Tag Archives: Bret Stephens

An Absolutely On-Target Essay

I frequently disagree with the conservative New York Times opinion writer Bret Stephens, but a while back, he honed in on an under-appreciated aspect of America’s current dysfunctions--our lack of authentic argumentation.

Before you decide that both Stephens and I are looney–after all, sometimes it seems as if all we Americans do is fight one another–let me emphasize that this is another of my frequent diatribes about the importance of using terminology accurately. Because whatever we want to label the interminable angry and hostile encounters between MAGA ideologues and the multiple factions of citizens appalled by and opposed to them, I don’t think you can properly call them arguments.

Stephens attributes his own appreciation of proper argumentation to his time at the University of Chicago, an institution that requires its undergraduates to read the books that formed the Western tradition, to familiarize themselves with a philosophy and literature that was notable for argumentation meant to persuade, not put down.

Where did the anti-Federalists differ from the Federalists, or Locke from Hobbes, or Rousseau from them both? The curriculum made us appreciate that the best way to contend with an argument was to engage with it rather than denounce it, and that the prerequisite to engagement was close and sympathetic reading. Reading Marx didn’t turn me into a Marxist. But it did give me an appreciation of the power of his prose.

I don’t think Stephens is wrong or exaggerating when he focuses on the importance of genuine argumentation to democracy.

What is the soul of the Western tradition? Argument. Socrates goes around Athens investigating the claims of the supposedly wise and finds that the people who claim to know things don’t. The Lord threatens to destroy Sodom for its alleged wickedness, but Abraham reproaches and bargains with Him — that for the sake of 10 righteous people He must not destroy the city.

The virtue of Chicago’s curriculum is that it introduces students to a “coherent philosophical tradition based in reasoned argument and critical engagement that explained not only how we had arrived at our governing principles but also gave us the tools to debate, preserve or change them.” (In other words, students who were required to immerse themselves in these works received an actual education, rather than a job training credential; a distinction entirely lost on Indiana’s pathetic legislature. But I digress…)

It’s hard to argue with Stephens’ observation that the Internet and the digital transformation of the way we receive information has facilitated our ability to inhabit carefully curated bubbles of ideology and “facts” confirming our biases. But he argues that the deleterious effects might have been mitigated “if we hadn’t first given up on the idea of a culture of argument rooted in a common set of ideas.”

Which brings me to Charlie Kirk.

Kirk, to my way of thinking, was not a real conservative, at least in the American sense. The point of our conservatism is to conserve a liberal political order — open, tolerant, limited and law-abiding. It’s not about creating a God-drenched regime centered on a cult of personality leader waging zero-sum political battles against other Americans viewed as immoral enemies…

It’s too bad that Kirk, raised in a Chicago suburb, didn’t attend the University of Chicago. It wouldn’t have hurt getting thrashed in a political debate by smarter peers. Or learning to appreciate the power and moral weight of views he didn’t share. Or recognizing that the true Western tradition lies more in its skepticism than in its certitude.

But the larger tragedy by far is that it’s America itself that’s losing sight of all that. In the vacuum that follows, the gunshots ring out.

That last sentence sums up the central point of the essay–at least as I read it. A citizenry that has lost the ability to engage in genuine arguments–and the operative word there is “engage”–expresses its disputes and disagreements with insults and violence.

The utter inability to engage in actual debate may be the most prominent characteristic of the incompetent clowns who dominate the Trump administration, and it may explain why the administration eschews civility and relies on invective and militarized violence rather than efforts at persuasion.

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What Real Conservatives Understand

Bret Stephens is a conservative columnist for the New York Times. He recently penned an essay titled “Democracy Dies in Dumbness”–a take-off the Washington Post’s slogan “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” That essay made two points I’ve tried to convey here.

Genuine conservatives, like Stephens, are appalled by what is being done by the MAGA radicals who are routinely identified as conservative. MAGA, Trump and Musk are anything but, and to label them such is an affront to actual conservatives. The second point–and the one amply documented in Stephens’ essay– is that the most obvious element of this horrific administration is its profound stupidity.

A lot of people, especially well-meaning “libruls,” strain to find some nefarious logic to the disasters Trump is perpetrating in Washington–some evidence that he’s an “evil genius,” or at the very least operating with some sort of intent, misplaced though it may be. To this I say bullfeathers! He’s ignorant, very stupid and also very clearly mentally ill. (I leave it to each of you to decide what that says about those in his devoted MAGA base.)

