The American Conservative

A Virginia House of Delegates subcommittee killed a series of bills that would have amended the constitution to automatically restore the voting rights of nonviolent felons once they had served their time. The Senate is expected to do the same today.

GOP-controlled legislatures killing measures which, by design or as a side effect, give more Democrats the vote is nothing new. Lawmakers pointed out that felons did have a procedure to restore the franchise by petitioning the governor. The issue, for the opponents of automatic re-enfranchisement, is the integrity of elections–someone convicted of a felony is of questionable judgment therefore they should be subject to review.

ThinkProgress writes, “Far from just simple procedural act, applying for clemency is no guarantee that whoever is governor will grant the clemency request.”

Strictly speaking that’s true, but Governor Bob McDonnell has approved the vast majority of these petitions since being elected and is a firm supporter of reintegration. He supported the bills, along with Attorney General and lone 2013 GOP gubernatorial nominee Ken Cuccinelli, and was disappointed at the outcome:

“Once individuals have served their time, and paid their fines, restitution, and other costs, they should have the opportunity to rejoin society as fully contributing members. As a nation that embraces second chances and believes in redemption, we want more productive citizens and fewer people returning to prison. Automatic restoration of constitutional rights will help reintegrate individuals back into society and prevent future crimes, which means fewer victims and a safer Virginia.”

The easy interpretation of House’s motive for scuttling the bill is pure self-interest. As with many Voter ID laws, the GOP claims to be looking out for the integrity of elections while making voting more difficult for reliably Democratic constituencies.

Yet with the number of felons McDonnell has pardoned, it’s hard to claim that there’s a failure in the current way of reintegrating ex-felons, and certainly not a big enough one to justify a constitutional amendment. So long as the governor’s hand doesn’t get tired.

The neoconservative decison to charge that Chuck Hagel is an anti-Semite strikes me as a tactical blunder–a decision grounded in the idea that since they can’t defeat the nominee on the issues, their better option was to try to assassinate Hagel’s character, presumed to be one of his greatest strengths. Such accusations raise the temperature around the nomination, with consequences  difficult to foresee. But just as anti-Semitism is a blight, so are false accusations of it. Peter Beinart has perceptively noted that no one in America ever pays a penalty for falsely maligning someone as an anti-Semite. This may be true today, but like all social rules, it is subject to renegotiation.

Ali Gharib at Open Zion has done a superb job deconstructing the evidence, or, I should say, “evidence,” on which the charge is based: leaders of the Nebraska Jewish community  who are alleged to think that Hagel has a Jewish problem deny there is anything of the sort. Hagel may not always have acted like Alfonse D’Amato in his attending to them, but really, why should he?

Since we know that genuine anti-Semitism has deep social and psychic roots in Western societies, it shouldn’t be surprising that the leveling of false anti-Semitism charges for political ends also has contours worth exploring. Quite unexpectedly, the Hagel nomination is opening a rich vein for their study. One thing one finds is that those who are quick to deploy false charges of anti-Semitism have begun to take on traits historically associated with bigoted paranoia.

Take for example the Wall Street Journal‘s Bret Stephens, the first to play the anti-Semitism card against Hagel. Last month he notoriously wrote, “Prejudice—like cooking, winetasting, and other consummations has an olfactory element. [With] Chuck Hagel…the odor is especially ripe.” Beinart and others have deconstructed Stephens’s charge, the centerpiece of which is that Hagel, in an interview, used the term “Jewish lobby” instead of “Israel lobby.” But connoisseurs of literary criticism may notice an eerie parallel to Stephens’ toxic paragraph. If evidence of Hagel’s anti-Semitism cannot be substantiated by facts or logic, it can nonetheless be smelled. It’s as if Stephens is seeking to transport us back to the world of Marcel Proust and the Dreyfus Affair, where the anti-Dreyfusards (the anti-Semitic precursors of French fascism, and, via Theodore Herzl, a propellant fuel for the birth of Zionism) were confident they could smell the Jew, an outsider even when an habitué of the best salons of Paris.* Only, of course, Stephens has reversed the roles, as it is he who smells Hagel.

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In his confrontational press conference yesterday, President Obama claimed that if Congress eventually turns on the “sequester”—the $1.2 trillion in across-the-board spending cuts that lawmakers delayed in the fiscal cliff deal—he will have come close to his stated goal of shaving off $4 trillion in deficits over 10 years. As the Huffington Post’s Jon Ward notes, Obama’s budget calculation derives in part from that of the liberal Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, cited by Paul Krugman and other critics of deficit alarmism.

