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question everything's JournalThe Beauty Queens of MAGA World
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In January, Abbie Stockard, the reigning Miss America, turned up at Donald Trump’s inauguration wearing a MAHA gown. When it came time to select a cabinet, Trump tapped South Dakota’s 1990 Snow Queen, Kristi Noem, as secretary of homeland security. Anna Kelly, a former Miss State Fair of Virginia, was appointed deputy press secretary. Last month, when the president needed someone to push through criminal charges against James Comey, the former FBI director, another beauty queen came to the fore: Lindsey Halligan. The one-time Miss Colorado semifinalist did the job after Trump pushed out the top federal prosecutor for eastern Virginia and elevated her.
Halligan’s turn in the spotlight has paled beside the glow of another pageant veteran. Erika Kirk, the widow of slain conservative activist Charlie Kirk, was Miss Arizona USA in 2012. At her husband’s funeral last month, she demonstrated preternatural poise addressing a stadium-sized crowd, extolling a traditional view of marriage in which he was the family’s spiritual leader while she maintained the home.
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To their proponents, pageants are a training ground for young women to succeed in a world beyond the swimsuit competition. They learn discipline and poise and how to think on their feet. The life of a Miss America—crossing the country to appear at events, speaking in public, developing a platform and smiling for endless pictures—isn’t so different from that of a campaigning politician.
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Margot Mifflin, author of the 2020 book “Looking For Miss America,” believes pageants and MAGA are “consonant” in their inclination to maintain the status quo. “MAGA culture is rewarding a certain kind of woman that beauty pageants reward,” Mifflin said. Both “revere conventional, traditional representations of women.”
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Trump, another Atlantic City hotelier, would become the pageant world’s king when he bought the organization that owns the Miss USA, Miss Teen USA and Miss Universe competitions. If Miss America is prim and studious, competing for university scholarships, think of Miss USA as the racier sister. Or as Mifflin put it, “It’s a little more of a skin show.” More than once, contestants complained about Trump going backstage when they were undressed—something he did not deny in a 2005 interview with Howard Stern. “I’ll go backstage before a show and everyone’s getting dressed and ready, and everything else, and, you know, no men anywhere, and I’m allowed to go in because I’m the owner of the pageant, and therefore I’m inspecting it,” he told Stern. “You know they’re standing there with no clothes…And you see these incredible looking women.”
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https://www.wsj.com/politics/the-beauty-queens-of-maga-world-23bf590b?st=TC5CCA&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
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Cynthia Ozick: A New York Jewish Life of Letters
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Although she attends an Orthodox synagogue, Ms. Ozick prefers to describe herself as “just generically Jewish.” If there’s a theme that dominates her oeuvre, it’s Jewishness, particularly Jewish life in America, which has of late infected her with sorrow. Jewishness, she says, is “co-extensive, or coterminous, with American life. You couldn’t pull Jews and America apart. Until now.” She means the period since Oct. 7, 2023.
Seated at her dining table, Ms. Ozick trembles as she speaks of “the mystery of that day in October.” On the very morrow, “it was as if, in this country and everywhere in the world, permission was suddenly given.” She means permission for antisemitism. Her consternation is “profound,” she says: “How could an event like that, a terrible massacre so minutely recorded by the perps, open these permissive floodgates?”
The question torments her. “It’s a greater puzzle than antisemitism itself. The whole world was standing there, suppressing antisemitism, and when Oct. 7 happened, it said, ‘Oh, look. It happened. So we can do it, too.’ ” Her last published commentary, which appeared on these pages, addressed these events. Titled “Antisemitism and the Politics of the Chant,” it asked whether we’ve “come to the end of a Golden Age” in America, especially for its Jewish citizens. She fears we have. The massacre gave a green light for “Jew-hate,” she says. “But for some exceptions, there was no sympathy. It was as if this country changed overnight.
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After Oct. 7, she confronted a question about the country to which her Jewish parents fled from Russia, and where they found great happiness in their lives as Americans. “Is it now the beginning, little by little, of the disintegration of what we’ve come to call the Judeo-Christian in America. Is the legacy of the Founding Fathers coming to an end?” (After that question, she apologizes for using a “cliché.”)
