National Review - 12 September 2022

52 Pages·2022·57.1 MB·English

SPECIAL ISSUE

NATIO
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AN AGENDA
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Contents ‘“rivirw-

SEPTEMBER 12, 2022 | VOLUME LXXIV, NO. 17 | www.nationalreview.com

ARTICLES

13 ALONG GOODBYE by Charles C. W. Cooke
Getting over Trump.

15 AFTER TRUMP by Dan McLaughlin
What will the GOP look like?

17 THE NEXT LAXALT by John J. Miller
Cheer and hoping on the Nevada campaign trail.

20 REFUND THE POLICE by Rachel Lu
Minneapolis reverses a mistake.

SPECIAL ISSUE:
A CONSERVATIVE AGENDA FOR 2023

22 REPUBLICANS NEED AN AGENDA by Yuval Levin
The most basic work.

24 POWER TO THE PARENTS by Dan Lips
Priorities for K-12 education reform.

27 HIGHER-VALUE HIGHER ED by Beth Akers
Enough with the magical financing.

29 MODERNIZING MONETARY THEORY by Alexander William Salter
The Fed can’t be left to police itself.

31 THE CHECK ON BIG TECH by Adam J. White
It is start-up tech, not big government.

33 MEDICAL BREAKTHROUGH by Chris Pope
Making conservative health reform popular.

35 BABY STEPS by Ramesh Ponnuru
National Republicans must act on abortion.

39

40

42

44

46

47

BOOKS, ARTS
& MANNERS

BEYOND ‘SCHOOL CHOICE’
Grant Addison reviews Hostages No
More: The Fight for Education
Freedom and the Future of the
American Child, by Betsy DeVos.

CONVERSING ON THE
COSMOS

John Wilson reviews Taxi from
Another Planet: Conversations
with Drivers about Life in the
Universe, by Charles S. Cockell.

COMRADES IN ART
John J. Miller visits the Museo Casa
de Leon Trotsky.

A MASS WITH MOZART
Jay Nordlinger writes from the
Salzburg Festival.

BAD LANGUAGE
Joseph Epstein unlocks multiple
existential threats of misused words.

CRIME PAYS
Ross Douthat reviews Emily the
Criminal.

SECTIONS

Letters to the Editor

The Week

AthWAFt «ics ee oe swan James Lileks
The Long View....... Rob Long
Poetry ......... Maryann Corbett

Happy Warrior. . . Jason Lee Steorts

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SEPTEMBER 12 ISSUE; PRINTED AUGUST 25

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Letters

A Voice for Choice

In his essay “A Lost Generation” (August 29), Vladimir Kogan comprehen-
sively analyzes the causes of student learning loss during the pandemic.
His “both sides bad” treatment of the resulting blue-state and red-state
solutions, however, lacks similar depth, particularly regarding school choice.

First, Republican-run states with blue urban centers and governance were
frequently forced to fix the mistakes of Democratic-led localities and special
interests. For instance, Iowa Republican governor Kim Reynolds fought a
lawsuit from the Iowa City School District and the Iowa State Education
Association to get students back into schools.

More troubling was Kogan’s minimization of the academic benefits of
school choice. A majority of random-assignment studies have found that
private-school choice improves academic outcomes, and numerous studies
show that the resulting competition carries those benefits over to public
schools. Further, most school-choice programs target the same low-income
families that Kogan rightly argues should receive the primary focus. It’s pol-
icy malpractice not to include school choice in efforts to remediate pandemic
learning loss.

I assume it’s unintentional, but Kogan conflates parent participation in
education with public participation in the culture wars. My experience over
20 years in education reform is that the vast majority of parents are busy with
work and family and prefer to avoid public advocacy. Parents typically take
advantage of school choice because they found their child’s previous school
a bad fit. They simply want better options and the accountability that school
choice provides.

Bill Phillips
Senior Director of Charter Policy
American Federation for Children

VLADIMIR KoGAN RESPONDS: I appreciate Mr. Phillips’s letter and agree about
the theoretical benefits of broader school-choice options, but my read of
the empirical evidence is that it is more mixed than he suggests and that
the benefits vary greatly with context (e.g., the quality of “fallback” public
schools) and depend on regulatory guardrails. I also agree that including
choice in efforts to address pandemic learning loss makes sense. But the
thrust of my criticism is that such efforts in many states seem to have begun
and ended with choice, failing to be a comprehensive set of policy responses
or to include more learning time.

