Category: Opinión

                    El Partido Republicano de California sigue comprometido con su declive.

El comité electoral de la asambleísta de California Megan Dahle transfirió $40,500 al partido republicano estatal el 22 de abril; dos días después, el Partido Republicano del Estado de California respaldó a su esposo, el senador estatal Brian Dahle, como su candidato a gobernador. El momento de esta transferencia generó sospechas de que Megan Dahle compró el respaldo del partido para su esposo, pero esta es solo una de las muchas controversias en un partido estatal que nunca ha estado más dividido o más impotente.

La proporción del electorado de votantes republicanos en California, con el 23,9 por ciento de los votantes registrados, nunca ha sido menor. Este declive ha sido implacable; del 34,9 por ciento en 2002 al 34,6 por ciento en 2006, al 30,1 por ciento en 2010, al 28,6 por ciento en 2014, al 25,3 por ciento en 2018.

La debilidad del partido republicano de California se refleja en todas las métricas importantes. Su representación en Delegación del Congreso de California es 10 de 53, que al 19 por ciento ni siquiera refleja los totales de registro de votantes. Bajo rendimiento similar plaga su actuación en la legislatura estatal: número de republicanos 19 de 80 asientos en la asamblea y 9 de 40 escaños en el senado estatal. De los ocho cargos estatales más altos (gobernador, vicegobernador, fiscal general, secretario de estado, tesorero, contralor, superintendente de instrucción pública y comisionado de seguros), ninguno está en manos de un republicano. Cada uno de estos titulares de cargos son demócratas. Para aquellos californianos que recuerdan que el estado estaba rojo cereza con la elección de George Bush en 1988, este giro a la izquierda es motivo de un arrepentimiento interminable.

Por lo tanto, el respaldo de Brian Dahle por parte del Partido Republicano de California podría considerarse irrelevante. Sus posibilidades de ganar son cero. Sin embargo, la decisión de respaldar a Dahle tiene consecuencias. El partido dejó pasar una oportunidad poco convencional pero potencialmente transformadora de ampliar su alcance al respaldar al candidato independiente Michael Shellenberger, uno de los aspirantes políticos más interesantes que ha surgido en California en muchos años. Un ex ambientalista progresista que apoya la energía nuclear y argumenta que la amenaza de la catástrofe del cambio climático es exagerada, Shellenberger ha planteado posiciones contrarias que podrían tener un gran atractivo para los californianos cansados ​​del crimen, los altos precios de la energía y las regulaciones absurdas que inhiben el desarrollo.

En su reciente libro San Fransicko, ampliamente aclamado, y en su campaña, Shellenberger expuso la negligencia casi criminal y la agenda oculta corrupta que informa al Complejo Industrial para Personas sin Hogar, mediante el cual los burócratas, los desarrolladores y las organizaciones sin fines de lucro recaudan miles de millones mientras la falta de vivienda empeora. Pero Shellenberger también ofrece soluciones. Promete construir refugios económicos, a diferencia de los programas de “viviendas de apoyo” donde el costo promedio de un apartamento de vivienda permanente ahora supera el medio millón de dólares por unidad. Promete sacar a los adictos de la calle al tratamiento obligatorio y poner condiciones de comportamiento a las personas sin hogar a cambio de asistencia.

Shellenberger ha mantenido posiciones que condenan su candidatura entre los conservadores sociales. Está a favor del aborto y apoya el matrimonio homosexual. Es cierto que la extrema derecha prefiere a Dahle, un político que carece del carisma o la visión para atraer a alguien fuera de los votantes republicanos confiables. El Partido Republicano del estado pudo haber encontrado una donación de $40,500 como un incentivo útil para respaldar a Dahle, pero su mayor temor era seleccionar a alguien que alienara a una base ya alienada. Pero no deberían haberse preocupado: hasta que se reemplace todo el liderazgo de la organización estatal, el Partido Republicano del estado de California nunca recuperará su base. Desde 2016, han apaciguado a su base de donantes que nunca son Trump mientras se oponen a sus bases, que son abrumadoramente pro-Trump. El recuento de votos de Trump en California en 2020, con más de seis millones, superó el número total de votantes republicanos registrados en California en casi un millón de votos. Al respaldar a candidatos tibios que no ahuyentan a su menguante grupo de donantes, los funcionarios estatales del partido se mantienen a sí mismos y a un puñado de consultores empleados, pero no hacen nada para promover los intereses de la política conservadora en California.

Muchas personas que no están familiarizadas con Shellenberger señalan sus credenciales ambientalistas como negativas, hasta que consideran sus puntos de vista actuales. En 2020, Shellenberger publicó Apocalypse Never, donde presenta un caso moral convincente a favor de los combustibles fósiles y expone el daño catastrófico causado a las comunidades de bajos ingresos en todo el mundo a las que se les niega el acceso a energía asequible. Shellenberger pide explícitamente un mayor desarrollo de los recursos de gas natural de California y la expansión de la generación más nueva de plantas de energía nuclear, que producen la forma más eficiente de energía sin emisiones disponible.

Michael Shellenberger se enfrenta a una prensa hostil ya una maquinaria política demócrata fantásticamente rica y poderosa. Pero el verano de 2022 promete ser caluroso, reseco y costoso. Los californianos pueden estar listos para prescindir de los bromuros familiares sobre la justicia racial, la equidad y el desastre ambiental a favor de un pragmático que ofrezca soluciones concretas a los crecientes problemas económicos y sociales del estado.

El Partido Republicano del estado esclerótico parece feliz de desempeñar el papel de la oposición leal, en lugar de chocar cabezas con sus donantes. Pero los votantes de California, como el electorado nacional, están preparados para la realineación. Los demócratas se han convertido en el partido de la riqueza establecida, comprometido con el caos, la división y la escasez. Hay un vacío político donde yacen los intereses de los californianos comunes. Lástima que no haya una oposición lo suficientemente valiente como para capturarlo.

Apareció primero en Leer en American Mind

The radical racialist ideology advocated by the progressive left, commonly known as Critical Race Theory (CRT), owes something to earlier academic leftist thought, including the critical theory of the Frankfurt School. Certainly, the Woke ideology of racial identity did not grow out of a vacuum. The work of the Frankfurt School is one of the several bodies of radical thought that have influenced leftist academics over the last half-century in their project to undermine traditional modes of political and cultural understanding.

However, there is a recent tendency of conservative critics to draw a neat and direct connection between CRT and the Frankfurt School which simply isn’t there. Important distinctions are lost and confusion is generated. When CRT critics of CRT cite leftist intellectual history as a key basis of their critique, but get it wrong, it undermines their argument unnecessarily. Legitimate criticism of Woke ideology stands on its feet. It is in the interests of that criticism to keep it honest.

In its original meaning, CRT was a framework for viewing race in light of legal practice and theory. The broader meaning of the term has to do with a set of axiomatic statements about the omnipresence and determining power of racism throughout the social and cultural order. Despite its self-description as a “theory,” Theories must be open to empirical test and disconfirmation; CRT consists of axioms. All the claims about race and racism made by CRT activists are to be accepted as true a priori, and most of them would not hold up to empirical test.

At its core, CRT claims that racist oppression is a fundamental principle of Western society and that all institutions and social practices in those societies depend on and reinforce it. There is no way to refute this hypothesis within the terms of CRT, which makes it unfalsifiable and thus logically incoherent as a scientific theory.

The intellectual core of the Frankfurt School, which originated in Germany during the Weimar Republic and then migrated to the United States with the advent of the Nazi regime, was Marxist. However, from the standpoint of classical Marxism, it was a heterodox version mingled with several other European idea systems such as psychoanalysis, phenomenology, and existentialism. As one of its best historians, Martin Jay, noted, the Frankfurt School thinkers abhorred dogmatic, closed systems: “Critical Theory, as its name implies, was expressed through a series of critiques of other thinkers and philosophical traditions.”

Though Frankfurt School thinkers were, like other cultural Marxists of their era, looking for new ways to frame the relationship of economic base and cultural superstructure, they always remained loyal to the Marxian understanding that economic relations and social class are the key to understanding power, inequality, and the possibility of revolution. For classical Marxists, all cultural beliefs are ultimately determined by economic relations of production. The dominant ideas of any society will thus be the ideas of the dominant economic classes.

