Dear Weekend Jolter,
The agitation over history curriculums that’s gripped the political press lately can make the debate feel like a new phenomenon. It’s not really. Jesse Jackson led the charge against Western Civ on campus back in 1987. One year later, a commission of historians and scholars took the opposite view. Bemoaning the state of history instruction in the schools, they found that at least half of American students “do not study world history or Western civilization,” the Times reported in 1988. One historian warned, “Our citizens are in danger of becoming amnesiacs.”
What’s different today is that those who dare raise those concerns are the ones treated like radicals. After Ron DeSantis proposed an overhaul for Florida’s public universities — including the elimination of DEI programs but also the mandatory teaching of Western Civ — an account from the Guardian matter-of-factly described it as “breathtaking in its scope, dog-whistle racism and naked ambition.” (Rich Lowry tracked the meltdown over the Western Civ component here.)
The response is indicative of how history as a subject — whether in the classroom or as conveyed within educational entertainment — is simply viewed through the lens of zero-sum politics. And to the victor, the spoils: in this case, the perceived right to recompose the nation’s story, ditch foundational texts, and assert as a matter of record what is better described as rhetoric. Consider Hulu’s The 1619 Project, which among other claims teaches that slavery formed the basis for American capitalism. Rich raises the questions that should have been asked before the episode aired:
Slavery has been a fact of human existence throughout recorded history. Why did it suddenly create capitalism a couple of centuries ago in a few select places, namely the Netherlands, Britain, and the American colonies? Why didn’t the Romans create it? The Vikings? The Spanish?
It is true that slavery and cotton production played a large role in the American economy, but they weren’t determinative. As Phillip Magness of the American Institute for Economic Research points out, slave-produced cotton and its derivatives accounted for 5 or 6 percent of GDP before the Civil War.
Are we supposed to believe that absent this sector of the economy, the growing financial and industrial might of the United States would have evaporated? . . . If slavery was the basis of capitalism, one wonders, why did the capitalist North dare wage a war to destroy the seedbed of its own prosperity?
Relatedly, Nate Hochman flags a Disney+ cartoon reboot that puts the lie to the notion that only conservatives engage in the culture wars. The cartoon features a spoken-word song seemingly engineered in a lab to inflame racial tensions; as for its treatment of historical details, it calls into question whether Lincoln “freed the slaves” since “emancipation is not freedom.” Adults can assess that claim as they wish — factoring in how segregation and sanctioned discrimination undermined the promise of emancipation — but erasing Lincoln’s irrefutable role in America’s racial progress before an audience of children serves only to miseducate in the name of a political agenda (in this case, reparations, as advocated by the cartoon singers).
Back to Florida for a minute: Stanley Kurtz has documented how DeSantis’s fight with the College Board over its AP African-American Studies curriculum is not about whether schools should teach African-American history (obviously, they should) but whether the curriculum should include elements such as “prison abolition, intersectionality, the socialist platform of the Movement for Black Lives, and the revolutionary meditations of Marxist radical Robin D. G. Kelley.” The College Board was ultimately willing to let that go in its revision. Perhaps they were the ones engaging in the culture wars. As for the renewed push for Western Civ in the state, NR’s editorial argues,
Quite obviously, there is a role for the government to play in guaranteeing that the educational institutions it runs are teaching the fundamentals, and ensuring that all students emerge from college with a basic understanding of Western civilization is about as fundamental as it gets.
DeSantis has a preternatural ability to hold the political spotlight, and there’s no doubt these battles are intended to pump up his 2024 profile. I’d bet good money he’ll overreach in the course of them. But the governor is voicing concerns about the education system that are valid, and shared, well beyond Florida. We just ran a piece out of Rhode Island that challenged the state’s social-studies standards, not just for their tendentious treatment of history but outright errors including appearing to confuse the Monroe Doctrine with Manifest Destiny.
As Rich wrote, “More than 35 years later, Jesse Jackson is finally getting the pushback he deserves.”
NAME. RANK. LINK.
