Pun Salad

I'll get to talking about that graph in a bit; I was led to it by Robert Tracinski's article at Discourse, The Year of Stasis.

I've noticed that Reagan-blamers tend to move The Year Things Started Going To Shit a little later, but 1970 is (indeed) another pivotal date.

Clicking the graph will take you too J. Storrs Hall's website, plaintively titled Where is my Flying Car? He also wrote a book with that title (which I read back in 2022; my report here).

Both Tracinski's and Hall's articles are (of course) worth your time. As Tracinski says: "There is nobody obstructing progress but us."

Also of note:

• Preceded by Big Bullshit, to be quickly followed by Durable Doldrums. Kevin D. Williamson is no fan of Trump's Contrived Chaos.

  Donald Trump, who likes to talk about locking up his political opponents and gleefully shares his repugnant homoerotic fantasies about subjecting uncooperative reporters to prison rape, now has declared some emergencies. A couple of them. One of them is a border emergency, and another is an energy emergency.

  There is, indeed, chaos at our border. It is not an emergency in the formal sense required for the imposition of emergency measures—it is not a natural disaster or a war—but rather a persistent policy failure, one that implicates several prior administrations, including Trump’s 2017-2021 administration. The historically minded among you will remember that Trump enjoyed a governing trifecta at the beginning of his presidency in 2017, and he and his Republican allies in Congress chose to respond to the border crisis by … enacting a very traditional country-club Republican tax cut. Republicans could have enacted any immigration law they wanted in 2017. They chose to do nothing of substance on the issue.

  Republicans today control the White House and both houses of Congress, and the only immigration-related bill headed to Trump’s desk is one that tinkers around the edges of enforcement in criminal cases, adding shoplifting to the list of crimes for which illegals may be detained. Donald Trump occupies the highest office in the land and has a Congress controlled by his allies, and topmost on their agenda is—shoplifting? It is, of course, a matter of symbolism over substance, which is the Trump style and, increasingly, the general Republican style.

  And, unfortunately, his cheerleaders seem to be stuck in Honeymoon Mode. Just picked at random: Victoria Taft at PJ Media, headlines: Trump Gloriously Lays Waste to L.A. Politicians Standing in the Way of Rebuilding

  Gloria in Excelsis Trumpo!

• Undelivered promises, mostly. At Commentary, Tevi Troy examines What Obamacare Hath Wrought.

  On March 23, 2010, Barack Obama signed the Affordable Care Act, and as he did so, then Vice President Joe Biden whispered loudly that the law was a “big f—ing deal.” He was right, though perhaps not in the way either he or Obama intended. The ACA did not, as promised, transform our health-care system or bend the cost curve down. But it was a big deal because the way it was passed has transformed our political system. A decade and a half on, we are still trying to recover from the partisan mischief and altered norms that its poison has injected into our national political bloodstream.

  Passing Obamacare was the main priority of the Obama administration in its first two years, and the Obamans were confident they could succeed because he had won in a landslide in which his party had strengthened its control of both houses of Congress. Over the course of the year it took to achieve his aim, Obama and his team sold Obamacare with great fanfare and adopted innovative and politically tough-minded tactics—but had little or no realistic understanding about what their policy prescriptions could or would do once the bill became law.

  Instead, he made wild promises based on his stated determination “to finally challenge the special interests and provide universal health care for all.” Obamacare would make access universal, lower costs substantially over time, rein in the pharmaceutical and insurance companies, and do all this while still allowing people who liked their health-care plan to keep their health-care plan. The magical thinking behind all these promises proved to be just that—magical.

  If you don't recall, or just weren't paying attention back then, Tevi's article will bring you up to speed. Obamacare is a mess, sure. But Obama's steamroller tactics to get it passed set us on the hyperpartisan path to where we are on a number of important issues.

• Not even in Minnesota. Christopher Frieman debunks Tim Walz: Socialism Is Not Neighborly.

  Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, the 2024 Democratic vice presidential nominee, recently urged his supporters to not “shy away from our progressive values. One person’s socialism is another person’s neighborliness.” Socialism is sharing a cup of sugar with the family across the street, and who could object to that?

  Walz’s identification of socialism with neighborliness is reminiscent of Bernie Sanders’s remark that, “to me, socialism doesn’t mean state ownership of everything, by any means, it means creating a nation, and a world, in which all human beings have a decent standard of living.” Here Sanders equates socialism not with any particular set of economic institutions, but rather with the uncontroversial idea that we should create a world in which everyone has a decent standard of living.

  Even socialist philosophers and writers are guilty of this kind of rhetorical sleight of hand. G.A. Cohen once argued that voluntarily sharing food and equipment with one’s friends on a camping trip is an embodiment of socialist principles. And according to George Orwell, socialism is the notion that “everyone does his fair share of the work and gets his fair share of the provisions;” he says that the merits of socialism so defined are “blatantly obvious.”

  Christopher notes that in order for socialism to "work" at all, “capitalist acts between consenting adults” (Robert Nozick's apt phrase) must be banned. And that's not neighborly at all, is it?

• On the way out the door? It appears that Trump II has done a good job with one Executive Order. Charles C.W. Cooke likes it, anyway, but he points out that DEI’s Die-Hards Still Don’t Get It.

  ‘When does he bring back segregated water fountains?” So asked John Harwood, formerly of the New York Times, NBC, CNN, and elsewhere, when informed that President Trump had decided to shut down the federal government’s sprawling archipelago of DEI initiatives. Through the screen, one could almost feel the self-satisfaction. Tweet sent. Box ticked. Virtuous credentials reacquired for the week.

  That sort of reaction to criticisms of DEI or affirmative action is typical within a certain corner of elite culture. Nevertheless, it is extremely silly — akin in its triteness and naïvety to that of those who believe the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea must be a democratic people’s republic because those words are included in its name. Certainly, in a vacuum, “diversity” is a nice enough word. So, too, “equality” and “inclusion.” But, as in Orwell’s 1984, where the Ministry of Peace deals with war and the Ministry of Truth with lies, what matters more than the labels is what those who wield them ultimately wish to do with the power they seek. And what those people have done, lo these many years, is establish a network of vicious, illiberal, harshly ideological institutions, whose sole purpose has been to bastardize the quotidian language of the American republic and to impress the warped results into the service of a narrow, intolerant, and censorious form of political progressivism. In practice, diversity, equity, and inclusion has not been diverse, equitable, or inclusive, but uniform, prejudiced, and clannish. Worse still, thanks to its unquenchable obsession with immutable characteristics, it has taken America further away from — not closer to — the core ideas adumbrated in the Declaration of Independence. It is, I will grant, unlikely that any of the architects of DEI desire to restore “segregated water fountains.” And yet, as a matter of unlovely habit, they have proved far more likely to defend segregating people by race than have their classically liberal critics. For their apologists to accuse those who wish to dismantle DEI and affirmative action of being obsessed with dividing people into groups is like accusing Carrie Nation of being a lush: It is about as wrong as one can possibly get before one falls off the edge of the map. Segregation? Sorry, buddy, but that’s the other guys’ jam.

  I'm here to chew bubble gum and provide free links to National Review articles. But I'm out of gum, and … I'm also out of NR free links for the month, sorry.