It takes some brass for Rafael A. Mangual to opine about ‘The decaying state of public safety’ here is its final paragraphs:
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The decaying state of public safety didn’t immediately deliver the backlash against soft-on-crime policies many expected. During those years, mass outrage over various policing incidents that went viral on social media seemed to override whatever reservations Americans had about the hundreds of legislative and administrative criminal-justice reform initiatives of the 2010s and early 2020s. It’s now clear, though, that many voters have reached their limits with respect to how much crime and disorder they were prepared to tolerate.
The progressive argument about crime and justice has always been based on lies and half-truths. Yes, America is an international outlier on incarceration, but the vast majority of prisoners in the U.S. are violent, chronic offenders who have squandered more than one “second chance.” Yes, police are imperfect and sometimes abuse their authority, but the sorts of fatal encounters that drove public outrage are statistically rare. Meantime, the public began to associate large-scale pullbacks in policing and concurrent declines in incarceration rates with deteriorations in public safety. And while certain minority groups have indeed been overrepresented in enforcement statistics, those same groups wound up bearing the brunt of the crime spikes that resulted from the “progressive” reforms.
One of the key takeaways of the 2024 election cycle may be that voters have learned a key lesson from recent history. When it came to progressive policies, they went along to get along—until the results hit them, hard and fast. If voters have wised up, however, it remains to be seen how much (if at all) this election cycle will affect the Left’s approach to these issues. The choices for Democrats are clear: moderate their positions to meet most Americans where they are, or stick to the playbook that brought them these election losses. Those hoping that they opt for the first course can enjoy, at least for now, some cautious optimism.
The Anti-Crime Election | City Journal (Nov 06, 2024)
Editor: With the Mayor of New York City under a 57 page indictment, what might that reveal about Rafael A. Mangual, The City Journal and the Manhattan Institute? Eric Adams was the favorite of the City Journal and the Manhattan Institute, not to speak of the New York Time’s resident Neo-Conservative Bret Stephens.
What’s in the 5-count indictment against NYC Mayor Eric Adams | CNN
Editor: The Reader might ask what is the relationship between public safety, and the indicted Mayor of New York City? Not to speak of the relationship of Rafael A. Mangual, The City Journal and the Manhattan Institute to the Mayor?
Ms. Noonan begins her essay by describing the French Revolution, based not in history, political history or its various expressions, but as a ‘a nationwide psychotic break’ ,that denies the very context of that revolution. Since the ‘Science of Psychoanalysis’ is a dead letter, call Noonan’s maladroit psychologization of that revolution a propaganda methodology: to render the political, into a trivialized modality, suited to the needs of propaganda, against the contemporary ‘AmericanJacobins’. That revolution marks the end of the Ancien Régime, praised by both Kant and Hegel before the ‘Terror’. That ushers in the Age of Democratic Revolution to borrow from R.R. Palmer.
We often make historical parallels here. History doesn’t repeat itself but it does rhyme, as clever people say. And sometimes it hiccups. Here is a hiccup.
We start with the moral and political catastrophe that was the French Revolution. It was more a nationwide psychotic break than a revolt—a great nation at its own throat, swept by a spirit not only of regicide but suicide. For 10 years they simply enjoyed killing each other. They could have done what England was doing—a long nonviolent revolution, a gradual diminution of the power of king and court, an establishment of the rights of the people and their legislators so that the regent ended up a lovely person on a stamp. Instead they chose blood. Scholars like to make a distinction between the Revolution and the Terror that followed, but “the Terror was merely 1789 with a higher body count.” From the Storming of the Bastille onward, “it was apparent that violence was not just an unfortunate side effect. . . . It was the Revolution’s source of collective energy. It was what made the Revolution revolutionary.”
Any surprise here? Noonan is a political propagandist whose quoted text is and will be a touchstone for her political allies in the American Political Center, now defined as the alliance between the New Democrats and the Neo-Conservatives. The choice of Simon Schama whose ‘history’ of that revolution meets the demand for an historian who is ‘heroically nonideological’ : consider this claim to be awash in ideology!
That is from Simon Schama’s masterpiece “Citizens,” his history of the revolution published in 1989, its 200th anniversary. It is erudite, elegant and heroically nonideological.
