Before I remark on James Freeman’s Wall Street Journal column on the challenge that the homeless pose for the people of Los Angeles, let’s reflect on this article by Benjamin Oreskes and David Lauter in the Los Angeles Times from 2019:

As people living in tents, RVs and makeshift shelters become a fact of life in neighborhoods far and wide, homelessness is now an all-consuming issue in Los Angeles County, with 95% of voters calling it a serious or very serious problem, according to a new poll conducted for the Los Angeles Times and the Los Angeles Business Council Institute.

The near-unanimous opinion that homelessness ranks as a top concern marks a sharp change from earlier surveys of Los Angeles voters over the past dozen years, said Fred Yang of Hart Research, the Washington, D.C., polling firm that conducted the survey.

Only traffic congestion and housing affordability — at 88% and 85%, respectively — came close to rivaling the near universal concern over homelessness.

“It’s all over L.A.,” said Justine Marine, a student who participated in a focus group tied to the countywide poll. “You can be in a good neighborhood, and it could be right around the corner. You can’t escape it.”

The methodology of that poll is described here. Angelenos are sympathetic with the homeless; they want those who need treatment to get it. They just don’t want homeless people in front of their houses or in their backyards. They want them discreetly out of sight.

Things have not improved since 2019. If anything they’re worse. I honestly don’t think the people of Los Angeles are quite where they need to be on this issue quite yet.

Now on to James Freeman:

Fleeing Los Angeles residents have lately been willing to acknowledge the expensive dysfunction and lawlessness that’s driving them to relocate. But this week brings hope that even those who remain may finally be willing to turn away from the extremes of progressive governance. Voters who decide not to abandon L.A. before this fall’s elections for mayor and other municipal positions can set a new course toward sanity.

A group of Angelenos recently expressed to Democratic pollsters their frustration with the city’s pandemic of homelessness. Benjamin Oreskes and Doug Smith report in the Los Angeles Times today:

“The degradation of life in L.A. is exponential, and I don’t see an end. The politicians are doofuses,” a white male voter said.
“California is the fifth-largest economy in the world. Why can’t we do anything?” a Black voter wondered.
“I run into one or two every day, and I wonder: This is someone’s son. Did he refuse help? How can you help them? We’re failing them,” a Latino voter remarked.

Sympathy is not enough. Making treatment available is not enough. Making housing available is not enough. Some of the homeless do not want treatment and in fact want to live on the street. I honestly believe that any person who deals with the homeless on a routine basis will tell you: sometimes you’ve got to do what they need rather than what they want.

From the recent LAT report linked above:

Angelenos, the pollsters concluded, are angry over the condition of the streets, disturbed by the human suffering taking place on them and frustrated with the inability of government to do anything about it. They want elected officials to set realistic goals, pursue tough policies and hold themselves accountable.

“You go to the store, you go to school, you go to work, and there they are, they’re everywhere,” Sragow said of the homeless people camped on streets around the county. “They’re just everywhere. And the measure of success will be when they’re not everywhere.”

When the trajectory of the policies that have been tried have failed time and again, you’ve got to change the trajectory of policy.

I think there’s a missing piece, a lapse in understanding in this editorial from the editors of the Washington Post on the failure of President Trump’s strategy with respect to China. Oh, I agree with them that the strategy was not particularly successful.

The results are in: China didn’t buy anything extra from the United States.

The purchases of U.S. exports that China did make in the past two years barely got back to the amount China was purchasing in 2017 — before Mr. Trump started his trade war, according to calculations by Chad P. Bown of the Peterson Institute for International Economics. U.S. exporters will never get back the sales they lost, and few have seen any meaningful growth in their sales to China under the “deal.” “The only undisputed ‘historical’ aspect of that agreement is its failure,” said Mr. Bown.

The main result of Mr. Trump’s bluster on trade was higher costs to the American public. Numerous studies have shown how tariffs were mostly passed along to American consumers, causing prices to rise on thousands of popular everyday items. It was a debacle that was easy to predict. Business leaders, economists and former trade officials from both parties warned the Trump White House repeatedly that the nation would have been better off without the trade war and the tenuous agreement that was ultimately reached with China (and not adhered to).