EDITORIALS
Biden’s SOTU speech was something, but it wasn’t reality: Biden’s Fantasyland
Whiny college students are proving Ben Sasse’s point about whiny college students: Ben Sasse vs. the College Adolescents
That editorial on Florida’s education fight, again, is here: DeSantis Is Right to Reform Higher Education
ARTICLES
Philip Klein: The Grotesque Bipartisan Moment during Biden’s State of the Union Address
Jeffrey Blehar: Deal with It: Biden’s State of the Union Was an Aesthetic Win
Dan McLaughlin: Even Trump Didn’t Choose Partisan Divisiveness in the Way Joe Biden Did
Dan McLaughlin: The Myth of Ronald Reagan and the Nazi Death Camps
Rich Lowry: Of Course Jeff Gerth Is Right about Russiagate
Brittany Bernstein: FBI Retracts Memo on ‘Radical Traditionalist Catholic Ideology,’ Says It Failed to Meet Bureau Standards
Jay Nordlinger: Statues of Liberty
Grover Norquist: Don’t Lose Sight of What Makes the Reagan Republican Party Special
Michael Brendan Dougherty: Mask Drama Was Probably for Nothing
Michael Brendan Dougherty: Trump Is Getting Squeezed, Left and Right
Thérèse Shaheen: China’s Dangerous but Inevitable Decline
Andrew McCarthy: The China Surveillance-Balloon Story Is Not Getting Better
Caroline Downey: Progressive Activists Launch Online Witch Hunt Targeting Fans of Harry Potter Video Game
Charles C. W. Cooke: Joe Biden May Yet Win Again
Neal Freeman: The Enduring Legacy of William F. Buckley Jr.
Jimmy Quinn: J. P. Morgan Executive Stars in Hong Kong Propaganda Video
CAPITAL MATTERS
Dominic Pino, on the problem with “buy American”: Biden Promises to Spend Your Money Poorly
LIGHTS. CAMERA. REVIEW.
Armond White finds authenticity and humanism in a new French film: Full Time’s Everywoman Superwoman
Brian Allen’s got a potpourri column, but it begins with a face-plant along the National Mall: The Smithsonian’s First Amendment Fiasco
EXCERPTS SO PIERCING THEY COULD TAKE DOWN A CHINESE SPY BALLOON
The worst part of the State of the Union? Phil Klein makes a convincing case that it was the part where they all agreed:
There were plenty of things to dislike in President Biden’s State of the Union speech, but the most grotesque moment actually was one of the most bipartisan: when both Republicans and Democrats stood with Biden to applaud the idea of not touching Social Security and Medicare, which both desperately need to be pared if there is any hope of the United States escaping a fiscal crisis.
The sequence began when Biden said, “Some Republicans want Medicare and Social Security to sunset,” triggering loud boos from Republicans, who from Speaker Kevin McCarthy on down have repeatedly said that they don’t want to touch the programs. The sliver of support for Biden’s statement comes from a bullet point from an agenda put out by Senator Rick Scott last year, which reads, “All federal legislation sunsets in 5 years. If a law is worth keeping, Congress can pass it again.” It is a sweeping statement that does not specifically mention Social Security and Medicare and that has not received broader support among Republicans.
Having received pushback from Republicans, Biden then pivoted to turning the moment into one of bipartisan agreement that the programs shouldn’t be cut.
“As we all apparently agree, Social Security and Medicare is off the books now, right, they’re not going to be cut?” he said. And as applause traveled from the Democratic to Republican aisle, he added, “We got unanimity.” . . .
The flip side of sanctimoniously refusing to touch Medicare and Social Security in the name of protecting current seniors is that the failure to take action is punishing working-age Americans. . . . With the ballooning retirement-age population and rising health-care costs, Medicare and Social Security alone are expected to cost $29 trillion over the next decade, according to the Congressional Budget Office, or more than half of projected tax revenue. Watching political leaders, many at or near retirement age, agree to do absolutely nothing to address this problem is an act of fiscal violence against younger Americans.
