City Journal July 2022.pdf

The Corruption of MedicineHeatherMac Donald The Green War on Clean Energy James B. Meigs Elites Panic Martin Gurri New York’s Real Dog Day Afternoon Daniel Edward Rosen School Choice Rising Steven Malanga Robert VerBruggen on Charles Murray Brian Allen on Hilton Kramer SUMMER 2022 $ 6.50

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Chicago

Martin Gurri The Elite Panic of 2022 From the end of Covid restrictions to Elon Musk’s Twitter bid to the Dobbs ruling, threaten progressives’ grip on power.

William Voegeli Can We Manage to Integrate? suburb Oak Park’s effort to achieve racial balance about engineered diversity. Allen Serious Critic Kramer rejected political York’s Dalrymple Oh, to England Stein

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correctness to champion aesthetics and standards in art. Departments 3 In Prospect 4 Soundings New

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James B. Meigs The Green War on Clean Energy environmentalists fight against the very that would cut carbon emissions.

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startling developments

The Influencer Charles Murray’s social science is sometimes provocative, usually controversial, always significant to the national debate.

Daniel Edward Rosen 70 The Deacon and the Dog Fifty years later, a former FBI agent looks back on the bizarre robbery that inspired an iconic New York film.

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Supreme Gun Distraction; States Take the Initiative; Facing Reality on Entitlements; . . . and other matters. Theodore

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Steven Malanga 30 School Choice Rising discontent with public education has sparked momentum for alternatives.

Nicole Gelinas Crash Curse New York City, traffic deaths are up as enforcement is down.

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Robert VerBruggen 58

Raven’s End 127 Contributors Harry

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Heather Mac Donald 12 The Corruption of Medicine of the profession discard merit in order to the demographics of their field.

Judge Glock 40 Subsidizing Addiction The government pays homeless addicts to stay on drugs and alcohol.

Andrey Mir 90 How the Media Polarized Us shift from ad revenue to the pursuit of digital has turned journalism into post-journalism.

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CITY JOURNAL2 City Journal (ISSN 1060-8540) is published four times a year by the Manhattan Institute, 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017. Telephone: (212) 599-7000. Fax: (212) 599-0371.

Publication Committee

Karen Marston

For full list, see www.city-journal.org

Published by the Manhattan Institute 2022 3

Contributing Editors

Jerome Rufino Picture Editor

Michael Knox Beran, Jonathan Clarke, Theodore Dalrymple, Stephen Eide, Nicole Gelinas, Edward L. Glaeser, Judge Glock, Victor Davis Hanson, Howard Husock, Kay S. Hymowitz, Andrew Klavan, Joel Kotkin, Charles Fain Lehman, Heather Mac Donald, Rafael A. Mangual, John O. McGinnis, James B. Meigs, Judith Miller, Lance Morrow, Aaron M. Renn, Christopher F. Rufo, Allison Schrager, Fred Siegel, Lee Siegel, Guy Sorman, Harry Stein, John Tierney, Michael J. Totten

Robert Jones studied at the Lyme Academy of Art in Old Lyme, Connecticut. He has served as artist-in-residence at Bryant Park and at the Ocean House in Watch Hill, Rhode Island. Jones’s work has been exhibited throughout New York City and New England, including at the Pleiades Gallery and Space Gabi. For more information, visit www.bobjonespainting.com.

Volume 32, Number

Art Director

Editor-at-Large Myron Magnet

Daniel TheodoreKennellyKupfer

Signed articles express the views of their authors and are intended solely to inform and broaden public debate. They are not intended to aid or hinder legislation before legislative bodies at the municipal, state, or federal level. © 2022 by the Manhattan Institute, Inc. Editor Brian C. Anderson Senior Editor

Associate Editors

Brian C. Anderson, William J. Bennett, Ann J. Charters, Anthony P. Coles, Michael J. Fedak, Kenneth M. Garschina, Roger Hertog, Roger Kimball, Myron Magnet, Vanessa Mendoza, Lawrence J. Mone, Peggy Noonan, Thomas P. Ogden, Michael Patterson, Russ Pennoyer, James Piereson, Robert Rosenkranz, Nathan E. Saint-Amand, Daniel P. Schmidt, Paul E. Singer, Thomas W. Smith

Paul Beston

Editorial Assistant Madeleine Miller

Steven Malanga Managing Editor

Summer

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have lately zig zagged between rage and de spair over, among other things, the abandonment of enforced masking to fight Covid, Elon Musk’s bid to buy Twitter, and the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade. Underlying “The Elite Panic of 2022” (page 23), ar gues Martin Gurri, is the Left’s fear that its control of Ameri can culture is slipping—and the wailing will get only more in tense if Republicans retake Con gress in November. As Andrey Mir explains in “How the Media Polarized Us” (page 90), the shift from ad-based revenue to digi tal subscriptions has made news outlets more partisan, fueling the general sense of outrage. New contributing editor James B. Meigs shows in “The Green War on Clean Energy” (page 48) how radical environ mentalists work to block the very technologies—above all, nuclear power—that could ef fectively reduce humanity’s car bon emissions without killing economic growth. The green commitment to wind and solar power ignores the environmen tal costs of these alternatives, while vastly overestimating their capacity to produce the energy we need. Thankfully, a more pragmatic school of environmen talism is emerging, Meigs notes. America is enduring a plague of homeless deaths—in Los Angeles, up to 2,000 a year— caused primarily by drug over doses and rampant street vio lence. It’s an ongoing tragedy that bad policies are making much worse, writes Judge Glock in “Subsidizing Addiction” (page 40). Instead of encouraging the down-and-out to get sober and live responsibly, government programs in many cities, fol lowing a no-judgment philoso phy of “harm reduction,” are actively rewarding destructive behavior—even criminal acts— by homeless people, offering them extra services, from free needles and drug parapherna lia to rent-free apartments. It’s past time for a rethink, Glock advises—and most taxpayers wouldStevenagree.Malanga has a cheeri er story to tell in “School Choice Rising” (page 30). Many school systems shut down in-person instruction for unreasonably long periods during the pan demic, even as they embraced controversial curricula informed by the ideas of critical race the ory. The result: widespread pa rental dissatisfaction with public education and a boom in edu cational options, with 18 states launching new school-choice initiatives or expanding existing ones in 2021, and more on the way in 2022. If the GOP indeed does well in the November elec tions, expect even greater mo mentum for choice.

In P rospect H eather Mac Donald has reported for City Journal on the spread of identity politics into numerous areas of American life, from law enforcement to university campuses to high culture. In “The Corruption of Medicine” (page 12), she shows how racialist ideology is now consuming health care. The demographics of the medical profession and racial dispari ties in health outcomes must result from systemic racism, the new common wisdom holds— and woe to anyone who dares question it. The race obsession dominates major health-care organizations, including the American Medical Association. And, as Mac Donald documents, public and private research funding is flowing away from basic science toward the politics of fighting “white supremacy.” The quality of medical care and scientific progress will inevita blyProgressivessuffer.

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This issue features two es says on major contemporary intellectual figures. Robert Ver Bruggen’s “The Influencer” (page 58) assesses the life and work of social theorist Charles Murray, whose often-controversial re search on welfare dependency, IQ, race and class, and educa tion has shaped the national debate several times over a generation or so. Brian Allen’s “A Serious Critic for Unserious Times” (page 110) profiles the late Hilton Kramer, whose de fense of high standards in art and culture and unrelenting op position to political correctness, both as editor and writer, offer a model of critical acumen.

Our issue also contains two fascinating tales from the annals of criminology: Theodore Dal rymple’s “Raven’s End” (page 120) revisits a haunting 1949 British murder case and reflects on its ambiguities. And Daniel Edward Rosen’s rollicking “The Deacon and the Dog” (page 70) retells—in time for the event’s 50th anniversary—the saga of one of New York City’s most bizarre bank robberies, which inspired Hollywood’s classic Dog Day Afternoon—Brian C. Anderson

T he Supreme Court recently struck down a 1913 New York State law restrict ing the carrying of licensed hand guns, finding that the state’s demand for “prop er cause” vio lates the Second and Amendments.FourteenthJus tice Clarence Thomas, writing for the 6–3 majori ty, determined that forcing law-abiding, licensed firearm owners to demonstrate an “additional, special need” to carry their handguns outside the home is unconstitutionally burdensome. New York’s public officials condemned the decision. New York City mayor Eric Adams said that the Supreme Court “will put New Yorkers at further risk of gun violence.” Governor Kathy Hochul called the ruling “reckless and reprehen sible” and convened a special legislative session to impose new laws to “protect New Yorkers.”

Photographs by Mark Lennihan/AP Photo

New SupremeYork’sGunDistraction

The NYPD recovers approximately 7,500 guns annually, and we have no reason to think that the total number of illegal guns is much smaller than it was 30 years ago. Given a 50-to-1 ratio of illegal-to-legal guns, it becomes increasingly clear that letting legal gun owners obtain carry permits won’t make much of a difference to the rate of violent crime in New York, which has soared in recent years.

Seth Barron

The Court’s decision, though, is a boon to politicians like Mayor Adams, whose preferred solution to the problem of gun violence is to demand that the federal government do some thing about it. Adams routinely faults the “iron pipeline” that supposedly feeds guns into New York City, “where guns are not made and are too frequently used,” and insists that “we need our entire federal government to be focused on addressing this crisis.” But local gang vio lence and gun-toting criminals are not issues like, say, inflation or climate change, which de mand a federal response because they are so far beyond the scope of municipal government to handle. In fact, New York City long ago dem onstrated that it is eminently capable of keeping guns off the streets and lowering the rate of violent crime without appealing to the White House. Proactive policing—including the use of stop-question-and-frisk to identify and arrest people illegally carrying guns; the enforcement of laws against fare evasion in the subways; and the prosecution of other “minor” crimes against public order—has a proven record of success in getting criminals off the street and in discouraging them from carrying illegal guns around the city. Recent reforms to policing and the criminaljustice system in New York, not federal inat tention, are directly to blame for the spike in violent crime. Many serious offenses are no lon ger “bailable,” so arrestees get released almost immediately after arraignment—if they are ar rested at all. Adams’s predecessor, Bill de Bla sio, disbanded the NYPD’s anticrime unit, which was uniquely successful in breaking up gangs and interrupting crimes in progress. Though

State and city leaders condemn a high court decision on legal firearms, saying that it will worsen rising violent crime—but that’s a problem in their own power to solve.

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New York City public advocate Jumaane Wil liams denounced the ruling as “irresponsible, illogical, and immoral,” claiming that it would make it “easier to conceal and carry a gun, to arm oneself with the constant threat of violence andIt’spain.”unlikely, however, that the Court’s ruling will have much impact, if any, on gun violence in New York. Virtually none of the shootings taking place on New York City streets involves legally owned firearms. Gun owners licensed to own a gun in their homes but not to carry one outside tend to follow the law and keep their guns at home. Data are scarce on this subject, but little evidence exists to suggest that licensed gun owners are involved in drive-by shootings, stickups, or gang-related assassinations. Accord ing to the NYPD, approximately 40,000 New Yorkers have handgun permits, allowing them to keep a gun at home. A disproportionately large number of these permits are held by resi dents of Staten Island, where the crime rate is lower than in the city at large. On the other hand, the NYPD in the late 1990s found that “as many as 2 million illegal guns were in circulation in New York City in 1993.”

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the source of its prob lems. The Supreme Court’s ruling on the right of legal gun owners to carry their guns for selfdefense is not going to affect the crime rate in New York City significantly. The solution to the problem can be found locally, through a steady rebuilding of the city’s institutions of public safety.

The already-high-stakes 2022 election season will also feature a host of state ballot measures on hot-button issues. Steven Malanga

Soundings

W ith control of Congress and 36 governorships up for grabs, the 2022 elec tions are shaping up to be transformation al. In some states, voters will get their say on hugely conse quential issues lower down the ballot, in direct-democracy initiatives on various hot-button issues, ranging from abor tion to gun rights to labor and tax policy. And given recent news, we’re likely to see more such initiatives in coming elections.

States Take the Initiative

The Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, over turning Roe v. Wade , has elevated the debate about abortion initiatives in five states—the most in any year to this point. In two states, Ken tucky and Kansas, voters will choose whether to amend their respective state constitutions to deny explicitly that any language in their found ing documents implies a right to an abortion.

The amendments respond to a series of state court rulings in places like California, Minne sota, Illinois, and New Jersey that resemble Roe v. Wade in holding that state constitutions guar antee abortion rights. After the Kansas supreme court issued one such ruling in April 2019, the Republican majority in the Kansas legislature tried to create an initiative for voters to amend the constitution in 2020 but could not muster the two-thirds vote needed to get the issue on the ballot after five Republicans voted against it. All five have subsequently left the legisla ture or been defeated in GOP primaries, and the legislature has since voted successfully to place the measure on the ballot in an election taking place in early August. The measure has received strong support from religious organizations, partially resuscitated under Adams, the units are no longer plain clothes teams, which limits their effective ness. Leftist prosecutors and judges are using their discretion not to prosecute crimes such as shoplifting or even assault, leading to a cli mate of impunity that emboldens criminals. Amid this crimino genic environment, in which the machinery of law and order has been hightive,thealreadypoliticalprisesabotaged,systematicallyitisnosurthatahobbledleadership,assailedfromleftastoopuniwouldpointtoacourtdecisionas

CITY JOURNAL6 Soundings legislature have now placed on the state’s bal lot a constitutional amendment guaranteeing a right to collective bargaining in both the private and public sectors. The proposed amendment not only gives workers the right to bargain but also explicitly states that Illinois may not pass laws restricting unions’ ability to negotiate over wages and benefits, as well as “other terms and conditions of employment.” While the amend ment has gained the support of many unions in Illinois, the expansive nature of the language in the ballot initiative has sparked opposition from employer groups, including the Illinois Associa tion of School Boards, the Illinois Chamber of Commerce, and the Illinois Manufacturers’ As sociation.Tennessee, meantime, was one of the first states to adopt right-to-work, shortly after Con gress gave states that option in the 1947 TaftHartley Act. Bolstered by research showing that right-to-work states have vastly outperformed required-unionization states on private-sector job growth over the last two decades, Tennessee now wants to join nine other states that have enshrined right-to-work protections in their constitutions. The state has been particularly including the Catholic Church in Kansas, which has donated some $750,000 to the political campaign for it. Leading the opposi tion is the ACLU, which has so far contributed some $235,000 to defeat ingInit.Kentucky, religious organizations want to add a clause to the constitution like the one proposed in Kansas, explicitly deny ing any right to abortion.

Voters in four other states (Alabama, Tennessee, West Virginia, and Louisiana) have already passed such amendments. Conversely, Vermont voters will get their say on a Right to Personal Reproductive Au tonomy Amendment, which would enshrine the right to abortion in that state’s constitution. The measure is being promoted by the state’s ACLU and Planned Parenthood chapters and opposed by religious groups and Vermonters for Good Government, which fears that the passage of the amendment might make taxpayers respon sible for funding abortions, fertility treatments, gender-transformation surgeries, and other pro cedures related to reproduction. The California legislature, meantime, has placed an initiative on the ballot that would explicitly add language to its constitution guaranteeing a right to abortion. In Montana, voters will decide on a law declar ing that infants born alive during an abortion procedure are persons and must receive medi cal care. Supporters placed the law on the bal lot after the state’s Democratic governor, Steve Bullock, vetoed a similar measure in 2019. Unionization is on the ballot in Illinois and Tennessee, albeit in different ways. In recent years, a wave of right-to-work legislation has swept the country. Four states bordering Illinois (Indiana, Wisconsin, Iowa, and Kentucky) have adopted laws giving workers the right to opt out of unions. Alarmed, union allies in the Illinois

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EntitlementsRealityFacingon

A Congressional Budget Office report leaves no doubt about the cause of the nation’sdebtcrushingburden.

Milton Ezrati

The unexpectedly robust rebound in tax rev enues after the Covid-induced economic lock downs has left many states flush with cash. A ballot initiative in Colorado will give voters a chance to cut the state’s income-tax rate to 4.40 percent, from 4.55 percent—an estimated $500 million reduction in revenue. This would be the state’s second voter-approved cut in two years: in 2020, Colorado residents approved a reduction from 4.63 percent to the current level, and Dem ocratic governor Jared Polis backed the initia tive. Are Colorado voters in the mood for more? Maybe. Polis recently said that the state should aim to eliminate its income tax and find better, less economically painful, ways to raise revenues. Massachusetts Democrats want to take their state in a dramatically different direction. Local Democrats have approved a state ballot initia tive that seeks to raise taxes by $2 billion. Voters will get to weigh in on the issue this November, amid increasingly good news on state finances. In April, Massachusetts collected $2 billion more in tax revenues from its residents than anticipat ed, and Republican governor Charlie Baker has been negotiating for tax cuts, even as Democrats ask voters for a whopping hike. The right to bear arms is never out of the news for long. The Supreme Court’s recent Bruen decision has kept a spotlight on gun rights, and citizens of several states will have their chance to vote on Second Amendment issues this fall. In November, Iowa citizens will vote on a consti tutional amendment to “keep and bear arms.” Currently, 44 other states have similar reinforce ments of the Second Amendment in their consti tutions (California, New York, and Maryland are among the six that do not). One Iowa legislative supporter of the initiative said that the amend ment is an attempt to set up obstacles for “lib eral judges” who are “willing to just take away your right to keep and bear arms.” Democrats have opposed the amendment on grounds that it might make it harder to modify the state’s gunGivenlaws.the long lead time necessary to place a referendum on the ballot in most states, this

Soundings year’s initiatives are the result of momentum created before our current news cycles. But giv en timely policy debates over issues like abor tion and gun rights, it seems likely that what voters in some states will decide over the next few months will set the stage for more directdemocracy campaigns. A new Congres sional Budget Office report confirms that Washington’s finan cial prospects are dire. Even while making generous assumptions about inflation and interest rates, these government econo mists and statisticians anticipate that federal spending will continue to outpace revenues well into the twenty-first century, creating historically large annual deficits and adding to the nation’s accumulation of public debt. By 2032, they fore cast, outstanding government debt will stand at 110 percent of the nation’s gross domestic prod uct (GDP), and by 2052, that figure will reach 185 percent—an astronomical share that exceeds that accumulated during World War II. Past decisions have made this forecast all but inevitable. More than anything, the growth of entitlements—Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid—has caused spending to exceed rev enues, creating outsize deficits and a mount ing debt burden. Though CBO forecasters did their best to work moderation into this inexo rable trend, they could not erase the effect on their projections. Their numbers make clear that Washington won’t get a handle on its deterio rating finances until it gains some control over entitlement spending and financing. Assuming that tax law remains largely un changed, these economists project that federal revenues from all sources will grow roughly in tandem with the economy, with the govern ment taking in an average of about 18 percent of GDP annually. The bulk of the projected deficit emerges on the spending side. The CBO projects effective at grabbing new manufacturing jobs and winning business relocations from unioniza tion states like California in recent years.

Economics can only point out that those deci sions will condemn federal finances to deficits and ever-increasing debt burdens until Wash ington takes one of three admittedly tough steps: reining in the growth of entitlement spending; sacrificing other government services; or tell ing voters that they must pay more in taxes. As the CBO has made clear, these are the only real ways to avoid an unprecedented debt burden. Perhaps the economy will eke out faster real economic growth than the CBO’s assumption of slightly more than 1.5 percent a year, which would relieve some financial strain. Or perhaps inflation will persist longer than the CBO’s ex pectation that all will be well by 2023, which would benefit debtors, including the govern ment, even if it hurts American households. But even if events reduce the intensity of the gov ernment’s financial problem, the budget basics would remain the same. Washington must ad dress the impact of entitlements realistically— and the clock is ticking. that federal outlays will expand from 23.8 per cent of the economy this year to 25.8 percent by the mid-2030s, and then climb to 28.9 percent by mid-century.Entitlement spending is to blame for most of this increase. Social Security, health care, and other transfers from Washington swell in these projections from 10.8 percent of GDP this year to 13.7 percent in the mid-2030s and to 14.9 percent by 2052, amounting to more than four-fifths the relative boost in all spending. The rest comes from the need for Washington to pay interest on an enlarged debt load, itself the result of past increases in entitlement spending. The CBO’s forecast tells a familiar story. Federal spending for decades has grown as a portion of the economy. In 1970, for instance, overall federal spending equaled some 18.7 per cent of the country’s GDP. The rise from this level to the CBO’s 23.8 percent estimate for 2022 occurred even as defense expenditures have fall en from 7.8 percent of GDP in 1970 to just 3.5 percent today. It was the relative rise in entitle ment spending from some 7.6 percent of GDP in 1970 to today’s level that all but erased the budgetary relief from the relative decline in de fenseWithspending.thishistory in mind, the CBO may have taken too optimistic a tack in its calculations. For instance, it assumes that defense spending will hold steady at about 3.5 percent of GDP—but mounting geopolitical pressures seem likely to drive some expansion in defense outlays. On entitlements, too, forecasters show signs of op timism, predicting that spending will go up at something close to the historical pace—yet sev eral considerations suggest that it may acceler ate. For example, the government has decided to continue subsidies under the Affordable Care Act, even though they were set to expire. These will accumulate over time. As of late June, Presi dent Biden was considering forgiving student debt, or at least a portion of it. This would con stitute a new entitlement. Exact amounts would, of course, depend on how much the govern ment decides to forgive and what income tests it places on recipients, but the government’s posture suggests an increase in the relative en titlement burden on the economy—and also sets

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Soundings a precedent for future generations of indebted collegians.Moresignificant than student-debt relief is the likely impact of aging on the country’s popula tion. As the huge baby-boom generation retires, the number of dependent retirees will contin ue to mount. In 1970, some 10 percent of the population was aged 65 or older; by 2019, that number was 16 percent; and by the mid-2030s, according to Census Bureau estimates, it will be 21 percent. Such a large proportion of older people will increase demands for Social Security and Medicare entitlements and other federal ser vices. Of course, CBO estimates try to take this trend into account, but perhaps not sufficiently. They consider the draw on Social Security, for instance, but not the burden on Medicare from the growing number of recipients over age 75. None of this is to say that entitlements, al ready at some two-thirds or more of the federal budget, represent the wrong way for Washing ton to spend money. These programs reflect popular priorities, ratified by Congresses of both parties and signed into law by Democratic and Republican presidents alike. How the nation should allocate its output of goods and services is ultimately a political judgment.

Slippery-SlopeofArguments They identify a structural tendency of progressivecontemporarythought.

Benedict Beckeld

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haustiondecadencetendedrectionintionsoftime:suchSocietiestheirbelslippery-slopebeTheseconsequences.claimsmaywrong,buttheladoesnotprovewrongness.slidedownslopesallthehistoryisfullexamplesofnathatmovedaprogressivediovertime,towardorexafteral

Soundings incorrect, and they offer insight about the nature of mod ernUsually,progressivism.rejection of slippery-slope ar guments occurs in the context of their claims that some policy will have bad

tering rules for elites, and then relaxed moral standards. Indeed, the slippery-slope argument, especially in the context of social decay, has a noble pedigree. Plato observes in The Republic that democracy leads to authoritarianism; as freedom and equality expand beyond orderly limits, only hardheaded authority can rein them in. The fall of the Roman republic to authori tarian empire and the rapid collapse of French republicanism before the rise of Napoleon stand as Today’sexamples.slippery slopes are more familiar. Consider contemporary discussion over the nature of rights. While political conservatives generally define rights negatively (freedom from something), progressives define them positive ly (freedom to something). The preservation of negative liberties is definite and circumscribed, seeking to conserve a particular thing; the search for positive liberties is less bounded, aiming to widen the scope of what is alleged to be true freedom. Contemporary progressives tend not to be satisfied with certain political victories, E very now and then, a piece of philosophi cal theory breaks into the popu lar educationanypeopleness,conscioussuchthatwithoutphilosophicalregu larly refer to it. One such theory is the rejection of the slippery-slope argument, which holds that an event, A, will set off a series of events culminat ing in some dreadful consequence, B—and there fore A should not occur. “The supposed Ωslippery slopes≈ are fake, silly rhetoric to placate the faith ful,” a columnist recently wrote, pointing to how partisans on different sides of contentious issues like gun rights or abortion take extreme positions. True, such arguments can sometimes ignore a potential middle ground and overlook the fact that the dreaded consequence will not necessarily fol low. But slippery-slope arguments are not always In Defense

CITY JOURNAL10 Soundings likely to unfold in all its decadence as the years progress. T he rise of remote employment may ben efit workers who sud denly have access to a wider national labor market, but it has left many office-heavy cor ridors of city down towns half-empty Some U.S. cities rich in specialized white-collar workers, such as New York, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C., risk being left with permanently suppressed demand for office space and high apartment rents that push newly virtual workers out to the suburbs. Revamping commercial corridors for mixed or residential use presents a compelling op tion for cities with still-sluggish office markets: here is a chance to put vacant office space on valuable land to better use while easing urban which, once achieved, give way to new de mands: for example, ac tivists hoping to secure rights for sexual minori ties initially made as surances that those who disagreed would be left alone; now they intend to stamp out dissent and expand the uni verse of rights beyond gay marriage. Given this history, one may be forgiven for suspicion of progressive inten tions, or for concluding that the slippery slope is itself embedded in the progressive posture. It is also a definitional question. Whereas con servatism wishes to re main in one place, or, at most, to move only in certain limited respects, the very definition of progressivism is to prog ress—that is, to keep moving. But the slippery-slope argument often reso nates as a criticism of modern progressivism and liberalism. By leaving the space open for debate and increased equality, liberalism tends to empower those who, unwittingly or not, seek to overthrow anything that can be called liberal. The race to ever-changing equality takes on a logic of its own. The slippery-slope argument is therefore plausibly applicable to progressive politics, by dint of the latter’s own nature to pushSlippery-slopeonward. arguments thus deserve some respect. The mere fact that an argument follows that form is largely irrelevant to determining its veracity. Someone accused by his interlocutor of using the slippery-slope argument should reply that the debate should not focus on the notion that cause A could lead to cause B—which is unremarkable—but rather, on how likely it is that cause A could lead to cause B. If recent experience is any indication, the slippery slope against which that interlocutor had protested is

Repurposing office space can ensure that city centers remote-workvibrantremainintheage.

Connor O’Brien

EncouragingOfficeConversions

Soundings of large units with above-average rent or sale prices to be financially viable, additional supply will still ease the rent crises gripping major cit ies this Finally,year.leftover federal money from last year’s American Rescue Plan could be redirected to tax breaks for office-to-residential conversion projects. Cities should be careful not to overem phasize conversion or attempt to engineer the conversions of entire neighborhoods, keeping open the possibility that more workers might re turn to the office down the road. But given how high work-from-home rates remain more than two years after the beginning of the pandemic and how few conversions are happening in city centers, it’s hard to imagine a well-tailored sub sidy yielding too many conversions.

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Farther from central business districts, the case for subsidies is weaker. Lower rents and land values make more conversions viable with out public funding. In some suburban markets, workers and firms are returning to in-person work much faster than in city centers—a process with which subsidies might interfere. Public sub sidies also should not chase conversions of Class A offices, instead focusing on older Class B or C buildings that are easier to convert and less coveted by tenants. Not all office buildings—even those sitting largely vacant right now—are cut out to be con verted to residential uses. Some may simply need to be demolished, while others will ulti mately fill up again. But even converting just 10 percent of midtown Manhattan’s older office space to residential use could yield 14,000 units in a city starved for new housing. It may not be local government’s role to assume the losses that building owners are facing in a post-pan demic economy. But cities do have an interest in preventing prime neighborhoods from empty ing and decaying, ensuring an adequate supply of housing, and adapting nimbly to economic change.Mayors and council members will need more than slogans and public pressure to bring life back to eerily quiet downtowns. They must meet this challenge with flexibility and a focus on dismantling the barriers to productive, adaptive reuse across their cities. housing shortages. If as many as 40 percent of office workers in cities like New York ultimate ly work from home in a post-pandemic world, these office-to-residential conversions will be un avoidable. But office conversions will not hap pen on their own unless cities make a serious effort to bring down their cost. Conversions tend to be inconvenient and ex pensive, particularly for postwar structures with large floor plates. Modern office buildings are typically wide and filled with windowless of fices, storage rooms, and elevator shafts. Since apartments require natural light, converting buildings with deep footprints will yield dark, long units. Some buildings are so deep that the only feasible conversions involve cutting an in terior courtyard. And tearing out or redirect ing existing HVAC, plumbing, and electricity to individual apartment units is costly and timeconsuming.Easingoffice-to-housing conversions will thus require much more than simply zoning neigh borhoods for new uses. Cities should also re lax rules to allow by-right conversions without lengthy reviews. Further, they should exclude these renovation projects from any parking re quirements, setback rules that differ between commercial and residential developments, and limits on height or floor-to-area ratios. A stream lined process to shepherd conversions quickly through relevant permitting processes and limit ing discretionary review will also save potential developers time and money. In commercial zones dominated by office space, planners should consider exempting con versions from inclusionary-zoning requirements. High affordability quotas—requiring a share of new units to be rented or sold at prices likely unprofitable for developers—may deter conver sions. Given larger office floor plates, developers will need to build larger units, making afford ability requirements even more cumbersome. In an all-residential or mixed-use neighborhood, in clusionary zoning can be the price that develop ers pay for building a new apartment complex; but in commercial zones with few or no existing residents, political backlash and displacement are less relevant concerns. And though conver sion developments will probably need to consist

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T he post–George Floyd racial reck oning has hit the field of medi cine like an earthquake. Medical education, medical research, and standards of competence have been upended by two related hy potheses: that systemic racism is responsible both for racial disparities in the de mographics of the medical profession and for ra cial disparities in health outcomes. Questioning those hypotheses is professionally suicidal. Vast sums of public and private research funding are being redirected from basic science to political projects aimed at dismantling white supremacy. The result will be declining quality of medical care and a curtailment of scientific progress.