The smarter move would have been to keep the United States in the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the big trade deal with other nations in the Pacific, including Vietnam, Singapore, Canada, Australia and Chile. The whole purpose of the TPP was to boost trade among other nations and lessen reliance on China, which was excluded from the deal. But Mr. Trump pulled out of the TPP in his first week in office, and other nations went ahead and completed the trade pact on their own. In an ironic twist, China is now petitioning to join.

concluding:

The United States has just learned costly lessons about the futility of trade wars and how China can’t be trusted to honor its deals. Now the Biden administration has to figure out how to hold Beijing to account for failing to fulfill its commitments. One conclusion ought to be clear: More tariffs are not the answer.

The missing piece is that I don’t think that the editors understand that the preferred strategy of the Chinese authorities is autarky. They don’t particularly want to buy anything from us they don’t have to or from anybody else for that matter. They’d rather be self-sufficient. They have made that abundantly clear.

Where I think I disagree most with the editors is in the end state. I think the end state is giving the Chinese authorities what they want and not selling anything to China, not buying anything from them, either. Our entire experiment in engagement with China has been a dreadful mistake, eviscerating U. S. productive capacity and strengthening China.

I won’t dwell on President Trump’s mistakes. My hypothesis is that he overestimated his own ability not to mention his energy, preferring bilateral trade agreements over multi-lateral relationships like the Trans-Pacific Partnership. One only has so much time, energy, enthusiasm, and ability. That’s why multi-lateral agreements exist.

This main question at hand is now what? How concerned are South Korea, Japan, the Philippines, Australia, and New Zealand about an aggressive, truculent, and hypersensitive China? There is probably an opportunity there for us if we have the wit to exploit it which, if the past is any indication, we don’t.

I found Ezra Klein’s most recent column in the New York Times interesting reading if only because it illustrated for me once again why I’m not a progressive although I share some of their putative aspirations. What concerns me about Ezra is that I get the impression that for him a larger, more assertive federal government is an end rather than just a means to an end. He opens with a shout-out to European socialism c. 1960 or 1970:

If you had to distill the ambitions of the Democratic Party down to a single word, you might well choose “Denmark.” But “France” would also work. Or “Germany.” Any Western European nation, really, with the social insurance options many of us envy: universal health care and affordable child care, to name but a few. Much of modern American liberalism is designed to close those gaps, to build here what already exists there.

France and Denmark’s systems of social services were created in the post-war period, up to about 1970. Germany’s is much older. I always find it entertaining when people point to a country whose entire population is smaller than than of New York City and, when its system of social services was established was 98% ethnic Danes and at least culturally Lutheran. The question is not whether such a system could work for the Danes in 1970. The question is whether such a system would be established now. Based on the rate at which the Nordic countries are retreating from their welfare states as they become more diverse, the evidence would suggest not.

Leave that aside because it’s not what the column’s actually about. What Ezra wants is national industrial planning. He wants the federal government to set the objectives for the entire economy not only to achieve the sort of expansive system of social services the Europeans adopted a half century or more ago but to head off climate change:

Build Back Better is a grab-bag of longstanding Democratic proposals jammed together into a superbill designed to evade the filibuster. Or maybe I should say: That’s what it was. But Build Back Better is, at this point, a dead letter. Senator Joe Manchin’s opposition forced Democrats back to the drawing board. The silver lining is that they now have the opportunity to design something that does have a good organizing principle.

But that will require resolving two fundamental tensions in how Democrats conceive of not just what the economy needs but what the government can do to help, and how to know when what the government is doing has hurt.

Many Democrats still fear the dreaded specter of “industrial policy” — of government picking winners and losers, and wasting money or reputation on bad bets and patronage. That pushes them to extremely general goals: more workers, or more research, or more broadband.

But that fear is now matched by a horror of where markets are leading us — into climate crisis. Here, the Biden administration gets specific. It names the technologies it wants and the kinds of infrastructure we lack: better batteries and more electric car charging stations and cheaper solar panels and next-generation geothermal and nuclear technologies.

It is possible that, had Ezra studied economics rather than political science or, had he been a better student, he might have encountered some notion of the knowledge problem in planned economies. Such systems obscure the very price signals that enable an economy to function optimally. And, if he hopes that self-interest can be purged from politicians and other notional public servants, he’s instantiating another of my pet peeves—the notion that human nature is infinitely malleable. There are some eternal verities and self-interest is one of them.

In his conclusion he manages to tie his opening to his strategy:

If Democrats want to claim a bigger role for government in shaping our future, they need to be the ones who are most outraged when it is government that is holding us back.

But to do that, they need a vision of America’s future that’s not just lifted from Western Europe’s past.

Do you see why that makes my wonder whether a “bigger role for government” is an end or a means for him?

