Requiem for a Failed Presidency

In a recent column Joel Kotkin offered an assessment of the Obama presidency. Being a Democrat he cannot be taxed with bias. Surely, he is disappointed, but he has always tried to see things as they were, not as he would have wished them to be.

Curiously, many of his arguments about Obama’s failed presidency have been used by Obama’s supporters to attack the incoming Trump administration.

For example, Trump’s detractors have criticized him for being a larger-than-life personality, a man who has run on nothing but his own persona. Most people liked Obama the man and liked his persona. But once you start asking what was behind the persona, that is, what Obama accomplished, the list is painfully short.

As for the Obama persona, Kotkin writes:

The greatest accomplishment of the Obama presidency turned out to be his election as the first African American president. This should always be seen as a great step forward. Yet, the Obama presidency failed to accomplish the great things promised by his election: racial healing, a stronger economy, greater global influence and, perhaps most critically, the fundamental progressive “transformation” of American politics.

When it came to racial healing, Obama turned out to be racially divisive. As I write this Obama supporters are excoriating Donald Trump for being racially divisive.

In Kotkin’s words:

Whenever race-related issues came up — notably in the area of law enforcement — Obama and his Justice Department have tended to embrace the narrative that America remains hopelessly racist. As a result, he seemed to embrace groups like Black Lives Matter and, wherever possible, blame law enforcement, even as crime was soaring in many cities, particularly those with beleaguered African American communities.

He continues:

Eight years after his election, more Americans now consider race relations to be getting worse, and we are more ethnically divided than in any time in recent history. As has been the case for several decades, African Americans’ economic equality has continued to slip, and is lower now than it was when Obama came into office in 2009, according to a 2016 Urban League study.

So, when it came to racial healing, Obama failed.

Kotkin gives Obama credit for the economic recovery, such as it was, but he points out that the recovery was anemic, at best and that it favored elites while disfavoring minorities and the middle class:

Yet, if there was indeed a recovery, it was a modest one, marked by falling productivity and low levels of labor participation. We continue to see the decline of the middle class, and declining life expectancy, while the vast majority of gains have gone to the most affluent, largely due to the rising stock market and the recovery of property prices, particularly in elite markets.

As you know, the Obama recovery was based on doubling the national debt. At some point the bill will come due and Obama will be nowhere to be found. His supporters will attack Trump for running up the debt and will hold him responsible for the bursting bubble:

At the same time, Obama leaves his successor a massive debt run-up, doubling during his watch, and the prospect of steadily rising interest rates. Faith in the current economic system has plummeted in recent years, particularly among the young, a majority of whom, according to a May 2016 Gallup Poll, now have a favorable view of socialism. Economic anxiety helped spark not only the emergence of Bernie Sanders, but later the election of Donald Trump.

When he arrives at foreign policy, Kotkin begins with a strange assertion. Perhaps to assert his bona fides as a Democrat, he denounces the Bush record in Iraq. He might have made an argument against the invasion, even though it was approved by Congress and by a significant number of Congressional Democrats. Instead, he emphasizes the state of Iraq in 2009:

To be sure, Obama did not leave us with the kind of catastrophic legacy that the incompetent Bush administration left behind, notably in Iraq. And he did help bring foreign perceptions of America back to levels that existed before Bush.

Of course, the state of Iraq in 2009 and in 2011 was fairly good. Barack Obama declared in December 2011 that things were so good in Iraq that we could pull all of our troops out of the country. How did that one work out?

As for foreign perceptions of America, Kotkin is referring to polls, thus to popularity contests. While the people of the world like America more than they had during the Bush years, their leaders systematically disrespect Barack Obama.

Kotkin seems to contradict himself when he lists some of the Obama foreign policy failures:

Yet, as his term ends, if one looks around the world, the ascendant powers — China, Russia and Iran — are all effectively enemies of America, despite Obama’s attempt to placate them all. Our perceived lack of backbone is certainly one reason why China is pursuing its policy to turn the South China Sea into its own private lake, and some of our historical allies in the area are gravitating toward the Middle Kingdom.

Projecting weakness might make you popular. It also causes other nations to take advantage of you.

However bad the situation in Iraq at the end of the Bush administration, the Obama administration leaves his successor an unimaginable catastrophe in Syria:

The most tragic of Obama’s failures has been Syria, where he refused to enforce his own “red line” against the Bashar al-Assad regime and gradually conceded control of that devastated country to Iran, Russia and assorted, often conflicting, Muslim militias. Recent talks to settle the conflict include Russia and an increasingly hostile Turkey, but not the world’s putative top superpower.

