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Suppose you were Treasury secretary at a moment of worrisome global financial instability. Here is near-bankrupt Greece, truculently threatening, unless Germany pays the pensions of its retirees and the salaries of its public servants, to undermine Europe’s rather fanciful currency, managed by a central bank operating within no single government’s fiscal policy. Meanwhile, in the world’s two largest national economies, China is trying to deflate safely a giant real-estate bubble of ghost cities financed by zombie banks, while the U.S. Federal Reserve presides over the seventh year of capitalism with an almost zero return on capital. Would you spend any time, as Treasury secretary Jack Lew is doing, on redesigning the $10 bill by removing the portrait of Alexander Hamilton, the genius architect of the nation’s financial system, as its main image and replacing it with the portrait of a woman, based on the politically correct whim that America should mark the 2020 centennial of women’s suffrage in this way?
What woman? It seems that almost any one will do, from civil rights pioneer Rosa Parks to Cherokee chief Wilma Mankiller, the reports. “It’s very important to be sending the signal of how important it is to recognize the role that women have played in our national life and in our national history for a very long time, really from the beginning,” said Lew, in prose that shows that language can become as inflated and devalued as currency.
This move would be an error of almost comic silliness. What makes money sound is people’s belief in the solidity of its value. It isn’t that it is made of gold, since history teaches that governments have debased even the hardest currency, clipping tiny bits off gold coins or mixing base metal with bullion in new batches stamped at the mint. The same is true of gold-backed banknotes, which governments have devalued again and again. After all, beyond its commodity value for filling teeth or making jewelry, gold has no value beyond the magical quality superstition assigns to it—or once assigned to it.
As world-historical Founding Father Hamilton rightly postulated, a banknote or a coin is just a promise to pay, whose value ultimately rests on people’s trust that that promise will be fulfilled. And it be fulfilled, not because America’s currency represents some set quantity of specie but rather because it mobilizes “the productions of the country,” wrote Hamilton, fueling the nation’s “unequalled spirit of enterprise, which . . . is in itself an inexhaustible mine of national wealth,” more than any of the gold mines of Spanish America or the not-yet-discovered gold fields of California. The wealth of the nation, at its most fundamental level, consists of the energy and imagination of its citizens in making use of and developing the natural and human resources at hand, often in ways never dreamt of before, and in the constant commercial exchange of the productions of their industry and inventiveness. The medium of exchange—the currency—that allows all this to happen seamlessly therefore does possess something like the magical quality of a self-fulfilling prophesy. The belief that it represents wealth frees and incentivizes people to create wealth.
Recognizing the role of belief—of faith—in making a currency work, Hamilton noted that “in nothing are appearances of greater moment, than in whatever regards credit. Opinion is the soul of it”—that is to say, the spirit that breathes life into it—“and that is affected by appearances as well as realities.” It’s for that reason that our first Treasury secretary backed his paper currency with a tiny fraction of gold, when gold still carried its magical aura. It would make the paper sound, so that people wouldn’t try to cash their paper dollars in for it all at once but instead would use them to finance productive activity. Like Dumbo’s feather, the small national stock of gold was a totem that gave people the courage and incentive to work the magic that was in themselves, which is what wealth creation really is. It’s for that reason, too, that Hamilton ensured that the shareholders of the central bank that would manage the currency would be largely private investors, with a minority government stake, because governments can’t resist the temptation to pay off national debt by inflating the currency, thus debasing it as a trustworthy medium of exchange. Private owners, by contrast, care about nothing more than the stability of their bank.
So the completely fiat U.S. currency that came into being when President Richard Nixon ended the dollar’s convertibility into gold in 1971 is scarcely more factitious than Hamilton’s 1790s dollars, but it is theoretically no less solid and effective—as long as the central bank manages it, as Hamilton did, to ensure its solidity. That’s why the 1978 Humphrey-Hawkins Act proved so dangerous to the national credit, for it charged the U.S. central bank—the Federal Reserve—with the impossible, contradictory task of balancing the economic need for a sound currency with the political desire for full employment. And it’s no wonder that the Fed is coming under criticism for its failures to do an impossible job flawlessly, or that critics are proposing such nostrums as a return to the gold standard.
