponding traffic moving in the other direction. The very politicians and academics who in the morning denounce America’s lethal white supremacy in the afternoon demand that the country open its borders to every intending Third World immigrant, with no penalty for illegal entry. These two positions are contradictory: The U.S. cannot be at the same time the graveyard for nonwhite people and an essential beacon of freedom and life-preserving haven from oppression for these same people.
What are the “white norms” and “culture” that “race talk” seeks to deconstruct? Objectivity, a strong work ethic, individualism, a respect for the written word, perfectionism, and promptness, according to legions of diversity trainers and many humanities, social sciences, and even STEM faculty. Any act of self-discipline or deferred gratification that contributes to individual and generational success is now simply a manifestation of white supremacy. The New York Times recently singled out parents who had queued up hours early to visit a sought-after public school in New York City. “Why were white parents at the front of the line for the school tour?” asked the Times headline. The article answered: their white privilege, not their dedication to their children’s schooling.
The test for whether a norm is white and thus illegitimate is whether it has a disparate impact on blacks and Hispanics. Given the behavioral and academic skills gaps, every colorblind standard of achievement will have a disparate impact. The average black 12th-grader currently reads at the level of the average white eighth-grader. Math levels are similarly skewed. Truancy rates for black students are often four times as high as for white students. Inner-city teachers, if they are being honest, will describe the barely controlled anarchy in their classrooms—anarchy exacerbated by the phony conceit that school discipline is racist. In light of such disparities, it is absurd to attribute the absence of proportional representation in the STEM fields, say, to bias. And yet, STEM deans, faculty, and Silicon Valley tech firms claim that only implicit bias explains why 13 percent of engineering professors are not black. The solution to this lack of proportional representation is not greater effort on the part of students, according to social-justice and diversity proponents. Instead, it is watering down meritocratic standards. Professors are now taught about “inclusive grading” and how to assess writing without judging its quality, since such quality judgments maintain white language supremacy.
It is impossible to overstate how fierce and sweeping the attack on meritocracy is: every mainstream institution is either furiously revising its standards or finds itself in the crosshairs for failing to do so. STEM professional organizations decry traditional means of testing knowledge. Diverse students should be able to get credit for participation in a group project or for putting together a presentation for their family and friends on a scientific concept, say these STEM professionals. Faculty hiring criteria are also under pressure. A decade or so ago, the demand was to give credit toward tenure for editing an anthology. Substitutes for scholarship have only gotten more creative. At Bucknell University, a minority faculty member suggested that participating in an expletive-filled faculty list-serve discussion denouncing Amy Wax, an embattled University of Pennsylvania law professor, should count toward the “intellectual labor” of minority faculty and be included in the faculty merit review.
The most sweeping solution to the lack of racial diversity on the faculty is to get rid of departmental gatekeepers entirely, some of whom remain stubbornly wedded to traditional notions of accomplishment. The University of California at Davis has handed hiring decisions in several STEM fields over to a committee dominated by the university’s head diversity official and other bureaucrats. These bureaucrats have no idea how to assess scientific research. They are good, however, at diversity bean-counting.
The social-justice diversity bureaucracy has constructed a perpetual-motion machine that guarantees it eternal life. Minority students who have been catapulted by racial preferences into schools for which they are not academically prepared frequently struggle in their classes. The cause of those struggles, according to the social-justice diversity bureaucracy, is not academic mismatch; it is the lack of a critical mass of other minority students and faculty to provide refuge from the school’s overwhelming bigotry. And so, the school admits more minority students to create such a critical mass. Rather than raising minority performance, however, this new influx of diverse students lowers it, since the school has had to dig deeper into the applicant pool. The academic struggles and alienation of minority students will increase, along with the demand for more diversity bureaucrats, more segregated safe spaces, more victimology courses, more mental health workers, more diverse faculty, more lowered standards, and of course, more diversity student admits. And the cycle will start all over again.
