The prize that Bob Dylan really deserves

By George F. Will

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/

December 9, 2016

There has been ferment among the literati since Bob Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature. Many say that however well Dylan does what he does, it is not literature. Dylan did not go to Stockholm on Saturday to collect his prize, which the Swedish Academy says was awarded “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.” Well, then:

“God said to Abraham, ‘Kill me a son’

Abe says, ‘Man, you must be puttin’ me on’ ”

or:

“Einstein, disguised as Robin Hood

With his memories in a trunk

Passed this way an hour ago

With his friend, a jealous monk

He looked so immaculately frightful

As he bummed a cigarette

Then he went off sniffing drainpipes

And reciting the alphabet

Now you would not think to look at him

But he was famous long ago

For playing the electric violin

On Desolation Row”

The New York Times primly notes that the academy is famous for “its at times almost willful perversity in picking winners.” Scottish novelist Irvine Welsh (“Trainspotting”) professes himself “a Dylan fan” but tweeted that this Nobel is “an ill conceived nostalgia award wrenched from the rancid prostates of senile, gibbering hippies.” Strong letter to follow.

One critic says that the more than 150 books on Dylan are “a library woozy with humid overstatement and baby boomer mythology.” A sample of the humidity is: “Dylan seemed less to occupy a turning point in cultural space and time than to be that turning point.” But Dylan should not be blamed for the hyperventilating caused by DSD — Dylan Derangement Syndrome. Besides, Dylan has collected a Pulitzer Prize for “lyrical compositions of extraordinary poetic power,” so there.

Now 75, he was born Robert Zimmerman in Duluth, Minn., and lived in Hibbing, 190 miles from Sauk Centre, home of Sinclair Lewis, who won the 1930 Nobel for literature (“Babbitt,” “Elmer Gantry”). This was evidence of abruptly defining literature down: Thomas Mann won in 1929. If you recognize even one-third of the 113 literature prize winners since 1901, you need to get out of the house more. Philip Roth has not won, a fact that would cost the Swedish Academy its reputation for seriousness, if it had one.

The Weekly Standard’s Andrew Ferguson would win the Nobel Prize for Common Sense, if there were one. He notes that by not taking himself too seriously or encouraging others to do so, Dylan has “proved two propositions that seemed increasingly unlikely in the age of media-saturation: You can shun publicity and still be hugely famous, and you can be hugely famous and not be obnoxious about it.” For this, Dylan deserves some sort of prize. Ferguson laments that it is evidently impossible to take Dylan “for what he is, an impressive man worthy of admiration, affection and respect, and leave it at that.”

Impossible. In an age of ever-more-extravagant attention-getting yelps about everything, people have tumbled over one another reaching for encomia, such as this from a Harvard University professor: “Dylan has surpassed Walt Whitman as the defining American artist."

(Hawthorne, Melville, Dickinson, Wharton, Fitzgerald, Faulkner?)

If song lyrics are literature, why did the academy discover this with Dylan and not Stephen Sondheim (from “West Side Story” on)? Last year, the literature prize was won by Belarus’s Svetlana Alexievich , whose specialty is interviews woven into skillfully wrought books (e.g., “Secondhand Time”). They are highly informative, even moving, but are they literature?

Sean Wilentz, a Princeton professor of American history, grew up in New York City near the end of its red-tinged folk revival and was 13 when he attended Dylan’s 1964 concert at Manhattan’s Philharmonic Hall. Wilentz’s book “Bob Dylan in America,” which would better have been titled “America in Bob Dylan,” interestingly locates him in the stream of American culture and celebrates him for expanding his range as relentlessly as he has toured — more than 1,400 shows in this century. Wilentz recalls how Dylan “going electric” at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival scandalized “the fetishists of authenticity,” but Dylan did not look back. “He sees,” Wilentz says, “a kind of literature in performance.” If that is so, then is Mike Trout, baseball’s best performer, doing literature for the Los Angeles Angels? Literature is becoming a classification that no longer classifies.

Never mind. Just enjoy the music of the surprising man who in 1961 arrived in Greenwich Village and who once said “my favorite politician was Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater.”