I would suggest the simpler Hamiltonian course of repealing Humphrey-Hawkins, giving the Fed responsibility and regulatory powers only to ensure a sound currency, and insulating it as much as possible from meddling by government, now more fiscally profligate than usual. But with so much worry in the air about the soundness of our currency, I would urge Secretary Lew to remember Hamilton’s words about appearances. Hamilton is on the $10 bill not because he is a white man (though a West Indian immigrant) but because he helped found the world’s oldest and most successful democracy and created a remarkably resilient financial system—if we can keep it. While Misses Parks and Mankiller are no doubt estimable and important characters, it is at least arguable whether they are in a league with Martha Washington, Abigail Adams, Sarah Jay, or Dolley Madison—and, as a mere matter of historical fact, none of those extraordinarily talented women founded our nation or framed the constitutional system that, however battered, has survived for more than two and a quarter centuries. So we honor Hamilton on our banknote for the inestimable value and worth of his contribution to our own freedom and prosperity.
The change Secretary Lew proposes is, he says, “symbolic,” but “symbols are important.” Indeed they are. So he would do well not to meddle with symbols of value and worth—the nation’s currency—in a way that suggests that value and worth can change with the shifting currents of politically correct fashion.
City JournalThe Founders at Home.
Photo by Willard/Thinkstock
, by Michael Stokes Paulsen and Luke Paulsen (Basic Books 2015)
The meaning of the United States Constitution is “fixed by the original meaning of its words,” according to the authors of a highly engaging new book titled, simply, . That proposition—music to the ears of originalists like Justice Antonin Scalia—underlies the book’s central theme: defending the Constitution’s text against those politicians and judges who “seek to rewrite [its] terms in the service of what are thought to be desirable policies.”
is the product of a multi-year collaboration between Michael Stokes Paulsen, a professor of law at the University of St. Thomas, and his non-lawyer son, Luke. The book’s first half provides an overview of the Constitution’s key provisions and an introduction to the major schools of constitutional interpretation, including the authors’ own originalist perspective. The second half offers a condensed history of American constitutional law. With sidebars on many of the personalities who shaped constitutional doctrine—not just judges, but politicians and litigants, too—the book does an excellent job of placing legal controversies in historical context.
The Paulsens are at their best when critiquing the modern era of judicial activism. In their telling, the Warren Court (1953–69) produced “careless” decisions, because the justices were focused on achieving policy goals rather than upholding the law. The nadir of this results-oriented jurisprudence was, as the authors correctly point out, the Court’s 1973 decision in v., which invented a federal right to abortion on demand. The authors assail as “the most extreme example of judicial activism in the twentieth century.” They even compare the decision—unfavorably—to , the notorious pro-slavery decision that helped provoke the Civil War. “Not even ,” they argue, “so completely seemed to disregard the text as did.”
Rather than citing the Constitution’s actual language, the Court relied on the doctrine of “substantive due process,” the idea that the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment empowers judges to strike down laws that they consider flawed, even if not strictly unconstitutional. That doctrine had been strongly endorsed by the Court eight years earlier in v., in which Justice William O. Douglas famously discovered a constitutional right to privacy hidden in “penumbras, formed by emanations” of the First, Third, Fourth, Fifth, and Ninth Amendments.
Justices O’Connor, Kennedy, and Souter come in for heavy criticism from the authors for their less-than-courageous decision in v. (1992) to reaffirm “whether or not mistaken” for fear of provoking a political backlash. Rather than engaging in honest jurisprudence, the three justices were motivated by delusions of “fashioning a political compromise they thought should settle the abortion issue once and for all.”