Due to the diversity imperative, medical schools admit black students with MCAT scores that would be automatically disqualifying if presented by a white or Asian student. Their academic performance is just what one would expect. Time to lower standards further. An oncology professor at an Ivy League medical school was berated by a supervisor for giving an exam in pharmacology that was too “fact-based.” A cancer patient presumably wants his doctor to know the facts about drug interactions, however.
This same process of de-norming is happening in law enforcement. Across the country, district attorneys are refusing to enforce misdemeanor laws and judges are releasing convicted felons early because virtually every criminal-justice practice has a disparate impact on blacks. That disparate impact is due not to criminal-justice racism, but to blacks’ exponentially higher crime rates. This ongoing push for decriminalization and deincarceration will result in more black lives being lost to violent street crime. The liberal elites seemingly don’t give a damn, however, since black street-crime victims are killed overwhelmingly by other blacks, not by racist cops or white supremacists.
The ultimate social-justice solution to the skills and behavior gap is to remove the competition entirely. From the moment children enter school, they are berated for their white heteronormative patriarchal privilege if they fall outside a favored victim group. Any success that they enjoy is not due to their own efforts, they are told; it is due, rather, to the unfair advantages of a system deliberately designed to handicap minorities. Teachers are now advised to ignore white male students, since asking or answering questions in class is another mark of male supremacy.
The pariahs are getting the message. A mother in Connecticut recently asked her son why he was not making more of an effort in college. He answered that doing so would be a function of white privilege. Such an answer can simply be an excuse for laziness. But the relentless attack on any achievement that is not proportionally distributed among different identity groups cannot help but dampen some students’ willingness to compete. Journalist George Packer recently wrote a controversial article in The Atlantic agonizing over the racial-justice crusade that has engulfed the New York City school system. Packer family politics are such that his fourth-grade son “sobbed inconsolably” when Trump was elected president, and Packer sympathizes with the broad goals of the school system’s racial-justice crusade. But even he worries about the fanatical levelling of academic excellence in the name of racial equity. Packer’s daughter proclaimed that she wishes she weren’t white so as not to have slavery on her conscience. One way to atone for being white is to stop conforming to allegedly white norms of accomplishment. Some alpha males will continue striving anyway, and certainly when it comes to college, admissions mania on the part of white elites has not abated yet. But over time, expect a subtle deflation of effort among those who have fully internalized social-justice guilt.
The only precedent for our current resentment-driven war on the West’s magnificent achievements is the Chinese Cultural Revolution, and that didn’t turn out well. The Cultural Revolution, however, was waged mostly by the less educated against the more educated. The oddest feature of today’s social-justice crusade is that it is being prosecuted by the elites against themselves. Every college president, law firm managing partner, and Fortune 500 CEO would rather theatrically blame himself and his colleagues for phantom bigotry than speak honestly about the real causes of ongoing racial inequality: family breakdown and an underclass culture that mocks learning and the conformity to bourgeois values as acting “white.” Anti-racism has become the national religion, with the search for instances of racism to back up that religion becoming ever more desperate. Over the last year alone, ladies’ flats, sweaters, keychains, and Adidas and Nike sneakers have been purged from the marketplace for their imaginary connection to racist symbols. Innocent schoolboys have been tarred as bigots by the national media, and a robust traffic in hate-crime hoaxes has thrived.
In fact, America is among the least racist countries on the planet. There is not a single mainstream institution not trying to hire and promote as many underrepresented minorities as possible. Conservative philanthropists and corporations spend billions each year on social-uplift programs to close the achievement gap. Taxpayer dollars are as liberally distributed from government coffers. We so take these efforts for granted that we don’t even see them; they have no effect on the dominant narrative about white indifference and exploitation.
We are in uncharted territory. How a civilization survives with so much contempt for itself is an open question. It is not wholly fanciful to see America’s drug-addicted malaise and rising mortality rates as a consequence, in part, of the nonstop denunciation of the white-male patriarchy. White identity politics is the inevitable result of this nonstop attack, and a logical one: if every other group celebrates its racial identity, why shouldn’t whites, if only as a matter of self-defense?