Virtually every major medical organization— from the American Medical Association (AMA) and the American Association of Medical Col leges (AAMC) to the American Association of Pediatrics—has embraced the idea that medi cine is an inequity-producing enterprise. The AMA’s 2021 Organizational Strategic Plan to Embed Racial Justice and Advance Health Eq uity is virtually indistinguishable from a black studies department’s mission statement. The plan’s anonymous authors seem aware of how radically its rhetoric differs from medicine’s tra ditional concerns. The preamble notes that “just as the general parlance of a business document varies from that of a physics document, so too is the case for an equity document.” (Such shaky command of usage and grammar characterizes the entire 86-page tome, making the preamble’s

Heather Mac Donald Guardians of the profession discard merit in order to alter the demographicsoftheirfield.

When the chairmanship of UCLA’s Department of Medicine opened up, some qualified faculty members did not even put their names forward, believing that they would not be considered.

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The Corruption of Medicine

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The Corruption of Medicine rests on an a priori truth: that there is no aca demic skills gap between whites and Asians, on the one hand, and blacks and Hispanics, on the other. No proof is needed for this proposition; it is the starting point for any discussion of racial disparities in medical personnel. Therefore, any test or evaluation on which blacks and Hispan ics score worse than whites and Asians is biased and should be eliminated.

Black students are not admitted into competi tive residencies at the same rate as whites be cause their average Step One test scores are a standard deviation below those of whites. Step One has already been modified to try to shrink that gap; it now includes nonscience compo nents such as “communication and interpersonal skills.” But the standard deviation in scores has persisted. In the world of antiracism, that persis tence means only one thing: the test is to blame. It is Step One that, in the language of antiracism, “disadvantages” underrepresented minorities, not any lesser degree of medical knowledge. The Step One exam has a further mark against it. The pressure to score well inhibits minority students from what has become a core compo nent of medical education: antiracism advocacy. A fourth-year Yale medical student describes how the specter of Step One affected his priori ties. In his first two years of medical school, the student had “immersed” himself, as he describes it, in a student-led committee focused on diver sity, inclusion, and social justice. The student ran a podcast about health disparities. All that politi cal work was made possible by Yale’s pass-fail grading system, which meant that he didn’t feel compelled to put studying ahead of diversity boast that “the field of equity has developed a parlance which conveys both [ sic ] authenticity, precision, and meaning” particularly ironic.)

Thus forewarned, the reader plunges into a thicket of social-justice maxims: physicians must “confront inequities and dismantle white su premacy, racism, and other forms of exclusion and structured oppression, as well as embed ra cial justice and advance equity within and across all aspects of health systems.” The country needs to pivot “from euphemisms to explicit conversa tions about power, racism, gender and class op pression, forms of discrimination and exclusion.” (The reader may puzzle over how much more “explicit” current “conversations” about racism can be.) We need to discard “America’s strong hold of false notions of hierarchy of value based on gender, skin color, religion, ability and coun try of origin, as well as other forms of privilege.”

A key solution to this alleged oppression is identity-based preferences throughout the medi cal profession. The AMA strategic plan calls for the “just representation of Black, Indigenous and Latinx people in medical school admissions as well as . . . leadership ranks.” The lack of “just representation,” according to the AMA, is due to deliberate “exclusion,” which will end only when we have “prioritize[d] and integrate[d] the voices and ideas of people and communities experienc ing great injustice and historically excluded, ex ploited, and deprived of needed resources such as people of color, women, people with disabili ties, LGBTQ+, and those in rural and urban com munitiesAccordingalike.”to medical and STEM leaders, to be white is to be per se racist; apologies and reparations for that offending trait are now de rigueur. In June 2020, Nature identified itself as one of the culpably “white institutions that is re sponsible for bias in research and scholarship.” In January 2021, the editor-in-chief of Health Af fairs lamented that “our own staff and leadership are overwhelmingly white.” The AMA’s strategic plan blames “white male lawmakers” for Ameri ca’s systemic racism. And so medical schools and medical societies are discarding traditional standards of merit in order to alter the demographic characteristics of their profession. That demolition of standards

The U.S. Medical Licensing Exam is a prime of fender. At the end of their second year of medi cal school, students take Step One of the USMLE, which measures knowledge of the body’s anatom ical parts, their functioning, and their malfunc tioning; topics include biochemistry, physiology, cell biology, pharmacology, and the cardiovascu lar system. High scores on Step One predict suc cess in a residency; highly sought-after residency programs, such as neurosurgery and radiology, use Step One scores to help select applicants.

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Despite the allegations of faculty racism, dis parities in academic performance are the predict able outcome of admissions preferences. In 2021, the average score for white applicants on the Med ical College Admission Test was in the 71st per centile, meaning that it was equal to or better than 71 percent of all average scores. The average score for black applicants was in the 35th percentile—a full standard deviation below the average white score. The MCATs have already been redesigned to try to reduce this gap; a quarter of the questions now focus on social issues and psychology. Yet the gap persists. So medical schools use wildly different standards for admitting black and white applicants. From 2013 to 2016, only 8 per cent of white college seniors with below-average

SUMMER 2022 15 concerns. Then, as he tells it, Step One “reared its ugly head.” Getting an actual grade on an exam might prove to “whoever might have thought it before that I didn’t deserve a seat at Yale as a Black medical student,” the student worried. The solution to such academic pressure was obvious: abolish Step One grades. Since January 2022, Step One has been graded on a pass-fail basis. The fourth-year Yale student can now go back to his diversity activism, without worrying about what a graded exam might reveal. Whether his future patients will appreciate his chosen fo cus is unclear. Every other measure of academic mastery has a disparate impact on blacks and thus is in the cross hairs.Inthe third year of medical school, professors grade students on their clinical knowledge in what is known as a Medical Student Performance Evaluation (MSPE). The MSPE uses qualitative categories like Outstanding, Excellent, Very Good, and Good. White students at the Univer sity of Washington School of Medicine received higher MSPE ratings than underrepresented mi nority students from 2010 to 2015, according to a 2019 analysis. The disparity in MSPEs tracked the disparity in Step One scores. The parallel between MSPE and Step One eval uations might suggest that what is being mea sured in both cases is real. But the a priori truth holds that no academic skills gap exists. Accord ingly, the researchers proposed a national study of medical school grades to identify the actual causes of that racial disparity. The conclusion is foregone: faculty bias. As a Harvard medical student put it in Stat News : “biases are baked into the evaluations of students from marginalized backgrounds.”A2022study of clinical performance scores anticipated that foregone conclusion. Professors from Emory University, Massachusetts General Hospital, and the University of California at San Francisco, among other institutions, analyzed fac ulty evaluations of internal medicine residents in such areas as medical knowledge and profession alism. On every assessment, black and Hispanic residents were rated lower than white and Asian residents. The researchers hypothesized three possible explanations: bias in faculty assessment, effects of a noninclusive learning environment, or structural inequities in assessment. University of Pennsylvania professor of medicine Stanley Gold farb tweeted out a fourth possibility: “Could it be [that the minority students] were just less good at beingGoldfarbresidents?”hadviolated the a priori truth. Pun ishment was immediate. Predictable tweets called him, inter alia, possibly “the most garbage human being I’ve seen with my own eyes,” and Michael S. Parmacek, chair of the University of Pennsylvania’s Department of Medicine, sent a schoolwide e-mail addressing Goldfarb’s “racist statements.” Those statements had evoked “deep pain and anger,” Parmacek wrote. Accordingly, the school would be making its “entire leader ship team” available to “support you,” he said. Parmacek took the occasion to reaffirm that doc tors must acknowledge “structural racism.” That same day, the executive vice president of the University of Pennsylvania for the Health System and the senior vice dean for medical edu cation at the University of Pennsylvania medi cal school reassured faculty, staff, and students via e-mail that Goldfarb was no longer an active faculty member but rather emeritus. The EVP and the SVD affirmed Penn’s efforts to “foster an anti-racist curriculum” and to promote “inclusive excellence.”

Grand rounds is a century-long tradition for passing on the latest medical breakthroughs. (Thomas Eakins’s great 1889 canvas, The Agnew Clinic , portrays an early grand rounds at the University of Pennsylvania.) Rounds are now a conduit for antiracism reeducation. On May 12, 2022, the Vice Chair for Diversity and Inclusion at the University of Pittsburgh’s Department of Medicine gave a grand rounds at the Cleveland Clinic on the topic “In the Absence of Equity: A Look into the Future.” Afterward, attendees would be expected to describe “exclusion from a historical context” and the effects of “hierarchy on health outcomes”; attendance would confer academic credit toward doctors’ continuing-ed ucation obligations. undergraduate GPAs and below-average MCAT scores were offered a seat in medical school; less than 6 percent of Asian college seniors with those qualifications were offered a seat, according to an analysis by economist Mark Perry. Medical schools regarded those below-average scores as all but disqualifying—except when presented by blacks and Hispanics. Over 56 percent of black college seniors with below-average undergradu ate GPAs and below-average MCATs and 31 per cent of Hispanic students with those scores were admitted, making a black student in that range more than seven times as likely as a similarly situ ated white college senior to be admitted to medi cal school and more than nine times as likely to be admitted as a similarly situated Asian senior. Such disparate rates of admission hold in ev ery combination and range of GPA and MCAT scores. Contrary to the AMA’s Organizational Strategic Plan to Embed Racial Justice and Ad vance Health Equity, blacks are not being “ex cluded” from medical training; they are being catapulted ahead of their less valued white and AsianThoughpeers.mediocre

CITY JOURNAL16 The Corruption of Medicine Meantime, medical professors need to be re educated, to ensure that their grading and hiring practices do not provide further evidence of the phantom skills gap. Faculty are routinely subjected to workshops in combating their own racism. On May 3, 2022, the Senior Advisor to the NIH Chief Officer for Scientific Workforce Diversity gave a seminar at the University of Pennsylvania medical school titled “Me, Biased? Recognizing and Block ing Bias.” Senior Advisor Charlene Le Fauve’s mandate at NIH is to “promote diversity, inclu siveness, and equity in the biomedical research enterprise through evidence-based approaches.” Yet her presentation rested heavily on a supposed measure of bias that evidence has discredited: the Implicit Association Test (IAT).The IAT’s own cre ators have acknowledged that it lacks validity and reliability as a psychometric tool. Increasing amounts of faculty time are spent on such antiracism activities. On May 16, 2022, the Anti-Racism Program Manager at the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California at Los Angeles hosted a presentation from the Director of Strategy and Equity Educa tion Programs at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai titled “Anti-Racist Transformation in Medical Education.” Mount Sinai’s Dean for Medical Education and a medical student joined Mount Sinai’s Director of Strategy and Equity Education Programs for the Los Angeles pre sentation, since spreading the diversity message apparently takes precedence over academic obli gations in New York.

MCAT scores keep out few black students, some activists seek to eliminate the MCATs entirely. Yet the MCATs, like all beleaguered standardized tests, are constantly scoured for questions that may presume forms of knowledge particular to a class or race. This “cul tural bias” chestnut has been an irrelevancy for decades, yet it retains its salience within the antitest movement. MCAT questions with the largest racial variance in correct answers are removed. External bias examiners, suitably diverse, dou ble-check the work of the internal MCAT review ers. If, despite this gauntlet of review, bias still lurked in the MCATs, the tests would underpre dict the medical school performance of minor ity students. In fact, they overpredict it—black medical students do worse than their MCATs would predict, as measured by Step One scores and graduation rates. (Such overprediction char acterizes the SATs, too.) Nevertheless, expect a growing number of medical schools to forgo the MCATs, in the hope of shutting down the test entirely and thus eliminating a lingering source of objective data on the allegedly phantom aca demic skills gap.

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SUMMER 2022 17 ply with these requirements could put a medical school’s accreditation status at risk and lead to a school’sMandatoryclosure.instruction in such politicized concepts will help diversify the faculty and administration—for who better to teach about oppression than a person of color? (Part of the appeal of diversity trainings and bureaucracy, whether in academia or the corporate world, lies in the creation of new employment slots dedicated to diversity activities, which can be filled without as great a sacrifice of meritocratic standards.) But being indoctrinated in “intersec tionality” does nothing to improve a student’s clinical knowledge. Every moment spent regur gitating social-justice jargon is time not spent learning how to keep someone alive whose body has just been shattered in a car crash. Ad vocates of antiracism training never explain how fluency in intersectional critique improves the interpretation of an MRI or the proper pre scribing of drugs.

T he medical school curriculum itself needs to be changed to lessen the gap between the aca demic performance of whites and Asians, on the one hand, and blacks and Hispanics, on the other. Doing so entails replacing pure science courses with credit-bearing advocacy training.

More than half of the top 50 medical schools re cently surveyed by the Legal Insurrection Foun dation required courses in systemic racism. That number will increase after the AAMC’s new guidelines for what medical students and faculty should know transform the curriculum further.According to the AAMC, newly minted doc tors must display “knowledge of the intersection ality of a patient’s multiple identities and how each identity may present varied and multiple forms of oppression or privilege related to clini cal decisions and practice.” Faculty are respon sible for teaching how to engage with “systems of power, privilege, and oppression” in order to “disrupt oppressive practices.” Failure to com Thomas Eakins’s great 1889 canvas, The Agnew Clinic, portrays an early instance of grand rounds—a century-long tradition for transmitting medical breakthroughs. Such rounds are now a conduit for antiracism reeducation.

Funding that once went to scientific research is now being redirected to diversity cultivation. The NIH and the National Science Foundation are diverting billions in taxpayer dollars from trying to cure Alzheimer’s disease and lym phoma to fighting white privilege and cishet eronormativity. Private research support is fol lowing the same trajectory. The Howard Hughes Medical Institute is one of the world’s largest philanthropic funders of basic science and argu ably the most prestigious. Airline entrepreneur Howard Hughes created the institute in 1953 to probe into the “genesis of life itself.” Now diver sity in medical research is at the top of HHMI’s concerns. In May 2022, it announced a $1.5 billion effort to cultivate scientists committed to running a “happy and diverse lab where minoritized sci entists will thrive and persist,” in the words of the institute’s vice president. “Experts” in diver sity and inclusion will assess early-career aca demic scientists based on their plans for running T he academic skills gap, confirmed in every measure of knowledge before and during medi cal school, does not close over the course of medical training, despite remedial instruction. Yet the lower representation of blacks through out the medical profession is solely attributed to racism on the part of the profession’s gatekeep ers. Nature accused itself of denying a “space and a platform” to black researchers, without nam ing any such researchers against whom it had discriminated or any editor who had done the discriminating. In April 2022, the Institute for Scientific Information decried the fact that the proportion of black authors in medical research did not match U.S. census data on the population at large. Black representation had not improved between 2010 and 2020, lamented the institute. If white supremacy lay behind that lack of prog ress, it was a mystery why the proportion of published Asian researchers over the same de cade had outstripped Asian population changes. Despite the persistent academic skills gap, a minority hiring surge is under way. Many medi cal schools require that faculty search commit tees contain a quota of minority members, that they be overseen by a diversity bureaucrat, and that they interview a specified number of minor ity candidates. One would have to be particu larly dense not to grasp the expected result. In recent years, the Memorial Sloan Kettering Can cer Center, the Cleveland Clinic Taussig Cancer Center, the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, the University of Chicago Can cer Center, the University of Pittsburgh Division of Medical Oncology, the Massey Cancer Center at Virginia Commonwealth University, the Uni versity of Miami Miller School of Medicine, and the Department of Medicine at UCLA’s medical school have hired black leaders. These candidates may all have been the most qualified, but the explicit calls for diversity in medical administration inevitably cast a pall on such selections. In at least one case, the runnerup possessed a research and leadership record that far surpassed that of the winning candidate. But he lacked the favored demographic charac teristics.Itmatters who heads research ventures and medical faculties. Top scientists can identify the

most promising directions of study and orga nize the most productive research teams. But the diversity push is discouraging some scientists from competing at all. When the chairmanship of UCLA’s Department of Medicine opened up, some qualified faculty members did not even put their names forward because they did not think that they would be considered, according to an Collegeobserver.seniors, deciding whether to apply to medical school, can also read the writing on the wall. A physician-scientist reports that his best lab technician in 30 years was a recent Yale graduate with a B.S. in molecular biology and biochemistry. The former student was intellec tually involved and an expert in cloning. His college GPA and MCAT scores were high. The physician-scientist recommended the student to the dean of Northwestern’s medical school (where the scientist then worked), but the stu dent did not get so much as an interview. In fact, this “white, clean-cut Catholic,” in the words of his former employer, was admitted to only one medical school. Such stories are rife. A UCLA doctor says that the smartest undergraduates in the school’s sci ence labs are saying: “Now that I see what is hap pening in medicine, I will do something else.”

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His only quibble was with the current emphasis on “racism,” which “might be hurting” the cause of racial equality, he said. Livingston had been taught to revile discrimination and yet was being told that he was racist. The focus, as Livingston saw it, should be on socioeconomic disparities, not alleged racial animus. After the podcast became an instant totem of white supremacy, JAMA disappeared it from the web. Livingston himself was disappeared from JAMA shortly thereafter. (Back at his home base at the UCLA medical school, he faced a show trial from fellow faculty members.)

What Is It?” Livingston, a UCLA surgeon, asked Katz to define structural racism. Katz gave as examples the routing of diesel trucks through poor neighborhoods and disparities in access to top-level medical care. Livingston responded that Katz had described a “very real” problem: impoverished neighborhoods with poor quality of life and little opportunity, where most resi dents are black and Hispanic. Livingston agreed with the urgency of making sure that all people “have equal opportunities to become successful.”

JAMA ’s editor-inchief Howard Bauchner, a professor of pediatrics and public health at Boston University, appar ently sensed that he might be next on the chop ping block and started issuing serial apologies. The disappeared podcast, Bauchner declared, was “inaccurate, offensive, hurtful, and inconsis tent with the standards of JAMA .” JAMA would be “instituting changes that will address and prevent such failures from happening again”—a “failure” being defined as deviation from racial justice orthodoxy. Bauchner genuflected further in an official statement: “I once again apologize for the harms caused by this podcast and the tweet about the podcast.” ( JAMA had promoted the podcast with a tweet asking: “No physician is racist, so how can there be structural racism in health care?”) For good measure, Bauchner also released a letter dated March 4, 2021, apologiz ing for the “harm” caused by the tweet and pod cast and expressing his “commitment” to call out “injustice, inequity, and racism in medicine.”

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JAMA was once a leading forum for physicians and other scientists to present research to their peers. Now JAMA’s overseers regard a fundamen tal component of the scientific method—debate “happy and diverse” labs. Those applicants with the most persuasive “happy lab” plans could re ceive one of the new Freeman Hrabowski schol arships. The scholarships would cover the recipi ent’s university salary for ten years and would bring the equivalent of two or three NIH grants a year into his academic department. If an ap plicant’s “happy lab” plan fails to ignite enthu siasm in the diversity reviewers, however, his application will be shelved, no matter how prom ising his actual scientific research. The HHMI program and others like it amplify the message that doing basic science, if you are white or Asian, is not particularly valued by the STEM establishment. How many scientific breakthroughs will be forgone by such signals is incalculable.

The leaders of today’s medical schools, profes sional organizations, and scientific journals would reject the foregoing critique. Teaching racial jus tice concepts and advocacy is not a swerve from medicine’s core competencies and obligations, they would argue; it is the highest fulfillment of those obligations. Racial disparities in health, they would say, are the biggest medical challenge of our time, and they are a social, not a scientific, prob lem. If blacks have higher rates of mortality and disease, it is because systematic racism confronts them at every turn. Changing the demographics of the medical profession is essential to eliminating the sometimes-lethal racism that black patients en counter in health care. Changing the profession’s awareness of its own biases is also key to achiev ing medical equity. And changing the orientation of medical research—away from basic science and toward race theory—simply moves medicine to where it can be most effective. And here we encounter a second a priori truth: health disparities are the product of systemic racism; any other explanation is taboo and will be ruthlessly punished. On February 24, 2021, Ed Livingston, dep uty editor for clinical reviews and education at the Journal of the American Medical Association ( JAMA ), recorded a podcast with Mitch Katz, president of New York City Health and Hos pitals, called “Structural Racism for Doctors—

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The Corruption of Medicine as out of bounds, at least regarding the diversity agenda. Livingston’s disagreement with Katz and the “structural racism” conceit was over language, not substance. Yet because Livingston suggested taking the “racism” out of the “structural racism” phrase and focusing instead on equal opportunity, he had, in Bauchner’s widely shared view, harmed blacks and violated professional standards of jour nalism. No disagreement is tolerated. Meanwhile, Bauchner’s efforts to distance him self from the “offensive” dialogue were not bear ing fruit. Ominously, an AMA committee put him on administrative leave, pending an “independent investigation”—as if there were a complex back story to what were clearly Livingston’s personal opinions. By June 2021, Bauchner, too, was out, even though, as he ruefully observed, he “did not write or even see the tweet, or create the podcast.”

The chance that the AMA would not appoint an intersectional editor-in-chief to replace the hapless Bauchner was zero. But just to be safe, the AMA named a black epidemiologist special izing in racial disparities to lead the search and staffed the search committee with suitably di verse members. The new editor, Kirsten BibbinsDomingo, is a “health-equity researcher”—also an overdetermined fact, given the career course of many black Bibbins-DomingoM.D.s.has already announced her determination to bring in “new voices” to en sure that JAMA ‘s family of journals regularly “name” structural racism as the cause of health inequities. Will those new voices be conducting the most cutting-edge clinical science? It doesn’t matter: basic science is, at best, irrelevant to structural racism and, at worst, complicit in it. L ivingston’s challenge to the idea that health disparities are caused by racism was sui generis among medical journalists. The hold of that idea within medical publishing is otherwise absolute. The New England Journal of Medicine, another for merly august institution now in thrall to racial politics, presents a nonstop stream of articles on such topics as the “Pathology of Racism,” “To ward Antiracist Allyship in Medicine,” and “How Structural Racism Works—Racist Policies as a Root Cause of U.S. Racial Health Inequities.”

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Entire issues of scientific journals have been devoted to racism. Scientific American published a “special collector’s edition” on “The Science of Overcoming Racism” in summer 2021. The edi tion was dominated by paeans to the IAT, denun ciations of the police, and scorn for any sugges tion of patient self-efficacy. (Prescribing weight loss to black women, for example, is a “racist” way to fight obesity, wrote a sociology profes sor and a nutritionist.) A special issue of Science in October 2021 addressed “Criminal Injustice” and “Mass Incarceration.” The issue opened with an editorial by a social work professor claiming that the U.S. crime rate is “comparable to those in many Western industrial nations.” This is a fanci ful proposition, in light of the fact that the Amer ican firearm homicide rate is 19.5 times higher than the average of other high-income countries, and nearly 43 times higher among 15- to 24-yearolds.Like the AMA’s Organizational Strategic Plan to Embed Racial Justice and Advance Health Eq uity, many of these antiracism articles consist of the formulaic rhetoric of academic victim stud ies, supplemented by the personal narratives that characterized early critical race theory in law schools. Others, though, try to quantify the rac ism that allegedly produces higher levels of ill ness and mortality in blacks. Those efforts, done through regression analysis, do not capture the personal behaviors that affect the course of dis ease, such as compliance with a doctor’s orders, adherence to a medication regime, and showing up for follow-up appointments. In some cases, the regression analysis does not account for the differences in the illnesses suffered by black pa tients and white patients at the start of the study. Nevertheless, the second a priori truth—that health disparities are necessarily the product of systemic racism—has devalued basic sci ence and encumbered medical research with red tape. The fight against cancer has been particu larly affected. White and Asian oncologists are assumed to be part of the problem of black can cer mortality, not its solution, absent corrective measures. According to the NIH, leadership of cancer labs should match national or local de mographics, whichever has a higher percentage of minorities.

SUMMER 2022 21 conference call with oncologists in April 2022 to discuss products in the research pipeline. Half of the call was spent on the problem of achieving diverse clinical trial enrollments, a participant reported. Genentech admitted to having run out of Thereideas.

In May 2022, a physician-scientist lost her NIH funding for a drug trial because the trial popu lation did not contain enough blacks. The drug under review was for a type of cancer that blacks rarely get. There were almost no black patients with that disease to enroll in the trial, therefore. Better, however, to foreclose development of a therapy that might help predominantly white cancer patients than to conduct a drug trial with out black participants.

is no evidence that racist researchers are excluding minorities from drug trials on nonmedical grounds, nor has anyone presented a theory as to why they would. The barriers to such drug trial diversity include a higher inci dence among blacks of disqualifying comorbidi ties, higher levels of personal disorganization, and a suspicion of the medical profession, which suspicion that same profession constantly ampli fies with its drumbeat about racism.

Cancer grant applications must now specify who, among a lab’s staff, will enforce diversity mandates and how the lab plans to recruit un derrepresented researchers and promote their careers. As with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Freeman Hrabowski scholarships, an insufficiently robust diversity plan means that a proposal will be rejected, regardless of its scien tific merit. Discussions about how to beef up the diversity section of a grant have become more important than discussions about tumor biol ogy, reports a physician-scientist. “It is not easy summarizing how your work on cell signaling in nematodes applies to minorities currently living in your lab’s vicinity,” the researcher says. Men tal energy spent solving that conundrum is men tal energy not spent on science, he laments, since “thinking is always a zero-sum game.”

A lab’s diversity gauntlet has just begun, how ever. The NIH insists that participants in drug trials must also match national or local demo graphics. If a cancer center is in an area with few minorities, the lab must nevertheless present a plan for recruiting them into its study, regard less of their local unavailability. Genentech, the creator of lifesaving cancer drugs, held a national Obsessing over diversity will not help students master the complexities of biology or the intricacies of treatment.

Packing those doctors off to diver sity reeducation will not improve black childbirth outcomes. It will, though, divert attention from

The advocates of this change insist that it is es sential to improving minority health. But what if they are wrong? If it turns out that individual be havior, pathogens that disproportionately infect certain groups, and other genetic dispositions have a more proximate influence on health than supposed structural racism, then this reorienta tion of the medical project will have impeded progress that helps all racial groups. Obstetri cians working in inner-city hospitals report that black mothers have higher rates of complica tions during pregnancy and in delivery because of higher rates of morbid obesity, hypertension, and inattention to prenatal care and prenatal-care appointments.

CITY JOURNAL22 The Corruption of Medicine solutions that could improve those outcomes— whether offering help in keeping appointments and complying with a medication regime or en couraging exercise and weight loss. And yet we are told that efforts directed at behavioral change are racist and that convincing patients that they have power over their health is victim-blaming. Higher rates of Covid fatalities among blacks is the latest favored proof of medical racism, amplified by a 2022 Oprah Winfrey and Smith sonian Channel documentary, The Color of Care . State and federal health authorities gave priority to minorities in vaccination and immunotherapy campaigns, however, and penalized the highest risk group—the elderly—simply because that group is disproportionately white. Those are not the actions of white supremacists. The likelier reasons for disparities in Covid outcomes are vaccine hesitancy and obesity rates. When the constant refrain about medical racism intensifies vaccine resistance among blacks, the widened mortality gaps will be used to confirm the rac ism hypothesis, in a vicious circle. Medical science has been one of the greatest en gines of human progress, liberating millions from crippling disease and premature mortality. It has also seen its share of dead ends and misconcep tions. Science goes astray when politics becomes paramount, as in the denial of plant genetics and natural selection under Stalin. America’s very real history of structural racism, a history that took us too long to remedy, resulted in segregated hospi tals and cruel disparities in treatment. That past is belatedly but thankfully behind us. The scientific method is a natural corrective to such fatal errors. Now, tragically, when it comes to the contention that racism is the defin ing trait of the medical profession and the source of health disparities, opposing views have been ruled out of bounds and are grounds for being purged. The separation of politics and science is no longer seen as a source of empirical strength; it is instead a racist dodge that risks “reinforcing existing power structures,” according to the edi tor of Health Affair s.

The guardians of science have turned on sci ence itself. The requirement of racial proportionality in drug trials is perplexing, since diversity advo cates insist that race is a social construct, without biological reality. Suggesting that genetic dif ferences exist between racial groups will brand you a racist. The AMA’s Organizational Strate gic Plan to Embed Racial Justice and Advance Health Equity sneers at “discredited and racist ideas about biological differences between racial groups.” If race does not exist, as received wis dom now has it, then the racial makeup of clini cal trials should not matter.