My own view is that I think that whether the federal government is too big or too small is a distraction from our actual problem. The federal government is doing the wrong things. I don’t want to minimize government or maximize it. I want to right-size it.

I’ve been musing about the differences among different generations of Americans. As you are presumably aware various generations have been given nicknames: the G. I. generation—born 1901-1927 (Tom Brokaw’s “Greatest Generation”); the Silent Generation—1928-1945; the Baby Boomers—1946-1964; Generation X—1965-1980; Millennial Generation—1981-1996; and most recently Generation Z—1997-. That’s not even vaguely scientific and it’s not hard to find exceptions but I think there’s a kernel of truth in the notion. I think you can find characteristic attitudes or attributes in different age cohorts.

IMO these generations are greatly misunderstood, particularly among people who are younger than the generation about which they’re talking. I find that Silent Generation and Baby Boomers are frequently lumped together or mistaken for one another, for example. Or the G. I. generation and the generation that preceded them.

This morning I’ve been thinking about the individuals who might be thought of as the voices of their generations and thought I’d open up that topic for discussion. So, for example, F. Scott Fitzgerald was frequently considered the voice of the “Lost Generation”. Here are my first stabs at the voices of their respective generations:

Do “generations” have no meaning? Does “voice of a generation” have no meaning? Any thoughts about my picks.

BTW, most of my colleagues, who tend to be Generation X or Millenials, have no idea of how old I am since I sound quite youthful. They know I’m older than they are since I speak blithely about things that happened before they were born. I get along fine with them. I’m told I’m extremely energizing, conveying enthusiasm which might surprise my readers.

CO:

Dolly Parton, yes, at least for a certain segment. Elvis Presley was an interpreter not a writer. I have no sense for how well Carrie Underwood represents her generation.

My work day is highly eccentric these days. My day typically starts at 6:30am, I have multiple meetings through the day, and I’m done for the day at 2:30pm. Then I take Kara for a walk and watch Jeopardy at 3:30pm. Two or three times a week I’ll have meetings at 5:00am. I’ve put my foot down on meetings earlier than 5:00am—if they must have a meeting earlier, I’ll as that it be recorded for me.

One of the things I’ve noticed while watching Jeopardy is how ignorant so many of the contestants are about American history. When they’re knowledgeable about American history it tends to be a consequence of professional development.

In his Washington Post column David Von Drehle inches towards a conclusions that I reached years ago:

Not so long ago, professors of literature were known to wonder what would happen when the steep decline in church attendance produced a generation of students unfamiliar with the Bible. How would those readers make sense of the Western world’s books and poetry?

The Bible was the lumberyard from which Western writers drew their material. They could discuss Solomonic wisdom or Job-like suffering, write phrases such as “turn the other cheek” or “prodigal son,” or give their books titles such as “Pale Horse, Pale Rider” or “East of Eden” with confidence that these two-by-fours — these lengths of rebar — would bear weight in a reader’s mind.

As it turns out, that rather large question was actually much too small. Yes, the shared biblical framework crumbled, but as part of a broader collapse of all common cultural structure. History will likely conclude that the 20th century was the high-water mark of mass communication.

It made sense to speak of “the audience” for television, for movies, for music. It made sense to measure “audience share.” The television set pulled in maybe half a dozen channels. Everyone watched whatever was showing at whatever time of day the programmers chose to show it. The radio dial was the same in every automobile dashboard.

On Feb. 28, 1983, more than 60 percent of all households with a TV in the United States watched the final episode of the sitcom “M*A*S*H” — all on the same platform, the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS), and all in the same evening. It was a fair bet that everyone you met, young and old, knew what “the Swamp” looked like and what drink was served there. They knew that Capt. B.J. Hunnicutt of Mill Valley, Calif., was named for his parents, Bea and Jay, and that Max Klinger was a fan of the Toledo Mud Hens baseball team.

Today, little remains of that common culture. Only the Super Bowl, played this Sunday in Los Angeles, attracts an audience of comparable proportions. Even the Olympic Games, unfolding on the fake snow of Beijing, cannot compel the American people to sit down and share an experience together.

I don’t watch professional athletics, whether won television or in person and I haven’t watched a second of the Beijing Winter Olympics.

Chesterton noted that the United States was a country founded on a creed. It doesn’t have ties of blood or land or ancient history to bind people together. That creed, sort of a secular religion, included the sentiments expressed in the Declaration of Independence, belief in the benignity of the Founding Fathers, and, admittedly, glossed over lots of darkness and shortcomings. So what? Name for me a country whose mythology doesn’t do the same thing. The difference is that our mythology is all that bound us together.