Politically, Obama has been a catastrophe for the Democratic Party. People voted for him and gave him his chance. In return he made his political party into an also-ran on the national state. One might say that after Obama the Democratic Party has nowhere to go but up:

Following the Obama script, but without the man himself, the Democratic Party lost most of the country. Hillary Clinton may have achieved a plurality among all voters, but Republicans ran the table in most states, and received upwards of 3.5 million more votes than Democrats in congressional races. Obama’s presidency saw the virtual destruction of his own party in much of the country, notably in the South, Appalachia and the Great Plains.

As for his achievements, they have been produced by executive orders, thus undemocratically. Those who tell us that the incoming Trump administration will circumvent the constitution and will rule by executive order must be looking in the rear view mirror.

Kotkin concludes:

His post-2010 achievements relied almost entirely on executive orders and regulatory rulings, most of which can be canceled out with the signature of President Trump. Obama may have soared into office based on his persona, but his denouement seems likely to be something less than glorious.

News from the German Front

Here’s some news from the front.

Zero Hedge keeps us up to date on the refugee invasion of Germany (via Maggie’s Farm). It’s  a useful corrective for those who believe that the problem is under control. Or that it is not a problem.

In no special order. I begin with the German government’s crime statistics:

Migrants committed 142,500 crimes during the first six months of 2016, according to a report by the Federal Criminal Police Office. This is equivalent to 780 crimes committed by migrants every day, or 32.5 crimes each hour, an increase of nearly 40% over 2015. The data includes only those crimes in which a migrant suspect has been caught.

Second, Germany is becoming Islamized:

Mass migration from the Muslim world is fast-tracking the Islamization of Germany, as evidenced by the proliferation of no-go zones, Sharia courts, polygamy and child marriages. Mass migration has also been responsible for a host of social disruptions, including jihadist attacks, a migrant rape epidemic, a public health crisis, rising crime and a rush by German citizens to purchase weapons for self-defense — and even to abandon Germany altogether.

As for assimilation and integration, it is not happening. The president of Turkey, Mr. Erdogan, is sending Islamist imams to German mosques to ensure that Muslim refugees do not assimilate. Remember the Ottoman invasion of Europe?

The Turkish government has sent 970 clerics — most of whom do not speak German — to lead 900 mosques in Germany that are controlled by the Turkish-Islamic Union for Religious Affairs (DITIB), a branch of the Turkish government's Directorate for Religious Affairs, known in Turkish as Diyanet. Critics accuse Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of using DITIB mosques to prevent Turkish migrants from integrating into German society.

The result could have been predicted:

Half of the three million ethnic Turks living in Germany believe it is more important to follow Islamic Sharia law than German law if the two are in conflict, according to a survey.

The government has chosen to deal with this problem by putting its collective head in the sand. And also, by censoring the facts.

For example:

A Cologne police superintendent revealed that he was ordered to remove the term "rape" from an internal police report about the mass sexual assaults in Cologne on New Year's Eve. He said that an official at the North-Rhine Westphalia Interior Ministry told him in an angry tone: "This is not rape. Remove this term from your report. Submit a new report."

And also:

There are written instructions ... today we are not allowed to say anything negative about the refugees. This is government journalism, and this leads to a situation in which the public loses their trust in us. This is scandalous." — Wolfgang Herles, Deutschlandfunk public radio.

We could go on.

Angela Merkel seems belatedly to have awakened to the problems she has created. But, is it too little, too late? Besides, what is she proposing to do about it? For now, not very much.

Merkel’s compassion is being seen as weakness, an invitation to invade Germany and eventually to make it into an Islamic state. The refugees do not see themselves as refugees. They see themselves as an invading army. 

To see this as a police problem is shortsighted and calamitous. Germany and other Scandinavian countries pride themselves on their ability to project weakness on the international state. They are proud to have women running their defense departments. They believe that it makes them holier than thou and that it puts them on the moral high ground.

Lulled into complacency, they are now paying a very heavy price for their naïveté and weakness. 

Think Like a Nazi

Even though America’s intelligentsia is rushing to the barricades to protect the nation against Steven Bannon, it has spent three decades defending Martin Heidegger against charges that he was anti-Semitic, and also a Nazi.

What could be more incoherent than teaching your students to think like Nazis, while leading the march against alt-right anti-Semitism?

While Breitbart has been resolutely pro-Israeli, Martin Heidegger was a Nazi in Germany in the 1930s, back when it meant something. After the war, when the horrors of the Third Reich could not be denied, the great philosopher had no remorse and could never bring himself to apologize.