The proponents of the systemic racism hypoth eses are making a large bet with potentially lethal consequences. In accordance with the idea that racism causes racial health disparities, they are changing the direction of medical research, the composition of medical faculty, the curriculum of medical schools, the criteria for hiring researchers and for publishing research, and the standards for assessing professional excellence. They are substi tuting training in political advocacy for training in basic science. They are taking doctors out of the classroom, clinic, and lab and parking them in front of antiracism lecturers. Their preferential policies discourage individuals from pariah groups from going into medicine, regardless of their scientific potential. They have shifted billions of dollars from the investigation of pathophysiology to the production of tracts on microaggressions.

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Martin Gurri From the end of Covid restrictions to Elon Musk’s Twitter bid to the Dobbs ruling, startling developments threaten progressives’ grip on power.

n April 18, U.S. District Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle struck down the federal requirement for wearing sur gical masks on airplanes, in airports, and while riding mass transit. Online videos showed passengers and air line staff ripping off their masks and celebrating in midflight. Given the accumulated frustration of two years of pandemic travel, the reaction was understandable. Far more remarkable was the vehemence of those opposed to the ruling. Judge Mizelle was unfit for office, they said. She was too young, at 35; she was unelected; she was a single, unrepresentative voice. Worst of all, she was an “activist Trump judge” and thus branded with the mark of the beast. Rescinding government policy—the kind of thing that American judges en gage in with abandon, and usually to progressive cheers—in this instance was condemned as a usurpation of the powers of the executive branch. Judge Mizelle had crashed an exclusive party reserved for people of higher caste. “The CDC has the capability, through a large number of trained epidemiologists, scientists, to be able to make projections and make recommendations,” said Anthony Fauci, bureaucratic czar of all things Co vid-19. “Far more than a judge with no experience in public health.” That was the heart of the matter. Fauci embodied a bureaucracy and political class that, with the active support of the media, had converted the public’s fear of infection into a principle of elite authority. Under this principle, only trained scientists can make projections and recommenda tions. The writ of government stretched as far as the boundaries of scientific truth—and those boundaries were, of course, determined by government agencies. It wasn’t just a question of specific policies like lockdowns and vaccine mandates. At stake was the restoration of the public’s habit of obe dience that had gone missing during the Trump years. By spring of this year, however, the public had shed most of its fears, as the in-flight celebrations demonstrated. Legally and psychologically, the state of emergency couldn’t last forever. Judge Mizelle merely officiated at the burial rites over the carcass of an improvised authority. The disproportion be tween a ruling about masks and the existential howl of the opposition can be

The Elite Panic of 2022

O

Three days after the mask mandate was struck down, on April 21, Barack Obama delivered the bad news about “disinformation” to a Stanford University forum on that subject. His unacknowl edged theme, too, was the crisis of elite author ity, which he explained with a history lesson. The twentieth century, Obama said, may have ex cluded “women and people of color,” but it was a time of information sanity, when the masses gath ered in the great American family room to receive the news from Walter Cronkite and laugh over I Dream of Jeannie and The Jeffersons. Those were the days when a “shared culture” could operate on a “shared set of facts.”

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The digital age has battered that peaceable kingdom to bits. Obama seemed unaware of the argument he was making, but it boiled down to this: the rise of social inclusiveness has opened the door to political chaos. As in the Judge Mizelle flap, the question, asked only tacitly, was who had the authority to make projections andOnline,recommendations.everyonedid.

People with opinions that the former president found toxic—nation alists, white supremacists, unhinged Repub licans, Vladimir Putin and his gang of Russian hackers—could say anything they wished on the Web, no matter how irresponsible, includ ing lies. A defenseless public, sunk in ignorance, could be deceived into voting against enlight enedTotalDemocrats.blindness to the other side of the story is a partisan affliction that Obama makes no attempt to overcome. At Stanford, he never mentioned the most effective disinformation campaign of recent times, conducted against Trump by the Hillary Clinton campaign, in which members of his own administration participated. He simply doesn’t believe that it works that way. Disinfor mation, for him, is a form of lèse-majesté—any insult to the progressive ruling class. How are we to deal with this “tumultuous, dangerous moment in history”? Obama was clear about the answer: we must recover the power to exclude certain voices, this time through regu

O bama’s speech, in turn, took place four days before the apparent sale of Twitter to Elon Musk—at which point elite despair, always vol atile, at last exploded in a fireball of rage and panic. Our unhappy age possesses a capacity for rhetorical grandiosity that may be unparalleled in history. Twitter in the clutches of the “supervil lain” Musk, we were warned, could trigger World War III “and the destruction of our planet.” The complaints about Judge Mizelle resembled gen teel mumblings in comparison. explained in terms of the loss of elite control—and it wasn’t the only recent example of such panic.

CITY JOURNAL24 The Elite Panic of 2022 lation. The government must assume control over disorderly online speech. First Amendment guarantees of freedom of speech don’t apply to private companies like Facebook and Twitter, he noted. At the same time, since these companies “play a unique role in how we . . . are consuming information,” the state must impose “accountabil ity.” The examples he provided betray nostalgia for a lost era: the “meat inspector,” who would presumably check on how the algorithmic sau sage is made; and the Fairness Doctrine, which somehow would be applied to an information universe virtually infinite in volume.

Obama views disinformation much as Fauci does Covid-19: as a lever of authority in the hands of the guardian class. Democracy, he tells us over and again, must be protected from “toxic content.” But by democracy, he means the rule of the righteous, a group that coincides exactly with his partisan inclinations. By toxic, he means anything that smacks of Trumpism. The former president’s speech was vague on details, but it left all options open. Who can say what pretext will be needed to expel the next rough beast from social media, tomorrow or the day after? The tone, nevertheless, was far from hope ful. The Barack Obama who spoke at Stanford plainly believed that nefarious forces have over run the information sphere and that the Web, supreme medium of American politics, is now the mother of lies. The talk of regulation, like the strangely unprogressive yearning for the twenti eth century, was a plea for dramatic intervention from a government that can’t enact an annual budget. An air of quiet desperation, I thought, clung to the performance.

Following the Obama formula, the itch to con trol what Americans can say online was equated with the defense of freedom. Granting unfettered speech to the rabble, as Musk intended, would be “dangerous to our democracy,” Elizabeth Warren said. “For democracy to survive we need more content moderation, not less,” was how Max Boot, Washington Post columnist, put it. “We In April, a U.S. district judge struck down federal mask mandates for all transit.

Two clear themes emerged from the noise surrounding this pseudo-event. The first is that the people in charge of American politics and culture are obsessed with control and hostile to any principle that might interfere with it. After expelling Trump and edging out founder Jack Dorsey, Twitter had evolved into a gated com munity for progressive-minded elites, with he retical opinions on race and Covid-19, for ex ample, ever more tightly policed. Musk, whose Twitter acquisition is not yet finalized, calls him self a “free speech absolutist.” He purchased the platform with the aim of returning it to a more “neutral” posture. For a considerable number of agitated people, the goal of neutrality was an abomination. Sud denly, “free speech” became a code for some thing dark and evil—racism, white nationalism, oligarchy, transphobia, “extremist rightwing Na zis”—all the phantoms and goblins that inhabit the nightmares of the progressive mind. Selfawareness was the first casualty of this war of words. The Washington Post , owned by multibil lionaire Jeff Bezos, solemnly preached the need for regulation “to prevent rich people from con trolling our channels of communication.”

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The imbalance between a divided nation and a monolithic culture warps our shared perception of reality. A potentially scandalous story about must pass laws to protect privacy and promote algorithmic justice for internet users,” was the bizarre formulation of Ed Markey, junior sena tor from Massachusetts. The Biden White House, never a hotbed of originality, recited the Obama refrain about holding the digital platforms “ac countable” for the “harm” they inflict on us. Honesty is a rare quality in the exercise of the will to power. For at least a generation, our elites haven’t valued anyone’s freedom but their own: but it was fascinating to hear them say it. T he second theme follows from the first. The elites are convinced that their control over Amer ican society is slipping away. They have con quered the presidency, both houses of Congress, and the entirety of our culture; yet their mood is one of panic and resentment. Trump, they are certain, will return to Twitter. There, as Obama warned, he will spew toxic clouds of disinforma tion and poison the minds of a gullible public. Attempts to enforce truth by legal means will be foiled by Trumpist judges like Mizelle. Inevita bly, Trump will be reelected, and a revanchist holocaust will ensue. To conservatives and Republicans, this rend ing of garments will appear disingenuous. After all, if you are obsessed with control, you will never get enough of it. But there’s no necessary contradiction between the two perspectives: you can be addicted to control and aware of its loss. In a vague and inchoate way, the progressive elites sense that they have power but lack authority. They live in dread of a reversal in the tide of his tory that will bestow the future to the worst kind of people and the bloody idols they worship. Much of the gloom reflected the changed polit ical climate. Starting with the onset of Covid-19 in the spring of 2020, elite fortunes took an al most magical turn. The pandemic frightened the public into docility. The Black Lives Matter riots enshrined racial doctrines that demanded con stant state interference as not only legitimate but mandatory in every corner of American culture. The malevolent Trump went down to defeat, and the presidency passed to Biden, a hollow man easily led by the progressive zealots around him. The Senate flipped Democratic.

The Elite Panic of 2022

There is a tremendous asymmetry in the align ment of ideological forces in this country. Politi cally, we are fractured: war-bands of every de nomination prowl restlessly through a zone of perpetual conflict. Electorally, we are divided.

Voting is binary: in practice, this means that the war-bands get artificially squeezed into one of two mega-tribes. On Election Day, we must choose one or the other—and, because of the dynamic among war-bands, any one of which can defect at any mo ment, majorities rest on a razor’s edge.

Culturally, however, we are monolithic. From the scientific establishment through the corpo rate boardroom all the way to Hollywood, elite keepers of our culture speak with a single, shrill voice—and the script always follows the dogmas of one particular war-band—the cult of iden tity—and the politics of one specific partisan fla vor, that of progressive Democrats.

As I write, the conventional wisdom is that the 2022 midterm elections will witness a slaughter of Democrats in both the House and Senate. With Biden’s incumbency blocking better candidates, Democratic prospects of retaining the presidency in 2024 look increasingly poor. Next Inaugura tion Day, the elite class, so recently triumphant, could find itself stranded in the political wilder ness. Yet even then, all would not be lost.

This victory parade culminated on January 6, 2021, when Trump’s outrageous behavior led to his expulsion from social media and the shun ning by polite society of anything that reeked of “insurgent” Republicanism. By Inaugura tion Day, the elites and their identitarian ideas seemed to stand unchallenged. That was never quite true—and the moment quickly passed. The burden of incumbency has crushed the Democrats. With Trump gone, they have nothing of substance to rally around. President Biden has staggered from disaster to disaster and is touching calamitous levels of un popularity. Biden inherited peace and a recover ing economy but must now deal with inflation, shortages, and a major war in Europe.

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proper informational treatment for Hunter Biden or Donald Trump. This was control at a far more elemental level—and only here, in the murky depths of truth and post-truth, can we discern the motive for this year’s meltdown over disinformation and its avatar, Musk. The elites, confronting what they believe to be a political tempest of biblical proportions, are terrified of losing their monopoly over culture as well. the son of the Democratic presidential candidate, though entirely true, can be smothered to death by Facebook, Twitter, and Google. On the other side, if you are a former Republican president, you can expect to get locked out of social media permanently, even though 74 million Americans voted for you. These decisions don’t reflect a consensus of public opinion. None of us was polled on the “Free speech absolutist” Elon Musk’s attempt to buy Twitter and return it to a more neutral posture enraged progressives.

W hether this will actually happen is beyond the reach of analysis: culture evolves in mysteri ous ways. But it may be useful to speculate on the matter. In this spirit, let me propose three strong countercurrents, already visible across the American landscape—that might, in time, threaten the cultural supremacy of the elites. The first is the intrusion of the political into the cultural. Since conservatives and Republicans are politically strong but culturally nonexistent, they will flex their political muscle to try to right the imbalance. Virginia and Florida have banned the teaching of certain progressive doctrines in public schools. When Disney, Florida’s largest employer, vocally condemned these laws, the company was punished with the removal of lo cal privileges. Should Republicans win Congress and the White House, I would expect American politics to experience a cultural Armageddon. The output of culture can’t be legislated on de mand: otherwise, the Soviet Union would have been a golden age of creativity. But raw political power can make the cost of cultural monopoly— and of idle posturing, Disney-style—unpleas antly high. A second threat to elite culture is the defec tion of the victim class. The cult of identity gen erates an insatiable demand for victim groups, which, by necessity, must become ever smaller and more marginal not only to the mainstream but also to traditional minorities. Even as the elites solidified their grip on culture, the focus of their performative outrage was drifting from civil rights and pocketbook issues to more eso teric questions of sexuality and climate justice. The new causes simply don’t resonate with His panics or blacks, whose socioeconomic interests lie in other directions. According to recent polls, significant numbers of both groups are threaten ing to abandon the Democratic Party. Progressivism is essentially a protection racket. If the elites ever lose the undisputed right to shout “Racism!” at the producers of culture, the latter will begin to fracture like the rest of the country and to look to the marketplace, rather than ideology, for inspiration. The last countercurrent may be the most po tent of all: the internal churning and disper sal of populations spurred by the pandemic

CITY JOURNAL28 The Elite Panic of 2022 and the availability of remote work. The num ber of Americans moving from their home re gions, a recent survey found, is at the highest level on record. Though conservative writers are quick to observe that this is predominantly a flight from Democratic-controlled states to Republican strongholds in the Sunbelt, the political implications strike me as unclear. Many of the newcomers, I’m guessing, will be Democrats.Farmore significant will be the impact on the culture. Migration is a powerful solvent. Millions of people are leaving home in pursuit of change. They wish to be reborn, reinvented, liberated from the dead hand of the past; pick your meta phor for personal transformation. Such sweep ing tides of humanity have always exemplified the central tenet of the American creed: that we are not captives to fate. Each wave of immigrants will begin a strange new story. To tell it, the cul ture, too, must be reborn and reinvented—and the mold of progressive dogmatism will be shat tered in the process. An unexpected blow against the progressive hold on culture came on May 2, when an anony mous leaker within the Supreme Court made pub lic Justice Samuel Alito’s draft decision to overturn Roe v. Wade and devolve the regulation of abortion to Congress and the states. By the time the formal ruling came down on June 24, traumatized elites seemed ready to repudiate the one branch of the federal government that they did not control. The Supreme Court had “burned whatever legitimacy they may still have had,” Senator Elizabeth War ren proclaimed. “They just took the last of it and set a torch to it.” Abortion on demand—an early victory over traditional culture—has become sac ramental to the left, with Roe v. Wade as holy writ. If Republican governors can align with Republi can-appointed justices to demolish this once-set tled arrangement, then every facet of the culture will be up for grabs. Justice Alito’s opinion “is not just about a woman’s right to choose. It is about much more than that,” cautioned Hillary Clinton, after the draft leaked. “Once you allow this kind of extreme power to take hold, you have no idea who they will come for next.”

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The Supreme Court decision in the Dobbs case, overturning Roe v. Wade, proved traumatic for the Left.

SUMMER 2022 29 in cultural products, elite control will be propor tionately diluted. Our cultural monolith, never popular, is today pounded by crosscurrents that undermine its so lidity. Alongside the vast progressive choir, qui eter voices—conservative, libertarian, religious, none-of-the-above—could soon arise, leaving our culture more fractured, more divided, and more representative of the nation as a whole. If that were to occur, sullen elites will point to the sale of Twitter to Elon Musk in 2022’s springtime of discontent, and remark, with typical vehe mence, that their panic was fully justified.

Are we on the cusp, then, of an anti-elite cul tural revolution? I still wouldn’t bet on it. For obscure reasons of psychology, creative minds incline to radical politics. A kulturkampf directed from Tallahassee, Florida, or even Washington, D.C., won’t budge that reality much. The group portrait of American culture will continue to tilt leftButindefinitely.that’snot the question at hand. What terri fies elites is the loss of their cultural monopoly in the face of a foretold political disaster. They fear diversity of any kind, with good cause: to the ex tent that the public enjoys a variety of choices

CITY JOURNAL30 School Choice Rising

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Steven Malanga Parental discontent with public education has sparked new momentum for alternatives.

F or school-choice supporters, 2011 is remembered as a banner year that reshaped education policy. It began with a newly installed Republicanled House of Representatives vot ing to reinstate Washington, D.C.’s Opportunity Scholarship Program, which congressional Democrats had worked to kill. A flurry of new state initiatives followed, from higher charter school caps to scholarship programs for kids leaving public schools. Be hind the burst of activity was a dramatic change in leadership in some states after the 2009 and 2010 gubernatorial elections, with school-choicesupporting Republicans gaining a net of seven governors’ seats. States with new governors, including Wisconsin, Florida, and Oklahoma, accounted for half of school-choice legislation passed that year. It has taken a decade and then a pandemic for the school-choice movement to surpass 2011’s achievements. Widespread public school clo sures and harsh health mandates in response to Covid-19—including compulsory masking of students—angered many parents, as did school districts adopting unpopular programs inspired by critical race theory, or CRT. One result: a bo nanza of new choice legislation in 2021. In all, 18 states (six more than in 2011) either instituted Several states have recently created education savings accounts that residents can use to finance alternatives to public schools—including homeschooling, which became more popular during Covid closures.

Mounting support for school choice, he observed, suggested a tide that only the educational bureau cracy was holding back.

School Choice Rising centrated too much power in the public sector, leading inevitably to an ineffective monopoly. He suggested a dramatic way to stave off decline: give money to parents and let them choose where to send their children to school. Over the years, as the performance of public schools, especially in urban districts serving low-income kids, declined, Fried man’s criticism intensified. In a 1995 Washington Post essay, he decried a system that produced “dismal results: some relatively good government schools in high-income suburbs and communities; very poor government schools in our inner cities.”

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The stakes in November are significant, with 36 governorships and thousands of state legisla tive seats up for grabs. Victories by reform ad vocates might initiate even more far-reaching efforts in 2023. No wonder optimism among choice backers has rarely been higher. Economist Milton Friedman originally pro posed the idea of school choice in a 1955 paper, arguing that the current model for governmentfinanced and administered public education con

In some early forms, school choice was bipar tisan. One of the movement’s early signature programs, vouchers introduced in Milwaukee in 1990, was the work of Democratic mayor John Norquist and Wisconsin Republican governor Tommy Thompson. Democrat Cory Booker won a 2006 Newark mayoral election stumping for al ternatives to the city’s awful public schools. Af ter Republican Chris Christie won New Jersey’s governorship in 2009, he worked with Booker to grow the number of charter schools in that city. In his 2008 election campaign, Barack Obama promised to double the federal money allocated for charters under President George W. Bush. Over time, that bipartisanship faded. One sign of a widening division emerged after Obama be came president. He increased funding for char ters modestly, but the support fell well short of his initial promises. Obama also backed away from extending the Washington, D.C. Opportu nity Scholarship Program, begun by his Repub lican predecessor Bush, which many of Obama’s Democratic allies, including teachers’ unions, opposed. The program, funding scholarships at private schools for some 2,000 low-income kids, was on the verge of being phased out by Obama, though it had proved so popular that its waiting list numbered some 9,000 students. But the 2010 midterm elections saved it, as Republicans, with a new majority in Congress, and a small group of Democrats, led by Senator Joe Lieberman, voted to renew the scholarships. That victory, combined with state election results, energized the school-choice movement. school-choice programs for the first time or ex panded offerings. Some 3.6 million students nationwide gained potential access to more education options, thanks to these moves. Several states widened initiatives originally designed to help lower-income children so that middleclass kids could also take advantage of them—an illustration of how disillusionment with public schools during the pandemic extended beyond failing urban districts. Homeschooling also re ceived a boost in some states. The broadening discontent may mark a de cisive change for school choice. Far from dissi pating after last year’s activity, the momentum seems to be building. Already in 2022, state leg islators around the country have sought to bring scholarships or charter schools into their state or to boost funding of existing programs. More rad ical proposals, like breaking troubled districts into smaller groups of charter schools, are also under consideration. Recent polls show support rising, even in Democratic-leaning states, for choice initiatives like education savings accounts (ESAs), tax credits for donors to scholarship pro grams, vouchers for special-education students, and charter schools. And the unexpected victory in Virginia last November of Republican Glenn Youngkin, who tapped into parents’ opposition to CRT in schools, has helped propel education reform as an election issue in other states this fall. “In Florida, we are taking a stand against the statesanctioned racism that is critical race theory,” Governor Ron DeSantis, up for reelection this year, said in April. “We won’t allow Florida tax dollars to be spent teaching kids to hate our country or to hate each other.”

Advocates in Wisconsin and around the nation heavily backed Milwaukee County Executive Scott Walker in his 2010 bid to become governor of the state. Opponents poured money into the campaign of Walker’s adversary, Democratic Mil waukee mayor Tom Barrett. After Walker won with nearly 53 percent of the vote, he quickly made national headlines in introducing Act 10, legisla tion that allowed employees in Wisconsin to opt out of unions and that took away the right of gov ernment labor groups to bargain collectively over wages and benefits. Almost immediately, publicsector union member ship slumped in Wis consin, shrinking from nearly 15 percent of all government workers to just 8 percent—in the process, cutting the power of labor groups, including the formidable Wisconsin teachers’Followingunion.that victory, in 2011, Walker signed legislation expanding the 20-year-old Milwaukee choice program, opening it to all students in the district and introducing a similar voucher plan in Racine. Walker would keep plugging away at school choice—in 2013, for instance, making vouchers available to qualifying families of stu dents around the state. The number of students benefiting from that effort has grown from 511 in 2014 to more than 14,500 today. Business executive Rick Scott similarly made school choice a key part of his campaign to win Florida’s 2010 gubernatorial election, after Repub lican-turned-independent Charlie Crist declined to seek reelection. “I want to offer parents a menu of options for their children, including but not limited to charter schools, private schools, home schooling and virtual schools,” Scott said. “I want to create an educational program that will allow parents to get creative in how to meet the distinc tive needs of their children.” Winning in a close, contentious race, Scott signed several key pieces of education legislation during his first year in of fice—increasing the number of special-education vouchers, making it easier for students from fail ing high schools to transfer to new schools, and raising the number of charter schools. He added other reforms in ensuing years, making Florida a school-choice leader.

The number of children using ESAs, government scholarship programs, and vouchers more than tripled over ten years.”

In Oklahoma, Republican Mary Fallin made history in 2010, becoming the state’s first female governor. One of her first-year victories was a law creating scholarships to private schools for low-income students, via a tax-credit program.

In Indiana, Governor Mitch Daniels, in his third year in office, signed in 2011 what may have been the nation’s most sweeping schoolchoice incomehelptablishingrizeinenablingonmovinglegislation—rethestatecapcharterschools,universitiesIndianatoauthocharters,andesvoucherstolow-andmiddle-studentsfi

nance their education at private schools. Arizona Republican governor Jan Brewer, meantime, signed a measure creating ESAs for special-needs students—an idea that subse quently spread to other states, including Ohio, where Governor John Kasich doubled the size of the state’s choice scholarship program and boosted the money that low-income students in Cleveland could tap for scholarships and tutor ing. In Louisiana, Governor Bobby Jindal, who had expanded vouchers and tuition tax-credit programs earlier in his administration, added a scholarship-choice initiative for special-needs kids in After2011.2011, the population of students taking advantage of school choice would rise signifi cantly. The number of children using ESAs, gov ernment scholarship programs, and vouchers more than tripled over ten years, from 200,000 in 2011 to 621,000 today. By 2021, ESAs were pro viding students with some $3.2 billion annually to spend on their K–12 education, and tax-credit scholarship initiatives distributed nearly $3 bil lionButmore.this growth has run into limits. Until the pandemic, the most credible argument for “

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Rising school choice remained that it was a way to help children from low-income families or with special needs in failing districts. Enthusiasm for more universal programs was less strong in many places. Even in Republican-leaning states, skeptics included otherwise-conservative legis lators from rural districts, who sometimes op posed educational choice on the grounds that too few alternative schools existed in their dis tricts. Moreover, as the Democratic Party under Obama, and then during the Trump years, moved further leftward, opposition to schoolchoice programs grew intransigent; bipartisan ship, such as it was, disappeared. An American Enterprise Institute analysis of some 70 state programs found that Republicans provided 2,844 votes to pass choice bills, with Democrats voting for them just 381 times. While Democrats have never been the main drivers of alternatives to centralized public school education, many choice programs are passed today without any help from the party. That makes new legislative victories for the GOP the most likely path for fu ture expansion of educational choice. T he pandemic proved a school-choice accel erant. When Covid hit, schools were among the institutions that officials shut down first, largely because we knew so little about the virus, how it spread, and who was most vulnerable. Fairly quickly, however, it became clear that children were among the least affected and that spread was not common in schools. In Europe, many school systems reopened in late spring 2020, just months after the virus struck. In America, openings were slower to happen. A late 2021 UNESCO survey estimated that France had closed its schools for only 12 weeks over the previous two years. In Spain, the number was 15 weeks; in the U.K., schools shut down for 27 weeks, and in Germany for 38. American schools had closed for 71 weeks on average.

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Florida governor Ron DeSantis (shown here signing a 2019 bill to create a new voucher program) has been a leader in pushing for parents’ educational rights, from barring the use of critical race theory in schools to expanding scholarships for poor children.

CITY JOURNAL34 School Choice

“After a year and a half, almost two years, of incredibly disrupted institutional experience that was visited on almost every family in the country, you probably shouldn’t say something like ΩParents don’t matter,≈ ” Derrell Bradford, president of 50 Can, a school-choice advocacy As time wore on, many American parents also got a lesson in the power of teachers’ unions to dictate policy. School closures varied consider ably by district and by state; one audit found that states with some of the least amount of in-per son instruction during the pandemic included California, Oregon, Washington, Illinois, New Jersey, and Massachusetts—all with strong teachers’ unions. In Chicago, the teachers’ union made national headlines by shutting down schools several times, including during the spread of the Omicron variant. Meantime, two states where unions enjoyed far less bargaining power—Texas and Florida—boasted the most in-personPervasiveinstruction.discontent with public schools man ifested itself in unprecedented enrollment de clines. In the school year starting in September 2020, enrollment fell 3 percent, according to the National Center for Education Statistics—a trend that seems to have continued for a second year, according to a National Public Radio survey of major American school districts. Early reporting in California, for example, suggests that enroll ment fell by 1.8 percent in the 2021–22 school year, on top of a 2.6 percent drop the previous year. Bigger transformations may be coming. Los Angeles school officials recently warned that the district faces an unprecedented 30 percent en rollment drop in the next decade, driven by de mographic factors and a shift toward alternative schools.Bycontrast, a Cato survey of K–12 private schools estimated that recent enrollment gains may have been as high as 7 percent. The National Alliance for Charter Schools reported a similar rise among schools that it surveyed. These num bers are no mystery. In a 2022 poll, 18 percent of parents said that they had switched schools for one of their children recently, and more than half were considering changes. More than one-third reported that the main reason they were looking elsewhere was their current school’s pandemic policies. Lurking in that poll is another explosive detail: 21 percent of parents considering a move said that they wanted more of a say in their child’s curricu

CITY JOURNAL36 School Choice Rising lum. While that sentiment can mean many things, the issue of school curriculum took on new impor tance over the last two years—above all, with the rise of critical race theory. Following the death of George Floyd in police custody in Minneapolis in May 2020, progressive educators and politicians intensified their advocacy for an instructional approach that teaches kids that systemic racism is pervasive in the United States and that whites enjoy special privileges that impede the advance ment of other racial groups. A backlash ensued. In Loudoun County, Vir ginia, parents showed up at a board of educa tion meeting to decry the racialized pedagogy. “You are now training our children to be social justice warriors and to loathe our country and our history,” one Chinese-American mother told the board. “Growing up in Mao’s China, all this seems very familiar.” Parents sued the board, claiming that the instruction was racially dis criminatory. In Wisconsin, a black retired Air Force pilot helped lead protests against CRT in schools, calling it a “pernicious ideology” and de manding curriculum transparency. In turn, some educators and government offi cials reacted to the parental concerns in ways that caused even more controversy. When parents in a Missouri school district objected to racialized instruction, a district literacy coordinator en couraged teachers to hide course materials from parents. As protests spread around the country, the National School Boards Association sent the Biden administration a letter claiming that school officials were under “immediate threat.” U.S. At torney General Merrick Garland then directed the FBI to investigate school protests as possible “do mestic terrorism,” enraging parents. In Virginia, 2021 gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe ob jected to a curriculum transparency bill because “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.” Republican Youngkin, who supported transparency, subsequently upset McAuliffe in the November election.