School choice alone will not close the gaps that opened during the pan-
demic, for two reasons. First, such programs—especially the recent ones—will
not help the students who fell behind the most. While Phillips is right that
school-choice programs have historically affected the categories of students
who suffered the most academically during the pandemic, that is less true of
the more recent legislation adopted since the pandemic, such as Arizona’s
universal-voucher program. Second, even with more options, most students
will continue to attend public schools. Phillips is also correct that greater
competition will benefit these students, but even the largest such positive
impacts documented in the research suggest that similar benefits would not
be enough to restore more than a fraction of the pandemic learning loss.

By all means, we should implement well-designed school-choice policies,
but we should not expect them to be a panacea for a pandemic.

Letters may be submitted by email to [email protected].

SEPTEMBER 12, 2022
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from the American Council of Trustees and Alumni’s What
Will They Learn?® project for the 2022-2023 school year.

The American Council of Trustees and Alumni’s (ACTA) What Will They Learn?® (WWTL) project
grades the core curricula at colleges and universities on an “A” through “F” scale based on how many
of the above seven subjects they require students to study. Out of over 1,100 colleges and universities
reviewed this year, only 24 institutions require at least six of the seven subjects necessary to earn an
“A” rating. With a rigorous core curriculum focused on the classical liberal arts, Patrick Henry College
is just one of seven schools to require all seven WWTL subjects.

WhatWillTheyLearn.com
The Wee

@ We plan to socially transition our mortgage debt until it
identifies as a student loan.

@ Once again, President Biden has issued an executive order
that he knew beforehand was illegal. This time around,
the aim is to transfer liability for hundreds of billions of
dollars’ worth of student loans from the people who took
them out, used them, and benefited from them to the
taxpayers who did not take out, use, or benefit from
them. As with much of Biden’s previous behavior—
the eviction moratorium, the federal vaccine mandate—
the measure represents a violation of Biden’s oath of
office, and it should be treated as such by Congress and
the courts. Speaking to the press last year, Nancy Pelosi
made it clear that the president did not enjoy the power

to “cancel” student loans. “The president can’t do it,”
she said, “so that’s not even a discussion.” Adopting a
professorial tone, she continued: “Not everybody real-
izes that, but the president can only postpone, delay
but not forgive.” This conclusion echoed a Department

of Education report from early 2021, which found that
the executive branch “does not have statutory author-

ity to provide blanket or mass cancellation, compro-
mise, discharge, or forgiveness of student loan principal
balances, and/or to materially modify the repayment
amounts or terms thereof.” Knowing this, Biden did it
anyway. If he is not held to account for the usurpation,
Americans could reasonably wonder if they still have a
Constitution to take an oath to.

™@ Biden’s claim of “zero inflation,” based on one infla-
tion report that showed no month-over-month change
in the Consumer-Price Index, may come back to bite him.
Year-over-year inflation, which is normally how it’s reported,
was still 8.5 percent in July, which is hardly something to
celebrate. And the main reason for the 0 percent month-over-
month reading was that declining gasoline prices offset rising
food prices. But gasoline is still about 40 cents more expen-
sive than it was the week Russia invaded Ukraine and about
80 cents more expensive than it was last August. Nearly every
food category, meanwhile, showed prices rising faster than
the average. The U.S. still has a long way to go before inflation
ceases being the top economic problem.

@ That problem will not be solved by the so-called Inflation
Reduction Act, which has just been signed into law. It pro-
poses to reduce inflation by dumping a few hundred billion
dollars of new federal spending into the economy. That the
act is grievously misnamed is already obvious enough: Bret
Stephens of the New York Times has suggested it be called
the “West Virginia Special Perks Act”—it turns out that Sen-
ator Manchin has a price, and it’s lower than we would have

4 NATIONAL REVIEW

| www.nationalreview.com

See page 6.

guessed—or the “Elon Musk Additional Enrichment Act.” It
is a foolish piece of legislation, which is not surprising, but it
also is a remarkable testament to the transformation of the
Democratic Party: The bill is stuffed with handouts for the
well-to-do—particularly those who are interested in buying
a new electric car—and it is absolutely loaded up with give-
aways for politically connected firms and industries. A model
run by Wharton projected that the bill’s effect on inflation
would be “statistically indistinguishable from zero,” while the
Congressional Budget Office offered the adjective “negligible”
as its estimate. Talk is cheap, but nothing else is.