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https://www.wsj.com/opinion/cynthia-ozick-a-new-york-jewish-life-of-letters-52aff38e?st=sZPMcc&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
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The Meaning of Gaza's Tunnels - Bret Stephens, NYT
(From last year but still relevant)
Ever since Israel withdrew its soldiers and settlers from Gaza in 2005, critics have accused it of blockading and immiserating the territory — turning it, as they say, into an open-air prison. The charge was always preposterous. Gaza shares a border with Egypt. Gazans were often treated in Israeli hospitals for cancer and other life-threatening conditions. Israel provided Gaza with much of its electricity and other critical goods even after Hamas came to power in 2007. Now, as Israeli troops uncover more of Gaza’s vast underground city, the falsity of the accusation has become even more apparent.
According to a report this month in The New York Times, Israeli defense officials now estimate that Hamas’s tunnels measure between 350 and 450 miles in a territory that’s just 25 miles long. (By comparison, the London Underground is only 249 miles long.) Some of Gaza’s tunnels are wide enough for cars; some are more than 150 feet deep; some serve as munitions depots; others are comfortably kitted out as command bunkers.
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All this should radically reconfigure the world’s understanding of what Hamas has done in, and to, Gaza. It has turned the territory into a gigantic military fortress purpose-built to attack Israel, endure Israeli retaliation and interpose civilian lives and infrastructure as part of its means of defense. Imagine any other government doing something similar to its people — say, putting the NORAD command center directly below Times Square — for a sense of the outrage Hamas is perpetrating against its own people.
That’s not the only outrage. How much did it cost to build these tunnels? How much concrete, steel and electricity did it divert from civilian needs? How many millions of hours of labor were given to the effort? What was the cost of building up its stockpile of thousands of rockets, which continue to be fired at Israel? How many ordinary Gazans had to be conscripted into the effort of miserably shoveling dirt deep underground — and how many perished in the effort?
We may never know for sure. But in 2014, around the time Israel first started to get a sense of the scale of Hamas’s tunnel network, The Wall Street Journal, citing Israeli military officials, reported that the cost of building 32 tunnels (a small fraction of what has since been uncovered) came to around $90 million.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/23/opinion/tunnels-gaza-hamas.html?unlocked_article_code=1.a08.YCsi.CrimHrUxLUwa&smid=url-share
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I was thinking about the border with Egypt: why can't supplies come from there?
Trump's Imperial Presidency? - Henninger, WSJ
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With Mr. Trump, however, we may be heading to the outer limits of what America’s traditional system of checks and balances can absorb. Among Mr. Trump’s first acts was to instruct his Justice Department not to enforce a ban on TikTok imposed by an act of Congress and affirmed unanimously by the Supreme Court. In his inaugural speech, Mr. Trump never mentioned Congress, exhibiting a disdain for the legislative branch also shared by his White House predecessors.
A remarkable deference to Mr. Trump’s use of his powers is happening, or being allowed to happen, because so many Americans think the political system is broken, a point he hit hard in his inaugural speech: “For many years, the radical and corrupt establishment has extracted power and wealth from our citizens. While the pillars of our society lay broken and seemingly in complete disrepair, we now have a government that cannot manage even a simple crisis at home.” In a blink, Mr. Trump went from zero to 60 on exercising presidential authority, declaring two national emergencies—on the border and energy policy. If energy is a crisis under the National Emergencies Act, anything is.
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The term “imperial presidency” was coined in the 1970s by the liberal historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. In practice, Democrats have invoked the threat of an imperial presidency as a cudgel against Republican presidents. It started with Richard Nixon and the political crisis over the Watergate break-in and Nixon’s impoundments of congressional spending. I’d argue you can draw a line from what happened to Nixon to the public’s elevation of Donald Trump, who is certain to be accused of conducting an imperial presidency. He will love it.
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House reformers also created a labyrinthine system of new subcommittees with overlapping jurisdictions. The House speaker became more a traffic cop than a setter of priorities. The gerrymandering of House districts proliferated, ensuring political polarization. The result of these flawed congressional decisions today is a household word: gridlock. Like it or not, Washington still has to function, and the void left by Congress’s decline as a coequal branch was filled by the administrative state down the street on Constitution Avenue. Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency is supposed to fix that. He may plant a flag on Mars first.
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The breadth of the Trump presidential orders is impressive but also a sign of a system that isn’t working as originally designed. Congress is supposed to represent the country’s varied interests, down to 435 separate congressional districts. And they are different. Mr. Trump is displacing that federalism of interests with the simpler idea of a uniform national interest, defined and executed by the president.