”

SUMMER 2022 37

Mayasuitedcouldoptionsadditionalgroups—witheducationsothattheyselectthosethatthembest.Floridaagaintookleadingrole.In2021,GovernorRon

The year has gotten off to a fast start. Ala bama’s legislature in April increased funding for education scholarships by 50 percent, to $30 bil lion. Earlier, South Dakota lawmakers expanded the state’s tax-credit scholarships. “It seems like every Republican lawmaker is sponsoring an group, observed at a Harvard conference on education policy. “There’s a lesson there about treating people poorly.” W hat followed Covid lockdowns and cur riculum fights was a burst of education legisla tion, marking another milestone in the choice movement. Eighteen states launched new choice programs or added to existing ones in 2021. The earlier emphasis had been on alternative schools like charters; but in 2021, legislation focused more on providing parents— including those in middle- and upperincome

the program. Indiana, Kentucky, Missouri, and West Virginia joined New Hampshire in creating ESAs last year. West Virginia shows how the tide has turned, post-Covid. Back in 2018 and 2019, teachers in the state mobilized to stop an expansion of charters and to vie for higher pay and better benefits. Af ter striking in both years, they had managed, for example, to water down a charter school bill so that it sanctioned just three new schools a year— this, in one of the few states at the time with no educational choice. The union also waged cam paigns against Repub lican state legislators who had stateRepublicanselectionclosingsingofsures,school-choicesponsoredmeadefeatingtwothem.ButfollowCovidschoolanda2020inwhichwonalegislaturesu

DeSantis traveled to a Catholic high school in Hialeah to sign a bill that committed about $200 million to increased schol arships for low-income students, covering 100 percent of tuition at the school of their choice, while also raising the income cap on the pro gram so that families making up to $100,000 a year could qualify. The state estimated that the expansion, which also exempts children of mili tary personnel from scholarship waiting lists, would make it possible for 60,000 more kids to take advantage of the initiative. New Hampshire illustrated the demand for such programs. Pre-pandemic, the state offered limited choice-scholarship money, funded by businesses, to low-income children; the program had a waiting list of just 30 students. Once Co vid lockdowns began, that list lengthened to 800 kids. Seeing the demand, state Republicans, who had wanted to build out school-choice offerings, passed a law in June 2021 to establish ESAs, giving families making less than $79,500 a year $4,000 to $5,000 in state money, which could be used on private school instruction, homeschool ing materials, or other services. By November, New Hampshire already had 1,600 applicants for “School curriculum has taken on withimportance—abovenewall,theriseofcriticalracetheory.

permajority, lawmakers passed a bill that of fers ESAs to students of all income categories. The expansive new initiative, like other ESAs, pays for tuition at private schools and includes money for tutoring and to purchase learning materials.Lastyear’s successes may be a prelude to fur ther gains. For one thing, government schools are flush with cash after the 2021 Biden stimulus provided K–12 education with an unprecedented $128 billion in federal money. That has helped mute criticisms that school-choice programs take money away from traditional public schools, leaving them cash-starved. In addition, polls suggest that Republican candidates are poised to make substantial gains in November elections— not just in Washington but in state and local races, too. That could supercharge school-choice initiatives in places where Democrats or moder ate Republicans have been blocking programs.

CITY JOURNAL38 School Choice

Rising education bill in this General Assembly,” an Ohio newspaper quipped in March. Among other things, Buckeye State Republicans want the state’s vouchers to cover all students. Tennessee is considering a similar bill that would expand statewide a 2019 voucher program originally designed for students in Memphis and Nash ville. In South Carolina, lawmakers want to use part of a budget surplus to create the state’s first vouchers. “The two things that I think are very distinct and loud that we’ve heard is that par ents want a voice in their children’s education,” Thousands of Milwaukee parents—including Sheila Haygood, shown here with her four daughters—have taken advantage of a voucher program in Wisconsin, one of the nation’s earliest, that pays for children in the city to attend private schools.

The last two school years may turn out to be the launching point of a transformational era in Amer ican education. School closures and other Covidrelated measures, along with the outsize power that teachers’ unions wielded over classrooms, have drawn far more parents into the schoolreform fold than ever before. No longer is public school choice an issue largely confined to poor par ents in failing districts. More important, polls and interviews illustrate that many parents are upset enough to change how they vote in order to get re form. “Interviews with New Jersey voters revealed that some Democrats’ breaks from their party last fall were neither flippant nor fleeting,” the Wall Street Journal recently observed. “Many [voters] described personal struggles to stress what they viewed as the needs of their family or community over partisanship.” The next six months will tell us just how deep those new priorities are. the head of the state’s legislative budget-writing committee said. Arizona expanded access to its state-funded scholarship program, originally designed for disabled children, to all students, allowing them to spend tax dollars on a school of their choice. In Wisconsin, Republicans have proposed breaking up the Milwaukee school system into several smaller systems. The bill is a response to a sharp drop in student performance during the pandemic. The ballot box may also prove decisive this election cycle (or next) in Michigan, where LearntogetDeVos,ofbysupporters,school-choicebackedformerSecretaryEducationBetsyaretryingtoenoughsignaturesplacetheLetKidsreferendumonthe

PHOTOZUZGA/APPETER

SUMMER 2022 39 feated another Republican endorsed by the local teachers’ union. The upheaval has also struck primary elections for the state board of educa tion, where two incumbent Republicans lost to candidates viewed as more supportive of school choice.Betsy DeVos has also waded into local bat tles, writing in the Fort Worth Star Telegram that Texas’s educational opportunities pale beside Florida’s: “Texas’ students felt this pain acutely during the pandemic, as many districts shut down and left students and families scrambling,” DeVos noted. “Add in concerns about how public schools are handling issues such as teachings on race and sex, and it’s even more remark able Texas continues to leave government, not parents, in control of education.” She is sued a challenge to public officials in the state, warning that parents “aren’t inclined to accept any more excuses as to why there’s a Texas-sized hole on the map of states that empower families to make the best educational choices.”

November ballot. DeVos and family members have contributed $400,000 to the effort, which would establish ESAs in the state. Some individual state races will be crucial. Wisconsin governor Tony Evers, a Democrat, has stymied Republican-led school-reform ini tiatives. He’s up for reelection, facing voters worried about crime, the economy, and schools. Wisconsin voters, polling suggests, strongly ap prove of the state’s school-choice program, so it’s no surprise that Republicans vying to run against Evers are talking about education reform. For mer lieutenant governor Rebecca Kleefisch, for instance, kicked off her campaign with a 30-sec ond ad lamenting school closings and pledging to expand school choice. Though Texas is considered one of the nation’s most conservative states, its record on school reform is modest. Advocates hope to change that by defeating Democrats and, in primaries, moderate Republicans opposed to school choice. Groups like the Texas Federation for Children, a PAC, have poured money into school-choice candidates’ campaigns. Already, in a special state-legislative election in Waxahachie, a can didate backed by choice advocates handily de “The last two years may turn out to be the launching point of a transformation in American education.”

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The government claims that it is trying to support the most vulnerable people, which means finding those with the most problems. But it has come to regard those problems as immutable, in need of a constant flow of fund ing. The government ignores how, by rewarding destructive behavior, it makes it harder for people to get their lives together—and thus, how it is encouraging the very problems that it claims to be solving.

Most Americans recognize that subsidizing drug abuse and crime is a terrible idea. In the 1990s, the public forced Congress to end similar, older programs. But the bureaucracy and the advocates have found ways to res urrect such policies—and expand them. For many welfare programs today, the deserving recipients are no longer those with the most setbacks or the least income but those maintaining the worst addictions and committing the most crimes. If anyone wonders why, say, Los Angeles suffers more than 2,000 homeless deaths yearly—quadruple the level of about a decade ago—and if anyone wonders why drug abuse and violence are the over whelming killers of the homeless, one reason is that the government is pay ing them to kill themselves and one another.

Subsidizing Addiction

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Today, drug abuse is not a barrier for homeless people seeking hous ing and welfare. In fact, many policies make drug abuse a prerequisite for services. Federal, state, and local programs give addicts more funds and as sistance than nonaddicts. And other favors go to homeless individuals who can prove that they’re engaging in criminal activity.

Judge Glock

I ra, an older, soft-spoken homeless man, recently went to the Down town Austin Community Court to see if he was eligible for free hous ing. One of my friends, a fellow researcher, accompanied him. Ira answered questions about his background, including about whether he had had run-ins with the law or a history of drug abuse. After the interview, the social worker at the court told Ira that his prob lems were not severe enough to get housing. Dejected, Ira joked, “If only I would have been a drug addict.” The social worker shrugged and re sponded that the community court’s housing program “takes a lot of things into consideration, but yeah.”

The government pays homeless addicts to stay on drugs and alcohol.

SUMMER 2022 41 and got it excluded from the Senate’s version. Yet Carey triumphed over Hughes in the congres sional conference committee. Soon, about 10,000 addicts were receiving SSI checks—almost all of them from New York’s welfare rolls. In its early years, the addiction program re mained limited in scope. The Social Security Ad ministration, more at ease cutting checks for the elderly than administering a complicated wel fare scheme, disfavored it. But a 1984 congres sional expansion of disability benefits, and some new court rulings, added more drug abusers to the caseload. Then, in 1989, the federal govern ment began spending tens of millions of dollars in outreach to get people on the disability rolls, focusing on the homeless, whose frequent ad diction woes provided an easy route to benefits. Soon, 250,000 addicts were on the rolls. Americans would eventually reject the experi ment. Newspaper reports told of addicts dying the day the latest SSI check arrived. An episode of NBC’s Dateline showcased a recovered alcoholic, who observed that the federal checks to addicts were “killing them on the installment plan.” CBS’s Needle exchange in Albuquerque, New Mexico: many government programs hand out free needles to anyone who asks. We have seen the lamentable effects of sub sidizing addiction before. From 1972 to 1996, the government defined addiction to drugs and al cohol as a disability, which meant that an addict could get a monthly disability check. If you could prove to a federal bureaucrat that you had a crip pling drug dependence, the government would pay you enough to feed yourself and your habit. If you got clean, it would declare you recovered and cancel your payments. The incentives, as econo mists say, were perverse. Congress created Supplemental Security In come (SSI) in 1972 to combine disability pay ments for the poor into a single program. Representative Hugh Carey, a New York Dem ocrat, was worried about his own state’s thenunique disability program, which funded heroin addicts—not because he wanted to end it but be cause he wanted federal taxpayers to pay for it. He succeeded in getting drug and alcohol addic tion included as a disability in the House of Rep resentatives’ SSI bill. Senator Harold Hughes, a Democrat from Iowa and a recovering alcoholic, understood the dangers of subsidizing addiction

The HUD mandates led a nonprofit group, OrgCode, to create the infelicitously named Vul nerability Index–Service Prioritization Decision Assistance Tool, or VI-SPDAT (pronounced veeeye spi-dat), which local governments nationwide adopted. In a typical VI-SPDAT survey for single homeless adults, a homeless person can accumu late “points” toward free housing. He can get a point if he has “run drugs for someone” or “shared a needle.” He gets another point if his drug abuse got him evicted from an apartment. There’s an other bonus point for taking medication other

CITY JOURNAL42 Subsidizing Addiction than “the way the doctor prescribed,” or selling the medication. For crime, the system awards a point if the homeless person has tried to harm someone in the last year, another for being the “alleged perpetrator of a crime,” and yet another for landing in a drunk tank, jail, or prison. If the person does enough drugs and commits enough crimes, he can get six total points. With enough time on the streets, he can get to the necessary eight points toward a free house, without show ing any other issues, apart from criminal behav ior and drug abuse. For families—almost always, single mothers— the scoring system rewards both drug and child abuse. Beyond the usual substance-use points, mothers get a point if children are frequently tru ant. They get a bonus point if their child spends two or more hours per day without any respon sible adult around. Incredibly, a mother can also get a bonus point if child protective services has removed one or more of her kids. Having “two or more planned activities each week,” such as going to the library or park, is a negative on their benefits score. A benefits system that rewards drug abuse, crime, and child abuse should collapse after public exposure, right? Yet the system came under attack only after tenuous accusations of racism. Activists argued that not enough minorities were getting into housing. Earlier this year, the creator of VISPDAT issued a mea culpa, calling for an end to the putatively racist program and for accelerating “activities to improve approaches that further pro mote racial and gender equity.” Though the Fair Housing Act forbids rewarding housing based on race, HUD in 2020 had already said that cities should change their scoring system to “dismantle embedded racism in [scoring] and prioritization processes” and find ways to get more minorities enrolled.Now,as a consequence, many states and cities provide their own scoring systems, often after adjusting the scoring to emphasize questions to which black people are, supposedly, more likely to answer yes. Under the Massachusetts “Vulner ability Assessment Tool,” a homeless individual gets four points for agreeing that “I am currently 60 Minutes ran a devastating piece featuring an addiction specialist who fretted that the federal government was “enabling” addiction and dis couraging treatment. In 1996, a recently elected Republican majority, with the help of many Dem ocrats, ended the SSI addiction program. Academics and many welfare bureaucrats were outraged. They spent years finding ways to skirt the law and restore addiction as a route to secure benefits. They have succeeded. One way that addicts have secured benefits is through new homelessness programs. The HEARTH Act, signed by President Obama in 2009, reorganized homelessness spending to emphasize giving permanent homes to the chronically home less—those on the streets for more than a year and with a disability. This was known as the Housing First philosophy. Without any seeming debate, Congress adopted the bureaucracy’s own defini tion of disability, which included “substance use disorder.”TheDepartment of Housing and Urban De velopment told local governments to devise a single ranking to determine which homeless people would get free and permanent housing. Those with “significant health or behavioral health challenges,” such as “substance use dis orders,” should get an advantage, HUD said. In a new twist on the old disability programs, the federal government also began making crimi nality a favorable condition for benefits. One of its housing-voucher programs for the homeless, HUD said, should prioritize those with “criminal records” and those with “high utilization of crisis services,” such as “jails.”

SUMMER 2022 43 using alcohol or drugs and not in recovery” but only one point if he has “been in recovery for more than one year.” The individual gets an ex tra two points if he has had an overdose or alco hol poisoning in the past 12 months. In Tacoma, Washington, the government says that the scor ing system should focus on getting housing for those with “active substance use,” “frequent crim inal justice interactions,” and, ideally, a “felony.” San Francisco asks if applicants have “ever had to use violence to keep yourself safe”; answer ing affirmatively yields bonus points for a new house. In all these places, getting into recovery or refrain ing from violence is almost fatal for an ap plicant’s chances for housing and benefits. The homeless can accelerate their ben efits by committing new crimes. Many cities have created “specialty courts” to deal with the particular problems of the addicted, the mentally ill, and the homeless. While some of these institutions use the power of mandated treatment to change lives, others have become another means to distribute funds to criminals. (See “Keeping the Mentally Ill Out of Jail,” Au tumn 2018.) If you’re homeless in Austin and commit an offense such as trying to sell drugs, you will get assigned to the Downtown Austin Community Court. According to internal docu ments, your supposed “punishment” will be “ac cess to basic needs, social services, and other resources,” so as to “address the root causes” of your situation. Your community service require ment will be met by the time you spend apply ing for welfare. Your assigned case managers will help you with those applications and also serve as chauffeurs, driving you to meetings and appointments. A single criminal act can open up various new benefits. As one news report says, the court wants to be “more of a social service organization than a court of law.” In San Francisco, similarly, the CONNECT program will let anyone charged with crimes vaguely associated with homelessness, such as “defecating in public,” “aggressive soliciting,” “drinking in public,” “fighting,” or even plain “destruction of property” to receive, instead of punishment, “supportive housing, case manage ment, medical services, family & employment programs,” and “meals service.”

T he government’s effort to give housing priority to addicts and criminals is even more damaging because the current Housing First model discourages treatment for addiction or other problems. The idea behind Hous ing First, also known as permanent sup portive housing, was that homeless people needed “low barriers” to get off the street and into housing; any mandates for treat ment, on this view, would discourage homeless applicants.

Housing First is now official federal policy, and every local homelessness group receiving federal funds has to adopt it. HUD tells these groups that mandates for addiction services “should be rare and minimal if used at all.” The head of a major nonprofit providing housing for Native Americans in Arizona told me that many of her homeless clients suffered severe alcohol problems, but the federal government upbraided her when she tried to require minimal treatment in exchange for housing. The Tacoma homelessservices center warns that housing “may not be restricted based on . . . current sobriety,” will ingness “to participate in substance abuse treat ment or counseling,” or even “goal setting” of any sort. In exchange for free housing, then, the government expects less than nothing from its clients.Some Housing First programs don’t just dis dain treatment; they actively encourage drug abuse. One Pennsylvania program, Pathways to Housing, for example, provides homeless ad dicts with free apartments (“fully furnished units chosen by the participants”)—as well as a needle exchange and necessary drug paraphernalia.

“One program gives homeless addicts free apartments—as well as a needle exchange and drug paraphernalia.”

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The federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, SAMHSA, a hot bed of activism, runs several programs designed to get benefits to addicts. One, SSI Outreach, Ac cess, and Recovery, seeks to enroll individuals with “substance use disorders” for disability. Its literature trumpets the ways its disability appli cations get flagged by the bureaucracy for quicker and more positive treatment and reports that 71 percent of its applications are approved—twice the rate of all applicants. Another SAMHSA pro gram, Grants for the Benefit of Homeless Indi viduals, tries to connect “clients who experience substance use disorders,” along with other men tal-health problems, to everything from Medicaid to SSI to food stamps. In 1990, a bipartisan majority in Congress forbade the Veterans Administration from giv ing disability to people based on their drug and alcohol addictions. But activists convinced the administration that if a “primary” injury, such as a leg wound, led to the “secondary” prob lem of drug abuse, the addiction garnered extra

It’s not surprising that housing filled with criminal addicts under zero requirements for treatment attracts problems. A San Francisco Chronicle investigation reported that in 2020–21, at least 166 people in the city’s permanent supportive housing program overdosed. This represented 14 percent of all overdoses in San Francisco during that period, even though these houses held less than 1 percent of the city’s population. One resident, Joel Yates, described what happened when he moved from a recovery house, which required sobriety, to a low-barrier supportive-housing unit: he quickly bumped into a neighbor on his floor who was smoking crack—and Yates relapsed.

The drug-abuse problem in these units has got ten so bad that the federal government awarded the largest homeless-housing provider, CSH, al most $4 million to research “overdose prevention practices in permanent supportive housing.” The outcome of the research, by the very definition of permanent supportive housing, cannot be to discourage drug abuse.

Activists, bureaucrats, and judges have begun chipping away at legal restrictions on addiction subsidies in other programs. In 2007, the federal government released an article titled “Document ing Disability for Persons with Substance Use Disorders & Co-Occurring Impairments,” which explains ways to get SSI disability payments for addicts, while avoiding the formal ban. The article claims that a profound difference exists “between the [ban on addiction funding] and scientific un

The only reasons the number of overdoses in San Francisco housing is not higher is that, first, the city doesn’t track all overdoses, and, sec ond, it has installed hallway Narcan dispensers to help revive overdosed residents. The horrific results of these programs confirm recent studies that show that the homeless placed in support ive housing are more likely to abuse drugs and alcohol than those left on the streets. And these grim findings dovetail with decades’ worth of research showing that boosting income to ad dicts increases their drug consumption and the likelihood of relapse. A free house frees addicts from lots of other expenses.

CITY JOURNAL44 Subsidizing Addiction derstanding of addiction,” which suggests that the right approach should be to provide indefinite checks to drug abusers. The article claims, without concrete evidence, that the 1990s-era cutoff led to more addicts in jail and restricted access to treat ment. It also explains how to demonstrate to wel fare officials that an applicant’s addiction was a manifestation of other, fundable disabilities, using lines such as the “patient’s cocaine use clearly ex acerbates his underlying psychiatric conditions.”

Psychiatric ills have become the easiest way to get addicts back on disability. After the cutoff of addiction funding in 1996, the percentage of SSI awards based on psychiatric diagnoses soared, to more than a third of the total, often with “cooccurring” addiction as a secondary disability. The increase in mental diagnoses absorbed al most half of the addicts who had been kicked off the rolls. In contrast to the bureaucracy’s claims of harm, a National Bureau of Economic Re search paper found “appreciable increases in la bor-force participation and current employment” for addicts removed from the rolls in the first years, but noted that, in the longer run, disability checks “returned to earlier levels, and the shortrun gains in labor market outcomes waned.”

SUMMER 2022 45 Angeles uses Medicaid and other funds to sup port the most incorrigible addicts. A homeless drug abuser in LA won’t get special help if she overdosed only twice last year—but if she had three or more overdoses, she can get free “trans portation, childcare support, establishment of benefits,” as well as assistance in receiving “SSI, SSDI, CAPI, CalFresh, and General Relief” funds. These programs are in addition to the general cash provision for the homeless, which itself has deleterious consequences. Many cities like New York and San Francisco phased out such cash programs about 20 years ago (the latter under then-mayor Gavin Newsom’s Care Not Cash pro gram), due to concerns about the money fueling alcohol and drug abuse, but they’ve now come back into vogue. One “old-school junkie” told for mer California gubernatorial candidate Michael Shellenberger about all the funds he gets to abuse drugs and live in the City by the Bay—over $600 in cash and $200 in food stamps a month. “I get paid to be homeless in San Francisco.” The “harm reduction” approach to dealing with addiction began with the simple idea that clean benefits. The 2001 federal court case of Allen v. Principi argued that substance abuse was often a sign of a psychiatric disorder and thus should be positive evidence of disability when award ing benefits. Now, despite earlier, broad-based concerns that the government was feeding veter ans’ addictions, the government is again paying for drug and alcohol abuse among a vulnerable population.Inlinewith the medicalization of every aspect of modern life, federal Medicaid dollars for in digent health care are now used for housing the homeless, and specifically for drug addicts. Con necticut and Florida use Medicaid funds to help those with both mental health and addiction dis orders find a place to live and help them keep their current housing. Florida says that its goal is to keep people with substance-abuse disorders in “sustainable housing through improved sup ports.” North Dakota says that its special Med icaid program for the disabled provides housing support to those with “alcohol abuse,” “cannabis abuse,” “cocaine abuse,” “hallucinogen abuse,” “opioid abuse” and the all-encompassing “other stimulant abuse,” as long as these are accompa nied by a “drug-induced mood disorder.” Los Deserving recipients in many social-services programs are no longer those with the most setbacks or the least income but those with the worst addictions and who commit the most crimes.

CITY JOURNAL46 Subsidizing Addiction much of that spending went to general lifestyle support. An academic study of an unnamed, government-funded Bronx harm-reduction cen ter noted that it offered free food, clothing, back packs, and MetroCards to attract “clients” from three “competing” needle programs. As the study noted, the center’s funding was “based upon the volume of individuals served.” The center paid regular income to “peer” counselors—individuals with a current or past drug addiction who advise other addicts, though what a current drug abuser could tell another, besides how to score, was un clear. Those addicts passed over for the coveted peer positions told the academic researcher that they would “take [their] talents” to other needle programs. The center also became a useful place to fence stolen goods, with employees purchas ing some of the contraband themselves, the study noted.Some cities have found even more direct ways to subsidize addiction. San Francisco famously provided alcohol, marijuana, and cigarettes to homeless addicts when it put them in free ho tel rooms during the Covid lockdowns. The city also laid out in the hotel lobbies the usual as sortment of free needles, rubber tourniquets for injections, cookers for heroin, and glass pipes for methamphetamine and crack. The city said that these supplies were necessary to keep the homeless in the hotels and protect them from the effects of Covid. And it worked: San Fran cisco did not see a single homeless death from Covid in the pandemic’s first year. Yet overall homeless deaths were double any previous year in the city’s history; more than 80 percent were substance overdoses. Over the past century, elites have tried to rede fine all crimes and all social problems as illnesses. The goal has been to remove any sense of personal responsibility and to attribute every problem ei ther to biology or society. Addiction, of course, is an illness. It hijacks the brain and turns a human into a vessel seeking just one thing: a fix. But indulging that addiction is a choice. It must be if we are going to encour age addicts to take steps toward their own re covery. Twelve-step programs require a person needles could prevent the spread of blood-borne diseases such as HIV or hepatitis among intra venous drug users. But it has morphed into yet another source of addiction subsidies. Earlier harm-reduction activists backed needle ex changes, where addicts brought in dirty needles to trade in for clean ones. But now, government programs hand out dozens of free needles to any one who asks. Cities like Seattle and San Francisco moved to providing free glass pipes for meth or free foil and cookers for heroin, usually focused (again) on the homeless. The putative health ben efits of new glass pipes and foil have never been clearlySinceexplained.1988,federal law has prohibited the funding of needles for illegal drugs. But in 2015, Congress allowed funding for all aspects of needle programs except the needles them selves. Instead of the simple needle exchanges that some politicians wanted to support, the bu reaucracy recommended supporting programs that offered as many free needles as possible. The Centers for Disease Control and Preven tion says that “although restrictive syringe dis tribution approaches such as 1:1 exchange may seem desirable,” they are “ not recommended.” Instead, they note that providing people up to 30 syringes a month may be helpful. President Biden’s stimulus act provided funds for many types of “syringe service programs and other harm reduction” initiatives without any of the usual restrictions, and that led the bureaucracy to try to maximize free drug supplies. SAMHSA offered a $30 million grant program to distribute, among other harm-reduction tools, “smoking kits/supplies” for those smoking crack and meth amphetamine. The grant prioritized smoking-kit distribution in poor and minority communities. What was once a wild conspiracy theory about the U.S. government encouraging crack use among African-American city-dwellers is now a publicly stated policy. The harm-reduction programs have extended their ambit to sustaining anyone with an ad diction. According to financial statements, St. Ann’s Corner of Harm Reduction, in the Bronx, received over $3.2 million in government grants and contracts in 2020. Though this was slightly more than it spent on all its programs that year, IMAGESTIMES/GETTYANGELESSEIB/LOSAL

SUMMER 2022 47 dicts to live together in small, suburban houses and help one another on the path to recovery. All clients in Oxford House must work and stay clean. Conditioning more housing and services on sobriety would be the best possible incentive for personal change. But such programs remain theInexception.the1990s, the public learned about destruc tive programs that funded drug abuse, and it struck back with laws and prohibitions. Yet new programs, often sneaked in by the bureaucracy, have reversed this trend and instead are encour aging what the law forbids. Then and now, most Americans understand the obvious: the govern ment shouldn’t be supporting drug abuse and crime. The taxpayer should not feed such habits or make it harder for addicts to get clean. In a bet ter world, the government would help damaged individuals to move ahead with their lives. But today, as Ira and other homeless people know, the government is helping them kill themselves on the public dime. to “make a decision” to stop abusing substances. Yet the government ignores choice and pretends that continued self-abuse is inevitable. It enables addiction instead of fighting it. We know that current policies don’t work. Drug overdoses have risen 500 percent in just two decades. More than 100,000 Americans over dosed last year, the vast majority from opioids. More drug abuse has been accompanied by more violence and crime, as well as increases in home lessness, especially on the street. Many cities have seen a doubling in annual homeless deaths just over the last five years. Earlier fears about heroin or the crack epidemic pale in comparison with the modern blight. Thankfully, some efforts promote better deci sions. The bipartisan 2018 Support for Patients and Communities Act created the Recovery Housing Program, which houses sober individu als, recovering from an addiction, for up to two years. The program should bolster nonprofits like Oxford House, which allows recovering ad A Los Angeles center for “harm reduction”—an approach that began on a principle of prevention but has morphed into yet another source of addiction subsidies

CITY JOURNAL48 The Green War on Clean Energy

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James B. Meigs Radicaltechnologiesfightenvironmentalistsagainsttheverythatwouldcutcarbonemissions.

I n 2018, a radical new environmental group emerged in the United Kingdom. The loose-knit organization called itself Ex tinction Rebellion, or “XR,” and aimed to raise awareness of climate change through disruptive protests. XR activists staged dramatic “die-ins” and shut down London bridges and metro stations. The group’s leaders warned that climate change could “kill six billion people this century” and called for Britain to halt the use of fossil fuels virtually overnight. Like the Occupy Wall Street movement that inspired it, XR disdains detailed policy prescriptions. But its members generally scorn our modern, energy-intensive lifestyles, while also rejecting nuclear power and other high-tech approaches to reducing emissions. To save the planet, many believe, capitalism itself needs to be overthrown. One of the group’s most charismatic spokes people was Zion Lights. The daughter of In dian immigrants and a mother of two, Lights was a longtime environmental advocate. (The Telegraph once dubbed her “Britain’s greenest mum.”) But she found herself hard-pressed to defend XR’s more extreme claims. Hoping to understand the issues better, Lights returned to college, where she studied the debates sur rounding nuclear power and related themes. “I started to realize that almost everything I had believed was wrong,” she told me, when I inter viewed her recently for a podcast. When Lights tried to discuss her new perspective with her XR Activists from Extinction Rebellion demonstrate at Munich Re’s headquarters, demanding the end of fossil fuels.

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The Green War on Clean Energy that threatens to “end human life as we know it.”