The authors take aim at many other sacred cows of progressive jurisprudence. The famous police warnings mandated by v. (1966) reflected the Court’s “policy judgment” and not the text of the Fifth Amendment. The Court’s rejection of school prayer in v. (1962) was based on a notion of the separation of church and state that is “found nowhere in the Constitution.” The Court’s 2013 decision striking down the Defense of Marriage Act was “cryptic and meandering in its reasoning.” v. (2003)—which struck down state anti-sodomy laws—is portrayed as an abrupt reversal of an earlier precedent ( v.) driven by certain justices’ desire to legislate from the bench. On affirmative action, the authors take a hard line: the plain meaning of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment “renders nearly all forms of state affirmative action programs illegal”—notwithstanding the Court’s continued tolerance of certain forms of affirmative action.
While makes a compelling case against judicial activism, the book is not without its flaws. In order to arrive at its critique of the modern Supreme Court, the authors have crammed too much Supreme Court history into a simplified narrative in which “substantive due process”—the legal doctrine at the heart of activist decisions like v.—is the central villain. The authors assert, for example, that substantive due process was invented by Chief Justice Roger Taney in , but fail to acknowledge that Taney never used the term “substantive due process” and, in fact, made only a single fleeting reference to “due process” in the course of his 50-page opinion.
Turning to the years after the Civil War, the book faithfully describes the rise of substantive due process culminating in v. (1905), in which the Supreme Court struck down state business regulations, ostensibly for violating the “liberty” protected by the due process clause, but more likely because the justices simply thought the regulations unwise. The Paulsens, however, don’t merely criticize the so-called Lochner Era of cases; they label the entire period of 1876 to 1936 as one of constitutional “betrayal.” The years 1936–60, when the Court repudiated , is celebrated in a chapter called “Restoration.” But this is painting with too broad a brush. While the Lochner Era including some regrettable activist decisions, the pre-1936 Court was generally quite faithful to the Constitution’s overarching design of a limited federal government. In v. (1917), for example, the Court correctly struck down the federal Child Labor Act as beyond Congress’s enumerated powers. In order to stay within their narrative of “betrayal,” the authors condemn for “curbing the national government’s ability to address important social problems”—a criticism grounded more in policy than on constitutional interpretation.
The authors are left trying to shoehorn the Court’s New Deal decisions into a tale of constitutional “restoration.” Alas, this was the era in which the Court tore down the Constitution’s express limitations on federal power in order to clear the way for FDR’s massive increase in federal power. The most extreme New Deal decision, v. (1942)—which upheld the power of the federal government to dictate how much wheat a farmer could grow for his own use—is depicted as “restoring the broad interpretation of national legislative power” asserted by Chief Justice John Marshall in the early years of the Republic. But that’s an odd kind of restoration—rather than restoring the Constitution’s text, the Court was restoring the (already-overbroad) interpretations that Marshall had asserted and that later courts had rejected. In reality, the Court in did exactly what the Paulsens argue against: it rewrote the Constitution to further its desired policy goals.
In attacking the Court’s “rights revolution” of the 1960s and 1970s, the authors have to some extent accepted one of the basic premises of judicial activism: the idea that the Constitution is primarily rights. It isn’t. The Constitution is a structural document—its purpose is to create a central government and simultaneously to limit that government’s scope. The document’s framers cared deeply about rights, but they believed that the best way to protect Americans’ rights was to limit the power of the federal government. The right to local self-government—ultimately enshrined in the Tenth Amendment—was the right that would safeguard all others. Though the Paulsens rightly identify federalism as one of the Constitution’s core themes in the book’s early chapters, they shy away from states’ rights throughout the historical narrative. They depict Jefferson’s doctrine of nullification, for example, as a tool that would be used to perpetuate slavery. In fact, the doctrine was invoked more often by abolitionists. With respect to the sovereign right of states to resist unconstitutional federal laws, the book claims that “the Civil War settled issue once and for all”—an odd proposition for authors who insist that constitutional interpretation must be based on the text alone.
