Dear Weekend Jolter,
China may have succeeded for now in muffling protests challenging the regime’s disastrous “zero-Covid” policy, but the mass demonstrations that erupted a week ago make unmistakably plain what Chinese citizens really think about Xi Jinping’s lockdowns. This is important — because it offers a glimpse of the true discontent the newly reanointed Xi faces across a country of 1.4 billion people. Our own Dominic Pino explained why such protests in authoritarian states often come as a surprise:
The economist Timur Kuran calls it “preference falsification.” It’s the idea that people in authoritarian regimes lie about what they truly believe as a matter of course. They don’t do it because they are bad people, but rather because it’s how to get along in an authoritarian society.
Kuran looked at preference falsification in the context of the fall of communism in Eastern Europe in the late ’80s. Hardly anyone saw it coming, even people who studied the region very closely and even people who lived there. . . . A country could be on the knife’s edge of a revolt or the government could be in total control; it’s impossible to know as long as most people are falsifying their preferences.
Today, the picture out of China is a little bit clearer.
I’m not betting on the imminent collapse of Xi’s government, but the era of acquiescence could be closing. Former political prisoner Jianli Yang and co-author Bradley A. Thayer, taking the long view, write that the protests “underscore what has been evident since 1949: The Chinese regime is not legitimate,” and predict more to follow.
Robert Conquest’s potent Stalin biography Breaker of Nations illustrated why public mindset is such a crucial bulwark in societies beset by hysteria, falsification, and denunciation. “People’s whole psychology was distorted in unnatural and inhuman ways,” he wrote of that era. “The massive system of threats and rewards — at least the reward of survival — conditioned the minds of millions into an almost Pavlovian submission to the state’s insistences.” Xi has not completed, yet, such a mass mental conversion. The regimes in Iran and, to a lesser extent, modern Russia face similar resistance. Jay Nordlinger observes the pattern: “Chinese are stirring. Iranians are stirring. The idea of liberty is alive. Authoritarianism is not the only and inevitable path.”
Even if China’s demonstrations come as a surprise, public outrage is the logical consequence of policies seemingly designed to test the limits of popular patience. These protests began after lockdowns were seen to prevent firefighters from reaching a blaze that killed ten in the city of Ürümqi. This, after a baby girl in quarantine who was overcome by vomiting and diarrhea died, the authorities having reportedly failed to help her in time. NR’s editorial calls this a crisis of Beijing’s own making, owing to the government’s failure to vaccinate the elderly or authorize superior Western vaccines, and urges the rest of the world to fix its gaze — “it’s easier to perpetrate atrocities when the cameras aren’t rolling.”
Perhaps no visual better captures China’s inhuman view toward managing Covid than that of its sprawling quarantine complexes. Officials opened a dystopian, 5,000-room facility last year to house travelers arriving from overseas, where they’d stay for two weeks while being served meals by robots. The same city is now working on facilities to house a quarter-million people. The results of Beijing’s sunk-cost bias are harming its credibility — already shattered abroad — at home. Whaddaya know, the masses resent being herded into pods like characters in The Mitchells vs. the Machines.
The whole tableau prompts Jim Geraghty to wonder if Xi Jinping might not be the MasterClass instructor we thought:
For all of the menacing, saber-rattling, relentlessness, and ruthlessness, Chinese ruler Xi Jinping and his surrounding yes-men also seem . . . well, kind of dumb sometimes. If not dumb, then they’re prone to sticking with a decision or policy that isn’t working, even as the evidence of how that decision or policy can’t work piles up and the situation gets worse and worse. They’re self-destructively stubborn, and so fearful of appearing flawed that they can never admit a mistake and keep doubling down on their original decision, attempting to gaslight everyone into believing it is a huge success.
Too bad for the Politburo, the people noticed.
NAME. RANK. LINK.
EDITORIALS
Cochise County should (and did) relent: Certify the Arizona Elections
The world is watching: Rising Up against China’s Zero-Covid Regime
ARTICLES
Rich Lowry: The Extreme Recklessness of Biden 2.0
Christian Schneider: Colleges Turn to Segregation to Solve Racial Ills
Michael Brendan Dougherty: Being a Conservative or Republican Has Always Been Cringey
Jay Nordlinger: Guess Who Came to Dinner
John McCormack: Republicans Condemn Trump’s Fraternizing with Antisemites
John Fund: New York’s Surprise Wins Delivered the House
Will Swaim: San Francisco: Stuck in the Suck
Brittany Bernstein: Iranian Players Mumble through National Anthem at World Cup after Alleged Government Threats
Nate Hochman: Remember When Western Technocrats Gushed over China’s ‘Zero Covid’?