To move ahead in Noonan’s psycholigizing polemic:
It was a revolution largely run by sociopaths. One, Robespierre, the “messianic schoolmaster,” saw it as an opportunity for the moral instruction of the nation. Everything would be politicized, no part of the citizen’s life left untouched. As man was governed by an “empire of images,” in the words of a Jacobin intellectual, the new régime would provide new images to shape new thoughts. There would be pageants, and new names for things. They would change time itself! The first year of the new Republic was no longer 1792, it was Year One. To detach farmers from their superstitions, their Gregorian calendar and its saints’ days, they would rename the months. The first month would be in the fall, named for the harvest. There would be no more weeks, just three 10-day periods each month.
For counterpoint to Noonan’s propaganda, read Hillary Mantel’s revelatory, not to speak of evocative essay on Robespierre:
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The historian François Furet tells us: ‘The revolution speaks through him its most tragic and purest discourse.’ It does not matter where he lived or what he was like, or that he walked through this gate the day before his horrible death. His temperament is of no consequence, nor the will that drove his punitively controlled body through the all-night sittings. But this abstract Robespierre is not the one that interests you, as you stand inside the passage, sheltered from the street. After all, you keep his portrait on your wall; if Furet’s formulation convinced you, you would not feel so desolate, and almost panic-stricken. The passage itself is confined and dark. Your throat constricts a little, and you remember what Michelet said: ‘Robespierre strangles and stifles.’ There are closed doors on your left. You glance up to the first floor. The windows are dirty. You say: ‘it is only a metaphysical space.’ Metaphysical wild horses would not drag you into Robespierre’s room or any space that might have been occupied by it. You lean against the wall, expecting something to happen.
Now, from the French Revolution and its sociopaths, framed in her a-historical psycholigizing we come to Noonan’s idee fixe: The reader can’t escape from the Party Line, so clearly enunciated by propagandists Jordan Peterson, Andrew Sullivan among other political hysterics !
So here is our parallel, our hiccup. I thought of all this this week because I’ve been thinking about the language and behavioral directives that have been coming at us from the social and sexual justice warriors who are renaming things and attempting to control the language in America.
The ‘enemy’ as defined by Noonan, exists in a political space, that shares a commonality with her psycholigizing: ‘ social and sexual justice warriors’ and their ‘speech codes’ that does not apply to Robespierre and the Jacobins. Who were purged/executed from their own ranks in the Thermidorian Reaction. These political actors that are Noonan’s propaganda Straw-Men: sociopaths . Noonan’s public shaming of American Jacobins ,who have not engaged in politically motivated violence. But are the subject of Noonan’s invidious comparison, that has no merit on its face. Propaganda is simply about producing a politically exploitable negative emotion. Noonan’s next political target will be Reps. Ocasio-Cortez, Omar, Pressley, and Tlaib?
Sun-headline: ‘We are a people that has experienced something epic together. We were given this brilliant, beautiful thing, this new arrangement,’ says the star of our next Book Club.
Peggy Noonan: On Loving America | The Free Press (In my email November 9, 2024)
Peggy Noonan has never gotten over the worship of Ronald Reagan! After Nixon, Ford and Carter, Reagan and his the city on a hill phrase, that it derived from a 17th-century Puritan sermon. This was the politics that reflected a white middle and working class grown weary of an etiolated Civil Rights Era politics. Not to forget the bussing of children to achieve racial balance.
Let Reagan speak for himself:
Headline: Ronald Reagan’s 1980 Neshoba County Fair speech
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I believe in states’ rights; I believe in people doing as much as they can for themselves at the community level and at the private level. And I believe that we’ve distorted the balance of our government today by giving powers that were never intended in the constitution to that federal establishment. And if I do get the job I’m looking for, I’m going to devote myself to trying to reorder those priorities and to restore to the states and local communities those functions which properly belong there.
I’m going to try also to change federal regulations in the tax structure that has made this once-powerful industrial giant in this land and in the world now with a lower rate of productivity than any of the other industrial nations, with a lower rate of savings and investment on the part of our people and put us back where we belong.
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Ronald Reagan’s 1980 Neshoba County Fair speech. (Following is the speech of Ronald Reagan at the Neshoba County Fair on Sunday, Aug. 3, 1980, as transcribed from a tape recording by Stanley Dearman, the now late editor and publisher of The Neshoba Democrat.)