Stephens detailed much of the ignorance:

It used to be common knowledge — not just among policymakers and economists but also high school students with a grasp of history — that tariffs are a terrible idea. The phrase “beggar thy neighbor” meant something to regular people, as did the names of Senator Reed Smoot and Representative Willis Hawley. Americans broadly understood how much their 1930 tariff, along with other protectionist and isolationist measures, did to turn a global economic crisis into another world war. Thirteen successive presidents all but vowed never to repeat those mistakes.

Until Donald Trump. Until him, no U.S. president had been so ignorant of the lessons of history. Until him, no U.S. president had been so incompetent in putting his own ideas into practice.

Stephens labels Trump “a willful, erratic and heedless president,” and says he’s prepared to risk both the U.S. and the global economy “to make his ideological point.” I disagree with him only on his evident belief that Trump has an “ideological point.”  I really doubt that Trump could spell ideological, let alone that he possess an articulable “point” he wants to make. He acts solely out of grievance, racism, anger and an insatiable desire for attention–as the inconsistency of his impulsive and damaging actions show, there is no coherent belief system motivating any of this.

Stephens does take on the obvious stupidity:

The Department of Government Efficiency won’t end well. It is neither a department nor efficient — and “government efficiency” is, by Madisonian design, an oxymoron. A gutted I.R.S. work force won’t lower your taxes; it will delay your refund. Mass firings of thousands of federal employees won’t result in a more productive work force; it will mean a decade of litigation and billions of dollars in legal fees. High-profile eliminations of wasteful spending (some real, others not) won’t make a dent in federal spending; they’ll mask the untouchable drivers of our $36 trillion debt: Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and defense.

Just as you don’t cure cancer by shutting down cancer research, walking away from NATO won’t achieve greater security for anyone, including ourselves. What passes for Trumpian foreign policy has already done incalculable damage. His “policy”– centered on cozying up to Russia– is monumentally stupid; as Stephens notes, what Trump has achieved internationally is a Russia that sees even less reason to settle, a Europe that sees more reason to go its own way, a China that believes America will eventually fold, and a once-again betrayed Ukraine that will have even less reason to trust international guarantees of its security.

In his last paragraph, Stephens makes a point with which I entirely agree.

Trump’s critics are always quick to see the sinister sides of his actions and declarations. An even greater danger may lie in the shambolic nature of his policymaking. Democracy may die in darkness. It may die in despotism. Under Trump, it’s just as liable to die in dumbness.

I just hope that there will be a government to salvage when we finally eject Trump, Musk, the clown show they’ve assembled and the sorry bunch of Christian Nationalists and elected invertebrates who continue to enable them.

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Who Are We?

Bret Stephens is a conservative columnist for the New York Times. There are policy positions he takes with which I disagree, but he’s an old-fashioned conservative–that is to say, sane–and on occasion he writes something with which I emphatically do agree.

He recently wrote a column about the Russian assault on Ukraine, arguing that this is a moment for America to believe in itself again. 

Being true to ourselves doesn’t require pretending that our history has been an unblemished story of righteousness. 

Who are we, with our long history of invasions and interventions, to lecture Vladimir Putin about respecting national sovereignty and international law? Who are we, with our domestic record of slavery and discrimination, our foreign record of supporting friendly dictators, and the ongoing injustices of American life, to hold ourselves up as paragons of freedom and human rights? Who are we, after 198 years of the Monroe Doctrine, to try to stop Russia from delineating its own sphere of influence? Who are we, with our habitual ignorance, to meddle in faraway disputes about which we know so little?

Such questions are often put by people on the left, but there’s a powerful strain of the same thinking on the right. When Bill O’Reilly asked Donald Trump in 2017 how he could “respect” Putin when the Russian president is “a killer,” the president replied: “We’ve got a lot of killers. What, you think our country’s so innocent?”

As Stephens reminds us, countries are better–and better off– when they proceed with “more self-awareness, less moral arrogance, greater intellectual humility and an innate respect for the reality of unintended consequences.”

But neither people nor countries are well served by the defects of those virtues: self-awareness that becomes a recipe for personal or policy paralysis, intellectual humility that leads to moral confusion, a fear of unknown risks that becomes an asset to an enemy. These are some of the deeper risks we now face in the contest with the Kremlin.

