Williamson is pretty vociferous in his opposition to abortion, writing of its origin in his birth to an unwed teenage mother in Texas in the early 70s when he was given up for adoption. Those events took place the year before Roe v Wade became the law of the land and Williamson, not unreasonably, thinks it the case had occurred a year earlier there would be no Kevin. While I don't share Williamson's abolitionist position on abortion, being more inclined to look at Europe for another approach - in most countries permissive until 12 to 18 weeks after conception and then very restrictive after that - it is a logically and morally consistent position and it was absurd for those who believe differently to demand his expulsion. It bespeaks a lack of confidence in their position.
Of course, the real reason for the objections was to deplatform an articulate writer of politically inconvenient views. It is safe to confine Williamson to the ghetto of conservative publications where no one whose views might be swayed would venture. It is a shame that publications like The Atlantic which once took pride in presenting a wide range of views now voluntarily intellectually stifling itself.
All of which is by way of letting readers know that Williamson has been on quite a roll recently at National Review. Here are links to a few of his recent pieces, along with some excerpts.
Health Care Is The Opposite Of A Right:
If you have twelve children and six cupcakes, the possibilities of division remain the same even if you declare that every child has the “right” to an entire cupcake of his own. Goods are physical, while rights are metaphysical, and the actual facts of the real world are not transformed by our deciding to talk about them in a different way.By the way, progressives don't actually think healthcare is a right - see, for instance, the Democratic Senators who just voted to oppose legislation requiring health care to babies born alive after an abortion procedure.
Senator Sanders points to the Scandinavian model as an example of what it means to have health care as a right. Senator Sanders has traveled widely in his life — he found much to praise in the Soviet Union while honeymooning there, and said so — but he is, like many American progressives, almost completely parochial. As is the case with the United Kingdom and much of Europe, Sweden, Norway, and Denmark are in the 21st century markedly different from the countries they were in the 1970s, when Senator Sanders’s awareness of the world seems to have congealed into the impenetrable clot of ignorance on such ghastly display in his current political career. A generation of reform — including tax cuts and reductions in the scope of the public sector — have left the Scandinavian countries with lower public-sector spending than such European standard-bearers as France and Belgium.The War In South Asia
As it stands, the U.S. system retains much of what people dislike about private care while incorporating much of what’s undesirable about state-dominated systems: insecurity and relatively high costs plus sclerotic bureaucracy and cumbrous regulation — hooray for us.
Swedish economist Tino Sanandaji links the social organizing principle behind the Scandinavian welfare states to what the Swedes refer to as duktig — loosely translated, “competence.” Citizens are understood not as baby birds with open beaks being fed by the state, but as having primary responsibility for themselves. “It has the connotation that you have the social obligation to be competent,” Sanandaji says.
Not a right, but a duty.
As a matter of national rhetoric, this is strongly emphasized in countries such as Switzerland and Singapore. That is one reason why the individual mandate to carry health insurance is uncontroversial in Switzerland. “We consider the health insurance mandate to be a form of socially responsible civic conduct,” former Swiss health minister Thomas Zeltner told Health Affairs. “In Switzerland, ‘individual freedom’ does not mean that you should be free to live irresponsibly and freeload from others.”
The time has come to cut Islamabad loose and recognize Pakistan for what it is: a state sponsor of terrorism. That the Pakistani state (and some Pakistani territory) is not entirely under the control of the Pakistani government and its elected leaders does not change the facts of the case. The United States should give Islamabad a date certain by which to get its act together or face sanctions under the relevant statutes.
The Trump administration should offer this to Modi in exchange for keeping India’s troops — and India’s missiles — on India’s side of the border.
If, in turn, Imran Khan and his government require international help in doing what needs doing, then a good-faith effort by Islamabad would certainly enjoy broad support, and not only from the United States. But Pakistan’s troubles run very deep: They are bred into its institutions and, to some extent, into its national political foundation, which is rooted in the belief that Muslims can truly flourish only in a polity in which Muslims predominate. The very different evolutions of Pakistan and India since 1947 give the lie to that belief, but Pakistan would not be the first nation to be governed by a lie.
The question is not whether there are American interests at stake. The question is whether we will pursue those interests on our own terms and under our own initiative rather than react to events beyond our immediate control.
Reparations For Slavery
The proposals are not intended to mitigate evil. They are intended to make Elizabeth Warren . . . or Kamala Harris, or Kirsten Gillibrand . . . president of the United States.