But, why all the effort to defend Heidegger? You see, the Nazi philosopher was the founding father of the practice of deconstruction. Students at American universities are taught to deconstruct texts, an activity that seems to be perfectly anodyne and unobjectionable. After all, what could be wrong with scouring a text—and not just texts—in order to find evidence of the vast conspiracy called Western Civilization, that would be Judeo-Christian civilization.

Strangely, no one seems to have noticed that when you set out to deconstruct Western Civilization you are going to show a marked animus to the religion and the people who are most responsible for founding it.

When you deconstruct a text you look for offending texts, identify them and neutralize them.

When the SS and the SA did the same thing in Jewish neighborhoods it was called a pogrom. When the Red Guards did it to Confucian texts and artifacts in China it was called a cultural revolution. In truth, the Heideggerian practice of deconstruction teaches students a bad habit, one that they share with some decidedly unsavory characters.

Since radical deconstructionists tend to be holier than thou, they forcefully reject the notion that thee practice that they have often spent their lives mastering derives from Nazism. They have contorted their minds in order to exculpate Heidegger, or better, to show that his Nazi practices had nothing to do with his philosophy. Obviously, you need to be especially bright in order to believe such a thing.

After World War II, Heidegger was banned from teaching for several years. The authorities believed that his thinking was dangerous. Then, thanks to certain French philosophers, the ban was lifted and everyone forgot about Heidegger’s Nazism.

They did until a Venezuelan scholar named Victor Farias published a book called Heidegger and Nazism in 1987. Many of those who were practicing deconstruction at the time were horrified. They morphed into anti-colonialists. And yet, Heidegger’s minions rushed out to defend him, led especially by one Jacques Derrida. Someone as brilliant as Derrida should certainly have known what he was dealing with. Whether he was most horrified by the attempts to discredit his deconstructive project or by his failure to understand a point that was staring him in the face… we do not know.

Many years after Farias, there were Heidegger’s Black Notebooks. When people started scouring them, they found that they were chock-a-block with anti-Semitic thoughts and feelings. Many people decided that they showed Heidegger’s true face. His defenders insisted that they were philosophical musings.

Now the German texts of Heidegger’s letters to his brother have  put another nail in the coffin of Heidegger’s reputation. The Los Angeles Review of Books has translated a review by Adam Soboczynski  from Die Zeit.

Soboczynski opens thusly:

Inside these pages one finds an unvarnished picture of the philosopher’s political disposition. In the Black Notebooks, a kind of diary of thoughts, Heidegger approached anti-Semitism from a philosophical remove, but these personal letters published expose him as a bona fide, unrepentant anti-Semite. They also show that — in contrast to prevailing beliefs — the Freiburg professor was politically well informed, and was an early and passionate supporter of National Socialism.

Heidegger was an early admirer of Hitler. He offered his brother a Christmas gift of Mein Kampf. Obviously, the philosopher was not put off by the book’s anti-Semitism:

As early as the tail end of 1931, the 43-year-old Heidegger sent his brother a copy of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf for Christmas, praising the future dictator’s “extraordinary and unwavering political instincts.” Heidegger interprets the right-wing conservative minority cabinet under Reich Chancellor Franz von Papen — which governed with the help of President Hindenburg between June and December 1932 — as a Jewish conspiracy.

In Heidegger’s own words:

On April 13, 1933, Heidegger writes enthusiastically:

It can be seen from one day to the next how great a statesman Hitler is becoming. The world of our people and the Reich finds itself in a process of transformation, and all those who have eyes to see, ears to hear, and a heart for action will be swept along and put in a state of extreme excitement.

Heidegger did not just get caught up in the spirit of the times. He firmly believed in National Socialism. Soboczynski explains:

Heidegger’s commitment to Hitler’s state and his membership in the NSDAP turn out to be based, quite logically, in his long-standing questionable convictions. As the letters now show beyond doubt, this was in no way the decision of an opportunistic careerist or the oblivious aberration of a political ignorant — as has been argued for decades in the philosopher’s defense. The familiar apologetic assumption that Heidegger adhered to a private, idiosyncratic notion of National Socialism, allegedly free from any form of racism, should be laid to rest.