One thing neither Obama nor Krugman mention is that a good chunk of this deficit reduction—the 2011 Budget Control Act—would not have materialized if not for House Republicans dragging Obama into the first debt-ceiling crisis.

Republicans, in other words, deserve at least half the credit for getting our fiscal situation close to the point where Obama and liberal budget wonks may breathe a sigh of relief.

A couple points, before everyone high-fives each other and calls off the debt-ceiling dogs:

Discretionary spending is the low-hanging fruit of deficit reduction. Discretionary spending programs are so called because Congress has control over their budgets—unlike mandatory programs like Medicare, Social Security, and Medicaid, whose outlays increase on virtual autopilot. Jared Bernstein, who has prodded his fellow liberals to put entitlements on the table, notes that Congress already has enacted 70 percent of the nondefense discretionary cuts called for in the Bowles-Simpson plan. Recall that these are the programs (education, basic research, infrastructure investment) that Obama really likes. The reason he has floated his willingness to accept modest entitlement reforms (raising the eligibility age of Medicare, chained CPI for Social Security), to the consternation of the Democratic base, is that he knows that programs that benefit the elderly are going to crowd out spending that he believes will “Win the Future.”

The unemployed recede further into the shadows. If we’re being charitable, we see that both parties at least notionally are interested in closing the “output gap”—wherein economic growth can’t keep pace with population growth—which is the primary reason we’re running such high annual deficits. Obama believes a proactive federal government can spur more technological breakthroughs like the internet and GPS. Republicans believe that reforming the tax code and shrinking government will do the trick. Whichever story you’re inclined to believe, you know we can’t close the gap overnight. Meanwhile, the unemployment crisis grinds on—especially severe as it is for middle-aged workers who are supposed to be in the prime of their careers and whose financial responsibilities are significantly more daunting than those of the unemployed young.

Faced with human suffering in the immediate term and the long-term crisis posed by an aging population, our political elites are paralyzed. They target marginal programs that deficit scolds don’t worry much about, and wait for the other side to take the plunge on entitlements. The jobless remain jobless. Growth remains sluggish. And the population keeps getting grayer.

Strange times we’re living in.

As we handed over our tickets to see Michael Haneke’s Oscar-nominated “Amour,” the ticket-taker said, “Theater is on your right. Enjoy!” My companion, who had already seen the story of an increasingly isolated old man trying to care for his beloved, degenerating wife, mused that this was perhaps not the most appropriate exhortation. Maybe something more like, “It’s theater five. Endure!”

“Amour” is a totally compelling, emotionally devastating movie, in which Haneke’s technical trademarks support his overall theme. It’s an extremely painful movie to watch and it’s by far the greatest of the three Haneke films I’ve watched so far. Spoilers etc. under the cut.

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“You have to watch this show; the first few episodes are the most reactionary critique of sexually liberated Brooklyn possible; it’s a dystopia.”

Paraphrased, that’s what one wise friend told me last year about “Girls,” the HBO series that captured best Comedy Series at the Golden Globes last night, along with a Best Actress nod for its creator, producer, and star Lena Dunham. The show also premiered its second season last night.

The series has become something of a fixation for the overclass. It is our financial crisis era-hipster version of “Sex and the City,” but written by a woman! The boys at Slate are learning to love it. The new editor of Gawker hates it. Good grief, even Esquire has episode recaps now.

The show has been hailed as “revolutionary” but from the opening scenes it has always felt fairly inevitable to me. As it exposes a certain privileged slice of new white transplant life in Brooklyn, I feel like I’ve been observing these characters for a decade. The Girls (now, really, young women) went to Oberlin, I went to Bard. A significant portion of my friends are also new white transplants in Brooklyn with similar ambitions, though they lack access to parental reserves of cash and social capital to construct their lives. But my friends can occasionally overlap with those people in Girls. In some ways, it is a life I might have lived or at least lived around, if I hadn’t self-consciously rejected certain features of it.

There is a self-awareness about the show and its creator that is endearing. Characters utter precious modern truisms in hilariously self-interested and defensive ways. Dunham’s character is portrayed as sexually depraved and worse–kind of creepy–when she visits her hometown in Michigan in one early episode. Dunham was also hammered in some corners of the press for not having more racial diversity in her show. This season her character is dating a black Republican played by Donald Glover. It is a bit of the diversity people asked for mixed with a diversity they didn’t. The world and characters that “Girls” portrays will surely spit him out soon.