CRT presents quite a different understanding of the basis of identity and power relations. Though CRT is specifically focused on racial identity, it typically embraces the concept of intersectionality. This is the connection of various identities of oppression including race, gender, sexuality, and an ever-growing number of others in a complicated web of structured inequalities. There is no ultimate reduction to social class or to economic structures of domination in CRT. In fact, much of CRT is directly hostile to the idea that differences in social class position are more significant than personal identity, which the Woke ideology sees as supreme. The CRT perspective would reject the idea that White House press spokeperson Karine Jean-Pierre necessarily ranks above every working-class heterosexual white man in America in social power. It is therefore grossly inaccurate to describe CRT as “Marxist,” as is done for example in Mark Levin’s American Marxism and other popular accounts. CRT rejects the Marxist determinism of every other form of inequality by social class.

What did the Frankfurt School have to say about how intersectional forms of identity, especially race, matter in analyzing oppression? Essentially nothing. Even Herbert Marcuse, the Frankfurt thinker who while on the University of California faculty interacted closely with Angela Davis and some other ‘60s cultural radicals who were steeped in the racial politics of that era, never deviated substantially on this point. (And Davis was careful always to remain orthodox—Stalinist, in fact—in her Marxism during the brief time of her relationship with Marcuse).

Though the Frankfurt School had a significant interest in the analysis of antisemitism as an element in forms of authoritarianism, there is nothing to be found in the works of its members on race as an identity category, the racial oppression of non-whites by whites, or anti-black racism. Indeed, there are significant elements of their perspective that are wholly incompatible with the CRT view of these topics.

Theodor Adorno, one of the best known Frankfurt thinkers, is best known as a writer on music, and nearly every bit of what he wrote on the topic is incompatible with the basic tenets of the CRT worldview. For Adorno, music, and all culture, arises in specific historical and social conditions. It reflects those conditions in its substance. Composers come along in specific historical situations, and their experiences are particular to their epochs, as are those of their listeners. Music has meaning in those contexts because of the shared historical space within which the composer and his audience exist. As a thinker informed by a Hegelian-Marxist view of the progress of history, Adorno believed that critical music would contribute to the progression through history of the various stages Marx described, ending in the realization of full human freedom. But this was not true of most music. Most music and most culture played a retrogressive role, contributing to the ongoing enslavement of men and their alienation from their deepest nature.

In classical Marxism, it was understood that the progression through history would find the proletariat inevitably rising to consciousness of their condition and then triumphing in political struggle with their captors in the bourgeois class to establish a social utopia. Adorno and others in the Frankfurt School recognized, in the historical reality of the mid-twentieth century, that the proletariat seemed to have fallen away from this promise. They had integrated into capitalism and strayed from the trajectory required to get them to revolutionary consciousness. Other actors, however, could potentially continue to contribute to the historical change to come, and Adorno focused specifically on aesthetic producers such as musicians. He viewed the composer as a productive worker. The forces of production came in his view to mean the techniques of musical composition as they have developed historically, while relations of production were reinterpreted as the relations between the composer and the musical material itself.

Of course, the critical task of the musician or composer could hardly be literally the same as that of the Marxian proletariat. Composers were not going to seize the factories. But Adorno thought they could engage in a kind of destructive and critical activity which could honestly represent for human beings their own suffering in the face of existing oppression and false consciousness. This would go some way toward destroying the ideological web of complicity that subjugates most of the members of modern society and even convinces them that their suffering is inevitable. Critical music would provide ideology critique of the highest sort.

In Adorno’s view, Beethoven had done this in his epoch. His work was the aesthetic culmination of an historical and social moment. It was framed by the social and political circumstances of the French Revolution and the rise of an industrial bourgeoisie in Europe. Adorno saw Beethoven as a musical spokesman for a rising bourgeois class, which was in its time revolutionary. He represented a remarkable moment of fusion and perfection of specific musical forms: the Classical and the Romantic. Because of his unique historical and social situation and his individual genius, he was able to embody the free subjectivity of bourgeois humanism that triumphed in the Revolution. In this way he was the most revolutionary and important composer of this epoch.

In Adorno’s own time, he recognized Arnold Schönberg as a contemporary version of Beethoven. Schönberg’s radical break with the Western harmonic tradition constituted for Adorno a critique of the reactionary political order that had descended upon 20th century Europe. He exploded the Western art music world’s tradition of organizing tones according to a system that valorizes certain combinations of tones, melodic and harmonic structures, and developmental schemes. Schönberg threw out the existing tonal system altogether and worked with the dissonances and alternative varieties of development rejected by the Western tonal system.

Adorno saw the modern social condition as characterized by overwhelming political bleakness, in the wake of the Holocaust, Nazism, and then global communist totalitarianism. Schönberg’s atonal, unsettling music forced listeners to see with clear eyes the horrific truth of their condition.

Adorno also had much to say about popular music, that is, music oriented to an economic market. Music made for the mass public by what Adorno referred to as the “culture industry” was incapable of playing a progressive role in society. It was inherently regressive and conducive only to maintaining conditions of human oppression and enslavement. Here again, the Marxian element of Adorno’s thought was crucial. He and the rest of the Frankfurt School saw the modern capitalist West as quasi-totalitarian, less brutal than Nazism or Stalinism, but just as incompatible with real human freedom. The entirety of the modern social order was geared to producing men who were essentially replicas of one another. They were incapable of independent thought and belief, and dully satisfied in their slavery to the capitalist system. This sameness was produced by constant saturation in formulaic and regressive cultural forms. From cradle to grave, the citizen of what Adorno called the administered society is subjected to a totalitarian model of relations with others, objects, and ideas. This gives the impression of tremendous variety, but it is based on the equalizing principle of economic utility. Everything is turned into a commodity and marketed, sold, bought, and trivialized. 

This was true not just of mass music. Culture itself also becomes dominated by this dehumanizing formula. The Frankfurt thinkers were interested, as were many other cultural Marxists of that era, in explaining why communist revolution, much anticipated by Marxists in the West, had not arrived. Reactionary cultural authoritarianism and the culture industry helped explain this.

The administered society is not an overtly totalitarian society in which people must be locked away to prevent them from experiencing freedom and endangering the prevailing order. Rather, the population is subtly induced to believe that they have freely chosen from among the many products before them, which are objectively all the same. Merely plugging in Woke racially enlightened lyrics to a musical structure that is wholly determined by the culture industry will not change anything.

This perspective dovetails with some conservative criticisms of popular culture. Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, and his pointed attack on rock and pop music, comes immediately to mind for anyone on the right of a certain age. More recent conservative critics of the morphing of pop music into softcore porn and the idiot aesthetic level of almost all contemporary pop music, which now nearly all approximates rap, the most musically unsophisticated of all the unsophisticated popular forms, have said much the same thing.

Adorno and Horkheimer are miles away from the CRT embrace of culturally relativist ideas that permit an ignorant attack on all high culture as white supremacist. The Frankfurt thinkers would have been aghast at the insinuation by today’s CRT radicals that a change in the racial identities of culture industry producers—academics, movie producers, museum curators, editors—will somehow magically revolutionize the content.

Consider Adorno’s view of jazz.. He vehemently denounced it, specifically rejecting the idea that black contribution to jazz meant it must be a liberatory music. Jazz was in Adorno’s view musically bankrupt. It was a pure aesthetic commodity, merely pseudo-individualistic since its improvisation always repeated a small number of basic structures. The black contribution to it was not rebellious; in fact, it constituted submission to its authoritarian structures. “Its rebellious gestures,” he wrote, “are accompanied by the tendency to blind obeisance.” This cultural slavery was more insidious than open slavery because practitioners and consumers of this mass culture industry music falsely believed they were free while they danced in shackles.

In the late ‘60s, near the end of Adorno’s life, he intended to give a series of lecture in West Germany on the basics of his philosophical system. However, the first lecture was disrupted by radical student protestors, who stripped nude on stage and threw flower petals at him, forcing the cancellation of the series. They wrote on the blackboard: “If Adorno is left in peace, capitalism will never cease.” These students are in a much stronger genealogical relationship to today’s CRT professors and activists than Adorno and his colleagues.