Joshua T. Katz: The Academic Memory Hole
A. J. Caschetta: The Navel-Gazing Inanities of MESA
Ryan Mills: San Francisco Supervisors Vote to Allow Police to Deploy Killer Robots
Madeleine Kearns: Tactless Old Lady Makes Royal News
Charles C. W. Cooke: Actually, Soccer Is Great
CAPITAL MATTERS
Jonathan Bydlak warns the coming lame-duck session could be worse for taxpayers than usual — much worse: Get Ready for a Big-Spending Lame Duck
After what was supposed to be a “red wave” election, Joel Zinberg notes that the GOP’s failure means Bernie Sanders will get a promotion: With the Democrats Keeping the Senate, Forget about Rolling Back the Government Takeover of Health Care
LIGHTS. CAMERA. REVIEW.
Brian Allen tells the rich and complicated history of America’s most famous cemetery (Part Two coming this weekend): Arlington’s Beautiful National Cemetery
Armond White returns to The Fabelmans, examining what went wrong: The Bombing of Spielberg
FROM THE NEW, DECEMBER 19, 2022, ISSUE OF NR
Ramesh Ponnuru: Never Again
Kristen Soltis Anderson: Republicans’ Lost Youth
Ryan Mills: How to Count Like Florida
Nat Brown: How Russia Sees Its Past
EXCERPTS FOR PRESIDENT 2024
In the latest issue of NR, Kristen Soltis Anderson strongly urges the GOP to find a way to reach younger voters, again:
This year, Republicans bounced back to 2014 levels with older voters, doing even better with 50- to 64-year-olds nationally than they had eight years before. The GOP won seniors by twelve points, and those ages 50 to 64 by eleven. Where, then, were the 2014-style victories?
The oldest Millennials are just now entering their forties, but the bulk are in their thirties, and this is where we see some differences emerge. In 2014, Democrats won thirtysomethings by four points; this year they won them by nine. And Republicans lost voters under age 30 not by a little, but by a whopping 28 points.
I cannot state this forcefully enough: Republicans’ current standing with young voters is appalling, and it does not need to be this way.
For instance, Republicans won younger voters in the 1994 midterms that ushered Newt Gingrich to the speakership, and it was voters in their thirties and early forties in that election who were the most upbeat about the GOP. Ronald Reagan dominated the youth vote in his reelection bid in 1984. When conservatives shrug and give up on young voters because it has “always” been this way, they betray a staggering misunderstanding of how young people voted in the latter part of the 20th century.
For Republicans to bridge the gap between their older base and a new generation, they need to understand the differences between them.
In case you hadn’t seen, NR has brought on a number of new columnists and contributors (here, here, here, here, here, and counting). Among them, Christian Schneider, whose column you can typically find right around midweek, gives a painfully accurate account of the new segregation taking root in American colleges:
Years from now, students of American history will be taught of the era when college students were kept from living near one another because of the color of their skin. When separate graduation ceremonies were held for students of color because of a group’s unease with the commingling of the races. When students were kept out of colleges because of their ethnicity. And when governors openly questioned the learning abilities of schoolchildren of color.
The history books covering this era, however, won’t be talking about the Jim Crow South or George Wallace’s 1963 declaration urging “segregation now, segregation forever.”
They will, instead, be referring to the last five years, in which colleges have begun separating students by race out of concern that it might damage the “mental health” of non-white students if they are forced to interact with white students.
What was once discarded as an embarrassing remnant of the Jim Crow era has now become de rigueur on college campuses, returning in the form of “affinity groups,” racially separate housing arrangements, and segregated theatrical performances. . . .
According to a study of 173 public and private colleges and universities conducted by the National Association of Scholars, 43 percent had programs to segregate student housing by race or sexual orientation, and 46 percent of schools had racially segregated orientation programs. Often, unaware of the inherent irony, schools conduct racially exclusive anti-racism training.
Rich Lowry counters the thinking on the other side of the aisle that another Biden run might be the safe bet for Democrats:
Joe Biden 2024 is a bad idea whose time has come.
If Democrats had gotten the shellacking that seemed to be coming their way in the midterms, Biden might have been wounded enough for elements of the Democratic establishment to begin to try to shoulder him into retirement.
Instead, the Democratic overperformance has Biden looking revitalized. Gavin Newsom told the president on Election Night that he’s not running against him (not that Biden was ever likely to face a direct primary challenge). Press coverage has emphasized Biden’s vindication. The shot in the arm is understandable given what his party was able to pull off, yet it doesn’t make Biden a day younger — in fact, he just turned 80, and every day of his presidency is an experiment in whether an unprecedentedly aged president can perform at the level demanded of the office.
Democrats consider Biden the safe choice in 2024, since he’s the incumbent and surrounded by flawed alternatives, yet he is actually an enormous risk. . . .