“Girls” may be impossible to watch for some people. Dunham is nude in it, frequently. Her on-off boyfriend will utterly repulse anyone with a hint of bourgeois sensibility. It isn’t delicate. It is so obviously partly based on true events, and partly fictionalized. It is difficult to refer to the characters by their fictional names rather than their identities: Dunham, Brian Williams’s daughter, David Mamet’s daughter.

Girls portrays an oddly telescoped kind of life. There are no children. The parents are far away and exist only intermittently. In the latest episode, one character’s mother shows up and talks frankly about sex, disgusting her adult daughter–ground well trod by Noah Baumbach in “Kicking and Screaming.” By comparison I see my in-laws no less than once a week, usually more times than that.

Instead the show is about 20-somethings who live in a world that seems parenthetical to  one with personal inter-generational obligations. The drama consists of the characters making demands of the world and demands of themselves, and failing to be satisfied. As with many of my friends (and myself) they invent and announce codes of ethics and conduct for themselves on the spot. “I’m doing this a different way, I’m not just going to show up on your door in the middle of the night… I’m going to make logical responsible decisions when it comes to you,” one character says.

The oddest thing about the show is that these girls are fascinated–that really is the right word here–by men who have so few qualities. And the fate of these girls is to continue these confusing sexual relationships with badly damaged men, where pantomimed rape fantasies are a feature and a bug, for perhaps a decade. Only then it may become permissible for their social set to start thinking of marriage.

Perhaps I underestimate the trials of my more suburban, married existence in comparison to those of my Brooklyn friends and their stand-ins on this drama. But for a show with the tone of wild celebration in self-discovery, enabled by so much social capital, the ambitions and possibilities for these Girls seem so small and sad, and their 20s seem tragic.

Of course, they’re all famous and will be pretty wealthy soon. So, maybe it is worth it?

Liel Liebovitz profiles the settler leader and tech entrepreneur Naftali Bennett, who leads  the Habayit Hayehudi (“Jewish Home”) party, which is likely to become the second-biggest in the Knesset after Israel’s elections next week. The piece is unusually helpful for readers like myself, who find Israel’s domestic politics somewhat baffling. Just a few months ago, Avigdor Lieberman was Israel’s most prominent nationalist politician. Due to legal problems, however, Lieberman is now out of favor–and Bennett is benefiting from his fall.

The most interesting thing about the piece is the way it places Bennett’s career in historical context. Although it is now among the most powerful elements in Israeli society, the so-called “national religious” faction that Bennett represents was originally marginal to the Zionist movement, which was militantly secular. Then:

The Six Day War fundamentally changed the game, emboldening Kook’s followers and believers in religious Zionism. Under the tutelage of [Rabbi Abraham Isaac] Kook’s son Rabbi Tzvi Yehuda Kook, a new generation of young religious Zionists came to see their mission as once again settling the newly liberated lands. It was as much, perhaps, a personal awakening as it was a theological one: The 1967 generation, the sons and daughters of religious Zionism’s original guard, looked at their parents—milquetoast, many of them foreign-born, nearly all of them political moderates—and boasted that they would do better. They would rebuild the Jewish state east of the Green Line.

Thus, the settler movement was born—and the religious Zionist movement was split in two. On the one hand, the older generation continued to understand itself in terms of the old balancing act between the dictates of the Torah and the ethos of the state, a challenge that doomed them to play second fiddle on either side of the church-state divide. On the other, the new generation was awash in Messianic zeal. In 1967, for example, one of its most incandescent leaders, Hanan Porat, wrote with characteristic ecstasy: “Here I am—for the priesthood, for the kingdom, to kill, to be killed. O Lord, here I am. … This is how I understand the true meaning of the word pioneer.”

Bennett is the political heir of the “pioneers” of the settlements. Although he has an affable manner, his proposals during the campaign include annexation of 62 percent of the West Bank and continued military control of the rest. As an opponent of a two-state solution, Bennett’s popularity is bad news not only for Palestinians, but also for American interests in the region. At the same time, it provides a useful reminder that religious nationalism is the only ideology that retains it appeal to ordinary people in Israel and around the world (including the United States). One of the challenges of a “realist” foreign policy that eschews divine sanction is to take account of this fact without embracing it.

Gage Skidmore / Flickr.com

To salvage some sort of positive news from the fiscal cliff deal, in which taxes went up but spending didn’t go down, it was said that the real winner was George W. Bush—with 98 percent of his tax cuts having been made permanent. If that’s the case, then Bush 43 is winning again. This time, on immigration.

Rising Republican star Sen. Marco Rubio revealed the basic outline of his stepwise plan to reform immigration law. The central question of any such proposal, of course, is how it deals with the 12 million or so undocumented workers who live here illegally: if not deport them, what then?