My point here is not to reinvigorate the Frankfurt School’s critique of mass culture, though conservatives without much reading in intellectual history might do well to consider how much it shares with conservative criticisms of capitalism’s ability to undermine deeper institutional spheres. Conservativism has its own such critiques in abundance, and the Marxism of the Frankfurt School effectively invalidates their work at a basic level. Accurately knowing one’s enemy, however, is essential to the likelihood of a positive outcome in the cultural war in which we are presently engaged. Sloppy thinking on CRT and its influences must be exposed to the light of criticism.

Apareció primero en Leer en American Mind

                    The brave moderation and manly prudence of Edmund Burke.

Burke’s Profound Consistency of Purpose

I will not be the first to draw upon and endorse Winston Churchill’s defense of Edmund Burke against the charge of inconsistency. As Churchill wrote in his magisterial 1932 essay “Consistency in Politics,” “mean and petty” spirits cannot appreciate how Burke fought against “a domineering Monarch and a corrupt Court and Parliamentary system” at home as the intellectual leader of the Whig Party and yet sympathized with the just demands of the American colonists, fought imperial abuse in India, and opposed the oppression of Irish (with whom he had deep ancestral roots[1]) while, at the same time, fighting with all his eloquence and might a “brutal mob and wicked sect” that was destroying France and unleashing war in the whole of Europe. Churchill adds, with an eloquence that matches Burke’s own, that “no one can read the Burke of Liberty and the Burke of Authority without feeling that here was the same man pursuing the same ends, seeking the same ends of society and Government, and defending them from assaults, now from one extreme, now from the other.” Churchill, a liberal conservative in the Burkean tradition, unsurprisingly gets to the heart of the matter. He saw in Burke a mix of principle and prudence at the highest and most honorable level. About this he was surely right.

The True Rights of Man

Burke is the greatest of modern thinkers who was at once a liberal and a conservative and even the founder, as many people have deemed him, of a distinctively conservative current within liberal modernity. His cause was liberty in the most capacious yet ordered sense: “a manly, moral, regulated liberty” (RRF[2], 7), as he so eloquently put it in the opening pages of Reflections on the Revolution in France in 1790. Without in any way jettisoning eternal verities— the “Permanent Things,” as T. S. Eliot called them—the Anglo-Irish statesman reaffirmed the classical principle of prudence where “circumstances…give in reality to every political principle its distinguishing colour and discriminating effect” (RRF, 7). In revolutionary France he saw less the restoration of “light and liberty” than a profound lawlessness in the guise of a fevered proclamation of the “pretended rights” (RRF, 7) of man. 

In Burke’s considered judgment, these rights were severed from “political reason” rightly understood. They were used to excuse the fulfilling of moral and civic obligations that are, always and everywhere, at the core of ordered or civilized liberty. Burke insisted that he was in no way opposed to the “real rights of men” (RRF, 50). Those rights draw on a concrete tradition of liberty rooted in law and gratitude toward the moral inheritance passed on by our forebears. In contrast, the “pretended rights” of the revolutionaries would “totally destroy” that inheritance while severing freedom from the primordial contract, the true social contract, that connects the living to the dead and to those yet to be born. In a justly famous passage in Reflections, Burke defines the “great primaeval contract of eternal society” as “a partnership in all science; a partnership in all art; a partnership in every virtue; and in all perfection” (RRF, 82). It is by no means limited to the concerns of the flesh and commodious self-preservation. It is a genuinely social contract informed by deep indebtedness to those who came before us and of self-conscious obligation to those who will follow. Modern social contract theories, on the other hand— those proffered by Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau with some variations—“dissolve” the body politic “into an unsocial, uncivil, unconnected chaos of elementary particles” (RRF, 19). Their principle is the principle of dissolution. 

Conservative Reformation versus Radical “Innovation”

Burke knew, in his memorable formulation, that “a state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation” (RRF, 19 for all quotations in this paragraph). He saw in age-old English liberty an admirable capacity to unite “conservation and correction,” even in extraordinary circumstances such as the Restoration of the monarchy after a tumultuous period of Civil War and Cromwellian despotism and the Glorious Revolution of 1688 when Britain momentarily found herself without a king. The ancient constitution of England was “regenerated,” or so Burke believed, and necessary reforms were introduced precisely as reforms and not as radical innovations. The body politic was thus never “disbanded,” never subjected to self-conscious and potentially nihilistic revolutionary assault. Reformation was its salutary principle. 

The literary critic and man of letters George Watson perfectly captured Burke’s thinking on these matters in a 1984 essay called “Burke’s Conservative Revolution” that originally appeared in Critical Quarterly. As Watson points out, reform for Burke, or even conservative revolution, “has nothing to do with total change and a new start, since it arises out of a respect for the system that it seeks to improve.” Burke put the matter most directly in his 1796 Letter to a Noble Lord, where he insisted that “to innovate is not to reform.” That is what the fellow-traveling nobles whom Burke severely reprimands in his rhetorical tour de force cannot begin to recognize. Like literary intellectuals before and after them, they flirted with radical revolution “in the complete style of the Jacobins” and later the Bolsheviks. As Watson puts it, the true reformer has everything to fear from nihilistic revolution even as the “violent revolutionary has everything to fear from reforms intelligently conducted and seen to work.” 

Watson aptly refers to “Burke’s reforming horror of complete revolution” and sees the same anti-totalitarian and anti-revolutionary impulses in a twentieth-century figure such as George Orwell. The same could be said of the Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who admired the great reformer Pyotr Stolypin but despised the murderous destructiveness of Lenin and his Bolshevik minions. Reform, an essentially conserving act for Burke, presupposes the continuity of civilization. Radical innovation, in contrast, prefers destruction to the patient and arduous work of conservative reformation. Burke’s great writings from the 1790s, beginning with Reflections, aim to inculcate precisely such an understanding and distinction. This was a central aim of his mission as statesman and political philosopher. Burke eschews both reaction and revolution for the noble path of conservative reformation. 

Prudence, Not Cultural or Moral Relativism

The abstract theorizing of the French revolutionaries (and its intellectual boosters) that Burke excoriated should not be confused with any contempt for truth or enduring moral principles on his part. Burke is the furthest thing from a relativist or a historicist who denies unchanging truths. In the impeachment trial of Warren Hastings, the governor general of the East India Company, for governing India in the spirit of a rapacious conquering army, Burke famously criticized “geographical morality.” He insisted that “the laws of morality are the same everywhere; and actions that are stamped with the character of peculation, extortion, oppression, and barbarity in England, are so in Asia, and the world over.” The Burke scholar Peter Stanlis has persuasively argued that Burke remained in some sense an adherent (although I would add a qualified one) of the natural law tradition. A moral and cultural relativist he was not.

“The science of constructing a commonwealth, or renovating it, or reforming it, is, like every other experimental science, not to be taught à priori” (RRF, 51). It nonetheless needs to be guided by wisdom rooted in historical experience, carefully crafted prudential judgment, and the moral precepts shared by all decent and civilized peoples. Political reason, Burke tells us, “is a computing principle; adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing, morally and not metaphysically, or mathematically, true moral denominations” (RRF, 52). If political reason so understood eschews the spirit of abstraction, of reckless theorizing, if it does not confuse metaphysical certitude with the necessarily “circumstantial” character of political judgment, it nonetheless deals with “true moral denominations.” Unless directed by sound principles or even by “prejudice,” understood by Burke as deference to the practical wisdom inherent in long-established traditions, circumstances in and of themselves cannot determine the decisions of a statesman. Prudence needs principle as much as principle needs prudence. Guided by the classics such as Aristotle and Cicero, Burke never confuses prudence with mere calculation or pragmatism or with a rejection of moral limits and constraints. In this regard, he is with the ancients and the Christians and not the modern Machiavellian tradition. 

Political reason is thus a practical or non-metaphysical manifestation of the human capacity for reason and has nothing to do with a rejection of reason per se. Tradition is indispensable to political reason precisely because it is a powerful vehicle for passing on the inherited or tried-and-true wisdom of the human race. It is in no way a “mystical” or irrational substitute for theoretical or practical reason. Rather, it is the form reason takes in the judgments and decisions appropriate to the changing circumstances that constitute public life and the great tasks of public-spirited statesmanship. Burke is a critic of an all-encompassing political rationalism but never of political reason within its legitimate sphere. 