Stephens analyzes the reasons for Putin’s fixation on Ukraine, and the self-deceptions that have motivated his decision to “re-unify” at least this part of the old USSR. But then he turns to the United States–and what we want to believe about ourselves.

The United States used to have self-belief. Our civilization, multiple generations of Americans believed, represented human progress. Our political ideals — about the rule of law, human rights, individual liberties, democratic governance — were ideals for all people, including those beyond our borders. Our literature spoke to the universal human experience; our music to the universal soul. When we fought wars, it was for grand moral purposes, not avaricious aims. Even our worst blunders, as in Vietnam, stemmed from defensible principles. Our sins were real and numerous, but they were correctable flaws, not systemic features.

It goes without saying that this self-belief — like all belief — was a mixture of truth and conceit, idealism and hubris, vision and blindness. It led us to make all sorts of errors, the acute awareness of which has become the dominant strain of our intellectual life. But it also led us to our great triumphs: Yorktown and Appomattox; the 13th and 19th Amendments; the Berlin Airlift and the fall of the Berlin Wall; the Marshall Plan and PEPFAR.

The only place I departed from Stephens’ analysis was with his concluding paragraph:

These victories were not the result of asking, “Who are we?” They came about by asking, “Who but us?” In the crisis of Ukraine, which is really a crisis of the West, we might start asking the second question a little more often than the first.

My own conclusion is that “who but us?” reeks of self-aggrandizement. What has so impressed me about the way President Biden has managed this crisis is that he hasn’t pontificated about America’s obligation as the only country that can stop aggression. Instead, he has taken to heart that old management axiom that you can get a lot done if you don’t worry about who gets the credit. Biden has re-invigorated NATO and forged agreement among democratic countries (and even some that aren’t so democratic) to employ carefully targeted sanctions likely to destroy Russia’s economy and ensure that the oligarchs around Putin experience a world of hurt.

The pertinent question is the one Stephens first identified: who are we? And the answer is, we are a country with sound and valuable ideals–granted, a country that often falls short of those ideals–a country with a majority of citizens who are devoted to those ideals, but who are currently demoralized by a loud and angry tribal minority that is working to abandon the principles the rest of us struggle to achieve.

Ukraine is fighting Russia. We are fighting the enemy within.

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Describing Mike Pence

Every Monday, Gail Collins and Bret Stephens have a “conversation” on the op-ed page of the New York Times. As I have noted on several occasions, I am a huge fan of Gail Collins, who argues for the liberal side in those conversations, and although I disagree with Bret Stephens–representing the conservative side– on a number of issues (not all), he makes me nostalgic for the time when Republicans a/k/a conservatives could be engaged in actual discussions. Today,  they prefer to emulate monkeys throwing poo….

Unlike the inarticulate Trump Republicans hurling verbal poo, Stephens also has a real talent for witty invective, and that talent was on display in his conversation with Collins last Monday.

The column was titled “The Mike Pence Saga Tells Us More Than We Want to Know,” and after touching on a number of other issues, including New York’s mayoral primary and Trump’s Ohio rally, the conversation turned to Indiana’s ex-Governor and America’s ex-Vice-President, Mike Pence.

Here’s that portion of their back-and-forth:

Bret: You know, I probably spend more time thinking about Mike Pence than I ought to, given my high blood pressure. He reminds me of Mr. Collins, the unctuous clergyman in “Pride and Prejudice” who’s always bowing and scraping to the overbearing, tasteless, talentless Lady Catherine de Bourgh while he lords it over the Bennet family because he stands to inherit their estate. Alternatively, Pence could be a character out of Dickens, with some ridiculous name like Wackford Squeers or Mr. Pumblechook.

Gail: Wow, great analogies. Plus, it is indeed possible you spend more time thinking about Pence than you ought to.

Bret: Here’s a guy who makes his career on the Moral Majority wing of the Republican Party, until he hitches his wagon to the most immoral man ever to win a big-ticket presidential nomination. Phyllis Schlafly deciding to elope with Larry Flynt would have made more sense. Then Pence spends four years as the most servile, toadying, obsequious, fawning, head-nodding, yes-sirring, anything-you-say-boss vice president in history. He’ll do anything for Trump’s love — but not, as the singer Meat Loaf might have said, attempt to steal the presidential election in broad daylight.