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We are about to enter another age of strong, if not imperial, presidential authority. And perhaps some of it is necessary, with no end in sight to Congress’s underperformance. But Mr. Trump’s instinct, evident this first week, is to be unbound by much of anything. Conservatives, not least his own people, will need to hold the 47th president to account.
https://www.wsj.com/opinion/trumps-imperial-presidency-we-may-be-headed-to-outer-limits-american-system-checks-and-balances-ef6e6c99?st=3aqTSg&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
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Harris Didn't Lose the Election So Much as Trump Won - Galstone, WSJ
(Galstone is the WSJ colunist on the left)
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First, pre-election surveys consistently showed that Ms. Harris’s ceiling was substantially higher than Mr. Trump’s, meaning a higher percentage of voters said they’d consider voting for her than him. Ms. Harris’s eventual share of the nationwide popular vote was much lower than the percentage of these persuadable voters. Postelection surveys show that late-deciding voters broke decisively for Mr. Trump. Ms. Harris failed to win over a small but vital share of the electorate, which was disproportionately younger, male, Hispanic and non-college-educated.
Second, the election involved two different contests: one in the seven swing states, the other in the rest of the country. In the latter, where advertisements and voter mobilization were scarce, support for Ms. Harris receded from the high-water mark Mr. Biden had established in the 2020 election—especially in blue states. In both Illinois and New Jersey, Ms. Harris received about 400,000 fewer votes than Mr. Biden did four years earlier. In New York, Ms. Harris fell short of Mr. Biden by about 600,000. In California, the shortfall reached 1.8 million votes, a 16.5% drop from 2020.
By contrast, in the swing states Ms. Harris came close to matching Mr. Biden’s performance, falling short by only 0.3%. This wasn’t enough, however, because Mr. Trump improved on his 2020 showing by 6.2%. Yes, Ms. Harris lost all seven swing states, but it’s more accurate to say that Mr. Trump won them with a message strong enough to overcome the Harris campaign’s edge in funds and organization.
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Mr. Trump has substantially expanded the Republican vote in Luzerne County, (PA). In 2012, about 58,000 voters in the county picked Mitt Romney. In the 2024 election, more than 92,000 picked Mr. Trump—a nearly 60% increase over 12 years, even though the county’s population size has barely changed and Ms. Harris’s vote was only marginally smaller than Barack Obama’s. The story is less about Democratic erosion than Republican mobilization.
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Voters with high levels of education tend to vote regularly, even in lower-intensity elections, while less-educated voters are more likely to turn out when they feel a strong and direct stake in the outcome. Through most of the 20th century, intensity benefited Democrats, who performed well with voters without college degrees. But now the Republicans hold the edge among working-class voters and do best when these voters see clear differences between the parties.
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The past four years should teach party reformers that abstract appeals to the benefits of long-term economic investments won’t suffice. Working-class voters have little slack in their family budgets and don’t have the luxury of waiting. They need to see tangible improvements in their lives within the span of a single presidential term. The onus is on Democrats to produce a new economic agenda that credibly promises—and then produces—this result.
https://www.wsj.com/opinion/harris-didnt-lose-the-election-so-much-as-trump-won-33ff3659?st=7nw1Rr&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
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Why did Bidenomics fail to deliver at the polls? - WaPo
So many things about the strategy made so much sense. The $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan at the dawn of Joe Biden’s presidency, which prevented a surge in poverty and joblessness as the covid-19 pandemic ravaged the economy, looked like exactly the right bet — especially given memories of the Obama administration’s timid response to the housing crisis of 2008 and the deep recession that ensued. The burst of industrial policy that followed (the Chips and Science Act, the bipartisan infrastructure law, the Inflation Reduction Act) appeared equally adroit — a strategy to address the plight of the many White workers without a college degree who turned out for Donald Trump in 2016 and, as conventional wisdom would have it, were devastated by the culling of factory jobs.
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But Dani Rodrik, an economist at Harvard’s Kennedy School, has, to my mind, the most compelling proposition: Bidenomics’ idea of the “working class” is outdated by a few decades.
Manufacturing employs only about 13 million of the nearly 160 million workers toiling outside of farms. Fewer than 1.4 million of those are represented by unions. The industrial policies and the trade barriers, speeches at the picket line and talk of factories returning to left-behind rural areas, were all aimed at a small corner of American society.
“A policy that promises to restore the middle class by bringing manufacturing back is not only unrealistic,” Rodrik wrote for Project Syndicate. “It also rings hollow, because it does not align with workers’ aspirations and everyday experiences.”