Prudence as Tough-Minded Moderation

As Greg Weiner puts it in his fine, recent book Old Whigs: Burke, Lincoln, and the Politics of Prudence, the prudent statesman must learn to combine “principle and circumstance” and, I would add, moderation and courage in a judicious and prudent way. Those noble virtues have an essential place in the exercise of judgment and action informed by prudence and are virtues in and of themselves. Weiner expertly shows that, for Burke, prudence is inseparably connected to “politic caution, a guarded circumspection” and a “moral rather than complexional timidity.” Those qualities, Burke wrote, were always “among the ruling principles of our forefathers in their most decided conduct.” Weiner quite rightly remarks that Burke “was perhaps the first commentator fully to theorize the case for caution as a sort of default position rooted in the moral virtue of humility.” The statesman is first and foremost the caretaker of a noble (if imperfect) inheritance that must be safeguarded and even cherished. Precipitous and presumptuous efforts to depart from the tried and true woefully exaggerate the human capacity to begin things de novo, from scratch, without the guidance of the wisdom of the past or the experience of our forebears. Burke’s endorsement of “politic caution” is thus both practical and epistemological in character since the revolutionary “innovator” has little or no appreciation of what he does not know. From this fatal mixture of ignorance and hubris only reckless destruction can follow. 

But once the ideological temptation is afoot in the human world, moderation must be accompanied by courage and no inconsiderable amount of spiritedness if civilization is to survive. When many in the English political class mistook post-Robespierre France with an ordinary European power, pursuing its national interest like any other great people or nation, Burke took aim at a “misguided prudence” that confused cowardice (or confusion) with humility. Burke saw “imprudent timidity” all around him rather than the true “wisdom of a nation.” Confronted by an aggressive ideological despotism that aimed to upend all governments not based on its revolutionary principles, Burke attacked the “unworthy hesitation” that flowed from the lack of “the courage to see” (to use a phrase of Solzhenitsyn’s addressing a similar tendency among twentieth-century politicians and intellectuals who refused to acknowledge expansionist Communism for what it really was). Weiner draws our attention to a distinction Burke introduces in the Letters on a Regicide Peace between “courageous wisdom” and a “false, reptile prudence” that arises not out of salutary “caution” but out of “fear” and misjudgment perhaps rooted in the failure to cultivate “the courage to see.” Yet whether as an advocate of “politic caution” or as a critic of “hesitating prudence” and “weakness of will,” Burke continues to exercise all the humanizing arts of prudence. In addition, his appeal to courage is never severed from an underlying moderation committed to the preservation of a civilization that bows in gratitude before the inherited wisdom of the past and that upholds the permanent necessity of “sacred limits and restraints.” Few statesmen can match the capaciousness of Burke’s soul, one that ties together courage and moderation and nobility of spirit with a humble deference before both God and the great inheritance that is civilization itself. Burke exudes nobility in his every thought and deed. 

[1] The always insightful and provocative Conor Cruise O’Brien has made this the key to understanding Burke tout court. One need not go nearly so far to appreciate that Burke remained a son of Ireland in important respects, a product of the influential Nagel family of County Cork on his mother’s side (a distinguished part of Ireland’s Catholic aristocracy) and a man who was faithfully married to his Catholic wife, Jane, for many decades. In his Introduction to his significant anthology of Burke’s writings, Reflections on the Revolution in France and Other Writings (New York, London, Toronto: Everyman’s Library), Jesse Norman describes the “private” Burke at the age of fifty in 1780: a “bespectacled Irishman” with red hair (when his wig was off), a Christian and “Christian latitudinarian” (truly respectful of Catholics and Protestant dissenters), an eminently “clubbable” figure who spoke to his wife with the “utmost tenderness”( Norman, pp. xii–xiii). It is an affecting portrait. Even as Burke fought Jacobinism with all his might, he worked to modify or eliminate Catholic disabilities in Ireland and to give aggrieved Irish Catholics some participation in the franchise. Burke saw their “universal exclusion” from the franchise, and thus from genuine political representation, as “a serious evil.” See the “Letter to Sir Hercules Langrishe” in Norman, op. cit., p. 603.

[2] I have consulted Frank Turner’s edition of Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, published in the Rethinking the Western Tradition series by Yale University Press in 2003. All quotations from this edition of Reflections on the Revolution in France will be cited parenthetically in the body of the text followed by the appropriate page numbers.

Apareció primero en Leer en American Mind

La nueva película de Dinesh D’Souza ha generado una gran cantidad de conversaciones nuevas sobre las elecciones de 2020, pero pocos entusiastas incondicionales de ambos lados de la división de “Elección robada” se dejarán influir. Aquellos que están convencidos de que nada salió mal en 2020 están ansiosos por descartar la película, sin importar las preguntas intrigantes que plantee. Aquellos que ya están seguros de que las elecciones fueron robadas están ansiosos por aceptarlas sin críticas, a pesar de sus deficiencias. Esta dinámica es evidente en las muchas piezas que ya han aparecido exaltando o tratando de desacreditar a 2000 Mulas. Un entrevista de D’Souza por Philip Bump del Washington Post ilustra perfectamente este ir y venir.

Ambas partes tienen un problema, que es que no pueden decidir si aplicar estándares legalistas o intuitivos al tema. Cuando se trata de aceptar la afirmación central de la película, que los organizadores pagados, o “mulas”, depositaron decenas o cientos de miles de votos en Georgia, Arizona, Pensilvania, Wisconsin y otros lugares, los críticos de la película señalan correctamente que la película no cumple con un estándar de sala de audiencias. El caso se basa en datos voluminosos, cuyo significado depende casi por completo de la inferencia.

¿Podría el hombre de la bicicleta haber tomado una foto de la urna para demostrar a sus patrocinadores que había completado su tarea? Sí, pero también podría haber estado tomando una foto para publicarla en las redes sociales, como los funcionarios electorales instaron a los votantes a hacer para estimular la participación. ¿Podría la mujer que usaba guantes de látex haber estado tratando de ocultar evidencia de huellas dactilares? Sí, pero también podría haber estado preocupada por el COVID. ¿Podrían las personas que hicieron múltiples visitas cerca de un buzón de entrega haber realizado múltiples vertederos de boletas? Sí, pero las disputas sobre la precisión del geo-seguimiento dejan abierta la pregunta de si la proximidad es suficiente para sacar conclusiones más allá de una duda razonable.

Los métodos utilizados para estimar el número de mulas y el número promedio de boletas depositadas por mula parecen arbitrarios o, en todo caso, no muy obvios. Ninguna de las organizaciones sin fines de lucro de las que se suponía que las mulas habían recolectado boletas fue identificada. Tampoco, por supuesto, se pudo ofrecer ninguna prueba sobre cómo se marcaron las papeletas en cuestión. La película, como ha dicho Ben Shapiro observadono pudo conectar los puntos de manera efectiva.

Imagine, por un momento, que 2000 Mulas estuvo disponible instantáneamente la semana posterior al día de las elecciones de 2020, y se mostró a los jueces que adjudicaron las denuncias de fraude del presidente Trump. No habría cambiado nada. Ninguna elección sería (o debería) ser anulada sobre la base únicamente de argumentos inferenciales. La película, que se estrenó un año y medio después del día de las elecciones y aún no puede considerarse decisiva, debería poner fin a cualquier noción persistente de que el conteo de votos electorales debería haberse retrasado hasta que se investigaran las denuncias de fraude y se llegaran a conclusiones. Todavía estaríamos esperando. (Por supuesto, el objeciones constitucionales planteadas a esas nociones por Joseph Bessette en Claremont Review of Books debería ser primordial).

Los partidarios de la premisa de la película responden intuitivamente. ¿Por qué diablos esta gente volvería a la vecindad de los buzones una y otra vez? ¿Quién va repetidamente a la biblioteca a las 2 AM? ¿Quién puede dudar realmente de cómo se marcaron las papeletas? ¿Qué pasa con las imágenes de video de personas que meten grandes cantidades de boletas en cajas de recolección? ¿Y qué hay del denunciante de Yuma, cuya figura sombría relató una historia de tráfico de votos en Arizona?