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Read more on this issue:

Garrison Keillor: Bob Dylan, Donald Trump and the wrong prizes

Elizabeth Thomson: Five myths about Bob Dylan

Fidel Castro and dead utopianism

By George F. Will

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/

November 26, 2016

Fidel Castro and Nikita Khrushchev (TASS via AP)

With the end of Fidel Castro’s nasty life Friday, we can hope, if not reasonably expect, to have seen the last of charismatic totalitarians worshiped by political pilgrims from open societies. Experience suggests there will always be tyranny tourists in flight from what they consider the boring banality of bourgeois society and eager for the excitement of sojourns in “progressive” despotisms that they are free to admire and then leave.

During the 1930s, there were many apologists for Joseph Stalin’s brutalities, which he committed in the name of building a workers’ paradise fit for an improved humanity. The apologists complacently said, “You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.” To which George Orwell acidly replied: “Where’s the omelet?” With Castro, the problem was lemonade.

Soon after Castro seized power in 1959, Jean-Paul Sartre, the French intellectual whose Stalinist politics were as grotesque as his philosophy was opaque, left Les Deux Magots cafe in Paris to visit Cuba. During a drive, he and Castro stopped at a roadside stand. They were served warm lemonade, which Castro heatedly said “reveals a lack of revolutionary consciousness.” The waitress shrugged, saying the refrigerator was broken. Castro “growled” (Sartre’s approving description): “Tell your people in charge that if they don’t take care of their problems, they will have problems with me.” Sartre swooned:

“This was the first time I understood — still quite vaguely — what I called ‘direct democracy.’ Between the waitress and Castro, an immediate secret understanding was established. She let it be seen by her tone, her smiles, by a shrug of the shoulders, that she was without illusion. And the prime minister . . . in expressing himself before her without circumlocution, calmly invited her to join the rebellion.”

Another political innovator, Benito Mussolini, called his regime “ennobled democracy,” and as the American columnist Murray Kempton mordantly noted in 1982, photographs of Castro “cutting sugar cane evoke the bare-chested Mussolini plunged into the battle for wheat.” Castro’s direct democracy was parsimonious regarding elections but permissive of shrugs. It did, however, forbid “acts of public destruction,” meaning criticism of communism.

This charge condemned Armando Valladares, then 23, to 22 years in Castro’s prisons. Stalin’s terror was too high a price to pay for a great novel, but at least the world got from it Arthur Koestler’s “Darkness at Noon.” And although Castro’s regime, saturated with sadism, should never have existed, because of it the world got Valladares’s testament to human endurance, his prison memoir “Against All Hope.” Prison food was watery soup laced with glass, or dead rats, or cows’ intestines filled with feces, and Castro’s agents had special uses for the ditch filled with the sewage from 8,000 people.

On April 15, 1959, 15 weeks after capturing Havana, Castro, then 32, landed in Washington at what is now Reagan National Airport. He had been in the United States in 1948, when he studied English and bought a Lincoln. This time, on April 16, in a concession to bourgeois expectations, he dispatched an aide to buy a comb and toothbrush. His connections to communism? “None,” he said. He endorsed a free press as “the first enemy of dictatorship,” and said free elections were coming soon. Then he was off to a Princeton seminar and a lecture in the chapel at Lawrenceville prep school, well received at both places.

By July red stars were being painted on Cuban military vehicles. Three years later, Soviet ballistic missiles were arriving. A year after that, a Castro admirer murdered the U.S. president whose administration had been interested in, indeed almost obsessed with, removing Castro.

U.S. flings at “regime change” in distant lands have had, to say no more, uneven results, but the most spectacular futility has been 90 miles from Florida. Castro was the object of various and sometimes unhinged U.S. attempts to remove him. After the Bay of Pigs debacle, the Kennedy administration doubled down with Operation Mongoose, which included harebrained assassination plots and a plan skeptics called “elimination by illumination” — having a U.S. submarine surface in Havana harbor and fire star shells into the night sky to convince Catholic Cubans that the Second Coming had come, causing them to rebel against Castro the anti-Christ. Nevertheless, Castro ruled Cuba during 11 U.S. presidencies and longer than the Soviet Union ruled Eastern Europe.

Socialism is bountiful only of slogans, and a Castro favorite was “socialism or death.” The latter came to him decades after the former had made Cuba into a gray museum for a dead utopianism.

Read more from George F. Will’s archive or follow him on Facebook.

Carlos Eire: Farewell to Cuba’s brutal Big Brother

Armando Valladares: I was a prisoner of Castro’s regime. Obama’s visit to Cuba is a mistake.

Eric Zurita: Fidel Castro’s death won’t reshape Cuba. Trump’s presidency might.