Now, as Mr. Von Drehle observes, the mythology has eroded and there are no forces with which to build a common culture. I don’t believe the outcome will be as benign as those who laud the abandoning of that common culture seem to believe.

I was amazed to find the editors of the Washington Post complaining about Democratic politicians “pandering”:

Facing potential Democratic losses in this year’s midterm elections, the Biden administration has already tried one classic election-season gimmick, releasing oil from the national Strategic Petroleum Reserve in a desperate attempt to ease gas prices. Now several Democratic senators want to step up the pandering, proposing to suspend the federal gas tax through the end of the year.

In fact, they should head in the opposite direction.

Their motivation is as obvious as it is imprudent. Inflation is among the biggest issues heading into this November’s vote. Gas prices are up about a dollar year over year. By suspending the 18.4 cent-per-gallon gas tax, Democrats can make it look as though they are restraining high prices. By making the suspension temporary, they can also claim that the tax break is merely an emergency measure to see the country through extraordinary supply shocks.

Yet, unlike in other parts of the economy experiencing high inflation, supply problems are neither novel nor rare in the oil market. Every time gas prices spike, and politicians roll out some ploy to seem to be addressing the issue, the culprit is typically a supply issue: a war in Libya, say, or a hurricane in Louisiana. The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries exercises cartel price-setting power, which makes it even harder for supply to respond to demand when disruptions occur. Politicians can declare — and have declared, over and over again — that spiking gas prices reflect exigent circumstances that require temporary relief. In this case, that temporary relief would cost the treasury about $20 billion.

The fact that this relief would terminate at the end of the year, right after the midterm elections, reveals the politics behind the proposal. Yet the only thing worse than a temporary suspension would be a permanent one.

Pandering is what politicians do. Did they think that claims of commitment to opposing global warming through reducing our use of fossil fuels were sincere? Could they possibly be that naïve? Politicians who actually get elected inevitably develop a hierarchy of values and at the very tippy-top of that hierarchy is saying whatever is necessary to get elected. That’s not just true of Democrats. It’s true of all politicians of whatever party who actually get elected.

My immediate reaction on reading the opening passage of this op-ed at the Wall Street Journal by Andrew Gutmann and Paul Rossi:

Over the past month we have watched nearly 100 hours of leaked videos from 108 workshops held virtually last year for the National Association of Independent Schools’ People of Color Conference. The NAIS sets standards for more than 1,600 independent schools in the U.S., driving their missions and influencing many school policies.

was better them than me. I have been through a vast number of company-required and companywide sensitivity training sessions over the years. Any allure they might have had evaporated 30 years ago. Here’s their assessment of the sessions they witnessed:

The path to remake schools begins with the word “diversity,” which means much more than simply increasing the number of students and faculty of color—referred to in these workshops as “Bipoc,” which stands for “black, indigenous and people of color.” DEI experts urge schools to classify people by identities such as race, convince them that they are being harmed by their environment, and turn them into fervent advocates for institutional change.

In workshops such as “Integrating Healing-Centered Engagements Into a DEIA School Program” and “Racial Trauma and the Path Toward Healing,” we learned how DEI practitioners use segregated affinity groups and practices such as healing circles to inculcate feelings of trauma. Even students without grievances are trained to see themselves as victims of the their ancestors’ suffering through “intergenerational violence.”

The next step in a school’s transformation is “inclusion.” Schools must integrate DEI work into every aspect of the school and every facet of the curriculum must be evaluated through an antibias, antiracist, or antioppressive lens. In “Let’s Talk About It! Anti-Oppressive Unit and Lesson Plan Design,” we learned that the omission of this lens—“failing to explore the intersection of STEM and social justice,” for instance—constitutes an act of “curriculum violence.”

All school messaging must be scrubbed of noninclusive language, all school policies of noninclusive practices, all libraries of noninclusive books. Inclusion also requires that all non-Bipoc stakeholders become allies in the fight against the systemic harm being perpetuated by the institution. In “Small Activists, Big Impact—Cultivating Anti-Racists and Activists in Kindergarten,” we were told that “kindergartners are natural social-justice warriors.”

It isn’t enough for a school to be inclusive; it also must foster “belonging.” Belonging means that a school must be a “safe space”—code for prohibiting any speech or activity, regardless of intent, that a Bipoc student or faculty member might perceive as harmful, as uncomfortable or as questioning their “lived experience.” The primary tool for suppressing speech is to create a fear of microaggressions.