Todas buenas preguntas. Los críticos no parecen tener buenas respuestas a estas preguntas. En cambio, recurren al argumento legalista de que no es su trabajo explicar las cosas. Dicen que D’Souza es el que presenta un argumento incendiario y la carga de la prueba recae sobre él. Su respuesta: Usa el sentido común. El sentido común, sin embargo, depende de un marco común, que los partidarios y los opositores de la narrativa de Elecciones Robadas no comparten. El campo está abierto de par en par para el sesgo de confirmación en ambos lados.

Cambiando de lado

¿Qué pasa con la implicación más amplia de la película: que, sin las supuestas mulas, Trump habría ganado las elecciones? Aquí se invierten los papeles. Los oponentes anteriormente legalistas de la premisa de la película se vuelven intuitivos, o al menos no legalistas. Incluso si el presunto esquema es cierto, y ellos lo niegan, ya sea que se hayan depositado o no de acuerdo con las reglas electorales de los estados involucrados, las boletas en sí mismas eran boletas válidas. En este punto, citan el testimonio de Wisconsin de Catherine Engelbrecht de True the Vote, quien dijo antes de una audiencia legislativa estatal: “Quiero dejar muy claro que no estamos sugiriendo que las boletas que se emitieron fueran boletas ilegales”. Aunque es posible que se hayan infringido las reglas, el resultado final de la elección no se distorsionó.

Por otro lado, en este punto, D’Souza adopta el legalismo. Incluso si las papeletas fueran representaciones válidas de las elecciones de los votantes reales (tiene dudas sobre esto, pero no puede probar que sus dudas estén justificadas), la forma en que se entregaron las convierte en votos ilegales. Si sus cálculos (más que un poco turbios) son correctos, se deberían restar suficientes votos ilegales en estados clave para darle la victoria a Trump.

¿Cómo debemos evaluar la probabilidad de que los demócratas y las organizaciones progresistas sin fines de lucro emprendan un esquema generalizado de tráfico de boletas en 2020? Sabemos que, en una escala mucho más pequeña, esas cosas suceden (como en las elecciones de 2018 en el Noveno Distrito Congresional de Carolina del Norte). Como lo muestran Mollie Hemingway en Rigged and John Fund y Hans von Spakovsky en Our Broken Elections, también sabemos que en 2020 sucedieron otras cosas extrañas, incluidos cambios en las reglas electorales legal y constitucionalmente dudosos en numerosos estados y una estafa grave de boletas en ausencia en enfermería de Wisconsin. casas Hasta que haya un recuento completo de los 470 millones de dólares gastados por Mark Zuckerberg en la movilización de votantes, seguirá habiendo dudas sobre adónde fue ese dinero en última instancia. ¿Y qué hacer con el denunciante de Yuma y el de Georgia que, según D’Souza, inspiró toda la investigación (aunque no apareció en la película)? Es, al menos, una historia más plausible que la teoría de la máquina de votación del Dominio de Kraken o las afirmaciones de que los demócratas fabricaron grandes cantidades de votos durante la pausa en el conteo a última hora de la noche de las elecciones.

Al mismo tiempo, ¿qué hacer con el hecho de que, aparentemente, solo hay uno o dos denunciantes en una operación que supuestamente abarcó varios estados, empleó hasta 54,000 mulas e involucró cientos de miles de votos? Si la inferencia y la deducción van a ser la moneda del reino, hay mucho que apunta en la dirección del supuesto esquema que no existe en la escala que se alega y, en cualquier caso, no es decisivo para el resultado.

Cuanto más anómalo sea el resultado, más se debe buscar explicaciones extraordinarias; cuanto menos inesperado sea el resultado, menor será la probabilidad de que sea el resultado de un juego sucio. Si Ronald Reagan en 1984 hubiera perdido repentinamente ante Walter Mondale, uno podría comprender razonablemente incluso la mera inferencia de fraude como explicación. Pero Donald Trump no era Ronald Reagan. Ya sea que uno consulte el promedio de encuestas de RealClearPolitics o 538.com, no hubo un solo día de la presidencia de Trump en el que una mayoría, o incluso una pluralidad, de estadounidenses dijera que pensaba que estaba haciendo un buen trabajo como presidente.

Durante casi toda su presidencia, comenzando alrededor del 27 de enero de 2017 y continuando ininterrumpidamente hasta el 20 de enero de 2021, los índices de aprobación de su trabajo estuvieron por debajo del nivel del agua, con más desaprobación que aprobación. Durante toda su presidencia, desde el primer día hasta el último, sus índices de favorabilidad, es decir, la evaluación de los estadounidenses de Trump como persona en lugar de su desempeño como presidente, también estuvieron bajo el agua. Durante toda su presidencia, una sólida mayoría de estadounidenses (en noviembre de 2020, una abrumadora mayoría) dijo que el país iba en la dirección equivocada. Sin margen de error y con un techo de alrededor del 47 % de apoyo, Trump presidió una pandemia, un fuerte revés económico y un verano de disturbios y discordia. La pérdida de Trump no debería haber sorprendido a nadie. Las explicaciones extraordinarias parecen innecesarias.

Luego estaban las encuestas preelectorales, realizadas por una amplia gama de empresas de encuestas de renombre, algunas de las cuales eran de tendencia republicana. El archivo de RealClearPolitics de encuestas cara a cara contiene 230 enfrentamientos presidenciales entre Trump y Joe Biden desde mediados de 2019 hasta el día de las elecciones. Trump lideró exactamente cinco de los 230, y solo uno después de febrero de 2020: una encuesta de Rasmussen dos meses antes del día de las elecciones en la que el presidente superó a su rival por 1 punto porcentual.

Se puede decir que los defraudadores expertos tratarán de arrojar suficientes boletas para producir una victoria plausible, pero esta operación tuvo que manejar esa tarea minuciosamente calibrada días o semanas antes de que se conocieran los totales de votos legítimos. Y tenía que hacerse en varios estados. Además de la improbabilidad práctica de este escenario en abstracto, la evidencia normal que uno podría esperar de los totales de votos inflados no aparece en 2020.

El día de las elecciones, el promedio de las encuestas del RCP mostró a Biden con un 51 % y a Trump con un 44 %. Si el fraude masivo hubiera fabricado cientos de miles de votos a favor de Biden, uno esperaría que su voto informado superara significativamente el número final de la encuesta nacional. Sin embargo, cuando se informaron los totales, Biden tenía: 51%. Trump terminó con un total informado de 47%, mejor de lo que predijeron las encuestas. Los promedios de las encuestas estatales en los seis estados clave que reportaron una estrecha victoria para Biden (Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pensilvania y Wisconsin) mostraron que Trump había estado a la zaga durante meses en todos menos en Georgia, donde con frecuencia intercambiaba ventajas con Biden. y recientemente había recuperado una pequeña ventaja, dentro del margen de error.

Si hubiera suficientes votos para rellenar los totales de Biden en todos los estados clave relevantes, también se esperaría que sus porcentajes informados allí hubieran sido significativamente más altos de lo que indicaron las encuestas de salida. Este no era el caso.

Por el contrario, en Georgia, Michigan, Pensilvania y Wisconsin, los totales informados por Biden fueron en realidad una fracción de un porcentaje más bajos que los números de las encuestas a pie de urna; en Arizona y Nevada sólo una fracción de un por ciento más alto. Todos estaban dentro del margen de error. Cómo podría haber una infusión masiva de votos fraudulentos sin que los totales de votos informados se alejaran mucho de la congruencia con las encuestas de salida (que también encuestaron a los votantes por correo) es un misterio continuo.

golpeando el tambor

Al final, la gente cree lo que quiere creer. Entonces, ¿por qué tantas personas están ansiosas por creer la historia contada en 2000 Mulas sin lidiar con sus defectos?