Baseball’s storyteller, our friend

By George F. Will

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/

September 2, 2016

The Dodgers honor Hall of Fame broadcaster Vin Scully prior to their Opening Day game against the Arizona Diamondbacks (mlb.com)

Irish poets learn your trade

Sing whatever is well made. . . .

— William Butler Yeats,
“Under Ben Bulben”

For 67 years, the son of Vincent and Bridget Scully, immigrants who came to New York City from County Cavan, Ireland, has been plying his trade. For eight years on the East Coast and 59 on the West Coast, on radio and television, he has strolled with Brooklyn Dodgers fans and then Los Angeles Dodgers fans down the long, winding road of baseball’s seasons. In an era with a surfeit of shoddiness, two things are well-made — major league baseball and Vin Scully’s broadcasts of it.

Although he uses language fluently and precisely, he is not a poet. He is something equally dignified and exemplary but less celebrated: He is a craftsman. Scully, the most famous and beloved person in Southern California, is not a movie star but has the at-ease, old-shoe persona of Jimmy Stewart. With his shock of red hair and maple syrup voice, Scully seems half his 88 years.

America’s “most widespread age-related disease,” Tom Wolfe has written, “was not senility but juvenility. The social ideal was to look 23 and dress 13.” It is not Scully’s fault that he looks unreasonably young. It is to his credit that he comes to work in a coat and tie, and prepared — stocked with information.

Aristotle defined human beings as language-using creatures. They are not always as well-behaved as wolves, but everything humane depends on words — love, promise-keeping, story-telling, democracy. And baseball.

A game of episodes, not of flow, it leaves time for, and invites, conversation, rumination and speculation. And storytelling, by which Scully immerses his audience in baseball’s rich history, and stories that remind fans that players “are not wind-up dolls.”

In recent years, Scully has not accompanied the Dodgers on the road. Hence this recent tweet quoting an 8-year-old Dodgers fan, Zoe: “I hate when the Dodgers have away games. They don’t tell stories.”

When the Baltimore Orioles visited Dodger Stadium in July, Scully’s listeners learned that the father of Orioles manager Buck Showalter fought from North Africa to Italy to Normandy to the Battle of the Bulge. Whenever the Orioles come to town, Scully dispenses nuggets about the War of 1812. On June 6 broadcasts, they learned something about D-Day. His neighbor once was Ronald Reagan.

This is how Franklin Roosevelt began his first Fireside Chat (March 12, 1933): “I want to talk for a few minutes with the people of the United States about banking. . . .” For many years now, Scully has worked alone because he wants to talk not to someone seated next to him but to each listener, which was FDR’s talent. A free society — a society of persuasion, exhortation and neighborliness — resonates with familiar voices, such as FDR’s and Reagan’s. And Scully’s.

On Opening Day this year, before the season’s first pitch, Scully was the center of attention on the center of Dodger Stadium’s diamond, standing on the pitcher’s mound with various retired Dodger stars, including pitcher Don Newcombe. Newcombe, now 90, was the starter in the first game Scully participated in broadcasting — Opening Day, 1950, in Philadelphia. Scully knew players who knew Ty Cobb. Scully’s listeners today include the great-great-grandchildren of earlier listeners. Baseball, more than any other American institution, and Scully, more than any other baseball person, braid America’s generations.

In this year of few blessings, one is the fact that Scully’s final season coincides with a presidential campaign of unprecedented coarseness. The nation winces daily from fresh exposure to sullied politics, which surely is one reason so many people are paying such fond attention to Scully’s sunset. It is easy to disregard or even disparage gentility — until confronted, as Americans now are, with its utter absence.

In late September, Scully will drive up Vin Scully Avenue to Dodger Stadium, settle himself in front of a mic in the Vin Scully Press Box, and speak five familiar words: “It’s time for Dodger baseball.” Later, as the sun sets on the San Gabriel Mountains, he will accompany the Dodgers for their final regular-season series, with the San Francisco Giants, who came west when Scully and the Dodgers did in 1957.

Then, or perhaps after a postseason game, he will stride away, toward his 10th decade. In this era of fungible and forgettable celebrities, he is a rarity: For millions of friends he never met, his very absence will be a mellow presence.

Read more from George F. Will’s archive or follow him on Facebook.