There are nearly 16 million workers in retail trade, 17 million in leisure and hospitality, almost 18 million in health care. For sure, they benefited from some of Biden’s policies. But incentives in the Inflation Reduction Act for contractors to work with union labor did nothing for them. So perhaps the lesson for some future Democratic administration hoping to assist the working class is not necessarily that populist policies don’t work. It is that these policies need to be aimed at what America has become, not what it was a bunch of decades ago.
https://wapo.st/4iVc7uU
Why did the Democrats get creamed? Sherrod Brown can tell you. - Tumulty, WaPo
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Now, the man who was possibly the last Democrat capable of being elected statewide, Sen. Sherrod Brown, has been defeated and is heading home. Costing half a billion dollars, Brown’s losing battle against Republican Bernie Moreno became the most expensive Senate race in the country. Brown came up about three points short in his quest for a fourth term. Why? Brown says the political shift in his state began with a signal event: the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1993, the first year of Bill Clinton’s presidency.'
“Workers have slowly migrated out of the Democratic Party,” he told me. “It accelerated as more and more jobs were lost. And I still heard [about NAFTA] in this campaign, especially in the Miami Valley, Dayton, where we still won, [and] up there in Mahoning Valley, where we didn’t win.”' Workers came to view Democrats “as a bicoastal elite party,” he explained. “We were too pro-corporate. They know Republicans are going to shill for corporate interests. They expected Democrats would stand up for them, and they don’t see that nationally.”
Then Trump came along and switched the script, breaking with the GOP’s long-standing free-trade stance to denounce NAFTA and other agreements, promote more protectionist policies and make promises such as ending taxes on overtime. “Republicans are now, for the first time, actually trying to talk to workers,” Brown said.
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But although he himself will no longer be there come January, Brown insists that Democrats can — and must — win back the votes of working-class Americans. Those voters may disagree with some of the party’s stances on social issues, such as guns, abortion, crime and immigration, but will return to the fold “if we stay on economic issues and do it right.”
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His future options include running again for the Senate in 2026, when there will be a special election to fill the unexpired term of the seat now held by Vice President-elect JD Vance (R).
https://wapo.st/3W1olse
Opinion Dems' future -- and democracy itself -- might depend on the DNC chairman pick - WaPo Rubin
As Democrats try to rebuild after the losses of 2024, there is lots of chatter about creating new organizations to work on communications or messaging or policy development. Democrats are effectively looking for workarounds to the DNC, which is no longer perceived as capable of meeting major challenges. Ask Democratic activists, donors and politicians about the DNC’s race for a new chairman for early next year, and you likely will get an eye roll or a comment about the DNC’s irrelevance.
Although the DNC hauls in massive donations, sets the presidential primary calendar and performs other functions, it was created in another era — before the internet, MAGA and the explosion of dark money. The DNC doesn’t need to be replaced, but it needs an overhaul. The DNC contest is about more than one party. In an era in which there is only one small-d democratic party, fashioning it into an instrument to effectively organize, message and combat disinformation is critical.
Former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley, who announced his run, last won elective office in 2010; another potential choice, Rahm Emanuel, served in the first Obama term. If the DNC wants business as usual, any of these (or the stolid Minnesota chair Ken Martin, who also announced) would do. But none seems up to reinvigorating the DNC to make it central to the party’s — and democracy’s — revival. If the DNC wants someone of a different generation who possesses the energy to shake up the party — and to improve the party’s standing in the critical Midwest — then Wisconsin chair Ben Wikler is the obvious choice.
Wikler has not announced (nor agreed to talk to me about it) but I know of no other contender who has mastered online communication and organizing, and who can enlist influencers to reach apolitical voters — all critical tasks among the many necessary to innovate a moribund party. An Atlantic magazine piece last year praised him (“Wikler’s talent is getting people to show up”) for dragging the state party back from “virtual irrelevance” and dubbed him “the man who has been hailed as ‘the best state chair in the country.’” You would think the DNC would want to nationalize his organization, described as “a comprehensive digital operation, an in-house research group, and a full-time staff of youth organizers.”
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As a sunny Midwesterner from a “nail-biter” state — rather than a deep blue enclave — Wikler understands how reaching ticket-splitters and moderates would be a plus for a party perceived as heavy on coastal elites. One Democratic think tanker tells me, “Harris won 14 of 19 states that touched the Atlantic or Pacific. She won 5 of 31 states that did not. A DNC chair from the interior of the country — like Ben Wikler — is a must.”