The Reader might note that Noonan frames her commentary with Charles de Gaulle, to add a bit of historical verisimilitude, to her adulation for her Reaganite Nostalgia!
The famous first sentence of Charles de Gaulle’s War Memoirs most happily translates as: “All my life I have had a certain idea of France.” It struck me when I first read it many years ago and stayed with me because all my life I have had a certain idea of America.
What is that idea? That she is good. That she has value. That from birth she was something new in the history of man, a step forward, an advancement. Its founders were engaged in the highest form of human achievement, stating assumptions and creating arrangements whereby life could be made more: just. In the workings of its history, I saw something fabled. The genius cluster of the Founders, for instance: How did it happen that those particular people came together at that particular moment with exactly the right, different but complementary gifts? Long ago I asked the historian David McCullough if he ever wondered about this. He said yes, and the only explanation he could come up with was: “Providence.” That is where my mind settles, too.
The election of Donald Trump has unleashed a flood of toxic nostalgia, for something that bears no resemblance to that putative ‘city on the hill’, of Reagan circa 1980!
Even the most the most incurious reader might wonder at the unintended consequences of the Zionist Porgram, against the Palestinians, that has metastasized into Lebanon, Syria, Iran, Yemen?
In April 1903 an antisemitic mob rampaged through the city of Kishinev, which was then part of the Russian Empire and is now known as Chisinau, the capital of Moldova. Nearly 50 Jews were murdered, women and girls were raped, and some 1,500 homes were destroyed. Among the survivors were my paternal great-grandparents Barnet and Bessie Ehrlich, who decided then and there to emigrate to America with their children.
This week there was another pogrom in Europe, this time in Amsterdam. “Barbarians on scooters are riding through our capital city hunting Israelis and Jews,” David van Weel, the Dutch minister of justice and security, wrote on X. He was referring to an orgy of violent attacks against Israeli soccer fans, who had come to the city to watch a match on Thursday between Maccabi Tel Aviv and Ajax Amsterdam.
“They started hitting us. They broke my face, knocked out a tooth, cut my lip,” an Israeli fan, Yaakov Masri, told Israeli media after locking himself in his hotel room, with a table to block the door. He said that he and his son were set upon “by around 15 young Arab men, some of whom were armed with knives and clubs,” according to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.
Some news accounts have pointed to provocative behavior by rowdy Israeli fans, including taking down a Palestinian flag and chanting anti-Arab slogans (in Hebrew), for contributing to the mayhem. They also noted heightened tensions connected to the war in Gaza.
Maybe. But that explanation ignores the many years of rising and virulent antisemitism in Europe that preceded the war, much of it within Muslim communities, along with evidence that the attacks were carefully and cunningly coordinated.
“Amsterdam authorities have contacted taxi platforms such as Uber and Bolt to discuss how drivers may have used the apps to screen Israeli phone numbers during the violence,” The Times of London reported.
To their credit, Dutch and other European leaders have been outspoken in condemning the pogrom, which came on the eve of the 86th anniversary of Kristallnacht. Willem-Alexander, king of the Netherlands, compared Thursday night to the country’s failure to protect Jews in World War II, and Olaf Scholz, the German chancellor, wrote that “Jews must be able to feel safe in Europe.”
That’s a fine thought, though whether it will make any difference to the deteriorating situation for Jews in Europe remains to be seen. “Most of those arrested were later released,” The New York Times reported, and El Al sent planes to bring Israelis home. If a reminder were ever needed of why Israel, for all of its travails, came into existence in the first place, this latest pogrom was it.
My advice to Europe’s besieged Jewish communities: Remember what Kishinev foreshadowed — and please get out while you still can.
Conversations and insights about the moment. – The New York Times 11/7/2024
Sub-headline: Donald Trump’s re-election to a second term on Wednesday, November 6, and the success of the Republican Party, of which he has taken total control, represent a major turning point for the United States.
Published yesterday at 11:15 am (Paris), updated yesterday at 2:50 pm
This time, they made an informed decision. In 2016, when they first entrusted him with the White House, American voters didn’t know what a Donald Trump presidency would be like and were taking a leap into the unknown. In 2024, the situation is different: Not only do Republican voters know their candidate inside out, right down to his least glorious behavior, he’s even more radical than he was eight years ago. Trump’s electorate knows where this president is going to take them, and wants more.