Read more about this topic:

Charles Krauthammer: Our own Mickey Mantle

George Will’s 2016 Opening Day Quiz

Brexit: Britain’s welcome revival of nationhood

By George F. Will

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/

June 24, 2016

(Daniel Sorabji / AFP/Getty Images)

The “leave” campaign won the referendum on withdrawing Britain from the European Union because the arguments on which the “remain” side relied made leave’s case. The remain campaign began with a sham, was monomaniacal with its Project Fear and ended in governmental thuggishness.

The sham was Prime Minister David Cameron’s attempt to justify remain by negotiating E.U. concessions regarding Britain’s subservience to the E.U. This dickering for scraps of lost sovereignty underscored Britain’s servitude and achieved so little that Remainers rarely mentioned it during their campaign.

Project Fear was the relentless and ultimately ludicrous parade of Cassandras, “experts” all, warning that Britain, after more than a millennium of sovereign existence, and now with the world’s fifth-largest economy, would endure myriad calamities were it to end its 23-year membership in the E.U. Remain advocates rarely even feigned enthusiasm for the ramshackle, sclerotic E.U. Instead, they implausibly promised that if Brexit were rejected, Britain — although it would then be without the leverage of the threat to leave — would nevertheless somehow negotiate substantially better membership terms than Cameron managed when Brexit was an option.

Voters were not amused by the Cameron government’s threat of what critics called aPunishment Budget to inflict pain on pensioners (e.g., no more free bus passes) and others because Brexit might cause the gross domestic product to contract 9.5 percent and home prices might plummet 18 percent. Voters did not like being told that they really had no choice. And that it was too late to escape from entanglement in the E.U.’s ever-multiplying tentacles. And that the very viscosity of the E.U.’s statism guarantees its immortality.

Voters chose the optimism of Brexit. Sixty years after Britain’s humiliation in the Suez debacle, Britain has a spring in its step, confident that it will flourish when Brussels no longer controls 60 to 70 percent of the British government’s actions. Britain was last conquered by an invading army in 1066. In 2016, it repelled an attempted conquest by the E.U.’s nomenklatura.

By breaking the leftward-clicking ratchet that moves steadily, and only, toward more “pooled” sovereignty and centralization of power, Brexit refutes the progressive narrative that history has an inexorable trajectory that “experts” discern and before which all must bow. The E.U.’s contribution to this fable is its vow to pursue “ever-closer union.” Yes, ever .

To understand why Brexit could and should be the beginning of an existential crisis for the E.U., look across the English Channel, to France. There, King Clovis recently was invoked 1505 years after his death in 511.

Before a particular battle, Clovis promised that if the God to whom his Christian wife prayed would grant him victory, he would become a Christian. He won the battle and converted. Recently, Nicolas Sarkozy, France’s once and perhaps future president, said France was “born of the baptism of Clovis,” it has a Christian tradition and remains “a country of churches, cathedrals, abbeys and shrines.”

Actually, 71 percent of the French say religion is unimportant to them and fewer than 4.5 percent attend weekly church services. But Sarkozy was aligning himself with the palpable desire in France and elsewhere in Europe to resist the cultural homogenization that is an intended consequence of the E.U.’s pressure for the “harmonization” of the laws and policies of its 28 disparate member nations.

In Paris these days there are marches by a group called Generation Identitaire, described as the “hipster right.” It aims to rally “young French and Europeans who are proud of their . . . heritage.” A recent statement on its website declared that “Islamist attacks” and “the migrant invasion” made 2015 “a turning point in the history of our country.” The statement continued: “The French have been silent for too long. . . . It is time to show our determination to live on our land, under our laws, our values and with respect to our identity.” Sarkozy, the son of Greek and Hungarian immigrants, sympathizes.

Euroskepticism is rising dramatically in many E.U. nations. There might be other referendums. Or the E.U. might seek to extinguish this escape mechanism. A poll in Sweden indicated that it might follow Britain out. In France, there could be a campaign for Frexit.

Such was the remain side’s intellectual sloth, it wielded the threadbare aspersion that advocating withdrawal amounted to embracing “isolationism.” Actually, Brexit was the choice for Britain’s international engagement as a nation . The revival of nationhood is a prerequisite for the reinvigoration of self-government through reclaimed national sovereignty. Hence June 23, 2016, is now among the most important dates in postwar European history.

Read more from George F. Will’s archive or follow him on Facebook.