In “Feeding Yourself When You Are Fed Up: Connecting Resilience and DEI Work,” we learned techniques, such as “calling out,” that faculty and students can use to shut down conversations immediately by interrupting speakers and letting them know that their words and actions are unacceptable and won’t be tolerated. Several workshops focused on the practice of “restorative justice,” used to re-educate students who fall afoul of speech codes. The final step to ensure belonging is to push out families or faculty who question DEI work. “Sometimes you gotta say, maybe this is not the right school for you. . . . I’ve said that a lot this year,” said Victor Shin, an assistant head of school and co-chairman of the People of Color Conference, in “From Pawns to Controlling the Board: Seeing BIPOC Students as Power Players in Student Programming.”

With the implementation of diversity, inclusion and belonging, schools can begin to address the primary objectives of DEI work: equity and justice. NAIS obligates all member schools to commit to these aims in their mission statements or defining documents. Equity requires dismantling all systems that Bipoc members of the community believe to cause harm. Justice is the final stage of social transformation to “collective liberation.” The goal is to remake society into a collective, stripped of individualism and rife with reparations.

In sessions such as “Traversing the Long and Thorny Road Toward Equity in Our Schools,” “Moving the Needle Toward Meaningful Institutional Change,” “Building an Equitable and Liberating Mindset” and “Breaking the White Centered Cycle,” we learned that the only way to achieve equity and justice is to eradicate all aspects of white-supremacy culture from “predominantly white institutions,” or PWIs, as NAIS calls its member schools, irrespective of the diversity of a school’s students. Perfectionism, punctuality, urgency, niceness, worship of the written word, progress, objectivity, rigor, individualism, capitalism and liberalism are some of the characteristics of white-supremacy culture in need of elimination. In “Post-PoCC Return to PWI Normal,” DEI practitioner Maria Graciela Alcid summarized: “Decolonizing white-supremacy-culture thinking is the ongoing act of deconstructing, dismantling, disrupting those colonial ideologies and the superiority of Western thought.”

DEI was “another thing to put on the plate, and absolutely now, it is the plate on which everything sits” said teacher Gina Favre, describing her school’s transformation.

No longer are private schools focused primarily on teaching critical thinking, fostering intellectual curiosity, and rewarding independent thought. Their new mission is to train a vanguard of activists to lead the charge in tearing down the foundations of society, reminiscent of Maoist China’s Red Guards.

I emphatically do not object to students learning the history of the United States, warts and all. I was astonished that more people weren’t aware of the Tulsa race riots the centenary of which was last year. I had learned about them in school. Why didn’t they?

And my parents taught me the importance of not using the “N word” and treating all people with kindness and consideration as well as the benefits I’ve gained through the accidents of my birth including race and my family 70 years ago. Why didn’t theirs?

I am skeptical that DEI training, as described above, will benefit anyone beyond those being paid to conduct them. Is being openly patronizing really an improvement over hidden prejudice?

I materially agree with Tom Nichols’s slightly tongue-in-cheek definitions of liberal democracy, authoritarianism, totalitarianism, libertarianism, socialism, and communism at The Atlantic’s “Peacefield” newsletter. I particularly like his definition of liberal democracy:

Liberal Democracy

What it is: A system of government that lets you read cranky articles about politics like the one you’re reading right now.

More specifically, democracies derive a ruling mandate from the free choices of citizens, who are equal before the law and who can freely express their preferences. Liberal democracies enshrine a respect for basic human rights (including the right of old cranks to speak their mind). Rights are, one might say, unalienable: The losers of elections do not have their rights stripped away. All citizens abide by constitutional and legal rules agreed upon in advance of elections and are willing to transfer power back and forth to each other peaceably.

What it isn’t: “The majority always rules.” Getting everything you want every time. Governing without negotiation or compromise. Winning every election. Never living with outcomes that disappoint you. Never running out of toilet paper or cat food.

Democracy, in sum, is not “things you happen to like.”

I have a few quibbles, of course. For one thing the most important “means of production” is money. I wonder if that realization would change his thinking?

I wish he had provided a definition of fascism. He uses the term twice in the article but never defines it. I’m curious which governments his definition would include and which it would not.

I’ll offer a definition of my own:

Majoritarianism

What it is: A system of government in which the majority always rules.

What is isn’t: Liberal democracy

I also have one more quibble. Sadly it is not true that “words mean things”, at least not for everybody. For the more post-modern among us it’s a Humpty-Dumpty world and words mean precisely what they wish them to mean, no more, no less.