Andew Sullivan's Hillary Postmortem

An excellent essay by Andrew Sullivan on the subject of Hillary Clinton's camp followers. Excerpt:

Clinton had the backing of the entire Democratic establishment, including the president (his biggest mistake in eight years by far), and was even married to the last, popular Democratic president. As in 2008, when she managed to lose to a neophyte whose middle name was Hussein, everything was stacked in her favor. In fact, the Clintons so intimidated other potential candidates and donors, she had the nomination all but wrapped up before she even started. And yet she was so bad a candidate, she still only managed to squeak through in the primaries against an elderly, stopped-clock socialist who wasn’t even in her party, and who spent his honeymoon in the Soviet Union. She ran with a popular Democratic incumbent president in the White House in a growing economy. She had the extra allure of possibly breaking a glass ceiling that — with any other female candidate — would have been as inspiring as the election of the first black president. In the general election, she was running against a malevolent buffoon with no political experience, with a deeply divided party behind him, and whose negatives were stratospheric. She outspent him by almost two-to-one. Her convention was far more impressive than his. The demographics favored her. And yet she still managed to lose!

The bonus bit at the end about the incoherence of those insisting all Trump voters were racist (a topic I recently wrote about) is equally good, if briefer. 

The Vacant, Commercial Symbolism Of "Fearless Girl" (And How She Could Be Forced To Go Away)

I wanted to pass on an excellent essay by Noah Rothman at Commentary about "Fearless Girl", the statue in New York City opposing the Wall St. bull:

Via Wikimedia

 Rothman notes that

The statue’s alleged purpose—both stated by its sponsors and plainly evident in the figure’s demeanor—is to present a challenge to orthodoxy. It is a call to address the perception that there are not enough women amid the rarefied ranks of Fortune 500 boards. This audacious assault on the staid prejudices of the gatekeepers of wealth and power in America was sponsored by the exclusive Boston-based investment services company State Street Global Advisors and approved by the New York City Parks Department. If the aim of this artistic display was to challenge intractable conventions and change minds, they chose an audience that has been uniquely receptive to their message.

Ironic, then, that

Only 17 percent of State Street’s leadership positions (five out of 28) are women. In terms of gender representation—a metric that measures neither an employee’s aptitude nor benefit to their employer—SSGA trails the average S&P 500 firm.

One might ask, therefore, if this isn't a sort of very public way to atone for perceived sins, true or false. It represents tribal affiliation gone mad, yet another public exercise of empty virtue signaling. A more interesting question is, will the girl stick around? Techdirt notes that bull statue creator Arturo Di Modica is trying to get rid of the girl using a novel (in the United States) legal theory: that of moral rights.

Importantly, though, this is interesting timing as it relates to moral rights. The US has been correct in (mostly) resisting putting in place a moral rights regime, and focusing on copyright as an economic right. Unfortunately, at this very moment, the Copyright Office is "studying" the issue of whether or not moral rights should be expanded. The first round of public comments has closed (you can read those comments if you'd like), but response comments are open until May 15th. Given this example of moral rights gone mad, perhaps it might be useful for the Copyright Office to be reminded of how moral rights might be used to stifle and stamp out important expression

The story goes on with an update by law professor James Grimmelmann who claims "Di Modica probably has no legitimate moral rights claim either", which probably is just as well, but copyright maximalism knows few bounds. I would not be too surprised if someone makes a serious go at defending Di Modica's claim.

Trump Voters Are Racists Because Only Racists Would Vote For Trump

Possibly the dumbest thing ever published at The Intercept, "Top Democrats Are Wrong: Trump Supporters Were More Motivated by Racism Than Economic Issues" by Mehdi Hasan does nothing to advance the title thesis. Opening with the smirking "facts are stubborn things" line, he proceeds to bring none of those to bear, instead filling up with circular logic and appeals to authority (Philip Klinkner). And then there's the fallacy of the excluded middle:

Klinkner himself grabbed headlines last summer when he revealed that the best way to identify a Trump supporter in the U.S. was to ask “just one simple question: is Barack Obama a Muslim?”