Read more here:

Anne Applebaum: Britain’s decision to leave the E.U. is a warning to America

Danielle Allen: U.S. bears some responsibility for Brexit

Sebastian Mallaby: Britain’s awful vote may be a tipping point

Declassify the Full 9/11 Report and the CIA’s Bay of Pigs History

By George Will — April 16, 2016

http://www.nationalreview.com/

U.S. President Barack Obama meets with King Abdullah at Rawdat al-Khraim (Desert Camp) near Riyadh in Saudi Arabia, March 28, 2014. The 90-year-old king was admitted to hospital in December with pneumonia. (REUTERS)

When President Obama departs for Saudi Arabia, an incubator of the 9/11 attacks, he will leave behind a dispute about government secrecy. The suppression of 28 pages, first from a public congressional inquiry and then from the 2004 report by the national 9/11 Commission, has spared the Saudis embarrassment, which would be mild punishment for complicity in 2,977 murders. When Obama returns, he should keep his promise to release the pages. Then he should further curtail senseless secrecy by countermanding the CIA’s refusal to release its official history of the 1961 Bay of Pigs debacle.

The nature of the 28 pages pertaining to 9/11 can be inferred from this carefully worded sentence in the commission’s report: “We have found no evidence that the Saudi government as an institution or senior Saudi officials individually funded [al-Qaeda]” (emphases added). Together, those five italicized words constitute a loophole large enough to fly a hijacked airliner through.

CBS’s 60 Minutes recently reported that former Florida senator Bob Graham, a Democrat who chaired the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and co-chaired the bipartisan joint congressional inquiry into 9/11 intelligence failures, says the pages suggest the existence of a network that supported the hijackers when they were in America. Former Democratic representative Tim Roemer, who was a member of the joint inquiry and then of the commission, and who has studied the 28 pages, says they contain (as 60 Minutes expressed his judgment) “provocative evidence — some verified, and some not” of possible “official Saudi assistance for two of the hijackers who settled in Southern California.” 60 Minutes said the two Saudi nationals had “extremely limited language skills and no experience with Western culture.” Yet, “They managed to get everything they needed, from housing to flight lessons,” after being seen in the company of a diplomat from Saudi Arabia’s Los Angeles consulate.

Before John Lehman was a member of the 9/11 Commission — which unanimously supported release of its report uncensored — he was a member of Henry Kissinger’s National Security Council staff during the Nixon administration and was secretary of the Navy during the Reagan administration. Lehman understands the serious and the spurious arguments connecting secrecy to security. He says the 28 pages contain no “smoking gun,” but he believes that senior Saudi officials knew that Saudis were assisting al-Qaeda. And he believes that because Saudi Arabia spends enormous sums worldwide funding schools that teach the virulent variant of Islam called Wahhabism, it is unsurprising that 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudis.

Now, about the Bay of Pigs invasion of April 17, 1961, a feckless use of American power that radiated disasters: President Kennedy promptly deepened U.S. involvement in Vietnam; Nikita Khrushchev, unimpressed, built the Berlin Wall and installed missiles in Cuba. Why should the CIA history remain secret 55 years after the invasion?

A federal appeals court has ruled, 2-1, against a Freedom of Information Act request for the release of the history. Citing a FOIA exemption that protects secrecy deemed essential to preserving government agencies’ deliberative processes, the court held that even after more than half a century the history is “still a draft” — never mind that its author retired in 1984 and died in 1997 — and hence is “still predecisional and deliberative.” So, documents can be kept forever secret by government agencies declaring them “drafts” or otherwise “deliberative.”

Nations need secrecy to protect deliberative processes and to conceal from adversaries the sources, methods, and fruits of intelligence gathering. However, as Daniel Patrick Moynihan argued in his book on the subject, secrecy is government regulation, but unlike most regulations, which restrict what people can do, secrecy restricts what they can know. Secrets are property, and covetous, acquisitive government bureaucracies hoard them from rival bureaucracies, thereby making government even more foolish than it naturally tends to be because it has no competitors. For example, the U.S. military kept from President Harry Truman its proof, derived from what are known as the Venona intercepts of Soviet communications, that Alger Hiss and the Rosenbergs were spies.

On Fox News Sunday April 10, Obama was asked if he could say that Hillary Clinton’s handling of classified information on her private e-mail server “did not jeopardize America’s secrets.” After waffling — saying Clinton would never “intentionally” jeopardize America — he intimated that many documents that are classified are not all that important to national security. He should apply this insight to documents pertaining to the disaster a decade and a half ago and to the debacle 40 years before it.