Happily, the authors are on much firmer ground when discussing separation of powers—the other essential structural feature of the Constitution. The Court’s decision in v. (2006), striking down the use of military tribunals to try captured al Qaeda war criminals was an “extraordinary” curtailment of executive power and one that President George W. Bush would probably have been justified ignoring entirely. The authors make the important point—one that continues to elude the mainstream media—that President Barack Obama has gone far beyond Bush in his assertion of unilateral executive power by claiming the right “to deploy offensive military force against other nations , without any authorization by Congress” (emphasis in the original).
All in all, is an excellent resource for non-lawyers and lawyers alike looking to understand the role of constitutional law in American history. Though the book would have benefited from a more nuanced narrative and a greater attention to structural issues, the Paulsens’ piercing attack on judicial activism is well worth the price of admission.
The Naked ConstitutionA Less Perfect Union
Photo by Howard Arnoff
Charleston’s Emanuel AME Church
Just when it seemed that it couldn’t get any worse, comes this: nine innocent people murdered at a prayer service in an African-American church in Charleston, South Carolina, evidently by a lone white gunman. The killer’s purpose seems to have been to set a match to the always-dry tinder of racial comity. A survivor of the massacre said that the suspect, Dylann Roof, told his victims: “You have to go. You rape our women and you’re taking over our country.” If this proves accurate—early reports from such events are notoriously changeable—any hopes that the simmering racial tensions of the last year would soon blow over are probably at an end.
Mass murder of African-Americans by a white man stirs echoes of an uglier period of race relations in this country. In particular, the murder of Christians at prayer invites comparison with the 1963 bombing deaths of four innocent girls at 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. Incalculable good has been achieved in race relations in the ensuing 50 years. America shed the skin of legal segregation, elected a black president, and saw the appointment of black attorneys general and black secretaries of state. But we’re told constantly that the issue remains unsettled. We are reminded—often, it seems, for the express purpose of sowing division—that the ghosts of slavery and Jim Crow haunt us always.
This discord is not foreordained. It’s entirely within our power to avoid descending into a profitless cycle of racial animus and recrimination, though this will require politicians and community leaders to speak tactfully and soberly. It will require decency and neighborliness. If the past is any guide, today and for the next several weeks, those qualities could be in short supply, as we will likely be treated to endless media fulmination on the question, “Who is to blame?”
Obscured by the passions this event will probably cause is the increasingly relevant issue of soft-target terror, which the , with unfortunate timeliness, devoted an article to yesterday. “[C]hurches and religious facilities . . . remain extremely vulnerable,” said James Nicholson, former U.S. ambassador to the Vatican. “[B]ecause it’s virtually impossible for them to serve their mission as places for people to go to worship and thus be accessible to the public without onerous security hurdles that they have to jump through.”
Personally, I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve sat in a church pew, scoping the exits and thinking, “What would I do if someone opened fire in here right now? Would I be able to carry these kids and run, or would I have to shield them with my body?” I used to think that this was post-9/11 paranoia; now I know that I’ll never be free of these thoughts.
The terrorist attacks of 9/11 turned our airports and airplanes into lock-down zones. The 2012 Newtown massacre turned our schools into maximum-security fortresses. The Charleston slayings might work to similar effect on our churches. How long before we are all living, working, studying, traveling, and worshipping in impregnable boxes of bulletproof glass? What a world to offer our children.
Photo by jen-the-librarian
New York City will soon finalize its budget for the next fiscal year, and public libraries are feeling shortchanged. Though Mayor Bill de Blasio’s budget boosts capital funding by $300 million over ten years, the libraries had requested much more—$1.4 billion. And de Blasio would cut operational funding by $10 million.