Do all Trump voters (or even most) agree with that sentiment? Who knows! Klinkner appears not to be terribly interested in that question, only in pushing his thesis that racists voted for Trump. The answer to that question is obviously "yes". In the end, Hasan is stuck assuming his conclusion, using his proxy Klinkner (all emboldening below mine):

Defenders of the economy narrative have a “gotcha” question of their own: how can racial resentment have motivated Trump supporters when so many of them voted for Barack Obama, across the Rust Belt, in 2008 and 2012? “They’re not racists,” filmmaker Michael Moore passionately argued last November.  “They twice voted for a man whose middle name is Hussein.”

Klinkner, though, gives short shrift to this argument. First, he tells me, “most of them didn’t vote for Obama. There weren’t many vote switchers between 2012 and 2016.” Second, “working class whites shifted to Trump less because they were working class than because they were white.” Klinkner points out that in 2016, Clinton, unlike Obama, faced a Republican candidate who “pushed the buttons of race and nativism in open and explicit ways that John McCain and Mitt Romney were unwilling or unable to do.”

Yet, where is the data underlying this? "A vote for Trump must be racist because racists voted for Trump" fails the hasty generalization test, but that's the sum total of his argument. It's a convenient hat rack for identity politicians, but as sound politics go, a disaster.

Update: A couple non-dumb essays on this subject, the first from Andrew Doyle at Spiked:

Identity politics, as it currently operates, is a mostly tokenistic endeavour. Too often it assures progression for women and ethnic-minority people who already come from a privileged background. It’s very easy for the middle classes to make their scattershot assumptions of ‘straight white male privilege’, to pretend that opportunity has nothing to do with socioeconomic status and everything to do with race, gender and sexuality. It’s a convenient method by which they can assert their own virtue while continuing to benefit from an inherently unequal economic system.

The election of Donald Trump should have been a wake-up call for the left. Instead, we have seen a doubling down on the very strategies that guaranteed his victory in the first place. Trump supporters are scorned and derided with increased vehemence, Brexit voters are still smeared as racist, and the working classes are urged to know their place and vote in accordance with the instructions of their technocratic masters. It would also appear that the word ‘Nazi’ has been redefined as ‘anyone with whom the left disagrees’. I’ve never met a Nazi, although I’m assured by many of my liberal friends that you’re never more than six feet away from one.

Next, Mark Lilla in the NYT:

One of the many lessons of the recent presidential election campaign and its repugnant outcome is that the age of identity liberalism must be brought to an end. Hillary Clinton was at her best and most uplifting when she spoke about American interests in world affairs and how they relate to our understanding of democracy. But when it came to life at home, she tended on the campaign trail to lose that large vision and slip into the rhetoric of diversity, calling out explicitly to African-American, Latino, L.G.B.T. and women voters at every stop. This was a strategic mistake. If you are going to mention groups in America, you had better mention all of them. If you don’t, those left out will notice and feel excluded. Which, as the data show, was exactly what happened with the white working class and those with strong religious convictions. Fully two-thirds of white voters without college degrees voted for Donald Trump, as did over 80 percent of white evangelicals.

You keep on keeping on, guys. I'll be here with the popcorn.

"Rule Of Law" When It's Convenient

So, the Los Angeles Times now recognizes that Donald Trump is a menace to the nation, a serial liar and a narcissist, with immense power. It is all but impossible to read their lugubrious, petulant editorial with anything other than a strong dose of schadenfreude. Where was their call that "even the president must submit to the rule of law" when Obama was symbolically evading the Constitution's demand that the Paris Accords must be submitted to the Senate for approval? Or when Kamala Harris rejected Neil Gorsuch's nomination to the Supreme Court because "Judge Gorsuch has consistently valued narrow legalisms over real lives", i.e. he actually applies the law as written vs. how people like Harris would like it to read? Or Hillary Clinton's famous rejection of the First Amendment's "Congress shall make no law" in favor of stifling criticism of her during an election cycle? It's clear that where the law, legal process, and actual accountability to constituencies get between the Democrats and their preferred policies, these they view as nothing more than encumbrance to evade. The hard work of actually convincing people remains undone, and to hear the Times tell it, has no place in their future; one must never speak ill of the government or its agents lest they stoke "public distrust of essential institutions". Indeed, Democrats whooped it up when Obama acted as a king, creating law by executive diktat:

Thanks a lot, liberals. It's all well and good that Joe Biden is now lecturing us that "the worst sin of all is the abuse of power," but where the hell was he—and where were you—for the past eight years, when the president was starting wars without Congressional authorization, passing major legislation with zero votes from the opposing party, and ruling almost exclusively through executive orders and actions?