Rubio’s plan, according to a Wall Street Journal interview, is as follows:

The special regime he envisions is a form of temporary limbo. “Assuming they haven’t violated any of the conditions of that status,” he says, the newly legalized person could apply for permanent residency, possibly leading to citizenship, after some years—but Mr. Rubio doesn’t specify how many years.

If that sounds familiar, it should. It was a central element of the Bush plan and its McCain-Kennedy congressional vehicle. The Weekly Standard’s Fred Barnes wrote of the plan in 2006:

Earned citizenship would permit the 12 million immigrants living illegally in the Unites States to apply for citizenship. They would be required to work for six years, commit no crimes, pay back taxes, and learn English. Then and only then could they get in line to become citizens, a process that takes five years.

Fast forward to last year’s presidential campaign, and you find former Gov. Mitt Romney employing the same sort of rhetoric: secure the border first; let those here illegally come out of the shadows and apply for legal residence or citizenship; and send them to the “back of the line.”

What we’ve got here, then, is the nonrestrictionist Republican line on immigration since the mid-Aughts.

For the record, I happen to favor it. It’s realistic, humane, and mindful of the rule of law. But there’s nothing particularly new or creative about it. And if it’s indicative of the kind of policy entrepreneurship we can expect from Rubio in the future, color me unimpressed.

Professional football is the most popular sport in the United States, judging from fan and media interest, but it has changed through the years and has become very boring and formulaic, so much so that it has become difficult to watch. I recall back in the Frank Gifford days of the New York Giants how players were true warriors a la Sam Huff, and you could almost touch them from the seats at Yankee Stadium. They were also part of the local community. Many of the non-marquee players lived in ordinary houses and worked selling cars or at Sears in the off season. Also they did not move around a lot and stayed with their teams until their playing days were over, after which they became high-school coaches.

Today football is all glitz and marketing, largely driven by greed on the part of both players and owners, fueled by a frenzied media. Players move around a lot to make more money and games that used to end at four o’clock now end at four-thirty because there are more ads to squeeze in. Play is stopped for television time outs and at kick-offs and punts there is little more than ten seconds of actual play sandwiched between two blocs of ads addressing such key issues as erectile dysfunction and discount double checks. Penalties also stop play frequently while the new rules that often do not allow players to touch each other lest they get hurt are largely incomprehensible. And then there are the huge American flags that have become as large as the entire playing field, waggled obligingly by girls and guys from the local National Guard outfit when the hip-hop singer reaches the words “star-spangled banner still waves,” followed closely by an approving roar from the forty thousand drunks up in the stands. One announcer this weekend told the television audience that the game was going out to American troops in 175 countries and “we can’t describe what they do for us.” Indeed.

But on Saturday something odd happened. Underdog Baltimore was playing Denver and the game went into overtime. I don’t know exactly what happened but it appeared that the network ran out of commercials because the play went into a second overtime almost uninterrupted. The players, featuring future hall of famers in linebacker Ray Lewis and quarterback Peyton Manning, were actually seen to pick up their pace, playing hard as if they really meant it. The officials refrained from making ridiculous calls. It was actually exciting and fun to watch. It was what America and football on a Sunday afternoon used to be all about, but it was likely just a quirk, similar to Jupiter aligning with Mars every 11 years. It probably won’t happen again.

The former secretary of state goes to the mat for the defense nominee on “Meet the Press,” largely on the grounds that Hagel won’t be quick to send U.S. troops to war. Guilty conscience? In the interview Powell defends his role promoting the Iraq War, but one wonders. I hope Hagel has the courage Powell didn’t if he’s ever similarly pushed to commit men and women to a war of choice.

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There have been a slew of stories about Washington DC’s unusually strong housing market recently, including this December gem about a house near H Street that received an astonishing 168 bids. The New York Times has a definitive article about the ongoing cultural and architectural transformation of the city. Annie Lowrey puts her finger on what makes some conservatives so uneasy about its success:

There’s something unsavory about having a capital city doing outrageously well while the rest of the country is limping along — especially when its economy is premised in part on capturing wealth rather than creating it.

There’s a legitimate case that much of the imperial city’s growth is essentially fraudulent, gleaning most of its sustenance off of wealth transfers, with many of the nine million people between Baltimore and Stafford here only temporarily. Until we wise up, declare the American experiment beyond salvageability, and send everybody home hoping they find more productive employment, we’re left to speculate about what all the upheaval means for the city’s substrate; those who call it home. To that end, here’s a story about an unsung person who arrived here during one of DC’s earlier waves of expansion.

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