A February Scan of the Body Politic

Martin Peretz, the owner-editor of the New Republic back when it was a force in American life, reminds us that the monument-mobsters rarely get it right. Harvard’s memorial to her sons lost in the Civil War sets in stone the names all of the Union dead, none of the Confederates. Okay. Wrongheaded, but okay. Harvard’s Second World War memorial, Marty notes, honors “enemy casualty” and grad student Adolf Sannwald, who died in service of the Nazis. Harvard, which is in the business of making fine distinctions, has lost me yet again. By the Cambridge calculus, Southerners are worse than Nazis?

• Here where I live in northeast Florida, the mindless toppler-mob seems to be slowing its frantic pace. Jacksonville, just now recovering from a bout of irrational ideological exuberance, is down to its last Confederate monument. The residual question now burns across the greater metro area: Who will pay for its demolition? This is how the monument madness ends — with bureaucratic squabbles, the moral arguments, so-called, long since discarded.

• The monument mobster’s work, though, is never really done. I ask you, what about the name of the city itself? Sure, Andrew Jackson liberated Americans from foreign tyranny, but his family owned slaves back in Tennessee. Didja ever think of that?

• Words Edgewise recommends that, henceforward, hometown heroes be honored with inflatable monuments made from a rain-resistant but biodegradable fabric.

• With due respect to my colleagues on the political-reporting side of the house, the results from this month’s special election in New York’s CD-3 tell us nothing about the potency of the border issue, inter-party fundraising trends, relative turnout enthusiasm, or much of anything else. The GOP lost the minute they nominated an Ethiopian woman who had served in the Israeli army and, all things whispered, had a background every bit as opaque as that of George Santos. I lived in that district for years. A generic, homegrown Republican, preferably with a vowel at the end of his surname, would have won.

• Biographies tend to fall unmistakably into one of three categories — good, bad, and great. It is cause for celebration that Jennifer Burns’s new book on Milton Friedman falls unmistakably into the third category. Her signal accomplishment is to make clear, without sacrificing nuance, the complex issues of modern economics.

• I confess that, even when instructed in a graduate course by Ludwig von Mises himself, I never felt sure-footed when discussing, much less defining, price theory, the marginal revolution, and the other befogged concepts then coming to the fore. Professor Burns re-proves the old adage that if the reading is easy, the writing was hard. I commiserate with the Burns family: She must have glued herself to the desk chair.

• One of the few quibbles raised by reviewers is the title of her book, Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative. It is nowhere recorded that Milton Friedman ever accepted that description of himself.

• I did not know him well, but I saw him a couple of times a year for a lot of years. He was a bantamweight brawler, quick to put up his intellectual dukes: He was not really offended but he seemed at least slightly disappointed when you agreed with him. And even when he brawled, he was not looking for a quick knockout in an ego-driven, Norman Mailer–style bull rush. Milton wasn’t even looking for victory. He was looking for the truth. Everybody liked him.

• One day as I was preparing him for a television appearance, I asked if we should introduce him as a “conservative economist.” He dismissed the suggestion with a brisk wave of the hand. He was fine with “free-market economist,” or “monetarist” (as long as it was preceded by one or more high-priced adjectives).

• But I take Burns’s point. Milton may have been the last conservative in the sense that, while he could never bring himself to support the full laundry list of conservative policies, he understood the necessity for coalitional solidarity. For Milton Friedman, who was pretty good with numbers, factionalism was never a winning formula.

• Bonus Round. The Burns book gives us, en passant, vivid mini-portraits of Milton’s colleagues at the University of Chicago. Frank Knight, F. A. Hayek, George Stigler, Gary Becker, Henry Simons, Jacob Viner, Aaron Director — some of the “Chicago boys” won Nobels, more of them should have. (Director brought his kid sister, another brilliant scholar, into the group. She soon changed her name to Rose Friedman.) For anybody who participated in or benefited from the post-war American economic boom — which number would include, among others, everybody reading this page — seeing those names should produce a warm glow similar to a baseball fan’s when recalling the lineup of the 1927 Yankees.

• Don’t throw out those recent NR issues until you’ve read Sarah Schutte’s piece on learning how to fly a plane. Surly Bonds Schutte, as she will no doubt soon be known around the hangar, gives us a glimpse of the spirit that won the West . . . and built a magazine in the East.

• Scott McKay, over at the American Spectator, is serializing his new novel at spectator.org. It’s called King of the Jungle, and I admit that I’m hooked.

• In my incautious youth, I raised a fair amount of money for Yale University, which beneficence seems to have earned me a permanent place on exclusive mailing lists. Unlike, say, you, I was invited last week to a presentation on “Gendering Democratic Theory from an Intersectional Perspective.” Are you non-elitists jealous yet?

• For an opinion journalist, there’s nothing more terrifying than the prospect of meeting your readers in person. I tensed up the other day when a youngish couple approached my table in a restaurant and the woman said in a loud and borderline-accusatory voice, “You’re Neal Freeman, aren’t you?” My first thought, of course, was to say, “No, I’m Rich Lowry. Now get out of my face before I call Rocco in Security,” but I was brought up properly by my sainted mother, so, instead, I owned up and braced for impact. There followed a full five minutes of gush — how much both of them enjoy NR and NRO and me and Charlie and Andy and Rich and Luba’s new magazine design and, well, just about all of it. To that lovely couple at Bistro Aix, I say: Thanks. I needed that.