He then shares a few of Heidegger’s anti-Semitic rants:

The opprobrium Martin Heidegger directs at Jews in the letters may have been typical of the widespread anti-Semitic discourse and conspiracy theories of the time. As early as 1916, he complained to his future wife of the “Jewification of our culture and universities,” against which the “German race” must “summon inner strength” to “rise up.” Still, in the case of Heidegger, such baseness is particularly abhorrent; not only were his famous academic instructor Edmund Husserl and his student and lover Hannah Arendt Jewish, but so were many other students that sat with him in his classes, including Karl Löwith, Herbert Marcuse, Leo Strauss, Jacob Klein, Elisabeth Blochmann, Hans Jonas, and Werner Brock, his last assistant prior to 1933. Complaining about his growing workload on April 13, 1933, Heidegger explains coldly: “three Jews are disappearing from my department.”

As you doubtless know, Heidegger declared himself to be equally an enemy of Bolshevism and Americanism. Might it be because he saw Bolshevism as the product of a Jewish mind and because he saw Americanism as a capitalist plot led by Jewish bankers?

Soboczynski concludes:

Just like National Socialism itself, the war was, for Heidegger, a battle in defense of the “Occident” and “German-ness” against the “great threat” posed by “Bolshevism” and “Americanism” (Jan. 29, 1943). On June 7, 1942, the philosopher still wonders why “our propaganda” doesn’t reveal “Americanism in all of its excesses.” Ultimately, he was left befuddled: “What the Weltgeist (world spirit) has in store for the Germans is a mystery. Just as murky is why it is using the Americans and Bolsheviks as its servants” (Jan. 18, 1945).

White Women Are Drinking Themselves to Death

Here’s a question begging for an answer: why are so many white women drinking themselves to death? The Washington Post reports the facts and, perhaps sagely, does not attempt to offer a solution. By all appearances white women, especially rural white women and especially college educated white women do not have it so good.

Apparently, white women have suffered the most during the past eight years.

The Post asks the question:

Why, after 50 years of unabated progress in life expectancy for every conceivable group of Americans – men, women, young, old, rich, poor, high-school dropouts, college graduates, rural, urban, white, black, Hispanic or Asian — had one demographic group in the last decade experienced a significant increase in premature deaths? Why were so many white women reporting precipitous drops in health, mental health, comfort and mobility during their working-age prime? Why, over the last eight years alone, had more than 300,000 of those women essentially chosen to poison themselves?

The Post also notes:

White women between 25 and 55 have been dying at accelerating rates over the past decade, a spike in mortality not seen since the AIDS epidemic in the early 1980s. According to recent studies of death certificates, the trend is worse for women in the center of the United States, worse still in rural areas, and worst of all for those in the lower middle class. Drug and alcohol overdose rates for working-age white women have quadrupled. Suicides are up by as much as 50 percent.

But, the situation really goes back to around the turn of the millennium. While the death rates for other groups diminish, those of white women increase. In another story the Post offers the statistics:

Drinking is killing twice as many middle-aged white women as it did 18 years ago.

Generally, middle age (age 35 to 54)  is not the time to die in modern societies. It is past teenage dangers, before the serious perils of age, and improved medical care and public-health campaigns are keeping more people alive.

So why are middle-aged white women dying more often even while death rates for other groups continue to go down? What are white women doing that is so different?

Strangely, college educated white women drink more than do women with some college and even more than women who have had a high school education:

One interesting twist that we’ll come back to shortly is that women with at least a four-year college degree report drinking more often than women without college degrees. Thirty-one percent of the women with a college degree reported drinking multiple days a week, compared with 21 percent of women with some college and 14 percent of women with a high-school education or less.

Yet, high school educated women are more likely to binge drink:

Scientists say that heavy drinking — many drinks at a time — can be more dangerous than regular drinking. One-third of white women reported “binge” drinking — having at least four drinks in two hours.

While women with college degrees drink more frequently, women with only a high-school education are more likely to say they binge drink.

What does it all mean? No one seems to know. Surely, the media will line up the usual suspects: insufficient mental health treatment, social media, and Fox News. And yet, one suspects that the phenomenon signals a fraying social fabric, a loss of national pride, a confusion over social roles coupled with economic decline.

Psychiatrists will say—reasonably-- that these women are self-medicating. What is so seriously wrong with their lives or with the nation that they are drinking themselves to death?

It's the Culture, Stupid!

George Will, who counts among those who got a few things wrong in 2016, has written a not-so-fond farewell to last year. (Come to think of it, how many people can honestly say that they will miss 2016.)

Will does not mention his own failures at political prognostication, so we will not mention our own.

Instead he offers scenes the culture wars. Or better, from the cultural tyranny that has characterized the Obama years. If you want to understand why Trump won, look at administrative overreach and the government's will to force people to follow rules that made no sense. As I and several others have noted, most of these rules defy or ignore reality. And yet, no one seemed to care… except the American voters who said: Enough.