It’s a reality that needs to be examined with eyes wide open. The path on which Trump, strengthened for his second term by his party’s success in the Senate, will take his country diverges fundamentally from the one charted by the United States since the end of the Second World War. It marks the end of an American era, that of an open superpower committed to the world, eager to set itself up as a democratic model. It’s the famous “shining city on a hill,” extolled by President Ronald Reagan. The model had been challenged over the past two decades. Now, Trump’s return is putting a nail in its coffin.
Editor: To call this hyperbolic, and even tinctured in political hysteria, is the describe it with a telling accuracy! American History puts it in perspective : given the fact that in 1968 Richard Nixon was elected to office, the victory of 1972, followed by Watergate, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, Bush The Elder, Bill Clinton, Bush The Younger , Barack Obama , Donald Trump, Joe Biden: These candidates, and then Presidents, represent the very mundane politics, and politicians who have held the American Presidency! Yet Le Monde wants to sound the alarm on Trump, who defeated New Democratic simpleton Kamala Harris, it defies the historical facts aided by that hyperbole and political hysteria.
Editor: I will offer a selection of Le Monde’s ‘arguments’:
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Trump views the world solely through the prism of American national interests. It’s a world of power struggles and trade wars, which scorns multilateralism. A world where transactional diplomacy replaces value-based alliances. A world, ultimately, where the US president reserves his harshest words for his allies but spares the autocrats, who are seen as partners rather than adversaries.
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If, as he threatened during the campaign, Trump ceases military aid to Ukraine and negotiates peace with Vladimir Putin in favor of the invader, the consequences of such an outcome will go far beyond the fate of Ukraine alone. They will affect the continent’s security as a whole.
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This threat is existential for the European Union, and its leaders need to be aware of it and prepared to confront it, without waiting for Trump to take office – they are long overdue.
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Editor: Le Monde ends it’s *Bill of Attainder’:
Trump’s victory at the end of a campaign of unprecedented populist, misogynist and racist virulence also bodes ill for women, immigrants and democracy in general. The 47th American president inherits a system he began to put in place when he was the 45th, one in which the sacrosanct checks and balances, those safeguards supposed to preserve American democratic institutions, are already weakened, and in which the Supreme Court has gone over to his side. He succeeded in downplaying the assault on the Capitol by rioters he encouraged on January 6, 2021. The image of a head of the world’s leading power who calls his opponents “enemies from within,” deems some of them worthy of the firing squad, vilifies dissident media and threatens to send the army to hunt down illegal immigrants in Democratic cities can only encourage illiberal leaders the world over, including in Europe.
Trump’s voters chose him in full consciousness, as did the business and tech leaders who rallied behind him, following in the footsteps of Elon Musk, the iconoclastic CEO turned eminence grise. The rest of the world will suffer.
Newspaper Reader.
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Acts of attainder or of pains and penalties were passed by some of the American colonial legislatures until the Constitution forbade them. In applying these prohibitions, the Supreme Court of the United States has expanded the historical conception of attainder. It invoked these clauses in 1867 in Cummings v. Missouri and Ex parte Garland to strike down loyalty oaths passed after the American Civil War to disqualify Confederate sympathizers from practicing certain professions. Similarly, in United States v. Lovett (1946), the court invalidated as a bill of attainder a section of an appropriation bill forbidding the payment of salaries to named government officials who had been accused of being subversive. Later decisions, however, have declined to treat requirements of loyalty oaths as bills of attainder, though they have invalidated such requirements on other grounds.
Nixon v. Administrator of General Services (1977) held that the Presidential Recordings and Materials Preservation Act was not a bill of attainder even though the law referred to President Richard Nixon by name. This law directed the administrator of the General Services Administration to seize tape recordings, papers, and other materials then in Nixon’s possession. The law did not impose a punishment and did not evidence a congressional intent to punish. In light of the fact that Nixon was the only president to resign under threat of impeachment by the House of Representatives, the court held that the “appellant constituted a legitimate class of one.”