The claim that every feature of our world rests on racial oppression—the thesis not just of social-justice education, but of the entire Democratic presidential primary field and of the New York Times’ high school-destined 1619 project—undermines the moral legitimacy of our country. All accumulation of wealth is suspect; every technological breakthrough and business success becomes nothing more than rank exploitation.
Even Max Weber might not have foreseen where the politicization of education would land us. He would certainly have been astounded that the hard sciences are now worrying about microaggressions and heteronormativity. We are jeopardizing the creation of new knowledge. But the most important function of schooling is to pass on an inheritance, as Michael Oakeshott explained, and that function is now all but obliterated. Serious humanistic learning has been decimated. When I speak at college campuses, I ask students what their majors are and what their favorite classes have been. Their answers are profoundly depressing: a shallow stew of communications studies, psychology, presidential debate-scoring masking as political science, and syllabi featuring comic books and the young adult literature of dysfunction. The focus of student attention is relentlessly presentist.
Our cultural past is full of wonderful mysteries, however: how, for example, did Western literature evolve from Medieval romance to the realistic novel—the romance peopled by allegorical figures who roam Classical landscapes, the novel showing acute attention to individual character and the details of everyday life? What did such a change mean for how human beings think of themselves in the world? The evolution of form, whether in literature, art, or music, is a grand adventure story, whereby we trace the ever-changing reflection of human experience in the mirror of human imagination. The greatest sin of the social-justice and diversity crusade is to teach students to hate this cultural inheritance. The social-justice crusaders are stripping the future of everything that gives human life meaning: beauty, sublimity, and wit.
The number one single today in 1960 topped the charts for the second time:
It’s not a secret that the number one album today in 1973 was Carly Simon’s “No Secrets”:
Today in 1973, Eric Clapton performed in concert for the first time in several years at the Rainbow Theatre in London:
This Friday I was at a small gathering of Christian men and women and heard a story that stopped me short. One of the attendees was a Christian businessman who employed mainly working-class young men. When he had spoken to his workers about their holiday plans, a full fourth of the men he talked to didn’t have any plans at all. Thanksgiving or Christmas or New Year’s Day was just another day. They’d go home, watch television, play video games, and drink—all alone.
As soon as he said those words, I thought of a chart. I know that sounds strange, but stay with me. It’s from 2017, and it comes from Sen. Mike Lee’s invaluable Social Capital Project. It should transform the way you think about America’s epidemic of “deaths of despair.” It represents the demographics of overdoses. …
As the slides progress, you notice a few things immediately—men overdose far more then women, single men overdose more than married men, and single men with only a high school education or GED overdose at a simply staggering rate. That rate is horrifying regardless of whether a person was single and never married or single and divorced (though, interestingly, the overdose rate for a widowed person was substantially lower).
Speaking of stories that will stop you short, after I heard my new friend tell his story, I read a wrenching essay by Nick Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn. Called “Who Killed the Knapp Family,” it’s adapted from their new book, Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope. The essay takes the deaths-of-despair crisis and personalizes it, describing how it impacts specific families in a town that Kristof knows well. It begins:
Chaos reigned daily on the No. 6 school bus, with working-class boys and girls flirting and gossiping and dreaming, brimming with mischief, bravado and optimism. Nick rode it every day in the 1970s with neighbors here in rural Oregon, neighbors like Farlan, Zealan, Rogena, Nathan and Keylan Knapp.
They were bright, rambunctious, upwardly mobile youngsters whose father had a good job installing pipes. The Knapps were thrilled to have just bought their own home, and everyone oohed and aahed when Farlan received a Ford Mustang for his 16th birthday.
Yet today about one-quarter of the children on that No. 6 bus are dead, mostly from drugs, suicide, alcohol or reckless accidents. Of the five Knapp kids who had once been so cheery, Farlan died of liver failure from drink and drugs, Zealan burned to death in a house fire while passed out drunk, Rogena died from hepatitis linked to drug use and Nathan blew himself up cooking meth. Keylan survived partly because he spent 13 years in a state penitentiary.
That’s a story of unimaginable pain and tragedy. It breaks your heart.