If the libraries are getting less than they wanted, it’s not for lack of a public relations effort. Visitors to the New York Public Library’s website find a pop-up petition enjoining them to “tell the city that libraries need more funding.” Every major city newspaper has recently run stories or editorials echoing the systems’ demands. But most commentary has failed to explore why, in a city with such a marked preference for bigger government, libraries remain cash-strapped almost six years after the last recession ended.
Any honest account of library underfunding must include the ongoing burden of retirement-benefit costs on the city budget. In the last fiscal year, New York City devoted $8.1 billion to pensions—a 152 percent increase over the prior decade. If pension costs had kept pace with the overall budget, which grew 42 percent between 2005 and 2014, the city would have had an additional $3.6 billion to spend on services. To put that figure in context, after accounting for inflation, libraries would need about $164 million to restore spending to prerecession levels.
Pensions are a form of deferred compensation. “Backfilling” pension systems—that is, making contributions into the system to make up shortfalls—is effectively using current tax revenues to pay for past work. The costs of the past squeeze services in the present.
In addition, last year, the city spent $3.1 billion on retiree health care. Workers who retire before they become eligible for Medicare can stay on the city’s plan at no cost. And, when they reach 65, they get their Medicare Part B premiums reimbursed. Such generous benefit packages have nearly vanished from the private sector—and are thus totally unnecessary to attract and retain a qualified city workforce.
In recent years, the city’s libraries have harmed their cause through lack of transparency. Last March, they tried to pass off a glorified Powerpoint presentation as a “special report” substantiating their request for more money. And yet, the libraries need more money. Even greater transparency won’t save them from having to close on hot summer days due to malfunctioning HVAC systems.
The fatal flaw of defined-benefit pensions, which city workers have, is that their costs increase during recessions to compensate for stock-market losses. When such cost increases combine with reduced revenues and the rising demand for many services—including libraries—that typically occurs during bad fiscal times, pensions’ impact on city budgets becomes devastating.
New York City is a big-government town. Municipal service commitments here are broader than elsewhere, and no true fiscal conservative has served as mayor in modern history. That’s a reality of New York, but it also means that single-issue advocacy makes even less sense with respect to municipal services here than in other cities. In exchange for any additional funding, city officials should demand more accountability and information from the New York library system, especially about its plans for what it calls its “midtown campus.” In addition, as should be the case with all capital commitments in New York, new appropriations should be guided by the principle of “fix it first,” not service expansion. Yes, the city should give libraries more funding—but library advocates should appreciate the inherent tension between expansive services and generous benefit programs for public employees. It’s those benefit programs that most need reform, which would ease the mounting fiscal pressure on city services, libraries included.
Photo by Theo Wargo/Getty Images
“They just want to use these words,” Jerry Seinfeld observed of today’s ideologically intolerant young in his recent ESPN radio interview, explaining why so many comics no longer play colleges. “They just want to use these words. ‘That’s racist. That’s sexist. That’s prejudice.’ They don’t know what the hell they’re talking about.” It’s no wonder the remarks generated such notice. Seinfeld has never shown an ideological bent in either his work or his life. That he cited his own 14-year-old daughter as exemplifying the unhappy phenomenon was especially surprising. A few nights later, appearing on Seth Meyers’s late-night show on NBC, Seinfeld more fully revealed himself. He made it clear that he views our politically correct popular culture, and the reflexive caution it imposes, with the stunned surprise of the belatedly aware; and, more to the point, that now that the veil has been lifted from his eyes, he has no intention of backing off.
Seinfeld described how an innocuous comic observation he made at a recent performance—that, when scrolling through names on their cell phones, people assume the imperious air of “a gay French king”; illustrating with an insouciant flick of an outstretched finger—he instantly felt the room go tense, as the audience silently responded: “What are you talking about ‘gay’? What are you doing? What do you mean?’ And I thought, ‘Are you me?’” He added that he “could imagine a time when people would say that it is offensive to suggest that a gay person moves their hands in a flourishing motion and you now need to apologize.”
it? That time is here and has been for quite a while. Like most of America, Seinfeld simply hadn’t been paying attention.