Attainder | Definition, History & Effects | Britannica
Of the post-mortem commentaries on the Trump Election, nothing quite compares to Bret Stephens ‘pre-mortem’ on the election, before the results were known:
Dear President-elect, __________,
This column must publish before Tuesday’s results are known, so I’ll have to fill in your name later. Sorry — but no worries. Because, whether it’s Harris or Trump, some pieces of advice will serve either of you equally well.
First point: You owe your victory as much, if not more, to your opponent than you do to yourself. If it’s President-elect Harris, be grateful you didn’t have to face Nikki Haley or some other Republican who was not quite so verbally flatulent and politically toxic as Donald Trump. If it’s President-elect Trump, thank your lucky stars that Kamala Harris was, after Joe Biden, probably the least electable potential Democratic contender. You’d have been toast if your opponent had been Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania or Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan.
Put bluntly, outside of your hard-core supporters, many if not most Americans dislike or distrust you and will not easily give you the benefit of the doubt. Which raises the second point: Unlike Barack Obama in 2008, Ronald Reagan in 1980 or Lyndon Johnson in 1964, you do not have a mandate for sweeping change. Even if your victory is larger than the pre-election polls anticipated. Even if you win majorities in Congress. Even if friendly pundits hail you as the Savior of Democracy or the Vanquisher of the Woke or some other quasi-messianic moniker.
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Opinion | To Whom It May Concern – The New York Times Nov. 5, 2024
Editor: Mr. Stephens is a Strussian and like his master, has a penchant for re-writing to political ends, if not as grandiose as the Masters re-write of The History of Philosophy, yet it follows the mendacious Straussian Model. The Reader might wonder that Francis Fukuyama, once Straussian now identifies as a ‘Liberal’.
Stephens even celebrate the 1994 Crime Bill!
But people can get their heads around legislative achievements like the bipartisan 1994 Crime Bill that put 100,000 police officers on the beat — and contributed to long-lasting improvements in public safety.
And who can forget Senator Joe Biden’s racism?
Video: Trump says ‘sources’ tell him Joe Biden repeatedly uses the term ‘Super Predator’ when referring to young black men – despite any evidence Democrat has said it
Joe Biden speaks of potential for ‘predators’ during 1994 Crime Bill speech in the Senate.
November 18, 1993 | Clip Of Senate SessionThis clip, title, and description were not created by C-SPAN.
User Clip: Biden 1993 speech
During a 1993 speech pushing the crime bill, Biden warned of ‘predators on our streets.’
A Party of Prigs and Pontificators Suffers a Humiliating Defeat
The final paragraphs of the Stephens diatribe:
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Today, the Democrats have become the party of priggishness, pontification and pomposity. It may make them feel righteous, but how’s that ever going to be a winning electoral look?
I voted reluctantly for Harris because of my fears for what a second Trump term might bring — in Ukraine, our trade policy, civic life, the moral health of the conservative movement writ large. Right now, my larger fear is that liberals lack the introspection to see where they went wrong, the discipline to do better next time and the humility to change.
Editor: Mr. Stephens last two paragraphs of his diatribe, are an unwitting self-description!
Mr. Finkelstein fails to report that Thedore H. White re-rote his 1972 book, The Making of the President, because of the Watergate Scandal. Though The Reader might find it hard to find the evidence of it, I was aware of the re-write, because it was a bit of a scandal of the time! I voted in my first American Election 1968 and recall it quite vividly! And White’s offered an object lesson to all political commentators?
Title this: Kamala Harris striding toward The Future? Even Alex Shepard can’t quite buy his own political chatter!
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Harris is not a generational politician. As I have written, she is not even a particularly different candidate from the one who crashed and burned in the 2020 primary. She is overcautious and too fond of bromides; her political instincts can be wobbly; it’s still not entirely clear what principles guide her foreign or domestic policy. But she has run about as impressive a campaign as you could expect any Democrat to run given the extraordinary situation that she found herself in—or that, more accurately, Biden put her, his party, and the country in by refusing to drop out of the race earlier.
If Harris loses, pundits will focus on a number of decisions: her choice of running mate, her reluctance to break with Biden, her muddled message to young and Arab American voters disgusted by her administration’s support for Israel’s destructive war in the Middle East, her overcautious approach to both messaging and policy. But the fact remains that Harris gave Democrats a chance they did not have before. That is an accomplishment in and of itself, no matter the outcome of the election.
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