I’ve been writing about deaths of despair since evidence of the phenomenon emerged on the national stage. Going back to college, I’ve been involved in ministries targeting exactly the young men most at-risk for alcoholism, drug overdoses, and suicide. And I’m convinced that the more we politicize the crisis rather than personalize it and spiritualize it, the more we’ll miss the mark.
No, I don’t mean to say that policy doesn’t matter. Economic opportunity matters. Prison reform matters. Quality health care matters. But I’ve also seen well-intentioned policies backfire, and I’ve seen governments spend vast sums to no effect.
When it comes to young men who not only never had a father, they never had a single positive male role model in their entire life—or spent any time with a functioning family—how do they possibly know how to sustain a healthy, loving relationship with a young woman?
When it comes to young men without male role models, you’re speaking of young men who not only don’t know how to build a family, they don’t know how to build a career. I’ve written about this before, but many years ago my wife and I were involved in a young adult ministry that—by God’s grace—enjoyed great success in reaching the unchurched kids from the trailer parks in our rural Kentucky community.
One thing I learned was that lives were changed through a sustained, dedicated, loving community. A functioning community doesn’t just provide love and resources. Indeed, if your ministry was defined by hugs and handouts, it would be ripe for exploitation. People would smile and accept both, but their lives wouldn’t fundamentally change. A functioning community includes elements of discipline and instruction as well.
The love has to be persistent. When a kid didn’t show up at church after he’d been attending for a while, we’d sometimes dash out between Sunday school and worship services and head straight to their homes, knock on their doors and ask if they were okay. We’d offer them a ride to worship and invite them to lunch after services. We jokingly called our car the “soul repo van.” But the goal was simple—let them know that they were not alone. They were part of a community.
And the instruction has to be real. People do not magically become diligent students or productive workers simply because someone loved them. Opportunity isn’t always easy in this country, but opportunity exists. A person has to be taught how to seize it, and they have to practice the basic life habits necessary to follow through.
Partisan politics is terrible at love. Parties are centered around their coalitions and focus on meeting their coalition’s needs. The Democrats are a party of single women. Republicans are increasingly a party of working-class men. Remember the Obama campaign slides chronicling the “Julia” “showing all the ways Obama’s policy would help Julia (and her son Zachary) from the cradle to the grave? But where was Zachary’s father? He doesn’t figure in the story at all. He’s the invisible man.
Partisan politics is often terrible at policy—providing a festival of overreactions that can do as much (or more) harm than good and providing false promises that eventually serve only to embitter a disappointed populace. For example, the desire to better treat pain led the Veterans Health Administration to launch a “pain is the 5th vital sign” initiative in the late 1990s, and other government agencies incentivized aggressive pain management—acts that led to countless unnecessary opioid prescriptions. We hear a lot about the role of big pharma in the opioid crisis. How much do we hear about the role of big government?
The modern populist outcry against the government—“this is happening because they didn’t care about you”—is often exactly wrong. Sometimes social ills are exacerbated because they did care. They just cared in a destructive way.
I find myself in frequent disagreement with those who argue that government policy should be the central focus of the battle against deaths of despair. Kristof writes movingly about the incredibly deep-seated pain and dysfunction in the families he highlights, then turns to government solutions like government-provided preschool, job retraining, and large-scale drug treatment programs.
Yet the evidence for the benefits of programs like Head Start is mixed, we’ve tried worker retraining programs for years, and they’ve largely failed. And while more and better (public and private) drug treatment is necessary—and perhaps holds out the best immediate hope at decreasing drug deaths—it doesn’t come close to addressing the larger social and cultural pathologies that have spawned such widespread loneliness and despair.
It’s fashionable to scorn personal responsibility as a solution to challenges that are so profound and deep. And there is certainly something perverse about saying that the solution to the challenges of fatherlessness is for young men who’ve been deprived of male role models to collectively act with a level of grit, character, and determination that they’ve never seen modeled by any man before. Individually, yes. Collectively, no.
But there’s a different kind of personal responsibility. That’s the responsibility of the privileged, of the faithful, and it was articulated by Jesus in Matthew 25:
I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me.’ Then the righteous will answer him, saying, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you drink? And when did we see you a stranger and welcome you, or naked and clothe you? And when did we see you sick or in prison and visit you?’ And the King will answer them, ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.’