Mostly exhorting Obama to act "unilaterally" and "without Congress" on terrorism, immigration, guns, and whatever because you couldn't dream of a day when an unrestrained billionaire reality-TV celebrity would wield those same powers toward very different ends. Hell, in the early months of Obama's presidency, The New York Times's Thomas Friedman held up China's "one-party autocracy" as the model to emulate.

It is impossible now to pity them, and just as hard to take seriously calls for a return to the "rule of law" they would forego the instant it became inconvenient.

Jill Filipovic's Weak Case Against Neil Gorsuch and Originalism

For some reason, absurd lightweight and "recovering attorney" Jill Filipovic has escaped my comment before, though I've noticed her typings previously; she came to my attention mostly because she thinks men accused of rape need not be accorded due process, having signed on for the idiotic "affirmative consent" concept. (Protip: it does nothing to change the fundamental he-said/she-said nature of determining consent after the fact, unless one gets a signed affadavit at the time. This is not how any human sexual encounter actually operates.) It says a good deal about her personally that she blocked me on Twitter despite our having no prior interactions, which tells me my ID ended up on an automatic blocklist somewhere.

She most recent styled a jeremiad against constitutional originalism generally and Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch particularly. Laden with straw men, half-truths, and orthodoxy, it serves more as a weathervane for a certain subspecies of liberal opinion than any sort of intelligent analysis. In trying to understand Gorsuch the jurist, wouldn't we want to look at some of the cases he was asked to decide? That would seem reasonable, but here we do not deal with a reasonable person — or even someone conversant with the law and why it is as it is.

Filipovic's dedication to postmodernist interpretation ignores actual arguments in the texts of decisions she criticizes, if she even gets that far. Her total failure to understand the majority opinion in Heller v. District of Columbia, her mischaracterization of the judicial history of the Second Amendment prior to that decision, and her claim that Heller represents a revisionist view (despite a fair number of high-profile liberal legal scholars reluctantly agreeing with its historical accuracy) is common enough, if wrong. Her claim that "The framers of the Constitution didn’t offer any instructions for how to interpret the document, nor did they get into specifics on what each of its provisions meant" is ultimately a cop-out on making any effort to find out what that meaning might be. (Apparently, plain English is no longer a requirement in law school.)

Tediously and redundantly making the "living Constitution" argument (she spends three of her nine points on the same thing), she deceitfully claims that "the writers of the Constitution arguably intended for it to be a living document" while ignoring the amendment process they left us to change it. To Filipovic, the Constitution is whatever she wants it to be, a slab of political copper for a legislative majority to hammer into shape on a whim. That is, she subscribes to the same legal regime that delivered unto us Dred Scott v. Sandford, Wickard v. Filburn,  Smith v. Maryland, and Korematsu v. United States.

In her telling, Gorsuch is merely a damned conservative, a zombie Antonin Scalia "originalist", which according to her, no one really is. (Indeed, Scalia's deference to original intent was rather situational.) It's true that Gorsuch follows Scalia's footsteps in some matters of criminal law, but there one would think liberals might take some solace; he has shied away from strict law-and-order deference to agents of the government. As we have seen thus far in his confirmation hearings, antagonistic Democrats are having a hard go to latch on to a single, clear reason to oppose him.

Filipovic is narrowly right when she observes, "The founders weren’t fortune tellers and couldn’t predict every possible legal issue", but only to the literal extent of that sentence. That is because their intent was that the vast majority of governing would occur at the state or local level; indeed, assent to the Constitution was enacted by the states themselves. The premise and promise of federalism was accountability to those most directly affected by law. One-size-fits-all approaches (e.g. a Federal minimum wage law that sets the floor for rural Wyoming workers as well as Manhattanites, or health care mandates that result in higher prices and fewer choices for people outside the coastal states) have a tendency to backfire. When she writes, "A strictly textual reading of a law isn’t neutral; it also invites in the reader’s own biases and assumptions", presumably she's upset because it isn't her biases and assumptions.