H@ The legislation, in one of its many provisions that had
nothing to do with inflation, instituted a 1 percent tax on
stock buybacks. A stock buyback is, as the name suggests,
what happens when a company finds itself sitting on extra
cash and decides that the best use of that money is to give it
back to investors—i.e., the people who own the company and
put up the money for its operations. Some of those investors

SEPTEMBER 12, 2022

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are Wall Street types of the sort Democrats like to denounce
when not shaking them down for donations, but many of
them are pension funds and retirement accounts that rep-
resent former teachers and other ordinary people. The thing
is, we already have a tax on stock buybacks, known as the
capital-gains tax, and it is already taking a bigger bite out
of investment because it isn’t indexed to inflation. The last
things the tax code needs are more complexity and more dis-
incentives to saving and investment. Democrats have sup-
plied both with the buyback tax.

@ And supplied more IRS, too. They are trying to pass off an
$80 billion windfall for the tax-collection agency as a measure
to modernize it. The IRS is famous for its outdated technology
and slow service, but even at federal-government levels of
inefficiency and waste, it doesn’t cost $80 billion to buy better
software and new computers. The bill allocated 4 percent of
the funds for taxpayer services, and 6 percent for modern-
izing technology. Much of the remaining 90 percent is for
bureaucratic expansion. And while Democrats are claiming
that audits will focus on the ultrarich, there simply aren’t
that many of them to audit. According to IRS data, there were
55,614 returns with adjusted gross income over $5 million
in 2019—you don’t hire 87,000 new workers to audit 55,000
returns. When Republicans asked the CBO for an estimate, it
found that the IRS augmentation would raise $20 billion from
those making under $400,000, Democrats’ supposed red line.
The good news is that the most likely outcome is not an army
of auditors bursting through the doors of middle-class Amer-
icans. Rather, it is that the IRS gets a bunch of taxpayer money
and little else happens. Most IRS employees are unionized,
and their union donates almost entirely to Democrats. The
union got the payday of a lifetime from its allies in Congress,
but Democrats are now the party of doubling the IRS—from
now until the only thing that’s certain besides taxes.

@ In the least surprising election result of the year, Liz
Cheney got blown out in the primary for her at-large Wyoming
House seat. She lost to the Trump-backed challenger Harriet
Hageman by more than 30 points. Cheney had kissed away her
House seat long ago, once she had gone all in on investigating
January 6 and quite possibly after she voted for impeachment.
She deserves credit for considering a commitment to the truth
about Trump’s shameful post-election conduct more import-
ant than her electoral prospects, although the workings of the
January 6 committee, to which she has been so central, have
been slanted and highly unusual. There are signs that Cheney
is going to become even more disaffected from the Republican
Party (she says she might not be able to vote for Ron DeSantis
if he is the Republican nominee), and the presidential run
that she says she is considering—perhaps in a GOP primary,
perhaps as an independent—would likely only help Trump.
It’d be best for all involved if she accepted that her best
role going forward isn’t going to be in elected politics again
anytime soon, if ever.

® Dr. Anthony Fauci is retiring from the government. Becom-
ing a Covid celebrity—complete with his own prayer can-
dles, action figures, and associated merchandising—seems to
have unleashed his worst instincts. From his initial comments

www.nationalreview.com

6 NATIONAL REVIEW

discouraging the wearing of masks to his highly misleading
statements about U.S. funding of gain-of-function research,
it became increasingly clear that Fauci’s pronouncements
were based on what he thought the public needed to hear,
and not necessarily his best reading of the facts. By Novem-
ber 2021, Fauci was contending that he was the walking and
talking embodiment of science itself: “It’s easy to criticize,
but they’re really criticizing science because I represent sci-
ence.” It was unjust to the critics, and unjust to science.