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Over the past half-century, their movement has scored world-changing victories in reducing air and water pollution, preserving wilderness, and protecting wildlife. But when it comes to fight ing global warming, the issue that most environ mentalists now see as the planet’s paramount threat, the green-policy elite has arguably done more harm than good. That claim certainly sounds counterintuitive, but evidence shows that some of the activists’ favored policies—especially the single-minded focus on wind and solar facilities for making electricity—have been marginally effective, at best. Other policies, such as replacing gasoline and diesel fuel with biofuels made from plants, actually increase emissions. One of the envi ronmental movement’s biggest self-described victories has been its long-running war against nuclear power, the only technology that dem onstrates the capability to reduce dramatically a nation’s carbon footprint. Today, some green activists are fighting against the next generation of climate-friendly technologies, including ad vanced nuclear reactors and systems to capture and store the carbon in fossil fuels, or even scrub it from the atmosphere. Call it the green war on clean energy. Extremists like Extinction Rebellion aren’t the only ones with misguided ideas about how best to reduce emissions. Last November, heads of state and representatives from global NGOs, financial firms, and energy companies gathered in Glasgow for COP26, the United Nations climate summit. Speakers unleashed their most impassioned lan guage. “We are digging our own graves,” said UN Secretary-General António Guterres. British prime minister Boris Johnson compared the planet to James Bond, “strapped to a doomsday device”

Nonetheless, global emissions do appear to be peaking. The more apocalyptic scenarios that some activists forecasted are unlikely to happen. In fact, most developed nations are slowly reduc ing their carbon footprints, though not at the ag gressive rates they’ve promised. Ironically, these reductions in emissions often occur not because of the policies advocated at climate conferences but despite them. Ted Nordhaus, founder of the eco-modern ist Breakthrough Institute, is skeptical of the “global climate-industrial complex” on display at COP26. “A climate movement less in thrall to fever dreams of apocalypse would focus more on balancing long-term emissions reductions with growth, development, and adaptation in the here and now,” he writes. The extremists of Extinction Rebellion and similar groups de mand “system change,” by which they mean dis mantling free markets, creating alternatives to existing democratic institutions, and deliberately reducing living standards through a process they call “degrowth.” The COP26 technocrats don’t advocate anything that radical, but they, too, en vision a more centralized, less growth-oriented model for society. Under the COP26 paradigm, entire sectors of the economy—energy, trans portation, manufacturing, housing—would un dergo wrenching transformations. According to this vision, markets are not adequate to manage the necessary transi tions. Instead, change must be driven through colleagues, she said, “I found there was this im mense, immense resistance.”

Despite the catastrophism, conference attendees mostly stuck to a well-worn playbook. Govern ments promised to boost spending on renewable energy and restrict use of oil and gas. Financial or ganizations agreed to international guidelines that penalize fossil-fuel investments and favor greenenergyWhileprojects.some countries promised to set even stricter targets for future emissions, China, the world’s biggest greenhouse-gas emitter, resisted demands to curtail its heavy coal consumption and pledged only to start reducing emissions sometime in the indefinite future. As the Associ ated Press noted, “the high aspirations and apoc alyptic imagery at the start of the summit were soon met with a cold dose of reality.”

Ultimately, Lights had to ask herself a pain ful question: “What if you’d dedicated most of your life to trying to save the planet,” she wrote in Quillette last year, “but then you real ized that you may have actually—potentially— made things worse?” It’s a question that more environmentalists should grapple with today.

SUMMER 2022 51 government regulation, supranational agree ments between industry and NGOs, financial controls, and other top-down measures. Certain technologies—electric vehicles, say, or roof top solar panels—must be heavily subsidized, while others—internal combustion engines, gas stoves—should be penalized or even banned. The use of fossil fuels should be curtailed by any means necessary, including pushing up prices by restricting drilling and pipeline construction. All policies must be geared to achieve “net-zero emissions” by 2050. This is a stagger ingly difficult goal, which would touch every aspect of mod ern life. Yet net-zero advocates too often reject or neglect the very policies most likely to help the world achieve it. As Nordhaus recently wrote in The Economist , the activist community “insists upon re-engineering the global economy without many of the technologies that most tech nical analyses conclude would be necessary, including nuclear energy, carbon capture and carbon removal.” In other words, green elites want to upend the lives of billions but show sur prisingly little interest in whether their programs work. In some parts of the world, the climate lobby has already managed to enact policies that raise prices, hinder growth, and promote po litical instability—all while achieving only mar ginal reductions in emissions. The problem starts with the movement’s blan ket opposition to fossil fuels. For example, most environmentalists viscerally oppose fracking and natural-gas pipelines. The Biden administration moved to curtail U.S. gas drilling within days of taking office (one reason U.S. gas prices have roughly tripled since Biden became president). But in fact, since natural gas emits nearly 50 per cent less carbon dioxide than coal, it is one of our best tools to bring down emissions in the short term, while also benefiting the economy. Alex Trembath, deputy director of the Breakthrough Institute, writes: “The U.S. fracking boom of 2008 onward tempered inflation, created hundreds of thousands of jobs during the worst recession in a century, and, yes, reduced carbon emissions by displacing much dirtier coal-fired power.”

“Some greens are fighting against the next generation of clean technologies, including carbon capture.”

Eco-pragmatists like Trembath see natural gas as a “bridge fuel” that can ease the transition to lower-carbon energy sources. (Soon, carbon cap ture and storage [CCS] technology could make it feasible to harness the energy in gas while put ting much less carbon into the atmosphere.) But most emissions,helpandsolarsivelyingasnaturalweactivistsenvironmentalarguethatmustphaseoutgasasrapidlypossible,replacitalmostexcluwithwindandpower.Windsolarpowercanreducecarbonaslong as they are part of a mix of energy sources. But renewable-energy champions tend to gloss over the huge challenges of trying to power the grid primarily with such on-again, off-again energy sources.People understand, of course, that wind and solar facilities make power only when the wind blows or the sun shines. But even experts some times underestimate what a complex challenge this “intermittency” presents to grid operators. Since most wind and solar facilities sit idle most of the time, renewable-power producers have to overbuild production capacity massively. Renew able power also requires a whole new network of transmission lines in order to shuttle power from, say, sunny areas to cloudy ones. Renewable back ers promise that imminent breakthroughs in bat tery technology will make intermittency a minor problem. In reality, while batteries can help grid operators manage short peaks in demand, they remain far too expensive to serve as a long-term backup. All these challenges mean that, while the “all-renewable” power-grid activists’ demand isn’t technically impossible, it would cost far more—and take far longer to build—than more balanced approaches.

The Green War on Clean Energy able, emissions-free, and capable of being scaled up to meet growing demand. But decades of an tinuclear activism have eroded public support. After the Three Mile Island and Chernobyl ac cidents, the U.S. and other countries imposed regulatory burdens that go far beyond legitimate safety needs. In most Western nations, nuclearplant construction has largely ground to a halt. But what if nuclear research and plant con struction had continued to advance at the pace seen in the 1970s? One Australian researcher concluded: “Had the early rates continued, nu clear power could now be around 10 percent of its current cost.” That cheap, clean power would have made the use of coal—and, in many cases, even natural gas—unnecessary for power gener ation. In turn, this hypothetical nuclear revolu tion would have eliminated roughly five years’ worth of global emissions from fossil fuels and prevented more than 9 million deaths caused by air pollution. Most green activists today would see such numbers as nothing short of a miracle. Yet it was environmentalists who led the cam paign to halt the rollout of the cleanest, and greenest, of all power sources. When Lights studied the debates around en ergy and climate, she came to the same conclu sions that other open-minded environmentalists have reached: that fears of nuclear accidents and waste are wildly overblown; that the advantages of renewable energy have been oversold; and that policies limiting the supply of energy inflict heavy costs on the poor. In 2021, Lights decided to split with her radical green allies, launching Emergency Reactor, a group that advocates for nuclear power and takes a more positive stance toward energy in general. “Wealthy countries need reliable, non-carbon energy, and poorer countries need clean energy to develop,” she writes on the group’s website. Lights isn’t alone. As I have written in these pages, a growing number of pragmatic envi ronmentalists now embrace nuclear power. (See “The Nuclear Option,” Winter 2019.) Tech gurus, including Bill Gates, are investing in next-generation nuclear startups. A handful of Despite those obstacles, most green activists regard wind and solar power as something close to a climate panacea. So one would assume that environmental groups are lobbying hard to get these projects approved and built. Yet environ mental activists often lead the way in opposing the construction of renewable-energy projects— especially when they’re slated to be built in their own backyards. In the U.S., environmental groups are currently fighting solar installations in Massachusetts, California, Nevada, Florida, and many other states. Wind-turbine farms face even more opposition: since 2015, more than 300 U.S. communities have rejected or restricted wind projects, according to a database main tained by energy author Robert Bryce. It’s no wonder many environmentalists are conflicted: the zero-carbon energy sources they demand can take a terrible toll on the wildlife and open spaces they love. California’s iconic Al tamont Pass wind farm, for example, kills thou sands of birds yearly, including an estimated 75 to 110 golden eagles. Solar farms threaten endangered desert tortoises and other wildlife. Because of their low energy density, wind and solar developments require enormous tracts of land, compared with other energy sources.

T

he biggest roadblock that the green move ment has thrown in front of cutting emissions is its long-standing opposition to nuclear energy. Leading environmental groups, including the Si erra Club, the National Resources Defense Coun cil, and the League of Conservation Voters, have been fighting nuclear power since the 1970s. “When you are in the environmental movement, you are just automatically anti certain things,” Zion Lights told me. “And nuclear power is the biggest bogeyman.”

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New York’s now-shuttered Indian Point nuclear power plant sits on just 240 acres. Replacing its power entirely with wind power would require more than 500 square miles of turbines. That’s a massive amount of land and habitat lost to en ergy production.

Even after decades of research into alternative energy, nuclear power remains the only proven means to produce electricity that is at once reli

IMAGESBURGE/GETTYM.C.

Wind-power technologies kill thousands of birds yearly, like this red-tailed hawk.

As Wagner says, green hostility toward nuclear power harmonizes with broader progressive political views. Some activists clearly state that their real enemy isn’t carbon but the market economy. In her 2014 book This Changes Every thing: Capitalism vs. the Climate , Canadian writer Naomi Klein calls climate change “the best argu ment there has ever been for changing . . . the rules of capitalism.”

Even moderate environmentalists often ex press similar, if less explicit, sentiments. These include the suspicion that technology is some how antithetical to nature, a fear that markets are fatally corrupted by greed, and a vague yearning for a more natural way of life. This faintly Rous seauian worldview leads to certain policy prefer ences: organic farms are better than “industrial agriculture”; collectivist solutions are superior to money-grubbing markets; growing biofuels is preferable to drilling for oil and gas; and so on. In this mind-set, wind and solar power (despite requiring plenty of exotic materials and tech nologies) intuitively seems like the antithesis of scary, high-tech nuclear energy. What could be more natural than harvesting the wind and the sun? Not all climate advocates embrace this kind of fuzzy thinking, of course. But an alarming number of lawmakers, NGOs, and even heads of state continue to favor utopian sentiments over economic and engineering reality. Europe offers a vivid example of this phenom enon. In 2000, Germany announced its ambition to become the world leader in developing renew able energy, while renouncing fossil fuels and nuclear power. As noted environmental scientist Vaclav Smil writes, this Energiewende policy “is rooted in Germany’s naturalistic and romantic tradition.” It reflects the socialist influence of the Green Party as well as the German public’s environmental groups have softened their op position to the technology. And some political leaders—notably, France’s Emmanuel Macron and President Biden—have embraced nuclear energy. As part of its $1 trillion infrastructure plan, the Biden administration is rolling out a $6 billion program to help save endangered U.S. nuclear plants. After years of discouraging investments in nuclear power, the European Union recently moved to include nuclear in its “Green Taxonomy” of technologies that it con siders compatible with net-zero goals. Recently, the global energy crunch caused by the war in Ukraine gave nuclear supporters another boost. Nuclear advocates still face an uphill battle. Most leading environmental groups continue to oppose the technology. The Capital Research Center estimates that American nonprofits cam paigning against nuclear power “spent at least $1.1 billion in 2018.” And official support for nuclear often comes with strings attached. The EU’s inclusion of nuclear in its Green Taxonomy, for example, includes tight time limits and other restrictions calculated to scare off investors. So despite hints of progress, the nuclear in dustry remains in a vise: on one side, nuclear plants face pressure from activists and politi cians; on the other, they are financially squeezed by renewable energy, which receives compara tively massive subsidies. Not surprisingly, U.S. nuclear facilities are closing at a rate of roughly one per year, with several plants likely to shut down over the next five years. And groups, in cluding the Union of Concerned Scientists, have begun lobbying against regulatory approval for the next generation of designs, including small modular reactors and other concepts. Despite ample evidence that these advanced reactors will be dramatically safer than today’s (already quite safe) nuclear plants, UCS opposes them— partly because their small size and low risk “could facilitate placement of new reactors in BIPOC [black, indigenous, people of color] com munities.” The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Com mission recently pleased these critics when it re jected an application from Oklo Power—one of the most promising nuclear startups—to build a test version of the company’s groundbreaking micro-reactor.

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The Green War on Clean Energy W hat makes nuclear power such a lightning rod for environmentalists? Climate economist Gernot Wagner notes that the modern envi ronmental movement “came of age against the backdrop of the global threat of all-out nuclear war.” He writes: “Take this anti-war base, add to it a hefty dose of anti-corporatism, a helping of anti-capitalism, and a pinch or two of Ωsmall is beautiful,≈ and most environmentalists’ attitude toward nuclear power becomes a fait accompli .”

SUMMER 2022 55 electricity from other states, and even permit the use of diesel generators for grid power. Not sur prisingly, California consumers now pay about 80 percent more for electricity than most Ameri cans. But the state’s carbon emissions have fallen only about 5 percent since 2000, roughly on par with the national average. Nonetheless, for years, California leaders re mained committed to retiring Diablo Canyon, the state’s last operating nuclear power plant, in 2025. Fortunately, Governor Gavin Newsom is having second thoughts. But the arguments advanced against the plant show the quasireligious nature of some renewable-en ergy advocacy. After experts pointed out that keeping Diablo running would pre vent an 11 percent spike in carbon emis sions and “save rate payers billions of dollars,” the Los Angeles Times responded with an editorial arguing that Cali fornia should close the plant regardless. There are “better ways to fight climate change,” the paper said. The plant’s closure should “serve as an impetus for California to accelerate the shift to renewable energy.” In other words, the paper contended, instead of taking the path most likely to result in lower emissions and lower costs, the state should go the dirtier, more expensive route to spur itself to even more virtuous action. As economist Wagner notes, “the real fear for most opposed to nuclear power appears to be that supporting it is a distraction from rapid solar and wind deployment.” For environmentalists of this stripe, getting to net-zero seems more like an abstract moral crusade than a genuine effort to cut Evenemissions.mainstream environmental groups sometimes seem strangely biased against poli cies that might bring down energy prices or help the economy. In New York’s Hudson Valley, the environmental nonprofit Riverkeeper has an impressive history of protecting the Hudson River habitat. But it also spearheaded the cam paign to close Indian Point, the nuclear plant antipathy to all things nuclear. Two decades later, Germany has spent well more than 500 billion euros on wind and solar infrastructure, biofuels, and other initiatives. Nonetheless, Energiewende is an environmental, economic, and geopolitical train wreck. By 2019, Smil notes, the country’s total share of energy produced by fossil fuels had fallen from—wait for it—84 percent to 78 percent. Despite its huge commitment to renew able energy, Germany hasn’t managed to reduce its carbon emissions any faster than the U.S. has. The country still mines and imports mountains of dirty coal. Even before the Ukraine crisis, German con sumers were paying the highest electricity rates in Europe. And shortfalls in domes tic energy production have made Germany desperately depen dent on coal—and on natural gas from Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Faced with that cascade of undesirable out comes, you might think that Germany’s leaders would reassess. But no. In January 2022—as win ter set in, energy anxieties mounted, and Putin amassed his troops—Germany closed three of its last six remaining nuclear plants. The rest are scheduled to shut down by the end of the year. At that point, Germany will have eliminated in a single year 12 percent of its total electrical gen erating capacity—all safe, reliable, and carbonfree. The action was “applauded by environmen talists,” wrote the New York Times . The biggest winner in this debacle has been Putin. In the U.S., California has followed a similar route. In 2018, Governor Jerry Brown signed into law a mandate to create “an entirely carbon-free energy grid” by 2045. The plan isn’t going well. Replacing the reliable baseload electricity from fossil fuels and nuclear plants with fluctuating wind and solar power has made the state’s power grid notoriously unreliable. To avoid blackouts, California has had to allow gas plants to exceed normal emissions limits, import coal-generated “Relying on fluctuating wind and solar energy has made California’s power grid unreliable.notoriously ”

The Green War on Clean Energy that provided 25 percent of the electricity in the New York City region. Advocates for clos ing the plant promised that renewable energy would easily replace the power lost. In addition to new wind and solar projects, they pointed to a planned underground transmission line that would carry renewable hydro power from Que bec to the metro region. Then-governor Andrew Cuomo promised that the closure would result in “no new carbon emissions.”

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But when Indian Point shut down for good in April 2021, all the wind and solar facili ties in New York State combined were produc ing less than a third of the power churned out by that single plant. So, just as in other regions where nuclear plants have closed, grid opera tors turned to natural gas to fill the gap. State wide grid-related CO2 emissions shot up by 15 percent. Analysts warned of potential blackouts. Electricity prices rose, too, jumping 50 percent for New York City residents. Then Riverkeeper executed a brazen maneuver: with Indian Point now closed, the organization began lobbying New York’s Public Service Commission against the proposed power line from Canada that it had previously supported. The group announced that it had “the courage to take a second hard look at this project.” Many clean-energy advo cates were outraged. Jesse Jenkins, a respected energy analyst at Princeton, took to Twitter to say that he found it “incredibly frustrating to see environmental groups who allegedly see climate change as a Ωcrisis≈ regularly and actively oppos ingRiverkeeper’ssolutions.”

about-face reveals a troubling contradiction at the heart of the climate move ment. Green technocrats say that we must “electrify everything,” shifting cars and trucks, home heating, industrial processes, and more to electric power instead of fossil fuels. In a world of ample, cheap electricity, that process might be feasible, even desirable. But while activists support renewable energy in theory, they con sistently oppose the infrastructure needed—not just to produce that energy but to deliver it to consumers. For example, a mostly renewablepower grid would require hundreds of thou sands of miles of new high-voltage transmis sion lines. Nonetheless, environmental groups have filed lawsuits against a proposed line de signed to carry wind power from New Mexico to Arizona and a similar transmission corridor linking Iowa and Wisconsin. Following a Sierra Club campaign against the project, Maine vot ers recently rejected a planned power line de signed to deliver Canadian hydropower to New England.Thegreen economy that activists envision would also entail a massive network of highspeed rail lines to help replace air travel. But NIMBY activists are fighting every mile of California’s planned high-speed rail system. That project’s estimated costs have ballooned to $100 billion, with no reasonable expectation that it will ever be completed. Electric vehicle batteries and components for wind and solar facilities will require millions of tons of min erals: lithium, cobalt, rare-earth metals, and more. Maine has one of the world’s richest de posits of lithium, but a 2017 law makes min ing in that state virtually impossible. Activists are fighting other proposed mines in Nevada, North Carolina, and other states. In Nevada’s Black Rock Desert, habitués of the Burning Man festival are suing to stop a proposed geo thermal energy project. Greenpeace and other groups oppose research into technologies that can capture and store the carbon in fossil fuels, or even strip CO 2 from the atmosphere. Crit ics worry that CCS technologies could “prolong demand for fossil fuels,” according to Inside Climate News The list goes on. Time and again, climate vision aries propose sweeping transformations of our way of life in the name of reducing emissions. But then they fail to build—or even actively oppose— the infrastructure necessary to make that dream a reality.Environmental radicals like the members of Extinction Rebellion might say that this is a good thing: our society is too rich, too energyhungry; we must be taught a lesson in austerity. Even supposed moderates sometimes echo that message. Conservatives never forgot Obama en ergy secretary Steven Chu’s 2008 comment that “we have to figure out how to boost the price of

SUMMER 2022 57 are exploring partnerships with U.S. companies to build small modular reactors. In Japan, Prime Minister Fumio Kishida wants to accelerate the reopening of nuclear plants that the country mothballed after the 2011 Fukushima disaster. Energy pragmatism is in the air.

Today’s economic and geopolitical crises may be an opportunity for climate activists to dial down the catastrophism and focus on policies that actually reduce carbon—without destroy ing our standard of living. For decades, radicals and even mainstream environmentalists have spoken the language of deprivation. Zion Lights and her eco-pragmatist allies prefer to argue for abundance. We don’t need to punish the public to save the planet, she says. The key is simply to “build a lot of clean energy.” In contrast to the angry, anarchic protests launched by Extinction Rebellion, her group Emergency Reactor recently held a series of small, cheerful demonstrations around London. Their aim: to educate the public about nuclear power. “People are keen to engage, get involved, and have thanked us for focusing on solutions instead of the negative aspects of climate change,” she said. When a former green radical becomes an optimistic environmental pragmatist, that’s a sign of progress. gasoline to the levels in Europe.” Even as he tries to reassure Americans about today’s strato spheric gas prices, President Biden optimistically describes the price surge as part of the “incred ible transition” away from fossil fuels.

“Only when the tide goes out do you discover who’s been swimming naked,” Warren Buffet once said. Russia’s Ukraine invasion slashed Europe’s energy supplies and exposed the risks of relying too heavily on wind and solar power. Some experts warn of blackouts, gas shutoffs, and economic chaos. Now European leaders are scrambling to get their hands on any type of fossil fuel they can. Germany is reopening coal mines and has asked the EU to roll back plans to limit investments in overseas fossil fuel projects. But despite the growing crisis, Germany refuses to consider reopening its recently retired nuclear facilities, or to keep its last three plants running. Belgium, which gets half of its electricity from nuclear power, also aims to close its nuclear plants by 2025. Other countries are taking a broader approach. France’s Macron had already announced a pro gram to build up to 14 new nuclear reactors. The Netherlands is making plans to build two new nuclear power stations. Several other countries After two decades of heavy investments in renewable energy, Germany has only slightly reduced its share of power produced by fossil fuels—and it still mines and imports mountains of dirty coal.

The Influencer

Charles Murray in his office in 1994, the year he published The Bell Curve, coauthored with Richard Herrnstein

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Robert VerBruggen Charles Murray’s social science is alwaysprovocative,sometimesusuallycontroversial,andsignificanttothenationaldebate.

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harles Murray’s 1984 book Losing Ground was the type of consequential study rarely seen anymore. Culminating in a radical “thought experiment” of eliminating the social safety net, it captured public atten tion, drew academic fire, laid the groundwork for the welfare reforms of the following decade, and launched a career in which Murray would provoke—and shape—debates over IQ, genetics, class, race, education, and more. As both welfare policy and racial disparities return to promi nence in our political debate, it’s worth looking back on that career. A mix of preparation and happenstance catapulted him into the closest thing to superstardom to which a social scientist can“Theaspire.whole thing about Ronald Reagan Ωshredding the safety net≈ had been a big deal,” Murray recently recalled from his home in Burkittsville, Maryland. The president had pop ularized the term “welfare queen” and tightened some welfare rules by signing a 1981 bill. And by that point, Murray had some informed thoughts about the safety net.

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osing Ground is the story of how things were supposed to improve after the 1960s but didn’t. Disadvantaged young women were having chil dren out of wedlock, disadvantaged young men were dropping out of the labor force, crime was up, and education had gone to hell. Reading the book today, one is struck by how far social science has come. Nowadays, pov erty data are available at the click of a mouse; back then, Murray spent hours in the Library of Congress and the reading room at the Census Bureau’s facilities in Suitland, Maryland, often settling for less-than-ideal data. But the book is gripping, anyway, using a mix of graspable numbers and commonsense storytelling to make itsAspoint.Murray noticed, the official federal pov erty rate fell markedly in the 1950s and 1960s, but progress faded in the 1970s. However, the official measure is an odd statistic; in determin ing how much money a person has to live on, it counts cash income, including welfare ben efits, but excludes other sources of government aid like food stamps. So Murray also presented Then pushing 40, Murray had already lived quite a life. He hailed from Newton, Iowa, where his father was a Maytag executive—and where Murray had taken on identities both as a smart misfit who played chess by mail and as a pool-hall prankster in what he calls a “happy, uneventful childhood.” He’d earned a history de gree from Harvard and a political science Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. And he’d spent years evaluating government programs.Murray joined the Peace Corps after getting his B.A., heading to Thailand as a volunteer with the Village Health and Sanitation Project, which promoted modern sanitation to rural Thais. He worked for two years in that role and another four doing research on rural develop ment. An insurgency was under way, and the Thai and U.S. governments were funding such work to win over the people. (“No, I was not a covert CIA agent,” Murray told me, referring to an allegation one finds online.) It was in Thai land that Murray learned how government can backfire, as well-meaning people wade into af fairs they don’t understand and state-provided aid infantilizes formerly self-sufficient citizens. It was also in Thailand that Murray first worked with the American Institutes for Research and his mentor Paul Schwarz, whose writing style he intentionally copied in his early years. After returning stateside and putting in his time at MIT, Murray again worked for Schwarz and AIR, this time studying U.S. programs and even tually becoming chief scientist of AIR’s Wash ington, D.C., office. Murray was sympathetic to those who tried to help the poor—but he kept finding that the programs didn’t work. Murray soon tired of his AIR work. “I’m not sure anybody ever read the reports, and even if they did, they didn’t have any effect,” he says. He was also coming out of a guilt-ridden divorce from his first wife, with alimony and child-sup port obligations. But he decided to take a risk, quitting his job with a plan of doing some con sulting and writing a book about the nature of happiness. When consulting didn’t work out as he hoped, he reached out to conservative think tanks, setting off a lucky series of events in the early 1980s.

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Murray’s first success was an offer to write a monograph about welfare policy for the Heri tage Foundation. In researching it, Murray be came fascinated by how the decline of poverty had slowed after the introduction of Great Soci ety programs, and he decided to “practice” writ ing an op-ed about it. He turned the result over to Heritage, expecting little to come of it. Weeks later, he was surprised when Schwarz—for whom he was still doing consulting work—con gratulated him on appearing in the Wall Street Journal Between the monograph and the unexpectedly high-profile op-ed, Murray’s arguments reached the conservative intelligentsia, including Irving Kristol, then editing The Public Interest , and Joan Kennedy Taylor, then director of book publish ing at the Manhattan Institute. The institute in vited Murray to speak, raised a $30,000 advance against royalties for him to write a book on wel fare, and promoted his ideas to lawmakers and media outlets. Murray would spend the better part of a decade as an MI senior fellow.

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Murray’s narrative of how progress ended relies heavily on incentives. In rewriting wel fare policy, society changed the rules for the poor. It now made sense, in the short term, to behave in ways that were self-destructive in the long term. He illus trated this vividly in the narrative of “Har old and Phyllis,” a fic tional young couple. Phyllis is pregnant, neither plans to go to college, and their parents have little money. Murray explained the options that the couple would have confronted in 1960, and again in 1970. In 1960, welfare was unattractive; the benefits for single mothers were low, and “man in the house” rules would kick Phyllis off the program if the two lived together. But by 1970, welfare was more generous. Phyllis could support herself that way, if hardly lavishly; the two could live together without affecting her benefits, so long as they didn’t marry; and Har old might be able to work only sporadically if he didn’t enjoy his job. Some aspects of the welfare system that Mur ray described were frustratingly wrongheaded. Before 1967, welfare mothers who got jobs were taxed at a rate of 100 percent, losing a dollar in benefits for every dollar they earned. That year, the government replaced this policy with the “thirty and a third” rule, meaning they could keep the first $30 they made and a third of the money they earned above that amount. As Murray notes, this change encouraged welfare recipients to work but made the dysfunctional program more attractive to those not already on it.

SUMMER 2022 61 trends for “net” poverty, which includes those other sources of support, and “latent” poverty, which excludes government assistance entirely. Net poverty continued to decline after the safety net expanded, but latent poverty, which Murray labeled the “most damning statistic,” stalled— and even started rising. Poverty had fallen for two decades as the economy had grown, but that progress had ended, with any further “gained ground” coming from government transfers.