America is full of tens of millions of affluent believers—and certainly not just Christians. Perhaps it’s time to shift the paradigm on personal responsibility. Instead of focusing on the personal responsibility of the hurting and the vulnerable, let’s look at the personal responsibility of the rich and the powerful.
I felt convicted after my Friday meeting. I went home and told my wife the story of struggling men, alone on the holidays. Her response was immediate. “What can we do?” I realized that as my life got busy, as we had kids and our careers flourished, that our engagement with the most vulnerable members of our community had diminished. The “soul repo van” languished in the garage.
That’s on me. Life can’t get too busy to obey God. And while the verse in Genesis that titles this piece refers to Adam and Eve, it still speaks a truth beyond husband and wife. It speaks to the truth of friendship and community. It is not good for a man to be alone.
It figures after War and Peace-size Presty the DJ entries the past few days, today’s is relatively short.
The number one album today in 1974, a few months after the death of its singer, was “You Don’t Mess Around with Jim”:
The number one single today in 1974 introduced the world to the word “pompatus”:
Today in 1982, Bob Geldof was arrested after a disturbance aboard a 727 that had been grounded for five hours:
The number one album today in 1964 was “Ring of Fire: The Best of Johnny Cash,” the first country album to reach the top of the album chart:
The number one single today in 1964, whatever the words were:
The 2014 NFC Championship Game between the Green Bay Packers and Seattle Seahawks will live in infamy because of the Packers’ collapse, but the game should have been over before halftime. While Green Bay led 16-0 barely 20 minutes into the game, the margin should have been much more lopsided.
On Green Bay’s first possession, Aaron Rodgers believed he had drawn the Seahawks offside so he threw it deep to Davante Adams but was intercepted in the end zone by Richard Sherman. Moments later, the Packers took over at Seattle’s 19 on an interception by Ha Ha Clinton-Dix but the drive stalled just inside the 2 and they settled for a field goal. The Packers took over at Seattle’s 23 when Brad Jones forced a fumble on the ensuing kickoff but the drive stalled at the 2 and they settled for a field goal. Leading 16-0, Green Bay took over at its 44 following another interception by Clinton-Dix but Rodgers returned the favor. In all, the Packers turned four first-half takeaways into just six points and settled for a 16-0 halftime lead.
Seattle got on the board on a fake field goal, with punter Jon Ryan throwing a 19-yard touchdown to lineman Garry Gilliam. Still, with a 19-7 lead, Green Bay appeared to clinch the victory on Morgan Burnett’s interception with 5:04 to play. Outside linebacker Julius Peppers told Burnett to get to the turf – and Burnett did, giving up a likely touchdown that would have driven a final stake into Seattle. Instead, three runs by Eddie Lacy went absolutely nowhere and the Packers punted with 4 minutes to go.
The wheels, of course, fell off from there. Seattle quarterback Russell Wilson scored from the 1, Brandon Bostick fumbled the onside kick rather than letting Jordy Nelson field it, Lynch rumbled in from 24 yards for the go-ahead score and Clinton-Dix played as if his cleats were stuck in concrete in giving up the two-point play that gave Seattle a 22-19 lead. A gimpy Rodgers drove the Packers to the tying field goal and overtime. Green Bay, however, never saw the ball in the extra period. Seattle drove 87 yards for the winning touchdown, with Wilson beating a blitz with a 35-yard touchdown pass to Jermaine Kearse against Tramon Williams.
“You feel like it’s a waste of seven, eight months,” left guard Josh Sitton said a day after the game. “What’s the point of getting this far? I’d have rather not even made the playoffs.
“We kicked their ass up and down the field all day,” Sitton continued. “And there’s no reason we shouldn’t have won the game. Literally one of 10 plays you can pick that if we get it, we win the game. It’s frustrating when you should have won the game and you’re the better team. I thought we were the better team all day except for 3 minutes.”