— George Will is a Pulitzer Prize–winning syndicated columnist. © 2016 The Washington Post

Why Antonin Scalia was a jurist of colossal consequence

By George F. Will

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/

February 14, 2016

Antonin Scalia, who combined a zest for intellectual combat with a vast talent for friendship, was a Roman candle of sparkling jurisprudential theories leavened by acerbic witticisms. The serrated edges of his most passionate dissents sometimes strained the court’s comity and occasionally limited his ability to proclaim what the late Justice William Brennan called the most important word in the court’s lexicon: “Five.” Scalia was, however, one of the most formidable thinkers among the 112 justices who have served on the court, and he often dissented in the hope of shaping a future replete with majorities steeped in principles he honed while in the minority.

Those principles include textualism and originalism: A justice’s job is to construe the text of the Constitution or of statutes by discerning and accepting the original meaning the words had to those who ratified or wrote them. These principles of judicial modesty were embraced by a generation of conservatives who recoiled from what they considered the unprincipled creation of rights by results-oriented Supreme Court justices and other jurists pursuing their preferred policy outcomes.

Today, however, America’s most interesting and potentially consequential argument about governance is not between conservatives and progressives but among conservatives. It concerns the proper scope of the judicial supervision of democracy.

Scalia worried more than some other conservatives do about the “counter-majoritarian dilemma” supposedly posed by judicial review — the power of appointed justices to overturn the work of elected legislators. Many Scalia-style conservatives distill their admiration into a familiar phrase of praise: “judicial restraint.” Increasing numbers of conservatives, however, reason as follows:

Democracy’s drama derives from the tension between the natural rights of individuals and the constructed right of the majority to have its way. Natural rights are affirmed by the Declaration of Independence; majority rule, circumscribed and modulated, is constructed by the Constitution. But as the Goldwater Institute’s Timothy Sandefur argues, the Declaration is logically as well as chronologically prior to the Constitution. The latter enables majority rule. It is, however, the judiciary’s duty to prevent majorities from abridging natural rights. After all, it is for the securing of such rights, the Declaration declares, that “governments are instituted among men.”

Scalia’s death will enkindle a debate missing from this year’s presidential campaign, a debate discomfiting for some conservatives: Do they want a passive court that is deferential to legislative majorities and to presidents who claim untrammeled powers deriving from national majorities? Or do they want a court actively engaged in defending liberty’s borders against unjustified encroachments by majorities?

This is an overdue argument that conservatism is now prepared for because of Scalia’s elegant mind. He was crucial to the creation of an alternative intellectual infrastructure for conservative law students. The Federalist Society, founded in 1982, has leavened the often monochrome liberalism of law schools, and Scalia has been the jurisprudential lodestar for tens of thousands of students in society chapters coast to coast.

Students of the court understand that, given Sen. Harry Reid’s demonstrated disdain for Senate rules, if Republicans had not won Senate control in the 2014 elections, the Nevada Democrat as majority leader would very likely now extend the institutional vandalism he committed in 2013. Then he changed Senate rules, by a simple majority vote and in the middle of a session, to prevent filibusters of judicial nominees other than Supreme Court nominees. This enabled President Obama to pack the nation’s second-most important court, that of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. Were Reid still majority leader, the Senate’s only rule would be the whim of the majority of the moment, and his caucus would promptly proscribe filibusters of Supreme Court nominees.

One consequence would be this: The United States today is one Supreme Court vote away from a radical truncation of the First Amendment’s protection of freedom of speech. A Democratic president in 2017 would nominate to replace Scalia someone pledged to construe the amendment as permitting Congress to regulate political campaign speech, which would put First Amendment jurisprudence on a slippery slope to regarding all speech as eligible for regulation by the administrative state.

Scalia lived 27 years after the person who nominated him left office, thereby extending the reach of Ronald Reagan’s presidency and reminding voters of the long-lasting ripples that radiate from their presidential choices. A teacher, wrote Henry Adams, attains a kind of immortality because one never knowswhere a teacher’s influence ends. Scalia, always a teacher, will live on in the law and in the lives of unnumbered generations who will write, teach and construe it.

Read more from George F. Will’s archive or follow him on Facebook.

Read more on this topic:

The Post’s View: Antonin Scalia’s remarkable legacy

E.J. Dionne Jr.: Scalia’s passing starts a court fight for the ages

Linda Hirshman: If Republicans block Obama’s Supreme Court nomination, he wins anyway

Jonathan H. Adler: The passing of a legal giant — Antonin Scalia, R.I.P.