The ensuing furor over the book was messy. As Murray himself wrote in 1985, Losing Ground “covers too much ground and makes too many speculative interpretations to lend itself to air tight proof.” Contemporaneous critiques tended to dispute that welfare had caused the social problems that Murray pinned on it, to credit wel fare for alleviating more hardship than Murray acknowledged, and to quibble about how gen erous safety-net programs really were. Looking back, Murray told me that he’s still proud of the work, but he admitted that its focus on incen tives came with some blind spots, includ ing that “there was something in the na ture of modernity that was pushing these phenomena of fam ily breakdown over and above the welfare system.”Of course, the United States never embraced Murray’s “most ambitious thought experiment,” which was to end welfare almost entirely and let families and communities step in. But within a decade, it was clear to most Americans that the welfare system was indeed highly dysfunctional, and states were experimenting with better ways of doing things. Congress passed some work-focused measures, most famously the 1996 welfare reform—essen tially declaring that society would continue to help poor single mothers but that they would be expected to get jobs. Like Reagan’s “shredding” of the safety net, welfare reform didn’t stop the rise of federal social spending—at least, not for long. And like the expansion of welfare benefits discussed in Losing Ground , welfare reform in spired debate as to its effects. But single mothers worked more, and their poverty rate declined, after the laws changed. Welfare reform is consid ered one of the Right’s biggest policy successes in recent Murraydecades.eventually accepted the safety net. In 2006, he released In Our Hands , which proposed replacing government social programs with a direct payment to each adult: a “universal basic income,” or UBI. It was a concept he’d thought “His ‘most ambitious thought experiment’ was to end welfare and let families and communities step in.”

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On metric after metric—poverty, unemploy ment, out-of-wedlock childbearing, dropping out of high school, getting a college degree, crime—IQ proved the better predictor. One might object that neither IQ nor SES was a fixed determinant of someone’s future (Herrn stein and Murray noted this themselves) or that the approach is unsophisticated. But these about since the late 1980s—inspired by the ideas of Milton Friedman, his growing awareness of the fact that people are born with different abilities, and his dislike of meddlesome govern ment—but that he didn’t think the United States could afford until federal spending ballooned to its more recent levels. Murray was therefore an early adopter of an idea that has attracted inter est across the political spectrum.

Murray’s writings echo in welfare debates to this day. As President Joe Biden has pushed to expand the safety net through his Build Back Better plan, for example, conservative critics have highlighted the unwelcome incentives that such changes would create in terms of work, marriage, and unwed childbearing. A few years after Losing Ground, Murray be came interested in the topic of IQ. It related to themes he’d already been writing about, he found, and most social scientists had neglected the litera ture on the subject. He decided to write a book about it but worried that the Harvard psychology professor Richard J. Herrnstein—who had writ ten IQ in the Meritocracy in the early 1970s and an article in The Atlantic about fertility differentials by IQ in 1989—might be thinking the same thing.

The NLSY79 had given its subjects the Armed Forces Qualification Test (AFQT), which Herrn stein and Murray believed measured IQ well, in their teens and early twenties, and then followed these kids to see how they did. Herrnstein and Murray used the data to answer this question: If all you know about someone is his IQ and a number summarizing his parents’ socioeco nomic status, or SES (combining income, educa tion, and occupation), which will better predict his outcome? To eliminate the role of race, these analyses were run only on whites.

The Bell Curve , appearing shortly after Herrn stein’s death in 1994, is several books in one. It summarizes the academic literature about in telligence and its measurement. It presents an original study based on the 1979 National Lon gitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY79), testing the theory that intelligence is a powerful predictor of life outcomes. And in its later chapters, it dives headfirst into the forbidden topics that it’s best known for, including racial differences in IQ.

A sort of cognitive horsepower, IQ is the abil ity to process complicated information, and it can be measured as accurately as any psycho logical trait. High IQ is almost a prerequisite for success in many high-paying occupations, and it’s measurably beneficial to workers in many lower-skilled jobs, too.

Murray called to ask. Herrnstein had no such plans, but he suggested that the two write a book together. Murray agreed. For this project, he moved to the American Enterprise Institute.

Like the statistics in Losing Ground , Herrnstein and Murray’s analysis of the NLSY79 stands out today for its simplicity. Even at the time, researchers were building increasingly sophisti cated statistical models to explore their data sets, but Herrnstein and Murray avoided that “bot tomless pit” to tell a story.

As Herrnstein and Murray explained, a “cog nitive elite” was emerging based largely on this characteristic. College attendance had grown, and universities had increasingly relied on stan dardized tests that correlate strongly with IQ, so the brightest kids from around the country could demonstrate their smarts and head to the top schools. Such tests had brought Murray from Iowa to That’sHarvard.oftencalled “meritocracy,” but as Herrnstein and Murray explained, people don’t do anything to earn their IQs. Quite the contrary: IQ is significantly genetic in origin; and in 1994, there was little evidence that deliberate environ mental interventions—short of, say, adopting a child into a new family—could raise or lower someone’s IQ. (More recent studies suggest that mandatory-schooling laws did have that effect, to the tune of one to five added IQ points per year.) In other words, society was stratifying based on a trait that is partly inherent and, at any rate, very hard to change.

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analyses issued a challenge to social science’s focus on SES. Then the book turned to race. It’s undisputed that black Americans score lower on IQ tests than whites, on average. Herrnstein and Murray emphasized that a difference in averages says nothing about individuals: millions of blacks are smarter than millions of whites. They also sum marized the debate over whether this gap was a function of whites’ and blacks’ differing social environments or instead reflected some genetic difference.Afterlaying out the evidence in detail both ways—for example, statistically controlling for SES reduced the black/white IQ gap by only By the mid-1990s, Murray’s arguments in Losing Ground (1984) had influenced welfare-reform efforts, culminating in legislation that President Bill Clinton signed.

about a third, but the gap had been shrinking in recent years, and children fathered by white and black U.S. servicemen in Germany following World War II had similar IQs—they presented their ultimate verdict: “It seems highly likely to us that both genes and environment have some thing to do with racial differences. What might the mix be? We are resolutely agnostic on that issue; as far as we can determine, the evidence does not yet justify an estimate.” Murray told me that Herrnstein and he had applied “ordinary rules of evidence and Occam’s razor.” Many readers, though, winced at the idea of treating a genetic IQ gap among racial groups the way one would treat any other topic.

CITY JOURNAL64 The Influencer rent science, as numerous experts showed dur ing the controversy. And its themes continue to resonate, sometimes in unexpected ways: witness the rise of “hereditarian leftists,” such as socialist pundit Freddie deBoer and liberal behavior ge neticist Kathryn Paige Harden, who accept that genes powerfully influence how individuals fare in modern societies but argue that this is a reason to help the disadvantaged. Advances in genetics have also kept alive the debate over race, though modern geneticists prefer the term “human popu lations.” A 2018 New York Times article by Har vard’s David Reich urged acceptance of the fact that these populations differ on the genetic level in important ways: Recent genetic studies have demonstrated differences across populations not just in the genetic determinants of simple traits such as skin color, but also in more complex traits like bodily dimensions and susceptibility to diseases. . . . I am worried that well-meaning people who deny the possibility of substantial bio logical differences among human popula tions are digging themselves into an inde fensible position, one that will not survive the onslaught of science. I am also worried that whatever discoveries are made . . . will be cited as “scientific proof” that racist prej udices and agendas have been correct all along, and that those well-meaning people will not understand the science well enough to push back against these claims. That’s not an endorsement of The Bell Curve , but it’s an expansion of the range of acceptable opinion. Murray returned to the topic of race in 2020’s lengthy Human Diversity—which didn’t reiterate his position that the black/white IQ gap is partly genetic but did summarize the emerging science of genetic differences across human populations, in addition to exploring the literature on sex dif ferences. For this reason, I found Human Diversity more cautious than The Bell Curve, but Murray disagreed. Given the broader scope of the newer The Bell Curve then asked whether society was getting less intelligent on the genetic level because lower-IQ women were having more children than smarter women. (On the envi ronmental level, society was actually getting smarter: in a phenomenon that Herrnstein and Murray christened “the Flynn Effect,” IQ scores had been rising for generations, far too quickly to be the result of genetic changes.) Finally, the book also reiterated Murray’s call to end welfare, arguing that redistribution was dysgenic:Wecan imagine no recommendation for using the government to manipulate fer tility that does not have dangers. But this highlights the problem: The United States already has policies that inadvertently so cial-engineer who has babies, and it is en couraging the wrong women. . . . We urge generally that these policies, represented by the extensive network of cash and services for low-income women who have babies, be ended. The government should stop subsi dizing births to anyone, rich or poor. The Bell Curve inspired even greater pushback than Losing Ground had. Articles and entire books appeared in response, raising every conceivable objection: the AFQT isn’t an IQ test; IQ tests are racially biased; many forms of intelligence exist; other ways of measuring the environment make it more competitive with IQ as a predictor of out comes; race is a social construct; racial groups’ IQ scores respond to social conditions more than the book acknowledged; Herrnstein and Mur ray’s sources were racist. One can spend weeks reading these old de bates and taking stands on each sub-issue. (Thomas Sowell’s American Spectator review, “Ethnicity and IQ,” and James Heckman’s Rea son review, “Cracked Bell,” are two good critical takes.) My own view is that Herrnstein and Mur ray had gotten ahead of the evidence on genetics and that they should have kept dysgenics out of welfare policy. Yet The Bell Curve is convincing when it comes to the power of IQ in modern societies. Much of what it said was indeed just summarizing cur

On such matters, the truth is one question, and whether we should talk about it is another. Numer ous thinkers have urged commentators to avoid such discussions for various reasons: it’s demoral izing to see one’s race characterized as inherently less smart on average; the science is too shaky to permit strong conclusions; people will be tempted “Often, Murray notes, public debates start with an assumption that any racial disparity must result from discrimination.”

Murray believes that compelling reasons ex ist to talk about racial differences, that efforts to sideline the genetic question have failed, and that any practical consequences of opening up the discussion can’t be worse than the status quo. For many purposes, he notes, public policy and public debates start with an assumption that any racial dispar ity must result from discrimination. If we cannot talk about ra cial gaps in IQ and crime, we cannot explain why this assumption is false, and therefore we cannot stop the stampede toward race-based policies designed to equalize outcomes.

SUMMER 2022 65 to jump from a difference in group averages to a belief that all whites are smarter than all blacks; historically, a belief in genetic IQ differences has led to monstrous policies. In a recent discussion with Murray, writer Coleman Hughes urged viewers to think about the situation that black par ents would find themselves in if it became normal to talk about the IQ gap on the nightly news.

So when you tell me that I am going to cre ate bad stuff by now saying, “Look, we’ve book, including differences in personality and so cial behavior, he didn’t think that there was a good reason to focus on IQ specifically: “The only reason to have emphasized IQ is to say, ΩAnd oh, by the way, on something I took so much shit about, we were right on that, too.≈ ” Murray’s latest book, the shorter Facing Real ity , steers clear of discussing the causes of racial gaps. But, inspired by the mess of a public de bate that followed the George Floyd protests of 2020, it tries to force America to confront the fact that racial gaps in crime and cognitive ability exist. It explains, for example, that the race gap on academic tests stopped narrowing in the 1990s and that blacks commit crimes at higher rates than whites by every avail ableYetmeasure.where his ear lier books drew crit ics’ ire for years after their publication, Human Diversity and Facing Reality hardly registered on the national radar. Why can’t Charles Murray annoy people like he used to? “I went into Fac ing Reality saying, ΩIt is your obligation to write this book because you’re one of the few people who is in a position to do it without putting their career in jeopardy≈—and nothing happened,” he said. He’d even declined to dedicate the book to anyone and kept his usual agent out of the pro cess in order to protect her from blowback. “It’s almost as if, in the current intellectual climate, it is no longer necessary to argue with people who say things like I’ve been saying,” he observed. “Given my history and my age and everything else, apparently I’m ignorable. You don’t have to confront the data.”

When I noted his discussion with Hughes and asked if he worried about the consequences of a franker debate, especially adding genetics to the mix, Murray responded: We’ve had a natural experiment; we’ve tried for 60 years to not talk about all those wounding things in public. And what has come out of it is the worst racial polarization since the Civil Rights Act—it’s been build ing over a long period of time. We have col leges dropping the SAT. We have Oregon outlawing minimum standards in math and reading and writing and so forth. We have a rhetoric in which whites are called evil and oppressive, and not just privileged but, worse than privileged, racist, no matter how hard they try not to be racist, and in which “colorblind” is hate speech, “melting pot” is hate speech. . . . I could keep on going. . . .

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oes Murray enjoy stirring up controversy? He doesn’t write with the freewheeling joy or spiteful rhetoric of someone who revels in political incorrectness. He has a clear prose style and pres ents well-crafted arguments that aim to convince an open-minded skeptic. Yet he’s no stranger to provocation.Thistension lays at the heart of a 1994 pro file of Murray by Jason DeParle in the New York Times Magazine , titled “Daring Research or ΩSocial Science Pornography≈?” Written in the lead-up to The Bell Curve ’s release, the profile followed Murray on a trip to Aspen, Colorado, during which “the man who would abolish welfare” flew first-class, drank fancy wines, and unguardedly doled out quotable quotes to the reporter, from using the term “white trash” to admitting that the topics of The Bell Curve offered “the allure of the forbidden.” “Social-science pornography,” from the article’s title, wasn’t an allegation from a Murray hater; it was an off-the-cuff comment from Murray himself, describing how his data could answer such questions as which types of white kids are most likely to drop out of high school. “Murray’s persona in print is that of the burdened researcher coming to his disturbing conclusions with the utmost regret,” DeParle wrote, “but at the moment, he seems to be hav ing the time of his life.”

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The Influencer probably got differences that are genetic to some degree,” I don’t buy it. I don’t see how it could be any worse.

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DeParle also mentioned an incident from Mur ray’sInpast:the fall of 1960, during their senior year, [Murray and his friends] nailed some scrap wood into a cross, adorned it with fireworks and set it ablaze on a hill beside the police station, with marshmallows scat tered as a calling card. [An old friend of Murray’s] recalls his astonishment the next day when the talk In Coming Apart (2012), Murray identified troubling trends in white America that have become obvious a decade later, especially drug addiction.

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pause follows when Murray is re minded of the event. “Incredibly, incredibly dumb,” he says. “But it never crossed our minds that this had any larger significance. And I look back on that and say, ΩHow on earth could we be so oblivious?≈ I guess it says something about that day and age that it didn’t cross our minds.” To some of Murray’s detractors, this was a chance to paint him as a white-hooded crossburner. Since even the Times didn’t portray the incident that way, however, others have drawn a different connection between this story and his later work, one in which the through-line is a certain racial obliviousness. DeParle, for exam ple, wrote that a controversial passage from The Bell Curve recalled “the high-school prankster who burned a cross, only to learn later what the fuss was all about.” I talked with Murray about the DeParle profile (he admits being casual in his language to con vey a certain persona), the cross incident (“the kind of thing that’s so stupid that only teenagers could do it”), and whether he enjoys controversy. He did confess to a contrarian streak: “Any time something is the conventional wisdom, there is an itch within me to say, ΩOh, yeah?≈ ”

CITY JOURNAL68 The Influencer associated with the “underclass,” including un wed childbearing and lack of work, had afflicted lower-educated whites more generally, while elite whites had self-segregated. Some accused Murray of neglecting the role of economics in these patterns. But Murray saw something hap pening within white America that few others noticed, and that no one can deny a decade later, given lower-educated whites’ role in both Don ald Trump’s election and the opioid epidemic.

But if there’s part of him that enjoys the fire he’s come under over the years, he said, “it must be hidden really deeply.” He was depressed af ter The Bell Curve came out, especially because people accused him—falsely—of having the numbers wrong. “There was no part of me that I could tap into that was saying, ΩIsn’t this cool?≈ ”

Coming Apart serves as a sturdy bridge be tween Murray’s most high-profile works and the impressive assortment of other books he has written. Some of these, like In Our Hands and Hu man Diversity , update Murray’s analyses in his most well-known areas of expertise; others flesh out the lessons that his work holds in a specific issue area, as in Real Education , which (among other proposals) urges educators to grapple more effectively with the fact that students have a wide range of cognitive ability. But still others—such as In Pursuit , What It Means to Be a Libertarian , American Exceptional ism , and By the People —deal with deeper matters. These books are key to understanding what ani mates Murray, as they explain his thought in a less fraught context. Murray believes that humans want to gain the satisfaction that comes from a life well lived. People want to earn their own way, make use of their talents, overcome challenges, and feel valued. They want to believe that, without their hard work, their families and communities would be worse off. Left to their own devices, with a limited government that keeps the peace, individuals and communities can strive toward that ideal. Murray especially has a soft spot for small towns, as shown by his choosing to live in a community of fewer than 200 people. But when a large, impersonal government provides too much, it robs citizens of the satisfaction, dignity, and self-respect that comes from taking care of themselves and one another. Murray also has a deep love of the Ameri can Founding. Having once called himself a libertarian, he now goes by “Madisonian.” He believes that the Founders got a lot right when it came to enabling citizens to pursue happi ness and that early Americans really were an turned to racial persecution in a town with two black families. “There wouldn’t have been a racist thought in our simple-minded minds,” he says. “That’s how unaware we were.”Along

N early 20 years after The Bell Curve , Murray published Coming Apart , the third book of his to make a major impact. It tied into The Bell Curve ’s theme of a society increasingly stratified along class lines but viewed the topic through a less IQ-focused and more sociological lens. Murray told the story of how the social problems once

“Murray has a deep love of the American Founding. Having once called himself a libertarian, he now goes by ‘Madisonian.’”

As for his family, he feels indebted to his wife, Catherine Bly Cox, for the disproportionate role she played in raising the children while he fo cused on his work. The two, both from Newton, began seeing each other about a year after Mur ray’s“I’vedivorce.been a good dad in reasonable ways,” Murray said. “Have I been as good as other dads are? No, I’ve spent too much time in this room, sitting in this chair, to have been as good as other dads can be.” In Pursuit argues that the satisfac tion that one gains from an endeavor is propor tional to the effort put in, which Mur ray has become only more aware of since he wrote it: “I don’t think the kids paid too heavy a price be cause they have such a wonderful mother, but the satisfaction I’ve taken from rais ing kids is not as much as it would have been if I had made a greater investment, and that’s just a reality of human life. There are trade-offs.”

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In Pursuit sought a return to the ideals of Jeffersonian democracy, with more local control; By the People proposed law suits and civil disobedience to tame the federal administrative state. Now, he’s mostly pessimis tic. “Even if we were to try to bring things back,” he laments, there’s so much constitutional, legal, and institutional “sludge” to wade through. For now, Murray doesn’t have another book in the works. He’s spending some time working on databases, something he loves doing. One of his projects is to post publicly more of the data behind Human Accomplishment, a 2003 book in which Mur ray ranked history’s most impressive artists and scientists based on the attention they had received in encyclopedias and histories from around the world.How is Murray faring on that all-important question of a life well lived? He recalled the ad vice he gave in The Curmudgeon’s Guide to Get ting Ahead , a short, lighthearted book from 2014: “Marry your soul mate and find a vocation you love, and everything else is a rounding error. I’ve done both of those things.”

As for his professional accomplishments, most writers would envy Murray’s influence. But Murray says that only one of his books will last 100 years, or maybe even 1,000— Apollo , which he coauthored with Cox in the 1980s. Rather than focusing on the astronauts who went to the moon, Apollo tells the story of the people who de signed the spacecraft, planned the missions, and guided the ships, based on extensive interviews. “What will people remember about the twen tieth century 1,000 years from now?” he asks. “Catherine argues that they’ll remember two things. They will remember World War II, which she thinks will take on kind of a Homeric Ωgood versus evil≈ that will keep it alive in the same way that a few wars have been kept alive. She says the other thing will be—and I agree with this—it’ll be the century in which human beings first left the earth. And the first time they did it was Apollo , and we will be a kind of primary source for historians, for as long as people write about it. I’m not saying that it will be a bestseller 1,000 years from now. But that book will last.” exceptional people, including in their insistence on limited government and in their dedication to an individualistic creed where people were judged on their merits, not on their social class at Murraybirth.

does not deny the horrors of Amer ica’s racial history. But alongside the positive developments on race and freedom since the Founding, he thinks that America has lost parts of what made it special. In By the People , Murray pinpointed 1937–42 as the period when the Con stitution’s limits on the federal government dis solved in a series of Supreme Court deci sions. Facing Reality raises the alarm about the threat that leftwing racial ideology poses to whatideasMurrayindividualisticAmerica’sstreak.Overtheyears,hasofferedforrestoringAmericahaslost.

T he memory that sticks out to Jim Murphy from the screwiest bank robbery in New York City’s his tory is not the slow drive down a dark road at JFK Airport, with a shotgun leveled inches from his head, or the scrum of onlookers hooting and hollering every time hostage-taker John Wojtowicz stood toe-to-toe with negotia tors. It’s not the salacious details of Wojtowicz’s backstory—man robs bank to pay for his “wife’s” sex-change operation in attempt to woo him/ her back—or the pop of Murphy’s revolver as he shot Sal Naturale during a struggle for control of Naturale’s shotgun. It isn’t the kiss on the cheek from the hostage he had just saved, or the night, a few years later, that he saw Lance Henriksen play a grim-faced caricature of him in Dog Day Afternoon , the Sidney Lumet film based on the 1972 robbery, while seated in a theater packed with an audibly pro–Al Pacino (playing “Sonny Wortzik,” the fictionalized version of Wojtowicz) and anti-Henriksen audience. What Murphy remembers most is the shot he didn’t take. It’s the feeling of the trigger as he aimed his gun at Wojtowicz, the mastermind of the robbery. At that moment, Murphy had just shot Naturale in his torso. Another FBI agent had just disarmed Wojtowicz of his rifle. But Wojtowicz also had a pistol in his waistband.

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The Deacon and the Dog John Wojtowicz gestures outside a Chase Manhattan Bank branch during the infamous robbery and hostage-taking in Brooklyn, August 22, 1972.

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Daniel Edward Rosen Fifty years later, a former FBI agent looks back on the bizarre bank robbery that inspired an iconic New York film.

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Today, Murphy runs his own private investi gation firm, which he’s done since he resigned from the Bureau in 1984. He looks the same as he did back then, save for more gray in his close-cropped hair. He still loves the Bureau and everyone he worked with there. He still wears collared shirts, ironed to perfection, still wears an expression that’s congenial yet discerning, still speaks in a gentle Queens accent. He is a man at peace with his life and the good and bad it has brought with it.

The Deacon and the Dog Murphy could have stayed at the Bureau and risen in the ranks. His last role was as assistant special agent in charge at the FBI’s BrooklynQueens Metropolitan Resident Agency. But he retired early to be closer with his family and take care of his younger son, who, at the time, had been diagnosed with cancer. He remains a man of deep Catholic faith. For the past 20 years, Murphy has served as a deacon for the Diocese of Rockville Centre. That evening, he would be presiding over a wake service for a family that had just lost a relative to suicide following a struggle with depression. “We’ve got to make some sense of it.”

For Wojtowicz, the bank robbery was over a man who wanted to be a woman. Wojtowicz met Ernest Aron at St. Anthony’s feast in Soho in 1971. Tall, thin, and effete, Aron was dressed in semidrag. Wojtowicz, a Vietnam veteran, was smaller, irascible—and promiscuous. He was also a mar ried father of two who became involved in the Gay Activists Alliance under the alias “Littlejohn Basso,” the last name a nod to his mom’s maiden name, the first a reference to his microphallus. “He was a Goldwater Republican who volun teered in the war in Vietnam to serve his coun try, came back home with his brain scrambled, and somehow in the Army he discovered he liked having gay sex,” said Randy Wicker, a re porter, author, and gay activist who knew Woj towicz and Aron. Wojtowicz became infatuated with Aron, and, after a long courtship, they got “married” in an informal ceremony, with Aron in a flowing wedding gown and his male wedding party dressed as bridesmaids. His hands were slowly moving down toward his waist. Murphy knew that Wojtowicz had the pistol and commanded him to “freeze,” to get his hands back up in the air; his trigger fin ger maintained the tension between mercy and retribution.Fiftyyears later, seated at a diner in Fresh Meadows, Queens, Murphy says that he can still feel that tension, the great control he had at that moment—and when Wojtowicz eventually com plied with his orders, the sensation of the trig ger’s release. Had Murphy not released it—had the incalculable hours of training he received at the Bureau not kicked in—he could have shot two men that early morning instead of one. Woj towicz “wasn’t at his gun yet. He was going for it. I could have shot him, and people would have said it was a justifiable shooting. I don’t think that’s the best way to behave. The instinct isn’t to kill somebody. The instinct is to stop the action,” Murphy noted. “You can’t leave these things in the bad guys’ hands. And I use Ωbad guys≈ for lack of a better term. We’re talking about a moment. I don’t think Sal was a bad guy. I don’t think there’s anyone in the world who’s a bad guy, you know? But he put himself in a very bad situation where the oppo sition can’t make that distinction,” said Murphy.

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Both the robbery and Dog Day Afternoon brought Murphy stature and admiration within the Bureau, as he regularly gave talks to starstruck FBI agents about the eternal conflict between the facts of a case and its Hollywood portrayal. Out side the Bureau, he remained relatively anony mous—few people knew of his involvement in the robbery, save for friends and family. In both the film and in published reports about the event, he was known simply as “Murphy.”

As for Sal Naturale, the young man he shot, he feels sorrow for him. He wishes things could have been different. Naturale, in Murphy’s mind, was a lost soul, a person whose free will steered him wrong. But for Murphy, sorrow does not equate guilt. “I do feel bad about Sal. The kid never had an opportunity to live his life. That has nothing to do with guilt,” Murphy said. “He got up that morning not having any idea what was going to be happening so many hours later. He had no idea, nor did I, on where he was going to be that night.”

SUMMER 2022 73 But Aron’s desire to transition to a woman caused friction in their relationship. Wojtowicz opposed the idea. During an argument, Aron had told him, “I want to have a sex change, or I want to die.” Aron became suicidal, and on his birthday on August 19, 1972, he over dosed on pills and was taken to King’s County Hospital, where he was committed to the psy chiatricHeartbrokenunit. and determined to get Aron out of the hospital, Wojtowicz recruited Bobby West enberg and Naturale, a 19-year-old from New Jersey with priors for grand larceny and drug possession, to help him rob a bank. After a few false starts at other banks in the city—in the 2013 doc umentary about him, The Dog , Wojtowicz recalled that they dropped a shotgun outside a Lower East Side bank, cutting that at tempted robbery short, while Westenberg ran into a family friend at another bank in Howard Beach—they eventually settled on a Chase Man hattan Bank in Gravesend, Brooklyn. On August 22, 1972, at closing time, Naturale and Wojtowicz, armed with a colt revolver and carrying a .303 British rifle and a 12-gauge shot gun, both concealed inside a box, entered the bank. Westenberg was supposed to hand a type written note to the teller: THERE IS NO REASON FOR ANYONE TOO [ sic ] BE INJURED OR KILLED. IT IS ALL UP TO YOU. THIS IS AN OFFER YOU CANT [ sic ] REFUSE Instead, he got cold feet and fled the bank, abandoning his two accomplices with seven bank tellers, a branch manager, and an unarmed securityWithoutguard.Westenberg, Wojtowicz and Natu rale proceeded with the robbery. Naturale, re volver in hand, approached the desk of Robert Barrett, the bank manager, and informed him that his bank was being held up. The excitable Wojtowicz, rifle now out of the box, jumped be hind the teller’s counter and went through the drawers and carriages, separating real money from the decoy bills, telling bank employees that he had once worked in a bank himself and knew how these things went. The bank tellers were instructed to keep an swering phone calls and to act as though every thing was fine. When Barrett got a call from a human resources officer at Chase Manhattan’s downtown office to discuss staffing, the officer, struck by Barrett’s unusual tone, asked if there was a problem. “Very much so and have a nice day,” said Bar rett, before hanging up. Chase Manhattan notified the NYPD. As it is today, New York City was then grappling with trou bling crime numbers. Midway through 1972, 810 homicides had been committed in the city—a new record—along with 443 shootings, according to the New York Times. In comparison, in 2022, 559 shooting incidents had taken place in New York as of June 12, NYPD statistics show. The num ber of murders—185 during this time frame— thankfully hasn’t reached 1972 levels. But seri ous crimes have been rising in the city for several years now. In contrast to today, bank robberies and hi jackings were exceedingly common in the 1970s. Gotham saw 469 bank robberies in 1970–71 alone, the New York Times reported. Back then, these crimes—along with kidnappings and hos tage negotiations, among other disruptions— informally fell under the auspices of the FBI’s Bank Robbery Squad. Working on nonviolent squads that handled, say, white-collar crimes, involved long hours stationed at desks or inside surveillance vans. The Bank Robbery Squad, by contrast, gave agents the chance to work the high-risk and dangerous cases that made them want to join the Bureau in the first place. “Some of the groups that we worked that were com mitting bank robberies were the BLA [Black “In contrast to today, bank robberies and hijackings were exceedingly common in the 1970s. ”

CITY JOURNAL74 The Deacon and the Dog ger. And that’s when I took my shot,” recalled Lovin. He shot Obergfell twice, sending him to the ground. The stewardess escaped unscathed. Obergfell died. The Federal Aviation Adminis tration told the New York Times that it was the first fatal shooting of a hijacker in the United States.“We tried to appeal to him and to de-escalate, and we wanted it to be resolved without any loss of life, period,” Lovin said. “But things don’t al ways work out that way.”