MiIn an email to her agency’s
11,000-person staff, CDC director
Rochelle Walensky concluded, “For
75 years, CDC and public health have
been preparing for Covid-19, and in
our big moment, our performance did
not reliably meet expectations.” She
wants the agency to respond quicker,
communicate more clearly and with
less jargon, and disclose what it doesn’t know as well as what
it does. That all sounds good, but few organizations deliber-
ately set out to respond slowly, communicate unclearly, or
deluge the public with complicated medical jargon. If the life-
and-death stakes of Covid-19 weren’t enough to shake the
organization out of its preexisting sluggish complacency, it’s
not clear an email from Walensky will do the trick. After the
mistakes of the Vietnam War and branch infighting, Congress
passed the Goldwater-Nichols Act to completely reorganize
the Defense Department. Such a reorganization of the public-
health apparatus should be on the table now.

H@ The evidence keeps piling up: Monkeypox is a disease that
affects highly sexually active gay men far more than any other
group of people. As in, 99 percent of all cases are in men,
and 94 percent of those infected reported recent same-sex
intimate contact. Additionally, nearly three-quarters of the
cases among men were among those who had had two or more
partners in the three weeks prior to the onset of symptoms.
Yet public-health officials continue to equivocate about who
is at risk for the disease. No one is well served by this evasion,
least of all the gay men who are contracting the disease.

M@ The adjective “widespread” does not do justice to the scale
of looting of Covid-related programs that seems to have taken
place. As with all the finest heists, how much was stolen will
never likely be known. In late 2021, the Secret Service esti-
mated $100 billion in losses, and others have made signifi-
cantly higher estimates. That there was some sloppiness in
the way that these programs were set up and administered in
the event of a sudden emergency is, perhaps, to be expected.
Still less is it surprising that one of the things all that stimulus
stimulated was fraud.

H@ Pro-abortion group Jane’s Revenge continues its crusade
against pregnancy-resource centers, in the name of unlim-
ited abortion. The most recent target was a pregnancy center
in western Massachusetts, where vandals graffitied benches
with the group’s tagline: “If abortion isn’t safe, neither
are you.” While disturbing, this instance of vandalism was
one of the milder attacks from Jane’s Revenge. Since May,

SEPTEMBER 12, 2022

POOL / GETTY IMAGES
Scientist Confesses:
Global Warming a $22 Billion Lie!

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Our editors were recently
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It reveals that a network of
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The man who has revealed this data
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pro-abortion activists, often claiming to be affiliated with the
group, have vandalized dozens of pregnancy centers across
the country. The attacks typically include defacement such as
threatening graffiti but also have involved broken windows,
theft, and arson. None of the culprits has been caught, but
the FBI has issued a tepid statement promising to investigate.

@ That the United States has a higher incarceration rate
than other developed countries is well known. Less well
known is our dearth of police officers per capita. A new paper
by Christopher Lewis and Adaner Usmani in the American
Journal of Law and Equality finds that if the U.S. were brought
into balance with the rest of the developed world, it would
have 1.9 million fewer prisoners and 500,000 more police offi-
cers. These outlier statistics are related. Under-policing leads
to high violent-crime rates and then to high incarceration
rates. The threat of severe punishment doesn’t deter criminal
behavior if criminals don’t believe they will get arrested. The
paper notes that “a single dollar spent on policing is almost
sixteen times more effective at deterring crime than a dollar
spent on incarcerating additional prisoners.” For both eco-
nomic efficiency and crime deterrence, the U.S. needs more
police, not fewer.

@ A federal judge blocked the implementation of a law that
Governor Ron DeSantis (R., Fla.) had made a centerpiece of
his reelection campaign: the Individual Freedom Act, known
colloquially as the “Stop WOKE” Act. The law, which prohibits
private and state employers from forcing workers to undergo
diversity training that might make them feel uncomfortable
about their race and limits what state-run universities can
teach about the inherent advantages or disadvantages enjoyed
by different races, was held to violate the First Amendment.
Judge Mark Walker concluded that the law was impermissibly
vague and represented “naked viewpoint-based regulation.”
In a vacuum, this is arguable. But Americans might credibly
wonder why the First Amendment prohibits this workplace
regulation of speech but not other regulations that progres-
sives happen to like. At present, we live in a country in which
the National Labor Relations Board has taken to prosecuting
people for jokes. If Florida’s act violates the First Amend-
ment, then it ought indeed to be enjoined. But it ought to be
joined in purgatory by others, lest the inconsistency look like
caprice.