It was not as bad as the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution—American students were not cannibalizing their teachers—but, led by student Red Guards and their bureaucratic enablers the Great American Cultural Revolution invaded far too many lives.

Will begins his compendium, thusly:

One day a year — Lemonade Day — children in Austin, Texas, can sell the stuff without spending $460 on various fees, licenses, and permits. Twelve-year olds in a Tampa middle school, learning about “how much privilege” they have, were asked if they were “Cisgendered,” “Transgendered,” or “Genderqueer.” Two years after Emma was the most common name given to baby American girls, the trend was toward supposedly gender-neutral baby names (e.g., Lincoln, Max, Arlo) lest the child feel enslaved to stereotypes. A New Jersey mother says a police officer interrogated her nine-year-old son after he was suspected of a racial slur when he talked about brownies, the baked good. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission pondered whether a worker committed racial harassment by wearing a cap emblazoned with the Gadsden flag (depicting a coiled rattlesnake, with the words “Don’t Tread on Me”). A University of Iowa professor complained that the Hawkeyes’ mascot, Herky, a fierce bird, is “conveying an invitation to aggressivity and even violence” that is discordant with the “all accepting, nondiscriminatory messages we are trying to convey.”

The mania even touched the Founding Fathers—the phrase was discovered to be sexist—and even to North Carolina’s restrooms:

As President’s Day approached, San Diego advised city workers to use “bias-free language” by avoiding the phrase “Founding Fathers.” A National Park Service employee giving guided tours of Independence Hall in Philadelphia told tourists that the Declaration of Independence and Constitution were produced by “class elites who were just out to protect their privileged status.” The employee praised herself for her “bravery.” The NBA, which plays preseason games in China, home of forced abortions and organ harvests, moved its 2017 All-Star Game from Charlotte because of North Carolina’s law stipulating that transgender individuals should use bathrooms appropriate to their physiology.

According to the NBA and our bureaucratic overlords, it’s a just cause. Apparently, the American people demurred. Naturally, this has caused culture warriors across the nation to fall into the slough or despond or to go into high dudgeon… or both, depending on the day.

And then, Will reminds us of another great Obama administration failure, this one the signature issue of Michelle Obama. As we know, Mrs. Obama has been praised to the rafters in the last days of her husband’s administration. Were she to run for office, we are assured that she would be a shoo-in. And yet, how did her school lunch program work out? Or should it be called: Starve the Children. 

We have followed it on this blog, but Will provides us with some needed perspective:

By 2016, six years after the president’s wife agitated for federal guidelines limiting sodium, sugar, fats, and calories in school lunches, 1.4 million students had exited the National School Lunch Program, and students had a robust black market in salt and sugar. A tweet with the hashtag #ThanksMichelleObama said, “The first lady can have a personal chef, but I can’t have two packets of ketchup?” 

Apparently, no issue was too trivial for the administrative state and its armies of bureaucrats. It was not just a hint and a nudge. It was an imposition. If you imagine that American parents, seeing their children forced on to a starvation diet in school, were going to take it lying down… you were wrong.

I mention it, and perhaps Will was thinking of it, but the accumulation nof these details tells us why people voted for Donald Trump.

The Hollow Men of the G.O.P.

Among those who got this year’s election wrong was Ross Douthat. One can think of a few more, but since today is presumably a day of good cheer, we will refrain.

Today, Douthat does a mea culpa. Apparently, he mistook foggy bottom for a crystal ball. Among his sage remarks is the following, an explanation of what the Trump ascendance said about the Republican Party, its leadership, its principles and ultimately, its decadence:

In the case of the G.O.P., that decadence was the party’s “Reagan yesterday, Reagan today, Reagon forever” commitments, which seemed to me misguided but powerfully entrenched, so that an assault on party orthodoxy as frontal as the one that Trump mounted would eventually forge a defensive unity among the party’s politicians and ideological enforcers.

As indeed it did — in exactly one place, the Wisconsin primary. But everywhere else, from the talk radio dial to the halls of Congress to Fox News, Trump’s assault revealed that the party’s would-be statesmen were mostly hollow men and its enforcers were mostly ratings-hungry cynics. I had thought that the G.O.P. was run by true believers in a dated catechism. But really it was run by people for whom the Reaganite catechism only mattered because they controlled the inquisition, and once Trump’s army of heretics refused to disperse they had no stomach for a fight.

Food for thought….

Happy New Year