Primero, otras tácticas encubiertas utilizadas indiscutiblemente en 2020 por los demócratas y sus aliados dan crédito a la historia. Además, una característica de la naturaleza humana es que siempre es preferible creer que tus oponentes hicieron trampa que creer que tus compatriotas rechazaron a tu chico. Hoy, cuando las burbujas mediáticas amistosas están de moda, también puede ser más fácil de creer. Los demócratas, por su parte, llevan mucho tiempo demostrando este fenómeno, ya sea con las acusaciones de que Reagan ganó conspirando con el ayatolá, que Bush padre ganó con una sucia campaña racista, que su hijo fue ungido por la Corte Suprema y luego amañado Máquinas Diebold en Ohio, o que Trump se coludió con Rusia. Los miembros demócratas del Congreso se han opuesto a los votos electorales en las últimas tres victorias presidenciales republicanas.

La narrativa de las elecciones robadas también tiene piernas porque Joe Biden es muy malo para ser presidente. La gente pregunta, ¿Cómo pudo haber ganado? La respuesta más probable, que convirtió con éxito las elecciones en un referéndum sobre un presidente impopular en el que él mismo era poco más que un apoyo inerte, es insatisfactoria para muchos. Los partidarios de Trump tienen dificultades para comprender cuán exitoso fue Trump en movilizar a la oposición.

No menos importante, un factor importante que contribuye es que el propio Trump continúa golpeando el tambor y ahora parece motivado únicamente por el deseo de redimir su pérdida, que no puede reconocer por razones tanto de necesidad política como de narcisismo personal. No en vano, los fundadores estaban preocupados por los peligros potenciales de la demagogia.

En conjunto, 2000 Mulas plantea interrogantes que deberían ser seriamente investigados por las autoridades. Al hacerlo, la película aboga por los límites legislativos en la votación por correo y la recolección de votos, así como por poner fin a las urnas de recolección de votos sin supervisión y la financiación privada de la administración electoral. Sin embargo, cuando intenta ir más lejos, su alcance supera su alcance y vierte combustible en un fuego que ya está emitiendo más calor que luz.

El cargo Estancamiento apareció por primera vez en La mente americana.

Apareció primero en Leer en American Mind

                    Las pruebas sólidas podrían permitirnos calmar a los extremistas de Covid y volver a la normalidad.

Hacer que los estadounidenses se hagan la prueba de covid-19 ha sido una estrategia crítica de salud pública para combatir la crisis desde el principio. Al principio de la crisis, la administración Trump tuvo éxito en un esfuerzo sin precedentes para acelerar el desarrollo, la producción y la distribución de pruebas de covid. ¿Qué significa ese éxito para la innovación futura y para enfrentar la próxima emergencia sanitaria?

Afortunadamente para Estados Unidos, las empresas de diagnóstico y laboratorio crearon múltiples pruebas de muchos tipos, a las pocas semanas de que nos informaran sobre el covid. De hecho, la primera prueba rápida fue autorizada por la Administración de Drogas y Alimentos de los Estados Unidos (FDA) en marzo de 2020, relativamente temprano en la pandemia, lo que supuso un gran paso adelante. A lo largo de la primavera y el verano de 2020, hubo una demanda pública continua de más pruebas y más rápidas, ya que se estaba debatiendo la cuestión de si el Covid se transmitía sintomática y/o asintomáticamente y en qué medida. El público aprendió un idioma extranjero de PCR, antígenos, anticuerpos, hisopos, reactivos, células T, sensibilidad, especificidad y muchas otras minucias antes oscuras del mundo de las pruebas.

Rápidamente, desde un punto de vista histórico, pero lentamente, desde el punto de vista del público, la industria de pruebas de EE. UU., desde fabricantes hasta laboratorios, médicos, patólogos y técnicos, aumentó su capacidad y velocidad, hasta que para el verano de 2020, había más del doble la capacidad en los EE. UU. para realizar pruebas, ya que había demanda pública de pruebas, aunque nunca hubo una cobertura perfecta en todas las partes de nuestra nación, con brechas locales y regionales en la cobertura en diferentes pruebas.

En cuanto a las actitudes del público hacia las pruebas, variaron ampliamente, desde aquellos que creían que las pruebas eran intrusivas y violatorias de los derechos a la integridad física, hasta defensores de la privacidad preocupados por cómo se monitoreaba y usaba la información de las pruebas y empleadores que veían las pruebas como una forma de regresar. trabajar de manera segura y las autoridades de salud que querían usar la información para planificar la respuesta. Y mientras que los escépticos señalaron que las pruebas solo eran útiles como una instantánea temporal de la infección e inútiles un momento después, los ciudadanos preocupados creían que las pruebas podrían proporcionar actualizaciones relativamente continuas sobre su propio estado de infección y de todos los que los rodean: familiares, compañeros de trabajo. , y todos los que encontraron. Las pruebas fueron fundamentales para todo lo relacionado con Covid: desde abrir escuelas hasta visitar a la abuela.

Y a pesar del gran y duradero clamor público por una mayor producción de pruebas, en seis meses teníamos mucha más capacidad de pruebas a nivel nacional de la que se estaba utilizando. E incluso con contratiempos temporales iniciales en el desarrollo de pruebas, se desarrollaron y autorizaron muchas pruebas. Como testimonio de la capacidad inventiva y productiva de nuestro país, antes de finalizar el 2020 se autorizaron varias pruebas rápidas y pruebas a domicilio, y se distribuyeron más de 150 millones de pruebas rápidas. Este fue un triunfo de nuestros científicos, inventores y fabricantes que ha sido poco apreciado.

Pero este logro real y bueno representa un desafío futuro con el que debemos lidiar: ¿cuál será el papel de las pruebas en la lucha contra las enfermedades infecciosas a partir de ahora?

Se dice que lo más peligroso en política es aumentar las expectativas. Combine eso con el hecho de que habíamos logrado un hito muy real pero subestimado: pruebas rápidas, caseras y ampliamente disponibles para una nueva enfermedad infecciosa en menos de un año. A HHS, ayudamos a incentivar y promover con éxito estas pruebas. Gran parte de eso se logró adoptando flexibilidades regulatorias y también brindando un mercado confiable para las pruebas, y la combinación de estos dos factores básicos generó una respuesta exitosa de la industria. Sin embargo, estos elementos pueden no estar siempre presentes para cada nueva enfermedad. Pero si no, ¿por qué no? ¿Esperará el público que este tipo de tecnología esté disponible de esta manera en el futuro? Ya hemos sido testigos de la insatisfacción del público con la distribución de pruebas del gobierno al final de la ola Omicron. Cuando se reconoció la amenaza y se determinó que las pruebas eran necesarias, la variante ya superaba el 70 por ciento de las infecciones en EE. UU. Las expectativas eran altas y, lamentablemente, el plan se consideró demasiado pequeño y demasiado tarde.

Y como la mayor parte del país busca una rampa de salida a la normalidad más allá de esta pandemia, se debe tener en cuenta un hecho amplio: una parte sustancial e influyente del público sigue convencida de que la pandemia está causando estragos y no ve la necesidad de volver a la normalidad. , o en cualquier caso discrepa fuertemente sobre el cronograma, los hitos y la justificación para tal “fin” de la pandemia. De hecho, destacados expertos en salud pública continúan prediciendo otro repunte de Covid y un regreso a las restricciones de Covid.

Sin embargo, ¿podría la comunidad de salud pública adoptar las pruebas como una alternativa al regreso de regímenes de salud pública más intrusivos y coercitivos? Y a medida que gradualmente volvamos colectivamente a la vida normal, pero sin una población completamente vacunada (habiendo fallado la coerción legal y los esfuerzos para estigmatizar a los no vacunados), ¿deberían volverse más frecuentes las pruebas y podrían servir de alguna manera como una alternativa a, digamos, la obligatoriedad? ¿vacunación? Si surgen otros coronavirus u otras enfermedades infecciosas (y lo harán), ¿podemos utilizar las pruebas como una parte más central de nuestra respuesta pública, dado que ahora sabemos que podemos preparar pruebas con relativa rapidez, desde un punto de vista tecnológico? De hecho, es posible que se puedan usar algunos tipos de pruebas para evitar la coerción de mano dura de los gobiernos (o entidades privadas que actúan a instancias de los gobiernos), ya sea para vacunar por la fuerza, aislar, distanciar o cualquier medida extrema que se pueda recomendar en el futuro. .