Murphy was in the FBI’s field office on East 69th Street when they got the call from the NYPD advising of the bank robbery in progress. By then, it was all over the media. NYPD and FBI snipers were already positioned on roofs. “Anyone else who had a right to carry a gun showed up,” noted Murphy.BobKappstatter, then a reporter for the Daily News , managed to get Wojtowicz on the phone by calling the bank. “I asked him, ΩHow you do ing? Do you think you could kill all these peo ple?≈ And he says, ΩYep, I could kill.≈ So we’re off and running,” says Kappstatter. Murphy arrived on the scene to find thou sands of spectators watching the standoff from the tops of trucks and behind police barricades. By then, the bombshell had already dropped: Wojtowicz was robbing the bank to pay for Aron’s sex change. “You couldn’t think of a bet ter angle while a story was happening. It came out of the blue, and people’s jaws were drop ping,” said Kappstatter. Wojtowicz confessed to being a “homosexual,” something that also made headlines back then. Inside the bank, Wojtowicz told tellers that he didn’t plan to harm them— that the police had forced his hand to keep them as Byhostages.8:00 pm , Dick Baker, special agent in charge at the FBI’s New York City office, took over hostage negotiations from the NYPD. Wojtowicz left the bank throughout the late afternoon and into the evening to speak with negotiators, each meeting causing a stir from the crowd. Wojtowicz, dressed in a T-shirt, offered to trade a hostage for Aron, who was still in Kings County Hospital. He asked for Liberation Army], the Weather Underground, and the Westies. You had bank robberies where guys went in and claimed they had a bomb with them,” recalled Murphy. Working for the Bank Robbery Squad meant being a jack-of-all-trades—sharpshooter, hostage negotiator, investigator, anything the situation might call for—at a time when bank robberies were a daily occurrence in New York. “You had to be prepared for meeting violence at the time of an arrest, and that was the adrenaline rush that we all sought and pursued, not for glory, but to get these guys and get them off the street,” said Kenneth Lovin, a former FBI Special Agent with the Bank Robbery Squad. Skyjackings were another unofficial FBI spe cialty. It was “the golden age of hijacking,” ob serves Brendan Koerner, in The Skies Belong to Us . More than 130 U.S. airplanes were hijacked between 1968 and 1972. One such attempted takeover involved Richard Obergfell, an unem ployed airline mechanic and lovesick New Jersey native. He had become infatuated with a woman in Italy, who was also his pen pal. He boarded a Chicago-bound TWA flight and, using a pistol he sneaked onboard with him, commandeered the plane, demanding that it be rerouted to Milan. As the Boeing 727 lacked the fuel capacity for a cross-Atlantic trip, Obergfell was flown back to LaGuardia and transported by car to JFK, where another jet awaited him and the air stewardess he had taken hostage. The Bureau tried to de-escalate the situation, bringing in a Catholic priest and FBI negotiators to reason with Obergfell. Those tactics failed. When Lovin arrived at JFK, John Malone, as sistant director in charge of the FBI’s New York Field Office, ordered him to stand behind a blast fence 175 yards away from the plane, armed with a Remington 760 rifle. When Obergfell was to make his way from the car toward the plane, Lovin had orders to take the shot—but only if he could avoid harming the stewardess. Lovin had scoped him for 15 minutes when Obergfell became distracted by a police car. “During his moment of excitability, he removed the gun for a matter of a few inches away from the girl’s head. And when he did that, I felt that even if I hit him and he pulled the trigger, she was in no dan

SUMMER 2022 75 he was afraid to, and that if he left, Sal would kill everybody,” according to Aron, in archival foot age in The Dog. Meantime, the police had cut off both the tele phone lines and the air conditioning. Wojtowicz and Naturale were now overheated and hungry. Sure, the two men now had over $38,000 in cash and nearly $175,000 worth of traveler’s checks in their possession. But with that had come eight restless hostages and unrelenting, unflattering media coverage. They were trapped inside a bank, surrounded by a battalion of law enforce ment and spectators who wanted to see things es calate to an explosive finale. (On two occasions, Wojtowicz fired his gun, once toward the rear of the bank upon hearing a “menacing” noise, an other when he accidentally discharged his rifle after bumping it into a desk, nearly blowing off a foot.) What Wojtowicz didn’t have was Aron— or a clear escape plan. hamburgers to be delivered to the bank. In stead, pizza was dropped off at the front door, for which Wojtowicz paid by tossing $1,000 in cash in the air, FBI agents scrambling to pick up the bills. The hostage-takers never ate the pizza, fearing it was drugged. “Every time he did exit the bank, he’d have the community yelling and screaming and chanting in support of them,” said Murphy. Inside the bank, the atmosphere between the hostages and their captors was, surprisingly, festive. “We cried, we laughed and joked. We took it as it came,” one of the hostages told the New York Times. Eventually, Aron was brought to the scene, per Wojtowicz’s request. But he refused to meet with Wojtowicz directly, fearing Wojtowicz’s “bad temper.” Instead, Aron was set up at a neighborhood barbershop, which had been con verted into a makeshift police command center. Wojtowicz said that “he wanted to come out but

Wojtowicz and his transsexual girlfriend Elizabeth Debbie Eden (Ernest Aron) in 1979, after his release from prison

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The first challenge for Murphy was where to secrete his weapon, a Smith and Wesson model 15. An agent offered his ankle holster and weapon, but Wojtowicz would find it if he pat ted Murphy down. He settled on placing the gun underneath the gas and brake pedals, concealing it under the floor mat. Murphy drove the airport limousine to the front of the bank. Wojtowicz ordered Murphy to walk to the back of the vehicle, in order to be frisked. Wojtowicz made a great show of the patdown, slowing down his search when he reached Murphy’s groin. The spectators went bananas. Murphy felt humiliated. Murphy returned to the driver’s seat and placed his foot on the brake. Wojtowicz searched underneath the driver’s seat and other locations—but not beneath the ped als. When Wojtowicz went to get the hostages, Murphy put the gun in his belt, covering the grip with his tie. Around 4:10 am, Wojtowicz and Naturale ex ited the bank. Naturale had hostages huddled around him—a human shield. In the limo, three hostages were placed in the second row. Naturale sat in the middle of the third row, a hostage on either side. In the last row was Wojtowicz, sit ting in the middle, also sandwiched between two hostages. There were now seven hostages left— a security guard had been released earlier in the standoff, and another hostage had been allowed to leave when everyone walked out of the bank. At 4:45 am, Murphy and his passengers headed off to the airport. Baker was in the lead car in front of him. Behind him was a 20-car convoy of lawenforcement vehicles. It was a 25-minute drive to theNaturaleairport. was extremely nervous, Mur phy saw. He held the shotgun at the back of Murphy’s head. “Sal, do me a favor and put that up. My wife will be really disappointed if that goes off,” said Murphy.“Don’t worry. It won’t fire,” replied Naturale. “If we go over a bump and it accidentally A fter hours of negotiations, Baker and Woj towicz reached an agreement. The two rob bers would be taken with their hostages to JFK, where a plane would fly them to multiple des tinations. At each stop, two hostages would be released, and when all the hostages were off the plane, Wojtowicz and Naturale would continue on to freedom, wherever that might be. Inside the bank, the robbers and their hostages brain stormed ideas on where they’d go—maybe Mos cow, maybe Tel Aviv. But how would the two robbers and their hos tages get to the airport? There was talk of tak ing separate cars, one robber and a few hostages per car, to JFK. Ultimately, it was agreed that they would be transported in an airport lim ousine, with a sole FBI agent, who would be at the wheel. Baker presented four agents to Woj towicz, having them stand in a line in front of the bank. Among the four were Thomas Sheer, a former Marine who would go on to serve as assistant director of the FBI from 1986 to 1987, and Jack Jansen, who stood over six feet and was built like a boulder. Wojtowicz looked them over and pointed at the least physically impos ing of the four. “I’ll take him,” he said—meaning Murphy.Wojtowicz went back into the bank. It dawned on Murphy that someone was going to die that night. It could be him. It could be one of the bad guys. God forbid it be one of the hostages. It was an unsettling feeling. Murphy turned to the crowd and looked for the priest he had seen earlier—the one who had tried to reason with Wojtowicz.Astheproduct of a Catholic education, from grammar school through St. John’s University, Murphy remained a man of faith. But he wasn’t living that faith the way he would have liked. If this was going to be it, he wanted to demonstrate remorse for any wrongs he had done. It would be a while before the airport limousine arrived. Murphy approached the priest. “I told him what was going to happen. I told him my concern was that there was a real possibility here that some one was going to die, someone was going to get shot, and it could be me. I asked him if he would hear my confession,” Murphy recalled. They walked along the tree-lined streets away from

CITY JOURNAL76 The Deacon and the Dog the crowd, and the priest listened to his confes sion. When they returned, Murphy felt at peace. Then the limousine arrived.

Poster for Dog Day Afternoon, the 1975 film based on the robbery IMAGESLMPC/GETTY

SUMMER 2022 77 had his right elbow on top of the seat, his hand gun concealed in his right hand. They continued the small talk. The plane taxied into the satellite area. The glare of the lights and the whine of the jet engines distressed Naturale even more. Baker casually discharges, it’s going to fire and I’m not going to be here anymore,” said Murphy. Naturale lowered the gun. On the drive over, they exchanged small talk, putting both hostage-takers at ease. Wojtowicz was starving and wanted to stop and get hamburgers. That couldn’t happen, Murphy ex plained, but he would see if he could sort something out at the airport, maybe get them some food on the plane.AtJFK, Murphy turned onto a long, dark road that would take them to the satellite area where the plane would eventually be—the same area where Obergfell was shot. Naturale was now frightened. He again raised the gun to Murphy’s head. Baker had already arrived in the satellite area. Murphy stopped the limousine and said he’d talk to Baker about getting them some food. Per prior agreement, a hostage would be released at the airport. It was sup posed to be Barrett, but he refused. In stead, it was one of the women sitting behind Murphy, creating an opening between him and Naturale. Baker and Murphy met halfway be tween the cars and devised their plan. When the airplane taxied into the sat ellite area, Baker would walk back to the limo’s right rear window, close to where Wojtowicz was sitting. With Baker in position, if Murphy thought he could take the shotgun from Natu rale, he would ask Baker, “Will there be food on the plane for these peo ple?” If Baker responded yes, it meant that he thought he could get the rifle from Wojtowicz, who had it resting on his lap. Their plan decided, Mur phy returned to the limousine. Baker was look ing into getting some food for them, he told the robbers.Itwas another 20 minutes before the plane would arrive. Murphy slowly got himself in po sition, resting his right knee up on the seat. He

Over 50 years later, Lovin says that he still can’t wipe that face from his memory bank.

During the standoff, the press described him as a homosexual, which he denied and wanted cor rected. Whereas the whole world knew about

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The Deacon and the Dog walked back to the rear window. Murphy turned around, sensing Naturale’s unsteadiness. “Will there be food on the plane for these peo ple?” asked Murphy. Baker looked at him. “Yes.” Murphy swung in his seat. He grabbed Natu rale’s shotgun with his left hand and pushed it up to the ceiling, raising his gun in his right hand while doing so. Naturale hung on to the shotgun with both hands. Murphy fired a shot, hitting Na turale in his chest. Naturale let go and collapsed in his seat. Baker pulled the rifle away from Woj towicz.Thehostages opened the doors and streamed out. Murphy had his gun on Wojtowicz, whose hands were inching down. But Murphy didn’t shoot him. Wojtowicz stopped. The robbery, as sensational and unprecedented as it was, had reached a predictable end. Murphy jumped over his seat. With Murphy’s hand on the back of his neck, Naturale let out one long exhale, flapping his lips, and then stopped breathing. He died on the way to the hospital. Later that evening, a hostage approached Mur phy and asked if Naturale had died. “Yes,” he re sponded. “That’s too bad,” she said, kissing him on the cheek. Murphy’s case was the third incident in 1971–72 in which hostage-takers were shot and killed by special agents from the Bank Robbery Squad. Lovin’s was the first. The second was the hijacking of a Mohawk Airlines plane by Heinrich von George, a failed businessman and father of seven, who faced in dictment for simultaneously drawing welfare and unemployment checks. Von George success fully hijacked the plane as it departed Albany, using what he claimed were a pistol and a bomb. The plane landed at Westchester County Air port, where he released all the passengers. After hours of negotiations, he received the $200,000 and two parachutes that he had demanded. The plane departed for Pittsfield, Massachu setts, diverted midair to Poughkeepsie, New York, per von George’s orders, and landed at Dutchess County Airport, where a car waited on the runway for him and his hostage, a steward ess. As von George entered the car, FBI agents charged. They had followed von George’s plane in one of their own, flying with no lights. One of those agents was the massive Jack Jansen, who, months later, would be rejected by Wojtowicz as a driver to JFK. Jansen jumped in, pulling the woman away from von George. He had his shot gun aimed at von George and yelled “freeze.” Von George raised his gun toward Jansen and fired. Jansen returned fire, shooting von George in the throat at point-blank range. He died, facedown on the tarmac. Von George’s gun turned out to be a starter pistol. The bomb was two canteens filled with water and wrapped in a red blanket. Three failed crimes committed by three failed men, each a victim of a thousand self-perceived indignities. They all shared the same delusion: that the bounty they would steal would finally bring them the life owed to them, the people they desired, the respect they desperately needed. Their strategies were, at best, half-baked. The crimes themselves would be beset by delays, in tense negotiations that dragged on for hours, and, when all options for peaceful surrender had been exhausted, they were met with lethal force. Like Murphy, Jansen and Lovin had their own flashbulb memories of the incidents, images that they could never shake. For Jansen, it was the viscera that sprayed forth from von George, levitating in the air like smoke, before hitting the ground on its final descent. For Lovin, it was the impact of the bullet as it struck Obergfell dead center in the chest, and then the dying man’s face, his eyes and mouth agog, a rictus of shock.

In life and in death, Sal Naturale was a big un known. He went by the alias “Donald Masterson.”

The three men spoke about this on a few occa sions, but not often. They knew what each was going through, and they all reached the same conclusion: while it was sad that it had to hap pen, these men had their chances to surrender. They wouldn’t do it.

SUMMER 2022 79 Institute. In these scenarios, “you’re either go ing to neutralize the threat or you’re going to be neutralized and, potentially, all the hostages get neutralized,” observed Straub.

Besides, what would have happened had they let the hostages and the robbers board on the get away plane? No way was the FBI going to let the situation go mobile. And unknown to Wojtowicz, FBI men were waiting for them onboard the plane. If it wasn’t Murphy who stopped Naturale, the job would have fallen to another agent. It’s unfor tunate that Naturale was killed. But it happened. As for Wojtowicz, after serving just five years in prison, he spent the second act of his life parlaying his notoriety in publicity stunts, like signing au tographs in front of the same bank he robbed (while wearing an “I robbed the bank” T-shirt). He died of cancer in 2006. Aron transitioned to Elizabeth Eden, a surgery paid for by the sale of Wojtowicz’s film rights for Dog Day Afternoon . She died of AIDS-related pneumonia in 1987. Murphy’s son died from can cer in 1992. He was only 12. His death left Mur phy in unthinkable pain and in need of a higher calling. At the gentle suggestion of his wife, he pursued the diaconate at his church, becoming ordained in 1999. Being a deacon has brought him the peace and sense of service that he had been seeking. “My son now has what we’re all working toward: salvation. Eternal happiness with the Lord. He’s never going to go through the loss of a child or some of the other heartache that’s around,” said Murphy. “I’m getting up there, so it’s not going to be long before we’re togetherKappstatteragain.”interviewed Wojtowicz again in 1979, not long after he left prison. He asked Woj towicz whether, after the death of a friend, a stint behind bars, the collapse of two marriages, and inspiring a Hollywood movie, he had learned anything.“Yeah,” said Wojtowicz. “Don’t rob a bank.”

Wojtowicz’s dirty laundry, few knew what Natu rale looked like, let alone who he was. To those who did know him, he was a “six-time loser” whom “nobody gave a damn about,” according to the New York Times The “Sal” the rest of the world came to know was the dimwit played by thirtysomething John Cazale in Dog Day Afternoon —though, in real life, Naturale had been just a lost 19-yearold kid. The movie amped up Naturale’s naïveté to the point of ridicule, which bothered Murphy.Whenthe film came out in 1975, Murphy took his wife to see it in a packed the ater on the Upper East Side. The audi ence, much like the crowd at the scene of the real standoff, seemed mostly to be on the side of the “bad guys.” When Henriksen, playing Murphy, shoots Cazale, dead center in the forehead, the crowd booed. Murphy wanted to leave before anyone in the audience might recognize him. Relatives who saw Dog Day Afternoon were indignant, cornering Murphy at family gather ings to ask: “How could you have possibly shot that guy?” They doubted whether he was in the right. “That forced me into a situation of sitting down with my [older] son, who, at the time, was only five, and explaining to him what had hap pened because I couldn’t allow him to find out from anybody else or to get a distorted view of it,” said Murphy. But the second-guessing of his actions lasts to this day. Reporter Randy Wicker still thinks that Murphy’s shooting was “cold-blooded mur der,” as he did when it happened. “He pushed the boy’s gun to the ceiling and instead of say ing Ωfreeze,≈ he simply shot him in the chest,” said Wicker.Yetsimply to say “freeze” to someone hold ing a shotgun—with another armed criminal in the car, along with several hostages—could have been a catastrophic misstep, according to Frank Straub, director of the National Policing “With Murphy’s hand on the back of his neck, Naturale exhaled, flapping his lips, and then stopped breathing.”

J ust before 2 am on February 28, 2022, after a night partying in up per Manhattan, Edgar Valette, 39, got into his BMW to drive two friends—Kimberly Martinez, 28, and Michael Santos, 30—home.

Crash Curse A fatal and deliberate crash in Times Square, 2017, involving a mentally ill driver: New York cut traffic deaths significantly over the three decades before Covid-19, but since the pandemic, it’s been a different story.

Nicole Gelinas In New York City, traffic deaths are up as enforcement is down.

Careening southbound down the Henry Hudson Parkway, he lost control of his powerful vehicle, vaulting over a barrier onto train tracks 500 feet below. The driver and pas sengers died. Ten weeks later, just before mid night on May 18, 30-year-old Alwayne Hylton lost control of his own speeding BMW on the

NEWSLIVEYING/XINHUA/ALAMYWANG

Charts by Alberto Mena

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of

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Yet the bad raw numbers hide some successes. The changes that the city has made to its streets over the last decade or so—creating room for pe destrians and cyclists and slowing car and truck drivers—have helped pedestrians, especially, who are dying in fewer numbers relative to a de cade ago. The city hasn’t made as much progress in protecting cyclists, but nor have cyclist deaths soared during the pandemic—an achievement, considering how much cycling has increased, as New Yorkers avoid the subway and as food-de livery workers serve people eating more takeout. Who, then, is perishing now in greater num bers? The victims often fit the profile of those elevated Bruckner Express way, north of the Manhat tan border in the southwest Bronx, plummeting to the roadway below to his death. Not long after that crash, on May 26, just before 7 pm , also in the Bronx, an unnamed 25-year-old man sent his Mer cedes hurtling off the New England Thruway, landing on the street below; he, too, per ished. Also in May, a 36-yearold man rode his motorcycle down the West Side Highway; as the sun rose, he slammed into a median barrier, dying on impact. Weeks later, in Queens, a 28-yearold man crashed his motorcycle “at a high rate of speed” down the Utopia Parkway into a brick wall, with the same fatal results. Since the Covid pandemic hit New York City in March 2020, traf fic deaths have skyrocketed, just as they have across the country. Locally and nationally, these deaths have paralleled the same double-digit trajectory upward as homicides and drug-overdose deaths. In 2019, 220 New Yorkers died on city streets, near the record low of 206, set the year before. In 2021, 273 people died, a nearly one-quarter increase in two years. In 2022, as of late May, 93 peo ple have died, down slightly from last year, but 12 percent above pre-Covid levels. Beyond the human toll, this reversal of street safety was a particular blow for former mayor Bill de Blasio, who left office at the end of 2021. De Blasio had made traffic safety a mayoral cen terpiece, promising, in his 2013 campaign, signif icantly to curtail traffic deaths, building on the double-digit reductions that his predecessors, Michael R. Bloomberg and Rudolph W. Giuliani, had made. By the conclusion of de Blasio’s final term, the increased carnage on the roads would appear, at first glance, to have undone all the im provements that he, too, had notched. New York City Department Transportation 1990 to 2019, New York City cut traffic deaths then pandemic disorder sent them soaring. CITY PEDESTRIAN

SOURCE:

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SOURCE: Author’s calculations based on New York State Traffic Safety Statistical Repository maintained by the Institute for Traffic Safety Management & Research 2017–19 AVERAGE/YR 2020 2021 Losing Control Antisocial driving, including drunk driving and speeding, soared during the pandemic, as selected factors in fatal crashes show. SPEEDINGDRIVERALCOHOLINATTENTION Deaths attributed to: 13 51 42 7 45 69 21 41 80

New York’s falling traffic deaths made it a national outlier. Between 2011, when traffic deaths hit a modern low nation wide, and 2019, such fatalities across the coun try rose by 11.9 percent, to 36,355 annually. In Gotham over this period, by contrast, they fell 12 percent. The difference in pedestrian casualties was especially striking. Nationwide, pedestrian deaths began rising in 2010, after having fallen, reasonably steadily, for at least three decades. By 2019, annual pedestrian deaths had risen from their 2009 low by more than half. But in New York, pedestrian deaths fell by 21.5 percent over the same near-decade. What made the difference? New York’s decade of reengineering its streets to favor walkers and

SUMMER 2022 83 killed in the single-car crashes noted above: younger men, drivers or passengers in motor ve hicles, often late at night, often speeding. New York’s increase in traffic deaths, in other words, tends to mirror its (and the nation’s) broader pub lic-safety problem: the self-destructive and dan gerous behavior of a young male demographic. As with the recent explosion in violent crime, members of this group are taking advantage of a law-enforcement vacuum that lets them get away with ever more antisocial behavior—until it kills them or someone else. Street engineering has mitigated this problem to some degree, and can do more, but it can’t entirely fix it. Policing and other direct enforce ment of behavior also have crucial roles to play. As in many areas of pub lic safety and public health, New York City started the pandemic with an advan tage. In 2019, the city’s 220 traffic deaths—whether people in cars, or pedes trians, or cyclists—repre sented a per-capita rate of about 2.6 per 100,000 resi dents, just a small fraction of the 11.1 per 100,000 killed nationwide. Among large, urbanized areas, New York stood out for safety, as well. In Miami-Dade County in 2019, for example, the rate was 11 per 100,000; metro Atlanta’s rate was similar. Even among denser northeastern and mid-Atlantic cit ies, which have long had lower traffic-death rates than the sprawl ing south and west, New York performed slightly better than Boston, with its 2.8 traffic deaths per 100,000, and much better than Philadelphia, with its 5.7 deaths perPre-pandemic,100,000.

Crash Curse cyclists indisputably saved lives. Bike lanes and new pedestrian islands and plazas narrowed au tomotive driving lanes, for example, forcing mo tor vehicles to go slower and giving walkers and cyclists more room to move and cross. As Alex Armlovich, then of the Manhattan Institute, con cluded in a 2017 study, “the evidence is clear that Vision Zero”—the aspirational global slogan to achieve zero traffic deaths—“has improved street safety.” Indeed, citywide, as street makeovers ex panded, pedestrian deaths fell from 158 in 2009 to a modern pre-pandemic low of 108 in 2017. Such remade streets were good for the safety of people in cars and trucks, too. In 2009, 90 motor ists, including motorcyclists, died on city streets; in 2019, the figure was 68. Enforcement also saved lives. Notes Michael Replogle, deputy transportation commissioner for policy during most of the de Blasio years, “automated and conventional traffic enforce ment,” coupled with a lower 25 mph speed limit on non-highway roads, “expanded greatly to dis courage aggressive driving.” Automated speed cameras in school zones, introduced by Bloom berg and widened under de Blasio, have slowed drivers over the past decade (even though, until recently, the state legislature required the city to turn the cameras off on weekends and overnight, when the plurality of crashes occur). Crash inju ries fell by 13.9 percent in the year after installa tion. More than half of drivers getting a speeding ticket in a school zone needed only one such $50 citation to change their behavior, never receiving another ticket, city data show. Police action reinforced the technology. In 2018, the record-low year for traffic fatalities, police issued a modern record-high number of speeding tickets—152,381—that more than dou bled the 2012 total. Whether making a purpose ful substitution or not, as police retreated from the tactic of stopping, questioning, and frisking young men allegedly behaving suspiciously on foot, they devoted some of these resources to stopping and summonsing young men behaving dangerously in cars. Though cyclist deaths are not driving the current surge in road violence, New York hasn’t made as much progress protecting cyclists as it has pedestrians.

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Even amid these grim figures, however, we can glimpse what New York has done right, relative to the rest of the country. The least bad news, relatively speaking, is the pedestrian death toll. In 2021, 126 pedestrians died. This figure is higher than the annual average of 114 between 2017 and 2019—again, nothing to brag about. But the pedestrian death toll nationwide has risen much more. Further, in 2022, through the end of May, 43 pedestrians had died, down from the same period in 2021 and 2019. One might argue that fewer pedestrians died in 2021, relative to the increase in other traf

CITY JOURNAL86 Crash Curse fic deaths, because fewer of them were on the streets. This hypothesis was true, for a while. In 2020, pedestrian deaths reached a record low. No pedestrians died in April 2020, a never-beforeachieved feat. Yet absent the extremity of total lockdown, that’s not how pedestrian deaths work. Pedestrians enjoy safety in numbers, not just from violent crime but from dangerous driv ers. Large crowds on foot in intersection cross walks, for example, deter drivers from speeding through turns. This reality is why dense New York has long had a much lower pedestrian death rate compared with other cities, where fewer people walk. Nor are cyclist fatalities pushing New York’s traffic-death numbers higher. This is a testament to the safety-in-numbers principle, as well as to New York’s improved cycling infrastructure. Bike riding soared by an estimated one-third on major corridors during the first year of the pan demic and has remained elevated since. The Citi Bike cycle-sharing program has smashed all its daily pre-pandemic records, with 72,298 rides daily in April 2022, up 21 percent from three years before; during the summer months, daily Citi Bike ridership reaches the low six figures. Tens of thousands of delivery riders have also taken to the streets, often riding faster-moving electric bikes that put their riders in greater dan ger. Indeed, of the 26 cyclists who died in 2020 and the 19 who died in 2021, 11 were “e-cyclists” (not including moped riders or riders on other vehicles without pedals). Working cyclists face disproportionate risk, but this changing mix of danger did not push the overall cyclist death tollNewup. York’s network of bicycle lanes works, where it exists. During 2021, none of the cyclists killed was riding in a well-protected bike lane when he died. One Brooklyn cyclist was killed, though—allegedly by a teenage wrong-way truck driver—in a lane where the city had al lowed barriers between cyclists and drivers to deteriorate, replacing physical separations with inadequate lane markings. The provisional takeaway is that the city’s bike lanes and other infrastructure are a success; they are just insuf ficient to keep up with growing demand. As Sergio Solano, a food-delivery cyclist who has The law-enforcement role in making traffic safer had begun much earlier, under former mayors David Dinkins and Rudolph W. Giuliani. Between 1990, New York’s record-high year for traffic deaths (and murders), and 2001, when Giuliani left office after eight years, traffic deaths fell from 701 to 393 annually; annual pedestrian deaths fell from 366 to 193. On traffic safety, re members Giuliani, “We tried to apply the same process we applied to the other problems . . . find out where the most deaths were taking place, and figure out what is needed to reduce it.” Among other initiatives, Giuliani launched a TrafficStat program, similar to CompStat for crime, to create a statistical map of hot spots for traffic crashes. And his administration also cracked down hard on drunk drivers and reck less drivers, seizing their vehicles and charging reckless drivers with misdemeanors, something rarely done. The city seized so many vehicles, Giuliani recalls, “that we didn’t know what to do with the darn cars.”

T he pandemic and related shutdowns that began in March 2020 have imperiled these inter twined successes of street engineering and law enforcement. Over the past two years, New York has performed even more dismally when it comes to traffic bloodshed than the rest of America. In 2021, 42,915 people died on the nation’s roads, up 18 percent from 2019—but New York saw an even worse increase of 24 percent. As Mayor Eric Adams said in May 2022, “we’ve seen traffic vio lence increase drastically in the past two years. This is a real crisis.”

That’s not to say that New York should be satisfied with these numbers. Deaths remain far higher than they are in comparable European cit ies. In London in 2021, for example, 55 pedestri ans and nine cyclists died—less than half of New York City’s totals, despite similar populations. But in New York, experiencing an explosion in the murder rate since March 2020, let’s de clare a modest success when we find one: the city has not lost a decade, or more, of progress in keeping pedestrians (and, to a lesser degree, cyclists) safer. I t’s a different story with motor vehicles. In 2020, 122 motorists died, a 52.5 percent increase over the average between 2017 and 2019. In 2021, 113 car and truck drivers (mostly car) and motorcyclists died, a 42.2 percent rise over the pre-Covid level. The trend is continuing in 2022, with 41 motor-vehicle occupants killed through May, up from 25 for the same period in 2019.Motorcyclists make up a big share of the in crease. Though many motorcyclists are responsi ble hobbyists, and many others aren’t at fault in fatal crashes with cars and trucks, this category of motor-vehicle death has long been a mark of young male recklessness. Before the pandemic, motorcycles made up just 2 percent of registered conveyances in the city but 14 percent of fatal crashes. As the city estimated in 2015, almost all motorcycle crash victims were male, more than half were under 35, and more than four in ten were driving without a license. Motorcycling has become far more dangerous since the pandemic began. If you’ve spent time in New York City over the past two and a half years, you’ve doubtless observed more cyclists “A new urban blight: drag racers, drivers accelerating at light changes, and drivers who seem enraged.”