Nor, even now, is there any suggestion that Seinfeld is politically engaged in a traditional sense. Notably well-adjusted and comfortable in his own skin, especially for a comedian, he enjoys friendships across the political spectrum, from Chris Rock and Louie C.K. on the left to Colin Quinn and Larry the Cable Guy on the right. His allegiance is to humor, about which—catch him on or in his chat with David Steinberg, or almost anywhere else where the subject is generating laughs—he’s unbelievably smart and analytical. Above all, he understands that the most essential element in his kind of comedy is precisely the one under such sustained attack today: honesty. It was key to the observational humor with which he established himself in the clubs and on late-night TV, and it drove his iconic show. No one on was especially nice or generous of spirit; corner-cutting and pettiness ran rampant. Yet the show’s characters, true to themselves even when (make that when) their behavior didn’t reflect well on themselves, inspired such affection because they were so recognizable, especially to the millions of young urbanities who formed its core audience. As Upper West Siders, pretending to social consciousness even when their hearts weren’t in it, their manifold hypocrisies made for especially rich comic fodder.
This is what Seinfeld is defending: the truth, irreverently expressed.
While this is obviously a fight on principle, it is just as obviously intensely personal. As marked its 40th anniversary in 2014, Mel Brooks, himself a liberal, bemoaned that racial sensitivities would preclude the film being made today—and it’s a real question whether some of most memorable episodes would pass muster in what conservative pundit Guy Benson aptly terms today’s culture of shut-up. Just off the top of my head, as a fan of the show, there were the following:
George, desperate to prove his racial bona fides by producing a black friend, seeks to befriend any black guy he can find, including a random guy on the street.
Kramer, refusing to wear a red ribbon on the AIDS walk, is set upon by a pair of gay bullies.
At the Puerto Rican Day Parade, Kramer accidentally sets fire to the Puerto Rican flag, and is attacked by a mob, including the same pair.
Not realizing that a woman he hopes to date is Native American, Jerry repeatedly offends her by proffering a gift of a cigar store Indian, using phrases like “Let’s bury the hatchet,” and finally by trying to using the term “reservation” when booking a table at a restaurant.
Susan’s father is humiliated when it emerges that he was John Cheever’s secret lover.
Kramer is serenaded by Mel Tormé at a benefit for the Able Mentally Challenged Adults, after being socked in the mouth, treated with Novocaine, and mistaken for someone mentally impaired.
All the episodes featuring shyster lawyer/Johnny Cochran stand-in Jackie Childs.
And that’s before we get to the Seinfeld guys’ constant objectification of women (just like real guys!), down to comparisons of specific behaviors and body parts. In fact, with the possible exception of a Jimmy Kimmel/Adam Carolla cable vehicle that once featured a video of clueless young women eagerly signing a petition to “end the suffrage of women”— might have been more indifferent to feminism than any in the medium’s history.
It’s a good bet that any of these subjects, treated more or the less the same way by a comedian on a college campus today, would be greeted with stony silence, or worse. Among the most telling reactions to Seinfeld’s remarks on ESPN was “An Open Letter to Jerry Seinfeld from a ‘Politically Correct’ College Student,” written by a journalism student at San Diego State University. It is a rather startling document, as poorly written as it is poorly reasoned, yet utterly confident in its rectitude. While allowing that he “loves and appreciates offensive, provocative comedy,” he cautions that “comedy in our progressive society today can no longer afford to be crass, or provocative for the sake of being offensive. Sexist humor and racist humor can no longer exist in comedy because these concepts are based on archaic ideals that have perpetrated injustice against minorities in the past . . . There needs to be a message, a central truth behind comedy for it to work as humor.” Offend away, he concludes his lecture to arguably the most successful comedian in America, as long as you’re “offending the right people.”