In short, any Democrat who believes that Biden is guaranteed to make it through a 2024 campaign without incident is fooling him- or herself. There already have been numerous disturbing episodes, and they will continue to pile up.
And voters have noticed. According to the exit polls, 58 percent of voters said Biden does not have the acuity to serve effectively as president.
If Democrats get their way, this is just the beginning. They propose to reelect a man who will be 82 years old on Inauguration Day, and 86 by the end of his second term.
The actuarial tables and the realities of ageing being what they are, this creates considerable risk of putting the country through the trauma of having a president who is incapable of carrying out his full term.
Michael Brendan Dougherty responds to the notion that conservatives should be ashamed by the Trump-era GOP, offering a simple retort: “no more than usual.” A walk through history:
It’s always been embarrassing. Probably my first political memory is of the vice president from the “Stupid Party” misspelling the word “potato” in front of middle schoolers.
I mean, where were you before 2016? You didn’t cringe during the Clint Eastwood thing? Were you not embarrassed by Senator Wide Stance? By the K-Street Gang making money on both sides of casino scams? By the congressional-page sex scandal? You realize that before Tucker Carlson was on Fox News — a man who, whatever you think of his politics, seems to actually read books — he was preceded by Bill O’Reilly, a best-selling author who gives no impression of having read the books he is said to have authored. In the years before Trump conservative media was awash in scuzzy scams — whether selling boner pills, gold, or reverse mortgages.
I can assure you that whatever is humiliating about Turning Point USA, it was fully in evidence in the bowels of CPAC years before, somewhere in between Flipper the Dolphin and the commemorative-coin people. You know all those horribly embarrassing fund-raising emails you’ve been getting? Well, it was conservative direct-mail fund-raisers who pioneered the paranoid, overly familiar, hands-in-your-pocket style of buck-raking. I’ve always found it distasteful in the extreme. . . .
I’m a conservative because my intellectual convictions and predispositions group me with the Right — at least a certain strain of it. In a democracy, that means being, in some strange way, in the company of scores of millions of people, many of whom find each other intolerable bores, embarrassments, or alien in some way.
You can’t quite get away from it just by joining the other side. You can run away from the closet-case foot-fetish megachurch pastor/lobbyist, and you’ll wind up with the bullying trans-bureaucrat/luxury-luggage thief. That’s the glory and shame of democracy. If you want to feel good about the political company you keep, join some august court of aristocrats. Until then, America is still the country of crazy frontier people, wild religious enthusiasts, cheapjack showmen, doomsdayers selling gold, and gold merchants selling doomsday.
Meanwhile, what’s San Fran up to these days? Oh — I regret asking:
The San Francisco Board of Supervisors approved a policy on Tuesday officially allowing police to arm human-controlled robots with explosives to kill or incapacitate people in extreme circumstances.
The two-hour policy debate was heated among the left-wing board members, according to news reports. Supporters argued that police can be trusted to use the robots, which could help stop a mass casualty event. Opponents said approving the use of killer robots was like something out of a science fiction movie, and a threat to the poor and to people of color.
Shout-Outs
Shane Harris, Souad Mekhennet, & Yeganeh Torbati, at the Washington Post: Rise in Iranian assassination, kidnapping plots alarms Western officials
Joseph Epstein, at the Wall Street Journal: We Need a Break From the Permanent Election Frenzy
Joel Kotkin, at Tablet: After Intersectionalism
A. B. Stoddard, at RealClearPolitics: Midterms No Mandate for Another Biden Run
CODA
The most pretentious thing I ever heard at a rock concert was the following introduction: “This is a song . . . about a book . . . about the Cuban Missile Crisis.”
But I’m a sucker for whatever the sonic equivalent of historical fiction is, so I stuck around for the set. This was years ago. Last weekend, on the way home from a visit to in-laws in India — didja miss me? — I encountered a band intro that rivals that Soviet-era scene-setting. Flicking through the music on TAP Air Portugal’s entertainment system, I stumbled across the following blurb, paraphrased: a gothic metal band’s concept album devoted entirely to the 1755 Lisbon earthquake. Yes, please.
This is how the album, aptly titled 1755, by Portuguese band Moonspell, begins. Not gonna lie, it’s a bit niche, and I’ll hazard a guess this will not be everyone’s cup of tawny port. But I thought it worth mentioning that an album exists about the 1755 Lisbon earthquake — which I should add was a, well, seismic event in world history, destroying much of the city, striking a blow to the heart of the Portuguese empire and affecting its political leadership, and eventually contributing to the creation of seismology as a field of study.
Thanks for reading, and thanks to Isaac Schorr for authoring this note while I was away. Have a great weekend.