For this, Trump rewards Pence by throwing him to a mob, which tried to hunt him down and hang him. But even now, Pence can’t get crosswise with his dark lord, so the idea of him ever taking the party in an anti-Trump direction seems like a fantasy.

Those of us who follow such things have watched as Pence tries to appeal both to Trumpers and to the majority of Americans who were appalled at efforts to withhold certification of the election results. He is continuing his adulation of his “dark lord” while insisting that his courageous fidelity to the Constitution kept him from refusing to perform his electoral duty. That balancing act is unlikely to mollify either the crazies who form the base of today’s GOP or anyone who spent four years observing Mike Pence. (It’s especially unlikely to endear him to Indiana voters, who found his preference for pontificating over governing during the prior four years very tiring).

Pence’s effort to cast himself as a defender of the Constitution is coming at the same time as Bill Barr’s equally tardy effort to distance himself from the Big Lie. (“It’s all bullshit.”)

Neither man is very persuasive, but the efforts are instructive. When two of his biggest sycophants attempt to distance themselves from the disaster that is Trump, it is a clear sign that his influence is waning–that those who were happy to carry his water when he was in office don’t expect him to regain power or influence–or be in any position to do them any good. (It’s too little, too late–Bill Barr is never going to regain the respect of the legal community, and Pence never had the respect of anyone other than a few naive fundamentalists.)

Wackford Squeers sounds about right…

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Beyond Left And Right

Bret Stephens–the New York Times columnist– is too conservative for my taste, by which I mean I tend to disagree with his positions on issues. But he is conservative within a traditional American liberal democratic framework.

If that observation seems odd to our contemporary American ears, it is because the language of politics has been debased. Years of Rush Limbaugh and his clones turned “liberal” into an epithet devoid of meaningful content, and the radicalization of the GOP has confused “conservative” with Neanderthal.

Which brings me back to a recent Stephens column with which I do agree.Mostly.

Stephens says the U.S. needs a Liberal Party. He dutifully recites the reasons third parties routinely fail in a system that is set around a two-party duopoly, but he also argues that both the GOP and the Democratic Party are historically weak. I’m unconvinced that things have changed enough to make a third party viable, but in the process of his discussion, he makes a very important–and very under-appreciated–point.

By “liberal,” I don’t mean big-state welfarism. I mean the tenets and spirit of liberal democracy. Respect for the outcome of elections, the rule of law, freedom of speech, and the principle (in courts of law and public opinion alike) of innocent until proven guilty. Respect for the free market, bracketed by sensible regulation and cushioned by social support. Deference to personal autonomy but skepticism of identity politics. A commitment to equality of opportunity, not “equity” in outcomes. A well-grounded faith in the benefits of immigration, free trade, new technology, new ideas, experiments in living. Fidelity to the ideals and shared interests of the free world in the face of dictators and demagogues.

All of this used to be the more-or-less common ground of American politics, inhabited by Ronald Reagan and the two Bushes as much as by Barack Obama and the two Clintons. The debates that used to divide the parties — the proper scope of government, the mechanics of trade — amounted to parochial quarrels within a shared liberal faith. That faith steadied America in the face of domestic and global challenges from the far right and far left alike.

But now the basic division in politics isn’t between liberals and conservatives, as the terms used to be understood. It’s between liberals and illiberals.

Stephens points to the illiberalism of both the Right and the far Left, pointing on the right to  “Stephen Miller on immigration, Steve Bannon on trade, Josh Hawley on elections and Marjorie Taylor Greene on every manner of lunatic and bigoted conspiracy theory.” On the Left, he excoriates excesses of the “Me too” movement and the so-called “cancel culture.” He says that the illiberal Right is by far the most dangerous, because it is capable of winning elections and, when it loses, willing to subvert them.

Whether you agree with his specific critiques or not, I think he is absolutely correct about the need to reinforce and restore the underlying liberal consensus that democracy requires-what he describes as the “capacious” liberal faith within which we can argue in good faith about what “sensible” regulations look like, and the extent of the “social supports” that cushion the vagaries of a market economy.

Today, we characterize those debates over specific policies as “liberal” or “conservative,” but they can only occur within a larger, widely accepted liberal democratic framework that embraces a government protective of individual autonomy, based upon consent of the governed (as reflected by the votes of the citizenry)and committed to equality before the law.

Specific policy debates are, as Stephens says, parochial quarrels within that shared liberal faith.

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