Added receiver Randall Cobb: “We just fell apart. You look up with 5 minutes left, you say, ‘There’s no way you can lose this game.’ And it just seems like we did everything to lose that game in that last little bit.”
A Rodgers vs. Tom Brady matchup in the Super Bowl would have been a game for the ages. Instead, the Packers wasted a chance to win a second Super Bowl in the Rodgers era. This season, with seemingly everything going Green Bay’s way, will Rodgers ever be in a better position to win a second title than he is this season?
Green Bay leads the series 20-9, including 2-1 in the playoffs. The 2003 playoff game at Lambeau Field went to overtime. Seattle won the toss and quarterback Matt Hasselbeck famously proclaimed, “We want the ball and we’re going to score.” Instead, he threw a pick-six to Al Harris.
“I was just happy I caught the ball. There’s guys who played with me who would tell you my ball skills weren’t that good,” Harris said recently.
In the 2007 playoffs, Seattle took a 14-0 lead just 4 minutes into the game before being buried alive 42-20 at snowy Lambeau Field. Ryan Grant ran for 201 yards and three touchdowns.
In Week 3 of the 2012 season, Seattle beat the Packers 14-12 on Wilson’s “Fail Mary” touchdown pass to Golden Tate that looked like a game-ending interception by M.D. Jennings. Shortly thereafter, the league struck a deal to bring its regular officials back following a contract dispute.
Green Bay has won eight consecutive home games in the series. Seattle’s last win at Lambeau Field came in 1999, a 27-7 romp in which Brett Favre threw four interceptions and Seattle won with Jon Kitna throwing for just 109 yards.
I got to see this across from where I was sitting:
As for Rodgers, Mike Tanier writes:
The more things change in Green Bay, the more Aaron Rodgers stays the same.
Over the last two years, the Packers have swapped out coaches and general managers, revamped their playbook, drastically altered their spending philosophy and completely rebuilt their defense. They’ve changed just about everything except Rodgers and his core entourage: top receiver Davante Adams, multipurpose wingman Aaron Jones, bodyguards David Bakhtiari and Bryan Bulaga.
The massive overhaul allowed the Packers to escape four years of 10-6 (at best) doldrums to finish 13-3, placing them two games away from the Super Bowl. The organization did its part. Now it’s time for Rodgers to do Tom Brady stuff, Hall of Famer stuff, $134 million contract stuff.
The next few weeks are a chance for Rodgers to live up to his reputation after a few too many seasons of coasting on it.
Now, there are two schools of thought when it comes to Rodgers, just as there are two schools of thought about every other NFL quarterback:
The pro-Rodgers argument: He has been the league’s best pure passer and playmaker since 2011, and he has only looked ordinary for long stretches of the last three to five seasons because of stale game plans and weak supporting casts.
The anti-Rodgers argument: His accuracy and big-play capability decline incrementally each year, but he has tuned out coaches and ignored open receivers for so long and has such a huge salary and gift for passive-aggressive blame deflection that no one in Green Bay has the authority or courage to force him to adjust.
The truth about every quarterback always rests somewhere between the capes and the critics. But in this case, the anti-Rodgers camp makes a lot of valid points.
Rodgers finished 12th in the NFL in passer rating this season, right between Deshaun Watson and Carson Wentz. He finished 13th in Football Outsiders DVOA, between Watson and Philip Rivers. He finished 21st in ESPN’s QBR, between Giants rookie Daniel Jones and Brady, who had a miserable season by his standards. Rodgers, fully healthy and freed from the predictable Mike McCarthy offense that allegedly held him back, had a middle-of-the-pack season by any statistical standard.
Blame Rodgers’ “lack of weapons” if you like, but he threw for fewer yards, touchdowns and a lower completion rate than Wentz, whose receivers and running backs were pulled from the Pat’s King of Steaks line after a Flyers game. Rodgers had Adams (for most of the year), Jones, a serviceable Jimmy Graham and familiar-if-ordinary receivers like Geronimo Allison and Marquez Valdes-Scantling to throw to, yet Derek Carr outperformed him statistically while throwing to a castoff Ravens tight end and a 5’10” fifth-round pick.