It's not a little ironic, then, when she cites UC Irvine's Erwin Chemerinsky, who rails about the hellscape an originalist legal environment might inflict on his fellow citizens. Among these mostly imagined complaints, he makes the fraudulent, asinine claim that "No longer would the Bill of Rights apply to state and local governments." Do they not teach the 14th Amendment at UCI? The Temperance activists rightly understood that federalism meant they couldn't create a nationwide ban on alcohol without passing a constitutional amendment, thanks to the 10th Amendment delegating most lawmaking to the states. In the post-FDR, "living Constitution" era, the War On Some Drugs can go on with barely a legal peep. Chemerinsky's view of federalism is really the substitution of whatever is most popular at the moment: rights of minorities bear no examination.

There's something odd about her screed appearing in the pages of Cosmopolitan, orthogonal as Filipovic's politics are to Helen Gurley Brown's message of sexual liberation for women. At least Brown understood the risks she undertook (if they frequently turned bitter); Filipovic wants to remake the world into a giant crib — or a jail for men.

The Frauds at PUPscan

I forgot to mention Carol Beuchat's excellent two-part series on PUPscan (part 1, part 2). Mostly, what they appear to be doing is taking the public's money and playing with an ultrasound imaging device. As Carol writes in her second piece, "A published, peer-reviewed study failed to find any evidence that ultrasound examination of young puppies was predictive of the development of hip dysplasia as adults."

We don't know what they are measuring. We don't know if they have any evidence that these mystery measurements tell us anything about hip dysplasia. We don't know how measurements of a structure that is cartilage in a puppy can tell us something useful about what to expect in the adult dog after it has been converted to bone. We don't know why they think they can ascribe to genetics any problems they see in their ultrasound examination.

As far as I can tell, they have no data that link whatever they are measuring to a diagnosis of or predisposition to hip dysplasia. If that's the case, then this is essentially a research project (and note that they call it the "PUPscan Project") in which the owners of the dogs will pay for collection of data that may or may not be useful, and at best it will be several years before they will even be able to say.

What I find especially disturbing is the fact that they are leading people to believe that they are providing useful information and "new hope for breeders of 'dysplastic' dogs", as in the title of their published article. Unless they can provide answers to the very basic questions I have asked them, I don't see that they have anything useful to offer.

But they still want your money, I'm sure.

Shelby Steele On The Exhaustion Of American Liberalism

One of the better writers on the subject of race, Shelby Steele, earned a great deal of notoriety with his The Content Of Our Character (1998). He returns with an essay appearing in the Wall Street Journal on that same subject, "The Exhaustion of American Liberalism". Key passage (emboldening mine):

White guilt is not actual guilt. Surely most whites are not assailed in the night by feelings of responsibility for America’s historical mistreatment of minorities. Moreover, all the actual guilt in the world would never be enough to support the hegemonic power that the mere pretense of guilt has exercised in American life for the last half-century.

White guilt is not angst over injustices suffered by others; it is the terror of being stigmatized with America’s old bigotries—racism, sexism, homophobia and xenophobia. To be stigmatized as a fellow traveler with any of these bigotries is to be utterly stripped of moral authority and made into a pariah. The terror of this, of having “no name in the street” as the Bible puts it, pressures whites to act guiltily even when they feel no actual guilt. White guilt is a mock guilt, a pretense of real guilt, a shallow etiquette of empathy, pity and regret.

It is also the heart and soul of contemporary liberalism. This liberalism is the politics given to us by white guilt, and it shares white guilt’s central corruption. It is not real liberalism, in the classic sense. It is a mock liberalism. Freedom is not its raison d’être; moral authority is.

"Mock guilt" is what drives the "check your privilege" nonsense, words mouthed to evade actual accountability for the things real world encounters with politics inflict on people. Here, I am thinking of David Simon's inexplicable, apparently branding-driven endorsement of the execrable Martin O'Malley, or the belief of Hillary voters in her moral superiority on matters of race. Privilege (despite the absurd and obvious problems with its explanatory power) in this reading is merely a catalyst for public displays of guilt  — but one need never actually do anything about whatever it is that makes one guilty.

Steele's essay is not without its flaws, and it has some gaping ones, particularly his insistence that "we all... know that [Donald Trump] isn’t [racist]". Trump's handling of his father's apartment complexes is enough to excite the charge, at least, and the Nixon-era DOJ was hardly radical. But overall, some excellent points.