To a considerable extent, his celebrity—along with the general presumption that, in his heart of hearts, he’s one of the good guys, a liberal—has shielded Seinfeld from the abuse he might have otherwise provoked from the nation’s humorless army of social-justice warriors. Indeed, Jerry Seinfeld may well be the hardest celebrity in America to marginalize. But some are ready to take a crack at doing just that. “Jerry Seinfeld’s anti-P.C. tirade isn’t just stale and lame—it’s cowardly,” tweeted Salon, following the ESPN interview. An MSNBC panel on the controversy made up of left-of-center media millennials produced the following:
Hostess Alex Wagner: Seinfeld has “fallen behind the times.”
’s Annie Lowrey: “I kind of roll my eyes at Jerry Seinfeld. You know, he’s a billionaire—like I don’t feel sorry for him if people don’t laugh hard enough at his jokes.”
Bloomberg Politics’s Dave Weigel: “(N)o one wants to think they’ve stopped being cool or they stopped being relevant—or especially, that they—that they’re now a bigot because they believe something they’ve always believed.”
MSNBC’s Dorian Warren: “I think it’s so cheap and easy to be able to insult people who are socially marginalized . . . you’re afraid to be criticized, because you can’t come up with funny jokes that don’t insult people.”
To his credit, Seinfeld isn’t backing down. In fact—and, perhaps this, too, speaks to his sense of invulnerability—he seems more eager than ever to engage the issue, as was clear on the Seth Meyers program. The host is straightforwardly liberal; the other guest that evening, editor David Remnick, is that and more—a man ever vigilant, lest an errant thought slip into his magazine.
“There’s a creeping p.c. thing out there that really bothers me,” Seinfeld opined of the troubling audience’s reaction at his recent performance, and Meyers and Remnick readily professed to agree.
“But you can also screw up,” said Remnick, noting that thanks to the web, he instantly hears about it whenever he does.
When that happens, asked Meyers, “Do you look back on the work and say ‘Wait, did we make a mistake?’”
“Of course,” said Remnick. “If you have half a brain you give it a second look.”
“When was that?” challenged Seinfeld, from down the couch. “Tell us about that?”
Remnick replied that one of the magazine’s recent covers had so offended “a guy on CNN” that the guy told him, on the air, that it “could have been a cover on a Nazi magazine.”
Seinfeld wasn’t buying. “Explain and defend, not apologize. Did you apologize? . . . Have you ever done that?”
No, Remnick said, but added that some cover sketches do go over the line, and sometimes there’s “a misfire—I got a misfire today.”
“What does that mean, you got a misfire?” Seinfeld asked.
“It was a sketch about a possible cover about the cover recently,” Remnick said, referring to ’s Caitlyn Jenner cover. “But it didn’t work.”
“I would like to know what it was,” pressed Seinfeld.
“You’re not gonna get it.”
The audience laughed and applauded, as if it was all in good fun, but Seinfeld was clearly in earnest. A moment later, he turned to the other media heavy, Meyers. “I saw on Instagram where you said, ‘I’m not going to make any jokes about Caitlyn Jenner.’”
Meyers looked momentarily abashed, before replying, lamely, “I said ‘that day.’ I sort’ve thought that was a wonderful moment, so it wasn’t a good time to make jokes.”
“Oh, good,” allowed Seinfeld drily. “I feel better about it.”
Many of us should feel better knowing Seinfeld is in this fight. Might he eventually go all in, and connect the dots? Might he come to realize that this issue also bears on the proliferating trigger warnings at colleges—the kinds his children will soon be attending—and the treatment of people like Condoleezza Rice and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and so much more?
Probably not. But for now, let’s settle for a steady push for the freedom to make light of anything, across the ideological spectrum—including, for the next month or so, Rachel Dolezal and her amazing quick-switch from white to black.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
City JournalNo Matter What . . . They’ll Call This Book RacistWhy We Won’t Talk Honestly About RaceWill Tripp, Pissed-Off Attorney-at-Law.