More..
https://wapo.st/3Z97YdS
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The Ideology Behind Campus Protests Is About More Than Israel - WSJ
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The passions on campus are focused on the war in Gaza, with protesters accusing the U.S. (and in many cases their own universities) of complicity in what they call Israel’s genocide of Palestinians. But the charge resonates for many young people, especially the most dedicated activists, for reasons that go beyond the conflict that began with Hamas’s attack last Oct. 7. The ideological basis for the anti-Israel protests is a broader set of ideas about “settler colonialism,” an influential academic concept that understands certain countries as inherently and permanently illegitimate because of the way they were founded. And while Israel is currently the most prominent example, the ideology of settler colonialism has even deeper criticisms to make of the United States. Indeed, in recent years, theorists and writers inspired by the idea of settler colonialism have created what amounts to a new countermyth of American history.
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This understanding of American history could be credible, even as a myth, only so long as the country was defined solely by the experience of its white citizens. Of course, writers like Bancroft knew that the land of freedom was built in part by enslaved people from Africa, on territory conquered from Native Americans. But these parts of the American story were tacitly agreed, by the official tellers of that story, to be inessential. That was the price of sustaining the belief that the history of America was synonymous with the history of liberty.
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It is no accident that the ideology of settler colonialism is flourishing today at the same time as right-wing populism. Both see our turbulent political moment as an opportunity to permanently change the way Americans think about their country. And as is often the case, the extremes of right and left are united in disparaging the compromises of liberalism, which they see as weakly evasive. In the case of settler colonialism, this means rejecting the understanding of American history that has been mainstream since the mid-20th century—that it is a story of slow progress toward fulfilling the nation’s founding promise of freedom for all.
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As this way of thinking about history and politics gains influence among educated young Americans, the unrest seen on college campuses this year may turn out to be just the beginning.
https://archive.ph/FwHAL
Opinion: The antisemitic lie at the heart of too many campus protests - CNN
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Claims that Israel has been committing a genocide of Palestinians date to long before October 7. Yet the population of Gaza was estimated to be less than 400,000 when Israel captured the territory from Egypt in a war against multiple Arab countries in 1967. It’s now estimated at just over 2 million. Population growth of almost 600% would make it the most inept genocide in the history of the world. What about now? Those repeating the word genocide over and over, turning it into a mantra that penetrates the public consciousness, smearing Israel and anyone who supports it, ignore the facts of this war.
This is not an unprovoked war, like Russia’s against Ukraine. It’s not a civil war between rival militias, like the one raging in Sudan — which, by the way, is being ignored by almost everyone, even though the UN describes it as one of the “worst humanitarian crises in recent memory,” where a famine could kill 500,000 people. No, Israel was attacked. On October 7, Hamas launched a gruesome assault on Israeli civilians, killing some 1,200 — including many women and children — and dragging hundreds of them as hostages into Gaza. Today dozens — including many women and children — remain in captivity.
Those who keep saying that Israel’s response is an act of revenge rather than the strategic, defensive war that most Israelis view as a fight for national survival against a determined enemy backed by a powerful country are deliberately distorting reality. In doing so, they are perversely evoking the same false blood lust and grotesqueness embedded in the blood libel archetype. Indeed, Hamas’ actions, which precipitated this war, don’t seem to exist in the minds of ostensibly humanitarian-minded protesters. Nor even the fate of the hostages, still captive in Hamas tunnels.
Although the campus protests vary in their message and actions from school to school, we never hear protesters chant that Hamas should release the hostages or accept a ceasefire. Quite the contrary. Accusations against Israel at times include praise for Hamas, one of whose aims — the end of the Jewish state — is shared by some key organizers of the student protests. As Secretary of State Antony Blinken recently said, “It remains astounding to me that the world is almost deafeningly silent when it comes to Hamas.”
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Aid distribution in the middle of a lawless war zone without police to protect supplies is incredibly difficult, and Hamas at times appears to be trying to make the situation worse. Hamas has “intercepted and diverted” food aid, according to the State Department. Trucks carrying food have been ransacked, looted and otherwise attacked, according to UN Humanitarian Coordinator for Palestine James McGoldrick, though he didn’t specify by which groups. On Sunday, Hamas fired rockets in the direction of one of the main aid crossings, killing four Israeli soldiers and disrupting humanitarian deliveries. Even the pier being built by the US to boost aid deliveries has come under fire.
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https://www.yahoo.com/news/opinion-antisemitic-lie-heart-too-162406008.html
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