@ “The definition of insanity,” as Einstein didn’t say, “is doing
the same thing over and over again and expecting a differ-
ent result.” Whoever’s words they were, they apply perfectly
to rent control, an idea that not only fails to deliver on the
promises of those who advocate it but, by wrecking the effi-
cient functioning of the housing market, generally leaves
most of those looking for a home worse off rather than bet-
ter. Yet the board of county commissioners in Orange County,
Fla., which includes Orlando, has approved an ordinance that
limits rent increases on multiunit buildings to increases in
the regional consumer-price index. The measure goes to the
voters in November. The rule is meant to lapse after a year,
a sunset clause of a type not much more believable in the
Sunshine State than anywhere else. Because a wider Flor-
ida law prohibits rent controls except in an “emergency,”

8 NATIONAL REVIEW

| www.nationalreview.com

the ordinance may not end up on the ballot. If it is, however,
Floridians should vote it down. The state has attracted many
new residents on the back of blue states’ misrule. It would be
perverse to start imitating one of its more destructive features.

@ A Republican candidate for the Florida legislature, Luis
Miguel, tweeted, “Under my plan, all Floridians will have per-
mission to shoot FBI, IRS, ATF and all other feds on sight!
Let freedom ring!” Freedom, rightly understood, has noth-
ing to do with it. In the 1960s, radical leftists talked the way
this Republican has: “Off the pig.” Carl Paladino, a Republi-
can candidate for Congress in New York, told Breitbart News,
“We have a couple of unelected people who are running our
government, in an administration of people like Garland,
who should be not only impeached, he probably should be
executed.” Paladino was referring to the attorney general,
Merrick Garland. We don’t blanch at rowdy political rhetoric.
Despicable is something else.

@ Oregon hasn’t had a Republican governor since 1987. The
Beaver State has a Democratic supermajority in both cham-
bers of the state legislature, and its registered-voter rolls skew
heavily blue. But Christine Drazan, the Republican nominee
for the 2022 governor’s race, is polling neck-and-neck with
her Democratic opponent. In July, the Cook Political Report
moved the race from “likely Democrat” to “leans Democrat”;
the next month, the University of Virginia’s Center for Pol-
itics moved the race from “leans Democratic” to “toss-up.”
None of this is entirely surprising: Tina Kotek, the Demo-
cratic nominee, is a close ally of the outgoing Kate Brown,
who was routinely ranked the least-popular governor in the
country. Brown leaves the state with the third-worst cost of
living, fourth-worst homelessness, sixth-worst business envi-
ronment, and eighth-worst education system in the country.
Oregon voters, understandably, seem less than excited about
another term of unchecked progressive governance.

H@ Portland, Oregon’s largest city, was the locus of riots, loot-
ing, and widespread disorder during the summer of 2020.
It is finding a return to normalcy beyond its reach. The city
responded to protesters by slashing $15 million from the
police budget and dismantling the police unit focused on
gun violence. The number of shootings skyrocketed, and
homicides surged in 2021 to 88—a more than tripling of the
20-year average prior to 2020. So far this year murders have
ticked downward only slightly, and the overall crime rate
remains elevated. A recent study measuring downtown foot
traffic in 62 major American cities ranked Portland’s near the
bottom. Destroyed businesses have not returned, and neither
have workers and tourists. Portland’s sad decline has proved
as swift and punishing to its remaining residents as it was
needless.

@ Small-time California marijuana farmers are “dying off
because of high taxes and baffling regulations,” according to
the Washington Post. When the libertarians said legalization
would make the weed trade just like every other business, they
weren’t wrong. We should not romanticize small business—
there’s a reason there are not mom-and-pop steel mills or
airplane manufacturers—but the long-observed fact is that

SEPTEMBER 12, 2022