Wall Street Journal columnist William McGurn ponders “the Democrats’ religion.” A slice:
In 1985 centrists led by Al From of the Democratic Leadership Council successfully pushed the party in a more moderate direction, culminating in the 1992 election of its chairman, Bill Clinton, to the presidency. But this time around, bringing the Democratic Party more in line with the values and aspirations of ordinary Americans requires far more than tweaking tax policies or rethinking its absolutism on fossil fuels. What Democratic centrists are up against today is a religion.
To call a view a religion usually means it’s beyond debate or reason. The left’s zealotry can sometimes look like that—witness all those videos of Harris voters melting down at the election outcome. But the better way to look at the Democrats and religion is as a larger view that makes sense of the world to its adherents.
In the old tradition of centrist reformers, liberal blogger Matt Yglesias recently tweeted nine principles for “Common Sense Democrats” aiming to rebuild a winning coalition. These range from recognizing the importance of “robust economic growth” and treating climate change as a “reality to manage not a hard limit to obey” to acknowledging that “biological sex is not a social construct.”
All are sensible—and all are unlikely to stick. The proposed reforms clash with a worldview that exerts a powerful hold on influential parts of elite America and the Democratic Party. Even Democrats and institutions that don’t subscribe to this faith have often been taken hostage by it, including many churches.
Here’s Mike Munger on Yuval Harari’s new book, Nexus. A slice:
If you like that kind of book — I thought Sapiens was great the first time I read it, but liked it much less after I assigned it for class and read it carefully — then Nexus might be worth a look. But there seems to be a trend in non-fiction books lately, drawing on “history” to authenticate the author’s pet ideological project, and at the same time sell a lot of books because the thesis is surprising. There are some egregious overreaches in the genre: Nancy McLean took James Buchanan’s (uncontroversial) claim that constitutions must limit the domain of democracy, and created a Bond-villain scenario where Public Choice was a plan for world domination. Matthew Desmond wrote a best-selling book that comes very close to saying that poverty in the US happens because elites like poverty, ignoring the fact that there is less poverty in the US than almost anywhere else on Earth, and less than at any other time in human history.
Donald Trump, whose election owed much to inflation, ran promising to increase living costs. His favorite word is (“freedom”? “justice”? don’t be silly) “tariff,” and the point of tariffs is to increase prices of domestically produced goods by depressing competition from foreign goods. (A truism: Protectionist nations blockade their own ports.)
George Leef reviews a book on how today’s “academic elites are undoing centuries of progress.” Two slices:
Professor John Ellis has been a critic of our higher-education system for many years. His book The Breakdown of Higher Education (which I reviewed here) masterfully analyzed the perverse trends that were (and still are) causing our colleges and universities to deliver much less educational value at much higher cost. His latest book, A Short History of Relations Between Peoples, is not primarily about higher education, but Martin Center readers will find it important because Ellis indicts our academic elites for their role in undoing centuries of progress and turning humanity back towards tribalism.
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Ellis also credits international commerce as helping to spread the gens una sumus philosophy. As trade grew, people began to take an interest in the cultures of those with whom they traded. Moreover, the economic value of trade did at least as much to improve the lives of the foreign peoples as it did the lives of the Europeans. Among other things, electricity and modern medicine vastly improved the lives of people in Africa, Asia, and South America.
All of that being so, shouldn’t we look forward to steadily increasing harmony and prosperity across the globe? Ellis is skeptical, because today’s intelligentsia routinely attacks the foundations of harmony and prosperity. They’re paving the way for a resurgence of tribalism.