Por lo tanto, para evitar en el futuro los peores elementos de nuestras pasadas respuestas de salud pública, como los cierres que han tenido consecuencias tan negativas para la salud y la economía, debemos abordar ahora estas preguntas.

Los nuevos modos de prueba pueden significar que la información sobre la propagación de enfermedades ahora se puede producir de manera rápida, amplia y económica. Siendo así, es probable que el público lo exija para su uso y protección. Cómo y cuándo esta información de las pruebas es utilizada por los líderes políticos, las empresas privadas y las familias, así como por el público en general, determinará si a corto plazo nos quedamos con la mitad del país continuamente temeroso de una enfermedad que no puede ver y medida, y también si a largo plazo volvemos al tipo de respuestas poco sofisticadas y de mano dura (pero tal vez inevitables en el contexto) que hemos visto en el pasado reciente. Sería trágico que los elementos fallidos de nuestras respuestas recientes se reproduzcan alguna vez. Parte de la forma de evitar esto puede ser comprender lo que podemos hacer en el futuro con las pruebas, prepararnos para ello y utilizarlo de manera creativa. No debemos permanecer para siempre en nuestro actual estado medio temeroso de un crepúsculo interminable de la pandemia. Asimismo, no debemos repetir nuestros recientes errores de política. Para evitar ambos, debemos comprender cómo obtendremos y utilizaremos la información sobre enfermedades en el futuro para permitir nuestra respuesta de salud pública sin herir o destruir a nuestra sociedad. Los enfoques creativos para las pruebas pueden ser una salida. La administración y la comunidad de salud pública tienen tiempo para determinar los próximos pasos en las pruebas.

Esperemos que lo hagan bien.

Apareció primero en Leer en American Mind

                    A conversation with Dinesh D’Souza about his documentary, 2000 Mules.

                    <p class="has-drop-cap">“This has been something people have been obsessed about for two years now.” </p>

The American Mind: You begin this movie by saying that the 2020 election “haunts the American mind.” Do you think there’s a disconnect between the base, which feels haunted by the possibility of fraud, and GOP leaders who are hesitant to address or discuss the issue?

Dinesh D’Souza: I think that there is a widespread suspicion across the political spectrum that the 2020 election was not all right. Now, not everybody might think it was stolen. But the idea that something was deeply awry, I think, is actually shared by the vast, vast majority of Republicans—including the Republican establishment, but also including a substantial number of independents and Democrats.

Now of course, the way that each of these groups responds to that suspicion is different. The Republican establishment, by and large, it’s kind of like, “something ugly went on”…but they don’t want to know really what it is. They would prefer not to know. They prefer to dust off and move on—and there are complex reasons for that, but one of them is that they are not entirely displeased that Trump was moved out of the Oval Office. So that’s the Republican establishment.

On the part of the Democrats, I think there are Democrats who themselves think, “we stole it.” But they think that was the right thing to do, because Trump is an authoritarian if not an outright fascist or Nazi—and therefore, emergency measures taken to yank him out of the White House are warranted and actually morally O.K.

And then of course there’s the broad Republican and MAGA base, which knows kind of in their gut that this was a stolen election, but has not had until now either the vocabulary or the actual evidence to be able to document it. And this is why the Left has been able to be so scornful. They’ll call it a “big lie.” When they say things like, “this is the most secure election in history,” they do not mean that they have done a comparison of elections and established this one to be the most pure. They haven’t done that legwork at all—they haven’t even attempted it. Their argument is merely that the burden of proof is on you, and if you can’t prove the election was stolen, we have to say it was the most secure. And so until this movie, the Left was kind of riding high on all this. And now the movie is showing up to ruin the democratic picnic.

TAM: Let me ask you a little bit about that burden of proof. In the film you talk to True The Vote [a firm that uses geolocation data and surveillance footage to identify suspected “mules” who carry multiple ballots to drop-off locations]. You present some of what they’ve been able to uncover, but a number of the folks you talk to also acknowledge that when it comes to 2020 itself, “I don’t think we’ll ever know the full story,” as Charlie Kirk says. Sebastian Gorka says, “It’s the perfect crime, because it cannot be curated after it’s committed.” I wanted to ask you first of all, do you agree with that assessment? That there’s no definitive way of going back and saying the election was rigged enough to flip it?

DD: Well I think that there are two questions here that should be separated. The first one is, is there adequate proof? And the second question is, even if there is adequate proof, is there anything that can be really done about it?

Now, the film presents what I consider to be adequate proof for the intelligent citizen, and by that I mean what’s adequate here is the best available explanation of what happened. I’m not trying to meet the standard of “beyond a reasonable doubt,” because this is not a case where I’m a prosecutor in a courtroom. And also there are certain limitations that are inherent to a film’s format—so for example, you know, I cannot produce appendices and tables of statistical geo-tracking data. I can show you a chart with a blue line representing the movement of a mule. And if you say, well wait a minute, I don’t believe you, show me the underlying data—well, I’m writing a book, and I’ll try to do some of that in the book, go to the next level of documentation. But you can’t do that in a movie. The audience would be bored to death.

TAM: That’s been some of the more bad-faith criticism of you—the Washington Post took you to task for not having basically cited every possible file.

DD: Right, or, if I show a particular mule—in this case it was the “bike guy”—and he’s taking photos of the ballot, we wanted to show that image, because it’s interesting to see these guys take photos. You can see that they’re not taking photos of themselves—a kind of an “I voted” photo—but rather photos of the ballot. But the Washington Post guy was like, wait a minute, I cannot tell from that image if he’s putting in one or three or ten ballots; what makes you think he’s putting in multiple ballots? 

And my point is actually, I agree: from the point of view of the film and that particular image, you can’t see multiple ballots. Some of this surveillance footage is grainy, sometimes it takes actual expertise to be able to zoom in and try to estimate the actual number of ballots. After all, you know, someone putting in 135 ballots or eight, it looks pretty similar. So unless they’re putting them in one by one, you need almost a magnifying glass to be able to look at the image to try to see what’s going on. So yeah, I mean, I’ve had a lot of this type of quibbling.

But what I say to myself is, you take any of the major criticisms being made—I mean, some of them are super dumb, some of them are more intelligent, you know, objections made by Ben Shapiro and others. But none of them can survive the observation of the movie as a totality. So that if someone says, for example—and this is true—that in Georgia you can give your ballot to a family member and ask them to drop it off. Now, this would by itself suggest that look, just me showing you multiple ballots doesn’t mean that something illegal is going on. That particular guy could have been dropping off ballots for a family.

But then I say, wait a minute: we’re talking about people that went to ten or more drop boxes. If you’re dropping off the ballots of your family members, why would you go to more than one drop box? Even if you drop some of them on one day and then you got a few more the next day, you’d go at most to two drop boxes, but not 10, let alone in the middle of the night, let alone wearing gloves, let alone taking photos of the ballots as they went in. All of that behavior, seen as a totality, is impossible to reconcile with the hypothesis [that these are innocent voters]—which, again, makes no sense once you’ve seen the movie as a whole.

TAM: I feel like I cut you off before you got to that second part: even if this kind of activity flipped the election for Biden, can anything be done?

DD: Let me say first of all, I’m not saying that that the court case cannot be made. I’m simply saying that you cannot jump from the movie to the Supreme Court. I mean, people literally say to me O.K., is the Supreme Court gonna watch your movie and like, drag Biden out of the Oval Office? And the answer is no, the movie is the first step.

And what the movie says is basically to attorneys general, to secretaries of state, even to elected officials, look: there is a very obvious course of action available to you here, and that is to apprehend the mules. True the Vote has their cell phone I.D.’s—they don’t have their names, but law enforcement can get their names very easily. The process is quite simply to get a warrant, go to the cell phone provider, unmask the mules, then visit them: Who paid you? Who put you up to this? Who organizes this operation? So, this is the normal course of action that law enforcement would take in any other case. A similar approach is called for here.

Now obviously, if they’re able to unravel and expose a wider cartel that would draw in many other people, the people who run these nonprofits, the people who have been funding the organizations it takes to pull all this together—yeah that’s a case that can absolutely end up in court. In fact the court is the proper place for it to end up.

