Pun Salad

This is a new contribution to economic theory that we could dub Pelosinomics: if only we increase government spending enough, we can eliminate the national debt!

Linking to a Sesame Street celebration of “Latinx culture,” Antonio García Martínez, sharpest wit on Twitter, wrote last fall: “One of the great mysteries is how every elite institution, from universities to corporations to media to even Sesame Street, all spontaneously coalesced on the same narrow set of values all of a sudden.”

The set of values in question belongs to the cult of identity—a ramshackle creed that maintains, for example, that the term “Latinx” signifies an actual human group. Once the province of pretentious professors and their captive students, the cult has leaked out of the cannabis-scented halls of academia to infect an astonishing number of people in power. García Martínez is right. In the scope and rapidity of institutional embrace, nothing like it has transpired since the conversion of Constantine.

The National Archives in Washington, D.C., today places warning labels on the Constitution, because reading it may induce unpleasant sensations in some identity groups. Universities like Princeton now publish “antiracist toolkits” to instruct the faithful on how to “move beyond diversity” and into identity heaven. Nike, which makes sneakers, demands of its customers: “Don’t pretend there’s not a problem with America. Don’t turn your back on racism.” The Cleveland Indians and Washington Redskins, two time-honored sports franchises, for their identity sins have had their names stripped away. I could extend the list unto boredom—it would range from prestigious media institutions like the New York Times to local bodies like the San Francisco school board.

The Gipper was a man of grace, civility, and dignity — the opposite of Trump, who has always confused bluster with strength and bragging with confidence. Reagan was widely read, deeply informed, and persuasive in sharing his views. (Anyone who doubts it should read the published collection of his writings, which shows a mind constantly at work.) It was during the Reagan ascendancy that the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan announced, with a touch of surprise: “Of a sudden, the GOP has become a party of ideas.” Trump, by contrast, neither reads nor thinks, and the party he dominates is not associated with either thoughtfulness or innovation. In 2020, the Trumpified GOP didn’t even bother to produce a platform. Instead, it boiled its views down to a single principle: “The RNC enthusiastically supports President Trump . . . and will continue to enthusiastically support the President’s America-first agenda.”

What is salient in politics changes from era to era, of course. Many policies that exemplified Reaganism in the 1980s would have no application to the Trump era, and vice versa. But changing circumstances cannot paper over the profound differences between the two men.

Take foreign policy. Reagan was the president who implemented a strategy to win the Cold War and deployed all his rhetorical power to weaken the moral standing of the Soviet Union. Trump was the president who repeatedly gushed over the world’s dictators, including Kim Jong Un, Xi Jinping, and Vladimir Putin. It is fatuous to pretend that there is no choice to be made between the legacy of the Republican who saw America’s enemies headed for “the ash-heap of history” and the Republican who praises the “genius” and “savvy” of Putin for his invasion of Ukraine.

Vladimir Putin is one man. How has it come to pass that a single man, the corrupt and banal ruler of a decadent and backward country, should be able to convulse the entire world, more or less on his own?

There are analogous situations in private life. A screaming baby may be the least powerful person in a room, but he can dominate the room with his screams. A heckler can momentarily interrupt a performance and command the attention of a thousand people in a theater. Criminals often are weak men, but they can impose their will on others simply by being ready to violate laws and social rules.

All voluntary constraints on power create advantages for those who do not accept such constraints — that is one of fascism’s genuine political insights and the reason fascists and fascist organizations reject constraints on power in principle. This is true both of the sort of fascist who calls himself a fascist and of the sort of fascist who calls himself a socialist (Lenin, Castro, etc.) and of the sort of fascist who spurns ideological language for vague promises of national greatness.

I have observed in the past that either socialism is the unluckiest ideology in the history of politics — inexplicably being taken up by Lenin, Stalin, Castro, Mao, Honecker, Ho Chi Minh, Pol Pot, etc. — or there is something wrong with socialism. Which, of course, there is.

A commuter rail line from New Hampshire to Boston would need increasing taxpayer subsidies to serve a shrinking number of riders, recent data on transit ridership and commuting patterns suggest. 

Health concerns are not the only reason commuter rail ridership remains a fraction of its pre-pandemic levels. Work and commuting patterns have changed, leaving public transit systems — especially commuter rail — with massive, long-term revenue shortfalls and shrinking pools of potential riders.

The New Hampshire Department of Transportation’s proposed “Capitol Corridor” commuter rail project would extend the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority’s Boston-Lowell line to Manchester (and possibly to Concord). It would undertake this expansion, at a cost well north of a quarter of a billion dollars, just as remote work begins to reshape commuting patterns.