Ruth Marcus: The GOP’s dangerously dogmatic Supreme Court obstructionism

What Bernie Sanders doesn’t understand about economic equality

By George F. Will
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/
October 16, 2015


Bernie Sanders at the first Democratic debate (Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

America is more distant from the 1933 beginning of the New Deal (82 years) than that beginning was from the 1865 end of the Civil War (68 years). Both episodes involved the nation’s understanding of equality: The war affirmed equality of natural rights, the New Deal addressed unequal social conditions. Today’s Democratic Party is frozen, like a fly in amber, in the New Deal preoccupation — but with less excuse than Democrats had during the Great Depression. The party believes that economic inequality is an urgent problem, and that its urgency should be understood in terms of huge disparities of wealth. Neither proposition is (to use the term Jefferson used when he wrote equality into America’s catechism) a self-evident truth.

The fundamental producer of income inequality is freedom. Individuals have different aptitudes and attitudes. Not even universal free public education, even were it well done, could equalize the ability of individuals to add value to the economy. Besides, some people want to teach, others want to run hedge funds. In an open society, rewards are set not by political power but by impersonal market forces, the rewards of which will differ dramatically but usually predictably. Beyond freedom’s valuable fecundity in producing unequal social outcomes, four other facets of today’s America fuel inequality.

First, the entitlement state exists primarily to transfer wealth regressively, from the working-age population to the retired elderly who, after a lifetime of accumulation, are the wealthiest age cohort. Second, big, regulatory government inherently exacerbates inequality because it inevitably serves the strong — those sufficiently educated, affluent, articulate and confident to influence the administrative state’s myriad redistributive actions.

Third, seven years of ZIRP — zero-interest-rate policy — have not restored the economic dynamism essential for social mobility but have had the intended effect of driving liquidity into equities in search of high yields, thereby enriching the 10 percent of Americans who own approximately 80 percent of the directly owned stocks. Also, by making big government inexpensive, low interest rates exacerbate the political class’s perennial disposition toward deficit spending. And little of the 2016 federal budget’s $283 billion for debt service will flow to individuals earning less than the median income.

Fourth, family disintegration cripples the primary transmitter of social capital — the habits, mores, customs and dispositions necessary for seizing opportunities. When 72 percent of African American children and 53 percent of Hispanic children are born to unmarried women, and 40 percent of all births are to unmarried women, and a majority of all mothers under 30 are not living with the fathers of their children, the consequences for the life chances, and lifetime earnings, of millions of children are enormous.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) is doing well, if not good, by reducing the debate about equality to resentment of large fortunes. He should read Harry G. Frankfurt’s new book “On Inequality.” It is so short (89 pages) that even a peripatetic candidate can read it, and so lucid that he cannot miss its inconvenient point: “It is misguided to endorse economic egalitarianism as an authentic moral ideal.”

Frankfurt, a Princeton professor of philosophy emeritus, argues that economic inequality is not inherently morally objectionable. “To the extent that it is truly undesirable, it is on account of its almost irresistible tendency to generate unacceptable inequalities of other kinds.” These can include access to elite education, political influence and other nontrivial matters. But Frankfurt’s alternative to economic egalitarianism is the “doctrine of sufficiency,” which is that the moral imperative should be that everyone have

The pursuit of increased economic equality might, but need not, serve the ethic of sufficiency. And this pursuit might distract people from understanding, and finding satisfaction with, “what is needed for the kind of life a person would most sensibly and appropriately seek.” This has nothing to do with “the quantity of money that other people happen to have.” Frankfurt argues that “doing worse than others does not entail doing badly.” And an obsession with others’ resources “contributes to the moral disorientation and shallowness of our time.”

Sanders focuses less on empathy for the poor than on stoking the discontent of those who are comfortable but envious. They will ultimately be discomfited by the fact that envy is the only one of the seven deadly sins that does not give the sinner even momentary pleasure. Fortunately, for most Americans, believing in equality simply means believing that everyone is at least as good as everyone else.

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To read more on this topic:

Dana Milbank: Sanders is right to be outraged

The Post’s View: Sanders’s questionable ‘revolution’

Catherine Rampell: Income inequality isn’t about the rich

Robert J. Samuelson: Myth-making about economic inequality