Photo by Scorpions and Centaurs
, by Steve Conn (Oxford University Press, 392 pp., $34.95)
The American political Left is now heavily associated with cities, but it wasn’t always so. Proto-Democrat Thomas Jefferson once claimed that the “mobs of great cities add just so much to the support of pure government, as sores to the strength of the human body.” William Jennings Bryan and prairie populists criticized cities as thrones of parasitic capitalism and exploitation. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal explicitly focused on rural concerns; where it did address urban concerns, it often provided an incentive for people to move out of the city. The National Industrial Recovery Act, the Resettlement Administration, and most importantly, the Federal Housing Administration, set the framework for the American suburban boom, with mortgage guarantees encouraging single-family home acquisition and tilting the field of housing purchase forever since in favor of buyers and against renters.
One merit of Steve Conn’s is a frank accounting of this past. Conn is understandably hostile to policies that explicitly favor the rural or suburban over the urban. The Interstate Highway system, he argues with ample justification, ruined countless urban neighborhoods in the name of progress. Large-scale urban renewal did the same. But while Conn doesn’t hesitate to eviscerate the architects of the highway system wholesale, he’s repeatedly eager to offer at least partial excuses for the tremendous missteps of the urban renewal crowd. Why? Because they possessed the twin left-wing graces of compassion and a willingness to spend public money. He grades on a curve; good intentions count in his book.
Conn outlines both left- and right-wing critiques of various urban renewal policies, but weights them differently. Left-wing criticisms are deemed undeniably true, while right-wing views—even those Conn generally agrees with, such as Martin Anderson’s —are dismissed as being anti-government. It’s a grating pattern, repeated throughout; Conn wants us to remember the good intentions behind a failed program, while reminding us of the bad faith of the failed program’s critics.
Anti-urban government policies undoubtedly contributed to urban decline in the late-twentieth century. City dwellers flocked to federally underwritten homes in suburbs connected by federally constructed roads. Sprawling Sunbelt cities looked nothing like their predecessors on the East Coast. Those who moved there, as Conn rightly notes, were often small government conservatives suspicious of government spending. Largely absent from Conn’s narrative of the growth of suburban and Sunbelt America, however, is mention of the crime, dysfunction, and high costs that drove people out of the cities in the first place. Conn views cities as powerless vessels, tossed asunder by waves of national scale.
Migration from the cities to the suburbs wasn’t all rosy, to be sure. Urban problems followed along with the people, and heavily suburban cities often proved worse at dealing with these problems than their more densely packed predecessors. Conn’s criticism of the legacy of sprawl is strong, and his account of suburbanites’ complaints rings true:
They complain about all the time wasted in traffic, and they lament the ugly sameness of it all. Most of all, they report that these places leave them feeling alienated and alone. They mourn the loss of some sense of community that these sterile physical and social environments have failed to give them. On the other hand, many of them reject the idea that any collective public action can or should be taken to address these problems.
Trouble is, Conn hates the suburbs so much he can’t bring himself so much as to acknowledge their benefits. Movement from the cities to the suburbs wasn’t driven simply by tail-finned, Goldwaterite selfishness. Compared with a life of urban renewal, school busing, crime, and crushing taxation, life in a cul-de-sac offered far more real community to millions of Americans. Whatever you think of them, the suburbs have clearly satisfied the hopes and wishes of many Americans more effectively than cities have over the last half-century.
Urban America is in better condition today than it was at the dawn of the progressive era. Some conservatives remain hostile to urbanism even now, when it boasts many more functional examples. This faction, as Conn notes, often opposes even sensible efforts to improve cities. But the best means of winning over these conservative suburbanites is not by lambasting them as anti-urban reactionaries, but by acknowledging that they have excellent cause for suspicion.
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