Nor is it obvious that African Americans such as Barack Obama, who is not descended from slaves, has a valid claim. Indeed, the term “African American” is increasingly useless as a meaningful social signifier as well-to-do immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean slide easily into the upper ranks of American society while black citizens of more ancient American ancestry continue to founder. The American sense of fairness is prickly and defensive — and central to our political culture. To present reparations as a means to justice, from that point of view, is to beg the question.Senator Elizabeth Warren, formerly promoted by her employers as a woman of color, has ’fessed up to being as white as Rachel Dolezal waltzing with the ghost of George Plimpton as snow falls gently on Vienna, has endorsed the payment of reparations to African Americans, a position held by Senator Kamala Harris but forsworn by other Democrats, Barack Obama notable among them, and rejected by Senator Bernie Sanders, the Brooklyn socialist who represents Vermont in the Senate and who is seeking the Democratic nomination even though he does not belong to the party.
This is, needless to say, another case of symbolism-over-substance Democratic politics. Democrats who gave a good goddamn about the lives of black Americans have had a great many years to do something about the schools in Philadelphia or the police department in Chicago, the so-called war on drugs, and a passel of economic policies that help to keep blacks poor — including such Democratic favorites as the Davis-Bacon Act, which explicitly was designed partly for that purpose — “superabundance of Negro labor,” and all that.
But doing the hard work of responsible governing doesn’t have the juice these hustlers are after.
And then there are the Republicans.
The deformed political alliance that still enjoys proclaiming itself the “party of Lincoln” from time to time suffers from its own deficiencies on this matter, some of them more obvious than others. On the one hand, it rightly rejects on classical-liberal ground the politics of collective categorical racial guilt and entitlement. On the other hand, it is the partisan home of the politics of white resentment and white anxiety. Mostly, the Republican party has since Thaddeus Stevens’s departure from the political scene endeavored to identify a date or an episode at which point it might declare the issue of African Americans’ social and political status concluded and return to its preferred full-time agenda of cutting taxes. But the question is far from concluded.
If our project is the full integration of African Americans into the main stream of American society — meaning a situation in which slave ancestry correlates no more exactly with socioeconomic position than does Italian ancestry — then we owe it to ourselves and to our fellow citizens to admit that a program of simple cash transfers is not going to get that done. It would almost certainly lead to an even uglier and bitterer species of racial politics than the one we already have. Reparations would likely prove to be as effective in incorporating African Americans as Indian reservations have been for incorporating Native Americans. “But reservations weren’t meant to bring Native Americans more fully into American life,” you might respond. “Just the opposite.” And, of course, you’d be right. Think on that.
There are a million and one things that could and should be done in the cause of justice and prosperity for African Americans as such — not simply as people who just happen to be over-represented among the poor, the incarcerated, and the murdered. (Here, the tragedy of the subordination of the NAACP and other like-minded groups, which effectively have been reduced to mere organs of the Democratic party, is terribly apparent.) Pursuing that reform agenda would be a blessing to the nation as a whole, and it is to the nation as a whole that national politics must in the end address itself, even as we take into account the unique situation of African Americans.
Merciless Sympathy
Merciless sympathy is the stratagem by which our natural solicitous feeling toward those who have suffered some wrong or some injury is forcibly reconstituted into support for a particular political agenda grafted onto the unhappy episode. Those who don’t support the politics are treated as though they were victimizing the victim (genuine or hoax) rather than disagreeing about a policy question.
Merciless sympathy is how declining to oppose Brett Kavanaugh’s appointment to the Supreme Court is transmuted into callousness toward rape victims, how support for the Second Amendment is recast as contempt for the children killed in Parkland, how doubting the breathless accounts of the Covington Catholic matter becomes racist hostility to an elderly Native American veteran. As rhetorical stratagems go, it is obvious, shallow, and stupid — and therefore effective in the era of Twitter-dominated discourse, in which shallowness and stupidity are weaponized.
The plague of phony hate crimes on college campuses, often coinciding with controversial political events, isn’t the product of coincidence. It is a strategy. Fictitious, politically charged stories of rape — Lena Dunham’s encounter with “Barry” the College Republican, the lies published by Rolling Stone, etc.—are not the products of coincidence. These things happen in clusters for a reason. That is not to say they are being centrally directed as part of some kind of well-tempered conspiracy, but rather that they are the natural result of a certain kind of politics attached to a certain worldview.
Merciless sympathy is used not only to silence doubters but to silence dissent.
Republicans Pounce
From a New York Times article headlined, “Republicans are demonizing Democrats as left-wing radicals on the economy, abortion and Israel” and “Republicans Already Are Demonizing Democrats as Socialists and Baby Killers.”Williamson doesn't mention that when there is a scandal or something else potentially negative regarding Republicans or conservatives the Times covers it as a straight news story focusing on the facts, or at least the facts most amenable to making those on the Right look bad, whereas when it involves Democrats the story is always about how the Republicans are trying to make it a story.
Republicans amped it up, seizing on a Twitter post by a freshman representative, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, which even some Democrats condemned as anti-Semitic, and ridiculing the “Green New Deal,” an ambitious economic stimulus plan unveiled by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a self-described democratic socialist.I.e., “Republicans pounce!”