A deeper dive into the data makes Rodgers look even worse. Per Pro Football Reference, Rodgers led the NFL with a Bad Throw Percentage of 21.2 percent. It’s wise to be skeptical of newfangled, subjective-sounding stats like Bad Throw Percentage, but many of the names just below Rodgers on the list (Jameis Winston, Josh Allen, Jared Goff, Mason Rudolph, Old Man Brady) earned reputations this season for throwing too many gopher balls.
Rodgers finished second to Brady with 31 throwaways, per Pro Football Reference; being a veteran and giving up on a play is one thing, but doing it about twice per game when you are supposed to be one of the NFL’s best playmakers is another. And Rodgers was one of 15 qualified quarterbacks with a Dropped Pass rate of less than 5 percent: again, his targets were not to blame for his ordinary numbers.
Dig a little deeper, and some instructive trends emerge.
Rodgers’ efficiency rate in the first quarters of games was 123.5, with nine touchdowns, zero interceptions and a completion percentage of 71.0. In the second quarter, his efficiency rating plunged all the way to 77.2, with a completion rate of 54.6, before balancing out at 94.3 (passer rating) and 62.8 (completion percentage) in the second half. To clarify that heap of statistical splits: Rodgers put up Patrick Mahomes stats in the first quarter and Dwayne Haskins numbers in the second quarter before balancing out in the above-average neighborhood for the rest of the game.
Those splits jibe with what Packers fans saw on the field all year. Rodgers usually looked efficient, and sometimes spectacular, while working within the structure of Matt LaFleur’s offense on the first few Packers drives. But then he became the self-indulgent old stage actor who refused to stick to the script and began improvising. While there were few overt signs of the Rodgers-LaFleur drama some of us anticipated/worried about/licked our chops for when the 40-year-old coach replaced McCarthy, there were too many long stretches in which Rodgers turned up his nose at his initial passing options, scrambled around directing traffic, overthrew a bomb he would have completed in 2014 and scowled impatiently as he walked to the sideline.
The result of Rodgers’ Jekyll-and-Hyde season might have been another 10-6 finish (or worse) if the Packers running game and rebuilt defense didn’t lift them to victory over Washington, the Lions (twice) and the Vikings (twice).
The 36-year-old Rodgers set a Hall of Fame standard for himself from 2010 to ’14. He has fallen well short of that standard in recent seasons. The Packers spent the last two years eliminating the reasons/excuses for his decline. Now it’s time for him to perform to that standard again, because the Packers won’t be able to beat their playoff opponents by scoring 20 to 24 points and trying to squat on the lead.
That doesn’t mean Rodgers must do everything single-handedly. Just the opposite: He must evolve the way the best-of-the-best are supposed to late in their careers. Brady replaced Randy Moss rocketry with a much more surgical approach. Peyton Manning changed teams and coaches at age 36 with his trademark professionalism and reached two Super Bowls. John Elway settled into a run-oriented system at age 36 and won two Super Bowls. They all met new coaches, weapons and realities about their declining skills halfway by learning to thrive in new systems or environments.
If Rodgers cannot lead the Packers to the Super Bowl this year, they’ll likely do even more to accommodate him next year: draft a half-dozen receivers, hold closed-door grievance-airings with LaFleur, sign Antonio Brown (that would go over swell) or whatever. That’s what teams do when they have over $100 million and a decade of organizational identity invested in their quarterback.
But if Rodgers can’t take this Packers team to the Super Bowl, it really means the next thing that must soon change in Green Bay is the quarterback. And it will all be because the quarterback himself refuses to change.
I wonder if Tanier wrote this a dozen years ago about Brett Favre. Change the names of the receivers and running backs, and you could have said basically the same things.
For what it’s worth, this year’s team’s fortunes seem much more dependent on how the defense does, and I predict the defense, not Rodgers, will decide the Packers’ fate Sunday.
The number one British single today in 1957 was the same single as the previous week …
… though performed by a different act:
The number one British single today in 1958:
The number one album for the fifth consecutive week today in 1976 was “Chicago IX,” which was actually “Chicago’s Greatest Hits”:
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 