But that’s not—the movie is a necessary, but not sufficient condition for that to happen. Now let’s turn to what can be done. When I started the film, my view was that not much can be done. My view was the statute of limitations has expired, there is a very small legal window basically between Election Day and Inauguration Day, and then it’s a done deal. And even if it turns out later that you can establish beyond the shadow of a doubt that the election was stolen, there is no recourse.

And so my original view was that the purpose of this movie is as a truth telling enterprise, because we still want to know. Even if we can do nothing, we still want to know. It’s kind of like if you have a guy who’s accused of a crime—let’s just say a robbery or rape—and the statute of limitations has expired, but there’s new DNA evidence that can establish definitively if he did it, you still want to know if he did it. Truth is important. And the second reason, I thought originally, was to prevent this from happening again.

Now, as I got into the film and began to realize the kind of sheer magnitude of the fraud and how disgusting it is, I began to revise that view and move toward the view that, why should we automatically assume that the beneficiary of the fraud should continue to benefit from the fraud? In other words, if Lance Armstrong won the Tour de France what, seven or eight times by using illegal drugs, the Tour de France doesn’t just say let’s fix it the next time around. They say, take away Lance Armstrong’s medals, because they don’t want him to get the fruits of the cheating. And I think that that is a legitimate question. I’m not claiming to know the answer to that question—I’m not claiming to know the constitutional process by which it’s adjudicated.

I mean, I’ve looked into it…basically the Constitution says this: it says the electors meet, it says that their decision is ratified by both houses of Congress, and the president takes office. And then the only other remedy beyond that is impeachment. The Constitution does not seem to envision the possibility that it will emerge later that the guy who’s in the Oval Office is a kind of usurper who has gotten there by fraud perpetrated by his own side. So I just want to make the point that we are in that sense in constitutionally uncharted waters.

And what I want people to do who watch this film is just take a few minutes to digest that, to let that sink in. Just so we don’t hastily jump over that and go O.K., well you know, let’s just go on to the next one. Before we go on to the next one, let’s really think about what happened this time. I think that’s going to better prepare us for how to how to handle the next time.

TAM: I’d like to address that question of how to handle the next time, but first: this strong desire to just close the question and move on. The near-prohibition on raising it from the Left…I wonder what your experience has been of that. Near the end of the film your interlocutors say you’ll be accused of targeting people, of undermining the electoral process, and so forth. Has that prediction proven true?

DD: well, at the end of the film, what Gorka and Charlie Kirk and a couple of others are discussing is potential lines of counterattack that can be used by the Left to attempt to discredit the movie. But prior to all that, I’ve got to say: this is my sixth film. And by now I have kind of a formula for releasing these films: typically it’s a wide release in a theater, and then it’s followed by essentially DVD and home box office, which is basically viewing it at home. And there are obvious channels to do that move: iTunes, Amazon Prime, then you try to go to a streamer—Netflix, something like that. And this entire model was unusable for me for this film. This is the most censored topic in America.

You have the certainty of being banned on certain platforms, and a likelihood of being pulled down on others. I thought to myself, you know, I don’t want to be in a position whereas I’m trying to release the film in the critical opening week, they pull a rug out from under me and that’s not going to happen. So I need a completely novel business plan to release this film, in a new way it’s never been done before.

And so I decided to have a very limited theatrical release, but a very strange kind: we actually rented out those theaters, which you can do by paying like, $5.00 a seat. Essentially you’re buying out the whole theater, but at a discounted price. And so we opened May 2nd and May 4th doing it that way—like, we’re renting this real estate, there’s nothing you can say about it. You can’t cancel the movie: once you’ve signed a contract we can sell tickets, and have people come and watch the movie that way. I’ve never done that before.

And then I put the film only on the Salem media platform and on the Rumble-owned platform called Locals, and this was actually kind of a good break for me. Because I had a powerful video platform, Rumble, on my side, that actually wants to go into the movie business, and saw this as an opportunity to demonstrate that content creators could put a movie on Rumble and do as well, if not better, and actually keep more of the revenue themselves than they would if they went in the traditional way. And so obviously I was open to this in part because I had no alternative, but also because they convinced me that Dinesh, you have a chance to kind of rewrite the rules of the Internet a little bit by doing it this way. But you know, I couldn’t put the trailer up on YouTube, I couldn’t buy ads on Facebook, so all the normal mechanisms for publicizing and distributing a film had to be put to the side. In that sense you can see that this is the first film I’m releasing in an age of censorship.

TAM: My sense from the outside is, in that regard, it’s been a pretty successful proof of concept.

DD: Oh, I mean, more than pretty successful. We have made this film into a massive success and a cultural phenomenon, you know, we have rappers writing songs about it, we have made $10 million in two weeks, which would be pretty good putting a film in 1,500 theaters! So I would say that in terms of the film’s profitability—as I say, the circumstances are different, but it is far and away my most successful film since the very first one, which was Obama’s America (2016), which broke all kinds of records and became the second-highest-grossing political documentary of all time.

TAM: So let’s turn now to this question of what comes next, at the level of the regime. Irrespective of 2020. When you talk with Hans von Spakovsky, you discuss some systemic changes that were made, in large part during COVID. Mass mail-in ballots, waiving signature requirements, etc., sometimes against the constitutions of the individual states. And these new procedures are highly vulnerable to manipulation. I wonder what your thoughts are on that: What kind of counter effort would be strong enough to roll that back, to secure elections and re-found the electoral process going forward?

DD: Well I mean, interestingly, the Republican Party is dominant in a number of these swing states. It typically dominates the legislatures. And the only problem is that the Republicans are kind of inert, and very slow to move. I mean, I can see this with my film itself: if I was a Democrat, if I was Michael Moore, if I made this exact same film about the 2016 election and showed massive, coordinated fraud by the Trump side, you can just imagine the furor. Chuck Schumer would be all over it on the Senate floor. Nancy Pelosi would be going berserk. They’d be demanding that Trump resign.

And contrast this with the Republicans, where, you know, literally if someone goes up to a senator or congressman, “have you seen 2000 Mules?” They’re like, “oh you know, I’ve heard a couple of things about that movie, would you send me a DVD?” [laughs] it’s a radical difference of psychology between the two sides.

So yeah, if the Republican Party wakes up, they are able to do a whole lot in this area. And now, if the Republicans take the House and the Senate, there’s the opportunity to have hearings, bring all of this to light, and actually follow this plot all the way up. And again as I said there’s a very logical way to do that. If Republicans get fired up by this film, they will put pressure on their local sheriffs to look into this issue of mules. And sheriffs have every authority to investigate. They have every authority to push this forward.

Now, ultimately, they’re going to need some sanction from the attorney general, and so this does become a political matter at the level of—say, Mike Brnovich, the attorney general of Arizona, or of course Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger in Georgia. Obviously I’m more optimistic that things can be done in states that have Republicans in positions of power than places where you’ve got, for example, Michigan or Pennsylvania, Democratic secretaries of state and Democratic attorneys general. I can see why those guys are not going to be overly eager to spring into action on this one.

TAM: Let me ask you then to close about your overall level of optimism. Obviously you wouldn’t have made this documentary if you didn’t think there was some chance of free and fair elections in the future. Do you have hope for the country going forward?

DD: I’m actually very confident. And I’m confident, by the way, not just in the MAGA movement, which I think is going to be fired up—and in fact we’ve already seen it to a degree that’s unbelievable. This film is getting incredible traction. People said to me, oh, it’s going to be displaced by the Ukraine war. Nope. It’s going to be displaced by the news about Roe v. Wade. Nope. It’s going to be displaced by this mass shooting. Nope. The traction under it reflects the fact that this has been something people have been obsessed about for two years now.

I also firmly believe that even if it’s establishment Republicans or RINO Republicans, you take Marco Rubio, you take Lindsey Graham, you take McConnell, you take Kevin McCarthy, you sit them down and play the movie, and then ask them what they think when they see the credits, I think they will be blown away. And they will absolutely realize that something is a wrong and something needs to be done. Now again, reasonable people can take different views of what should be done. They might take the view that look, this is a bygone with regard to 2020, and we need to address 2022 and 2024. But I’m optimistic enough to believe but no sane Republican can see this movie and conclude everything is fine with the electoral process as is.

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