In the wake of the fallen Chinese spy blimp, Thérèse Shaheen takes a broader and longer view concerning the real threat from China:
Simply put, it is not China’s possible near-term aggression that threatens global stability but China’s impending long-term decline relative to the rest of the world as other countries grow, develop, and prosper and the PRC fades as a share of global growth. It is time to acknowledge this and start thinking about how the U.S. should best position for it. We’re still dealing today with the effects of the collapse of the Soviet Union, for which there was limited but inadequate planning and preparation by government leaders and strategists in advance. Given our leadership role in the world, we should prepare for the possibility — within a reasonable planning horizon — of the PRC’s implosion on multiple levels. Given China’s role in the global economy and its size, the consequences would likely be more difficult than what we faced at the end of the Cold War.
For a short period during the pandemic and its immediate aftermath, most of the world seemed to have come to terms with the fact of China’s structural weaknesses. Unfortunately, global denialism about the PRC’s unresolvable challenges has returned. The news coming out of the recent annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos seemed to be all rainbows and butterflies. The “zero Covid” restrictions have been lifted! China’s back at Davos! China will rebound this year! Vice Premier Liu He promised attendees “proactive fiscal policy,” “prudent monetary policy,” “expanding domestic demand. . . . We welcome more foreign investment.” The Davos set ate it up, as they did a few years back when Xi Jinping came and quoted Abraham Lincoln even as he had begun the purges and social clampdowns needed to achieve the unrestricted grasp on power he achieved in the 2022 party congress.
Understanding China’s longer-term challenges can be boiled down to the straightforward acknowledgment that there is nothing more annoying than arithmetic. We got a profound reality check recently when the PRC disclosed that 800,000 more Chinese died last year than were born. Looking back just a few years, we see that most demographic projections for China showed a population decline happening later this decade. But it now apparently is upon us, years before much of the earlier analyses suggested. The scenarios articulated by the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences show China’s population at 587 million in 2100, an average annual decline of 1.1 percent. Other (non-China) estimates show less of a decline, but it’s hard to chalk that up to anything but wishful thinking.
The shrinking population exacerbates China’s other challenges, and it is quite foreboding. Consider future economic growth. The world is buzzing about how the PRC may return to strong growth this year with post-Covid “reopening” and such. Of course, it is impossible to know the true state of China’s national economic reporting, because it is not transparent, and the government willfully misrepresents the facts. But whether there is closer-to-trend economic growth in 2023 is not really the issue. It’s not the next two or three quarters that mean much for China’s future but rather the next two or three decades. And the prospects are not good.
In honor of Reagan’s birthday this past week, Dan McLaughlin put together a comprehensive fact check on a peculiar claim that has persisted over the years. The piece begins:
On the 112th anniversary of Ronald Reagan’s birth, we commemorate his many monumental accomplishments as the greatest president of the past century. But it is also a good occasion for correcting the record regarding the persistent, never-ending efforts to obscure those accomplishments with misleading smears. One attack on Reagan that has grown in the telling over the years is the claim that he invented a wartime story about having been present at the liberation of the Nazi death camps. The problem: The actual evidence of Reagan saying this is vague, thirdhand, and contradicted on the record by people who were there. It is also inconsistent with Reagan’s own public accounts of how he first came to see the reality of the Holocaust on film.
The death-camps story is of fresh interest again because we now live in a golden age of fabulists in American politics, driven by the George Santos drama. Of course, there are all different types of falsehoods politicians tell, ranging from white lies dictated by convention, to invented histories, concealment of fact, and tall tales for the sheer mischievous thrill of putting on an audience.
Shout-Outs
Steven Nelson, at the New York Post: Saudis increase US citizen’s tweet sentence to 19 years in ‘middle finger’ to Biden
Gabe Kaminsky, at the Washington Examiner: Disinformation Inc: Meet the groups hauling in cash to secretly blacklist conservative news
Chuck Ross, at the Washington Free Beacon: Hunter Biden Wanted Office at Think Tank Where President Stashed Classified Docs
Jeff Clabaugh, at WTOP: College degrees are losing more career clout
CODA
It’s not too late for a little Ozzy tribute here, after the Dark Lord recently indicated his touring days may be over.
A classic title track, from an album with absolutely bonkers cover art, is this one. Even better, let’s travel back to the beginning, when that band from Birmingham decided to marry the blues with the occult, turn up the noise, and create something . . . offensive. And great. “N.I.B.” makes the case better than I can.
Have a great weekend.