Well.
Is not Representative Ilhan Omar, a Democrat, a radical on Israel, as well as an anti-Semite? Of course she is. Is not Representative Ocasio-Cortez, also a Democrat, a socialist as she says she is and a left-wing radical on the economy? Are not Democrat-controlled states passing laws that allow for the killing of babies while they are being born? All of these things are true. They aren’t even really debatable.
The issue isn’t that “Republicans pounce.” Of course they pounce on this madness. They should. They must. The problem is the madness, not the opposition to it.
Regular Order
What if these are not extraordinary times -- or, at least, not extraordinary in the way our activists and media entrepreneurs would have us believe?
Everybody has an emergency to peddle. They always appear at the most convenient times and in the most convenient places. President Trump has just suffered a humiliating defeat in his confrontation with Congress about funding for his beloved wall — and losing a political contest, or having a disagreement about spending, is not an emergency. President Trump has been in office since January 2017, and if illegal immigration is an emergency now, it was an emergency then, but he has only now got around to declaring a state of emergency. The variable isn’t the level of illegal immigration — it’s Trump’s getting steamrolled by Nancy Pelosi.
The fake hate crimes tend to crop up in the places where real ones are least likely to happen but where people are most eager to have them happen in order to affirm their own petty hatreds, which means the socially segregated spaces occupied by the social-justice Left, college campuses prominent among them. In November, Goucher College was convulsed by a series of threats against black students and racist graffiti, which turned out to be the work of a hoaxer, Fynn Arthur, a black student and member of the lacrosse team who was charged with a criminal offense in the matter. These things have the feel of inevitability: The closest thing to a genuine hate crime to happen at Goucher College was the school’s decision to admit young Jonah Goldberg as an undergraduate.
Likewise, the “epidemic” of sexual assaults on college campuses is a myth, an urban legend that shows up nowhere in the actual crime statistics, which suggest that college women are in fact less likely to suffer a sexual assault than a member of the general population. (The women most likely to suffer sexual assault are poor, nonwhite, and non-college educated, especially those residing in relatively insular or isolated communities.) Campus feminists invent these stories for reasons of cultural politics, as we have seen over and over: Lena Dunham and “Barry” the College Republican, the Rolling Stone fiction, etc.
Informed by Randolph Bourne’s admonition that “war is the health of the state,” socialists have long used every war — or “moral equivalent of war” — as a pretext for insisting that the state take over the commanding heights of the economy: World War I, the Great Depression, World War II, Paul Ehrlich’s fanciful Malthusian prophecies regarding overpopulation, the 2008-09 financial crisis, the “inequality” panic, and now, under the dotty inspiration of Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, global warming — a dozen different maladies, the same proffered therapy in every case.
Extraordinary.
What to do about Adolf Hitler is a different kind of question from what to do about Donald Trump or what to do about the illegal immigrants employed by such firms as Houston-based Waste Management of Texas. But if you can convince yourself that Trump is the moral equivalent of Hitler, that illegal immigration is a sudden existential threat to the republic, that our nation’s allegedly atavistic redneck culture has us on the verge of a Kristallnacht for homosexuals, or that all life on Earth will become extinct if Field Marshal Sandy doesn’t have her way every time she stamps her foot, then you can justify — to others, and to yourself — measures that are extraordinary. Among those extraordinary measures is the lie in the service of “a greater truth.”
But what if these are not extraordinary times — or, at least, not extraordinary in the way our activists and media entrepreneurs would have us believe?
The “greater truth” is this: The United States of America is a relatively peaceful, extraordinarily prosperous, and fundamentally decent society. Americans are greedy and violent, but we also are generous and brave. Our country is home to flat-Earthers and world-changing geniuses, both of them in unusual numbers. It’s a package deal. We have a relatively ineffective and dysfunctional federal government, and we have social differences that have put the two main modes of American life (and the political tendencies related to them) at odds with one another, and that more bitterly than is necessary. Those are real problems.
We’ll sort them out — if we allow the excellent institutions we have painstakingly constructed to do that perform as necessary. These include the separation of powers, the rule of law, due process and the presumption of innocence, models of guilt and entitlement that are individual rather than racial or otherwise corporate, freedom of speech, open discourse and inquiry, adversarial political parties, and — this is almost lost — a meaningful distinction between public and private things. The purpose of emergencies — and, especially, phony emergencies — is to empower partisans and advocates and people with power to overrule those institutions in the pursuit of their own immediate parochial goals, whether those include a wall along the southern border or a mandatory seminar on “rape culture” at Yale. Conservative budget nerds often speak of their desire to see Congress return to “regular order.” But it isn’t just Congress that needs to return to regular order — so do the presidency, and the courts, and the people.