SUMMER 2022 87 doubled up on motorbikes without helmets, joyriding. In 2020 and 2021, motorcyclist deaths outpaced the annual average between 2017 and 2019. There’s one rough way to quantify the motorcyclist risk-taking that has helped cause these deaths: between 2017 and 2019, according to my calculations derived from a state database of crash factors maintained by the Institute for Traffic Safety Management and Research, just 11 percent of motorcyclists killed in New York City crashes failed to wear a helmet, as required by law. In 2020, the figure rose to 17.8 percent, and in 2021, to 25 per cent.The proliferation of electric mopeds (which, like motorcy cles, but unlike elec tric bicycles, require a license plate, and thus fall into the “mo tor vehicle” category) adds to the problem. In the summer of 2020, three riders on bike-share mopeds operated by the Revel startup died, two helmet-less, despite city requirements. That fall, a Revel moped rider killed a Manhattan pe destrian, a rare but real example of the danger that fast-moving two-wheeled vehicles can pose (nearly all pedestrians are killed by car and truck drivers).Themost significant increase in the death toll since 2020, though, is borne by people driving or riding in cars or SUVs. Since 2020, New York ers on foot, on bicycles, and in other cars and trucks will be familiar with a new urban blight: drag racers, drivers accelerating at light changes, and drivers who seem enraged. This translates into real public-safety deterioration. Between 2017 and 2019, an average of 46 vehicle occu pants—drivers or passengers—died annually in car crashes. The pandemic smashed—liter ally—these historically low numbers. In 2020, the death toll was 71, and in 2021, 64—increases of 54.3 and 39.1 percent, respectively. As of May, the situation was worsening: 33 such motor-ve hicle occupants have died so far this year, nearly double the average of 17 in the first five months of 2017, 2018, or 2019. helped organize a trade group, El Diario de los Deliveryboys en la Gran Manzana, to advocate for better safety for working cyclists, notes, “putting . . . barriers between cars and cyclists is working,” albeit “very slowly.”

A 2010 city study found that “80 percent of pe destrian [fatal or serious] crashes involve male drivers, while only 57 percent of New York City driver’s licenses are held by males.” In about eight in ten fatal crashes, drivers were behind the wheel of their own vehicle, not a commercial vehicle such as a taxi. Between 2017 and 2019, in more than one-quarter of fatal crashes (across genders), the driver was under 30. The gender breakdown hasn’t changed much of late. Men continued to be behind the wheel in more than eight in ten fatal crashes the last two years. The other risk factor, though, has grown even riskier: young drivers. In 2020, drivers un der 30 were in 100 fatal crashes, up 42.9 percent from the average between 2017 and 2019 and constituting 31.4 percent of the total. In 2021, the trend, though abated, continued, with young males driving in 28.2 percent of all fatal crashes. Just as fewer motorcyclists are wearing helmets, as the law requires, fewer drivers and passen gers in fatal crashes were wearing seatbelts, as similarly mandated—40.8 percent were unbelted in 2021 and 2022, up from 31 percent in the im mediate pre-Covid years. More drivers are speeding: 69 such deaths occurred in 2020, a major increase over the av erage of 42 annually between 2017 and 2019, followed by a new high of 80 such deaths in 2021. And more are drinking. Though drunkdriving deaths fell in 2020—presumably because bars and restaurants were closed for much of the year—they rose past the pre-pandemic average in 2021, as entertainment venues reopened. Fi nally, more fatal crashes are occurring at night: 114 in 2021; and 97 in 2020, up from the pre-pan demic average. As former city traffic commissioner Sam Schwartz says, drivers are “behaving outra geously.” Schwartz visited the scene of that sin gle-car February 2022 Hudson Parkway crash that killed three, including the driver—and found no skid marks. In 2020, one could at least argue that drivers were behaving recklessly by accident. With roads devoid of traffic, people could perhaps speed or lose their attention with out fully noticing. By 2021, though, normal traf fic levels had returned—and the deathly trips continued.

What was the big factor that changed begin ning in 2020, apart from the less trafficked roads and the fact that many newly unemployed and out-of-school teens and young men had extra time for motoring misadventures? It’s not as if New York ripped out its new pedestrian plazas and bike lanes. To the contrary, the city made even more such space for cyclists and walkers, and for diners, via its “open streets” and “open restaurants” recreation and dining programs. Rather, law enforcement changed. Automated cameras continued to issue fines—nearly 4.4 mil lion tickets in 2020 (numbers for previous years aren’t comparable, as the city greatly expanded the program in 2020). But police-directed en forcement of the laws of the road—against drunk driving, speeding, and general reckless behav ior—plummeted. Between 2017 and 2019, the NYPD issued an average of slightly more than 1 million “moving violations”—for speeding, redlight running, and other dangerous driving—an nually. In 2020, the figure dropped to 510,000, and in 2021, to 508,000. Just as New York drivers were proving that they couldn’t regulate their own behavior, the city severely curtailed its reg ulation of that behavior. On the densest streets and avenues, drivers still find some of their reckless behavior thwarted by bike lanes, pedestrian plazas, speed bumps, frequent red lights and intersections, and other physical obstacles, and the city can and should create more such obstacles. But bike lanes and bus lines, especially those without physical bar riers to keep out car and truck drivers, aren’t entirely self-enforcing. As A. Mychal Johnson, founder of South Bronx Unite, a quality-of-life advocacy group, notes of his own truck- and cardominated neighborhood, “traffic deaths have increased because traffic enforcement is not a priority for the NYPD. They overlook doubleparked cars, especially their own, vehicles in bike lanes, delivery trucks double-parked, and trucks traversing through residential areas to avoid congested truck routes.” In early May 2022, the

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t’s never been a secret that male drivers—par ticularly, young male drivers driving their own vehicles—are responsible for most traffic deaths.

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B ad drivers, like other antisocial actors, have proved since 2020 that they’re not going to con trol themselves. The Adams administration has taken some welcome steps to do so. Most impor tant, the mayor realizes that traffic violence and violent crime go together. “I’m sending a clear message that this city is not going to be a city of disorder,” he said in May, and “vehicle crashes” are a sign of “a city of disorder.” The mayor will revive the Giuliani-era TrafficStat program, pin pointing locations where “people are speeding, driving fast, reckless[ly] driving” for stepped-up police enforcement. The city will also continue to build out speed bumps, new intersection de signs that slow traffic with raised markings, and bikeThislanes.spring, the city successfully lobbied the state legislature to let it keep its speed cameras on 24 hours daily. But cameras can’t make up for the human enforcement pullback, especially “Police enforcement of the laws of the road—against drunk driving, speeding, and recklessplummeted.behavior—has ”

since, as The City news site reports, drivers are increasingly using bogus or obscured license plates to evade cameras. Police officers must stop drivers with such plates.

Twenty-two years later, his words are more rel evant than ever. driver of a box truck careening through a midBronx intersection struck and killed 16-year-old Alissa Kolenovic, who was walking to school; weeks later, a truck driver killed a bicyclist on Bruckner Boulevard. In both instances, chaoti cally designed streets, coupled with negligible enforcement of traffic in a semi-industrial area, were to blame. The law-enforcement absence is most glaring on limited-access highways and wide arterial roads. “We’ve made strides on intersections,” says Matthew Carmody, a veteran transporta tion engineer at city planning firm AKRF. “But away from inter sections, where you have these long, wide boulevards” and “big distances between in tersections . . . [driv ers] speed.” Wide roads, including high ways, are “empty of traffic many hours of the day.” Crash barriers did not stop Valette and his friends from plunging over an upper Manhattan highway embankment to their deaths.

The Adams administration can’t ignore the death toll among working delivery cyclists. Most cyclists are independent contractors for apps such as DoorDash and Grubhub. The business model requires them to ride long distances, and quickly, to deliver hot food. A double-digit an nual death number that would be unacceptable in any other blue-collar occupation, such as con struction, should be unacceptable in this one as well. As for reckless car and truck operators, repeat dangerous driv ers, including the tens of thousands whose vehicles rack up five or more speed-cam era violations yearly, should face consequences. Before 28-year-old Tyrik Mott sped the wrong way down Gates Ave nue in Brooklyn and killed infant Apolline MongGuillemin in her baby carriage in September 2021, his vehicle had racked up 91 speed-camera tick ets, as Streetsblog reported. Cops had repeatedly pulled him over, and the state had suspended his license. But Mott kept driving. Similarly, Michael de Guzman, the person charged with drunkenly hitting and killing New York University student Raife Milligan in May 2022, had four speeding violations on his vehicle in just five months. But both still drove with impunity. To stop such drivers before they kill, Adams should revive the other Giuliani-era program, as well: seizing the vehicles of the most reckless drivers, people caught behaving dangerously several times behind the wheel. “If you get ar rested for reckless driving to the point where we charge you with a misdemeanor, we’re go ing to take your automobile from you,” Giuliani said in 2000. “And we’re going to take it from you . . . because it’ll remind you that this is important. This kills people. It also kills you.”

CITY JOURNAL90 How the Media Polarized Us

Andrey Mir The shift from ad revenue to the pursuit of digital subscriptions has turned journalism into post-journalism.

P ublic trust in the media has hit an all-time low. Common explana tions for this crisis of credibility include bias, polarization, and fake news, but these causes are themselves effects of the tectonic, and generally overlooked, shift in the media’s business model. Throughout the twentieth century, journalism relied for its fund ing predominantly on advertising. In the early 2010s, as ad money fled the industry, publica tions sought to earn revenue through subscrip tions instead of advertising. In the process, they became dependent on digital audiences—espe cially their most vocal representatives. The shift Journalism wanted its picture to fit the world. Post-journalism wants the world to fit its picture.

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Everything we once knew about journalism de pended on the model of the ad-funded news me dia. Advertising accounted for most of the news industry’s revenue during the twentieth century. This business model provided a selective advantage to certain kinds of media. Since the revenue from copy sales was not sufficient to maintain news production, news outlets needed to attract advertising. As a result, media that re lied mostly on the reader’s penny, such as the formerly influential working-class press, eventu ally lost out in the marketplace. The mass me dia that oriented themselves around the “buying audience”—the affluent middle class—received money from growing advertising and thrived. In political economy, this selective effect is called “allocative control.” The ad money did not tell the media what to do; it just chose the media that encouraged its audience to buy goods. Me dia critics Edward S. Herman and Noam Chom sky argued that it affected the mechanism of discourse formation, as the media maintained a context favorable for consumerism and political stability, and thereby “manufactured consent.”

The only entity to which journalism was called to be biased against, even meticulously so, was power. This was a part of the credibility code, too. Endowed with these principles, initially rooted in ad funding, journalism evolved in the twentieth century as the “watchdog of democ racy,” positioning itself above partisan party struggle.Finally, the media’s dependence on advertis ing determined their attitude toward their read ers. If the audience was supposed to be affluent, mature, and capable, so, too, were journalists from advertising to digital subscriptions invali dated old standards of journalism and led to the emergence of post-journalism.

This business model was extremely success ful. By the end of the twentieth century, the news media had reached the apex of their 500-year his tory. Even regional newspapers such as the Bal timore Sun possessed several well-staffed foreign bureaus. Never were the media as rich and in fluential as in their golden age, just 25 years ago. Plenty of journalists still on the job remember those glorious days. Under the ad-based model, media capital rep resented a significant social force. It protected its interests, its market value, and therefore its in dependence.

CITY JOURNAL92 How the Media Polarized Us Ad money carried the risks of advertisers’ pressure in news production, which would have undermined newsroom autonomy, a source of reputation and therefore capitalization. So pro fessional standards were elaborated to protect journalism from advertisers and establish the credibility of news coverage. Credibility was seen as a professional virtue but also as a com modity. “The theory underlying the modern news industry has been the belief that credibil ity builds a broad and loyal audience, and that economic success follows in turn,” declared the American Press Association in its 1997 “Princi ples of Journalism” statement.

Thus, paradoxically, the allocative control of ad money determined the allegiance of main stream media to corporate elites (hence, “cor porate media”) but also sustained high-quality journalism. Newsroom autonomy was protected by the standards of objectivity, nonpartisan and unbiased reporting, attention to the arguments of all parties involved, investigative rigor, the separation of fact from opinion, and other guar antees enshrined in the ethical and professional codes of news organizations. The same set of professional standards that was meant to secure credibility and indepen dence from ad money turned journalism into a public service. “The central purpose of journal ism is to provide citizens with accurate and reli able information they need to function in a free society,” claimed the American Press Associa tion’s statement. “Commitment to citizens also means journalism should present a representa tive picture of all constituent groups in society. Ignoring certain citizens has the effect of disen franchising them.”

The abundance of money enabled newsrooms to develop an autonomy secured by the division between news production and adsales departments—a “glass wall” between ads and news. Preselected by ad money, news orga nizations geared toward affluent audiences be came influential to the point that their autonomy determined their market value.

SUMMER 2022 93 expected to avoid judgment when reporting— they were to present the naked facts and the positions of both political sides to the public to judge. Hypocrisy and professional arrogance, of course, had always had a place in the profes sion: journalists have long seen themselves as a kind of priestly class. Nevertheless, leaving judgment to readers (or at least pretending to do so) was one of the fundamental virtues of ad-funded journalism. And since publications wanted to broaden their audience, not narrow it, they served reader preferences by downplay ing, rather than em phasizing, potentially divisive issues. All of this cooled the political activ ity of the public. In his 1999 book Rich Media, Poor Democ racy , media historian Robert McChesney described the low de gree of participation in elections as “democracy without citizens.” If the medium is the message, then the message of the ad-funded news media was “buy!”—not “vote!” or “protest!” This might have seemed to be bad for democracy, but po larization in society was at a low point, while the influence and prosperity of the mass media were at an all-time high. The political tranquility of the public was a side effect—detrimental or benevolent, depending on one’s perspective. T he Internet broke this idyll. It turned out that the ad-based model relied not on the con tent attracting an affluent audience but on the monopoly over ad delivery that the Internet simply destroyed. The ad-based media business achieved power and prosperity over the course of 100 years; it collapsed in just ten. The collapse started with the classifieds. At their peak in 2000, classified ads brought in $19.6 billion, about one-third of newspapers’ revenue. As Craigslist, eBay, and others killed this market, classifieds revenue plummeted to $2.2 billion in 2018. Corporate advertising was next. Suddenly, firms found that they could reach their desired audience online directly and precisely with full control over content, context, and targeting. Google and Facebook delivered the fatal blow. It became obvious to advertisers that old media had offered them a costly and inefficient method of carpet-bombing their targeted audiences. By contrast, Google and Facebook knew the pref erences of billions of individuals and provided personally customized delivery of ads to each of them. In 2013, Google alone made $51 billion in ad revenue. That year, American newspapers’ ad revenue was $23 billion, and the global newspa per industry collected $89 billion in ad rev enue. The GoogleFacebook duopoly surpassed 60 percent of the share in the U.S. digital ad market in 2018. It became in creasingly clear that old media had little chance of competing with digital platforms. Ad revenue in the U.S. press hit rock-bottom in 2013, falling below the level of 1950, when the industry started measuring the print ad market. In 2016, the Newspaper Association of America stopped reporting newspapers’ annual ad rev enue: this source of revenue had basically ceased to exist. Residual advertising in print media, both offline and online, lost its industrial scale and any commercial meaning. Today, advertis ing contracts in the media often resemble charity from ideologically aligned businesses. Advertising revenue fell below the level of reader revenue at the same time across the world. In 2014, ad revenue in the global newspa per industry ($86.5 billion) trailed reader reve nue ($92.4 billion) for the first time in the history of industrial measurement. Even the strongest American newspapers could not hold advertis ers: the New York Times began getting more rev enue from readers than from ads in 2012. Observing these changes, McChesney wrote in a foreword to the 2015 reissue of Rich Media, Poor Democracy that “the marriage of capitalism and journalism is over.” Divorced by capital ism, journalism now sought new partners. Some “If the audience was supposed to be mature and capable, so, too, were journalists expected to avoid judgment.”

These forms of social organization are incom patible. And the greater the differences between the agendas shaped by social media and by the mainstream media, the more intense the clash becomes. Between 2009 and 2014, the alterna tive agendas induced on social media became so powerful that they produced a “crisis of au thority,” in the words of Martin Gurri, who described this as the “revolt of the pub lic.” The viral editor agitated the digitized, urban, educated, and progressive youth to the point of political indignation. Protests, and even revolutions, broke out across the globe, including the Arab Spring (2009–11), Occupy Wall Street (2011), the “social justice” protests in Israel (2011), the Indig nados protest in Spain (2011), the student pro tests in Greece (2010–11), the anti-Putin protests in Moscow (2011–12), the Taksim Square Protest in Turkey (2013), and many others. Each of these events had its own set of causes, of course, but all had several features in common. First was the demographics of the participants— they tended to be, again, those digitized, urban, educated, and progressive youth. Second, the protests generally opposed the establishment, re gardless of ideology, from Hosni Mubarak’s and Vladimir Putin’s regimes to the U.S. economic and political system during Barack Obama’s presidency. Social media elevated the role of progressive discourse producers: academic, bo hemian, and social-justice activists. The main social feature of the new medium—the intensity of self-expression in the pursuit of response— tended to convert private talks into public activ ism and thus empowered activism as a mind-set, not just an activity. In the 2010s, activism gained momentum in digital media and thus prolifer ated far beyond its traditional circles. publications invested their hopes in ancillary businesses—from organizing conferences to selling wine—but these markets were already saturated. Others courted philanthropic bil lionaires or public funding, but the handful of high-profile survival stories could not arrest the dynamic of decline. The news media returned to their natural and only remaining source of reve nue—selling content—at a time when subsisting on print subscriptions and newsstand copies was no longer viable. Losing ad business and having no support from the printed word, news organi zations turned to their last hope: digital sub scriptions. Who was the digital audience by the early 2010s? Social me dia had already spread around the world, be ginning with young, urban, educated, and usually progressive people. Both Twitter and Facebook were created by youth, for youth. Social-media users strove to find, pro duce, and share facts, evidence, opinions, and ex pertise—anything that could trigger interest from others. Discourse on social media involves a dis persed mechanism of mutual informing that does the job of what I call the “viral editor”: selecting, refining, and delivering socially relevant content, optimized for virality. This tendency created an alternative news en vironment. And led by the pioneers of digital activism, young progressives shaped an alterna tive agenda. Before long, they revealed how sig nificantly their agenda differed from that of the old mainstream media. The transition of news coverage and public discussions from legacy media to social me dia invited politicization. The old news media, which tended to serve established institutions, began competing with the multidirectional, ver satile, and oscillating forces born in the live in teractions of peers and structured by the viral Newspapers once relied heavily on advertising revenue, an arrangement that kept journalists’ natural liberal predisposition in check. “The viral editor agitated progressive youth to the point of indignation. Protests, and even revolutions, broke out.”

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uch were the conditions in which legacy me dia began looking for business opportunities in a new digital environment. To sell digital subscrip tions, they needed to find ways to attract the digi talThisaudience.isnot to say that journalists were complete strangers to the digital public. On the contrary: nowadays, journalists usually come from the ranks of urban, educated, and progressive elites; they are often young; and some were themselves social-media pioneers. Journalists, therefore, were naturally predisposed to align with the dominant ethos of early social media—in part, because they “have always been more liberal than their fellow countrymen,” as Batya UngarSargon pointed out in her 2021 book Bad News: How Woke Media Is Undermining Democracy . “But in the past,” she maintained, “this liberalism was checked by their publishers, who were often the owners of large corporations, or Republicans, or both. They wanted their newspapers and their news stations to appeal to the vast American middle, which meant that journalists were not at liberty to indulge their own political preferences in their Indeed,reporting.”thead-based business model had kept the natural liberal predisposition of journalists in check. The balance between the liberalism of the newsrooms and the business necessity to ap peal to the “vast middle” for better advertising maintained both the market value and cultural power of journalism. Despite its inherent liberal ism, journalism still needed to address affluent consumers, encouraging journalists to follow the professional standards of objectivity and unbi ased investigative rigor. The highest examples of that work—such as the Watergate investiga tion, the Pentagon Papers , and the Boston Globe ’s “Spotlight” investigation of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church—bolstered the professional reputation of the news media. Yet the essential ingredient of that recipe— the advertising-dictated necessity to appeal to the median American—had disappeared by the early 2010s. The inherent liberal predisposition of the newsrooms was suddenly unchecked by The ad-revenue model funded a cornucopia of print choices for consumers.

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How the Media Polarized Us any financial imperative. The cultural proximity between journalists and the progressive users of early social networks, the news-gathering power of social media, and the need for media organi zations to secure digital subscriptions led to an ideological convergence between large media organizations and digital progressives. Quan titative studies cited by Ungar-Sargon indicate that the use of terminology associated with woke politics, such as “racism,” “people of color,” “slav ery,” “white supremacy,” and “oppression,” has skyrocketed in the American mainstream media precisely since 2011. The principles of news coverage also changed significantly. Coverage was determined by fo cusing on pressing social issues highlighted by the progressive Twitterati. The need to go digi tal made the media consider Twitter as their referential source for discourse formation. This radical shift affected the entire news ecosys tem—including television and radio, which du tifully followed the changing discourse model of the print press, acquiring their own digital addictions and dependence on the social-media crowd.Still, this ideological transformation did not bring the media any financial gains—at least, not until Donald Trump arrived on the scene. The metamorphosis of the media did not hap pen during Trump’s presidency. Instead, Trump’s ascension was in part a result of the media’s trans formation from being ad-funded to chasing digital subscriptions.Associalmedia began permeating society, the user demographic grew older, more rural, less educated, and more conservative. Comparative data on social-media proliferation suggest a hy pothesis that the online activity of a certain demo graphic group can lead to the political activation of this group if the group exceeds an “awareness threshold”—defined as the point at which about 60 percent of the group uses social media. The urban, college-educated, and aged 18–49 cohorts crossed this threshold in 2011. Social-media use for older, less urban, and generally more conser vative demographics had reached about 60 per cent by 2016. In the early 2010s, digital progressives still identified with a new, decentralized power structure that fought the establishment. But as the mainstream media gravitated toward so cial media and propelled them into a dominant discourse-formation role, digital progressives became the establishment. In a matter of several years, digital progressivism resettled from the “cloud” to the “pyramid,” from a posture of rebel lion against centralized power structures to one of alliance with them. Meantime, social media kept growing. By 2016, digital conservatives represented the new “cloud.” As their younger predecessors had done years earlier, they became a socially significant force. Soon enough, they discovered that the agenda that the mainstream media imposed clashed with their views—and their sense of losing ground and losing country grew sharp. The power of social media lies not so much in exposing mainstream bias but in revealing that so many other people see these biases, too. As Marx said, an idea becomes a material force as soon as it grips the masses; by providing access to information and self-expression, social media enabled the materialization of indignation. What happened next is history. Donald Trump sensed the demand, gained extraordi nary media attention for free, made himself a channel for conservative indignation, and brought about the release of the already builtup resentment of the conservative “cloud.” His rise used the same mechanism that underlay the early Twitter revolutions. In terms of media ecology, Trump’s ascension completed the Oc cupy Wall Street movement, but on a different demographic basis.

B etween 2010 and 2016, digital subscriptions remained insignificant from a business perspec tive. The news media wooed the digital pro gressives, but it was not until the conservative demographic—and Trump—arrived as forces on social media that the news media started raking in digital subscriptions. Until then, the mainstream media did not have any commod ity to offer their newly chosen referential group. Trump helped fix that. He became that missing

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ness model. But this business model has strati fied the press, bringing meaningful results only to large, nationally concerned media outlets. News validation creates a swarming effect: peo ple want to have disturbing news validated by an authoritative notary with a greater followership. Audiences want to pay only for flagship media, such as the New York Times or the Washington Post . If other, smaller media outlets don’t join the chorus, they risk digital backlash; if they do join it, they struggle to differentiate themselves and lack authority to be a recognized news vali dator, anyway. Most subscription money flows to a few behe moths. The new sub scription model has led not only to media polarization but also to media concentra tion.The biggest loss, however, is the mu tation of journalism into post-journalism. The death of those newspapers that shut down before this mutation was at least honorable. Journalism wanted its picture to fit the world. Post-journal ism wants the world to fit its picture, which is a definition of propaganda. Post-journalism has turned the media into the crowdfunded Minis tries of Truth. The worst part for journalists is that only a few enterprises can succeed in this new business model. The worst part for society is that all legacy media need to pursue digital subscriptions or viewership as their last hope for survival, and thus must join the race of postjournalism.Atemptation always exists to blame media bias on a closely held conspiracy, but the real drivers lie deeper. Creed and greed might fill the me dium with the messages, but it is the medium it self that defines polarization—its true message. If ad-driven media manufactured consent, readerdriven media manufacture anger. If ad-driven media served consumerism, reader-driven media serve polarization. There can be no “solution” for a shift of such magnitude. “How do we fix polar ization?” is the wrong question. The right ques tion is, “How are we going to live with it?” commodity immediately after his shocking vic tory. The mainstream media understood the signal, upgraded Trump from amusement to ex istential danger, and started selling the Trump scare as a new commodity. The media quickly learned to solicit subscrip tions as support for a noble effort—the protec tion of democracy from “dying in darkness,” as the Washington Post put it. A new business model emerged, soliciting subscriptions as donations to a cause. Donations required triggers that the love-hate alliance of Trump and the media read ily supplied. The cru cial part of the new business model was not just Trump him self but the significant number of his sup porters. The most ter rifying thing was that fully half the elector ate supported such a “monster” (in the view of the other half). By no means were the media interested in mitigating this divide. They needed to maintain frustration and instigate polarization to keep do nors scared, outraged, and engaged. The news media reminded readers how outrageous the outrageous events were, and their focus turned toward such events. As the scare came to re place news as a commodity, the mainstream media switched from news supply to news validation.Bothends of the political spectrum were in volved. Right-wing outlets also tried to sell scare instead of news—the scare of losing ground and country. The new business model made the me dia the agents of polarization. They organically joined to the mechanisms of polarization that had formed in the larger media environment— on the Internet and social media. Some main stream media grew their digital subscriptions severalfold during Trump’s tenure. W hat comes next for the media industry?

The validation of disturbing news within certain value systems has finally become a viable busi “As the scare replaced news as a commodity, the media switched from news supply to news validation.”

Can We Manage to Integrate?

William Voegeli Chicago suburb Oak Park’s effort to achieve racial balance counsels skepticism about engineered diversity.

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O ne lesson from America’s two-decade Afghanistan de bacle is that you can’t achieve success if you can’t define it. A political goal is seldom at tained if every description of it sounds vague or arbitrary; it cannot be realized by any known policy mech anism; and it draws strong opposition from foes while earning only tepid support from putative constituents. Housing integration is no excep tion. As a senator, Walter Mondale was a leading congressional sponsor of the Fair Housing Act. After its 1968 enactment, he said that the law’s purpose was to replace ghettos by means of “truly integrated and balanced living patterns.”

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Fifty-four years later, it remains unclear how to parse or implement that objective. Not that people have stopped caring. The Imperative of Integration (2010), by philosophy A view of downtown Chicago from Oak Park’s Metra commuter rail station

The same polls show that AfricanAmericans believe that a neighborhood is inte grated when blacks account for 20 percent to 50 percent of the inhabitants, two to four times their proportion in the national population. Is integration still a goal worth pursuing?

Similarly, Richard Rothstein of the Economic Policy Institute argued in The Color of Law: A For gotten History of How Our Government Segregated America (2017) that federal policies are the main reason we have housing segregation, by which he means that blacks and whites are far less likely to share a neighborhood than random chance would predict. Such segregation has harmed all Americans, he contends, but especially blacks. Further, only countervailing federal policies can end it, which is urgent because “integration will benefit all of us, white and African American.”

In this scenario, not only would many com munities remain predominantly white; no community could be predominantly black.

Can We Manage to Integrate?

T hat whites and blacks have irreconcilable ideas about what integration means is no small problem. If, as a thought experiment, we subor

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Sociologists Maria Krysan and Reynolds Far ley showed in 2002 that the first choice for 20 percent of African-Americans was to live in a neighborhood that was all-black, and another 23 percent preferred one that was more than two-thirds black. In 2019, a banker, who could have afforded a home anywhere in Chicago, ex plained to journalist Carlo Rotella his decision to reside in South Shore, a neighborhood more than 90 percent black: “I value the quality of Af rocentrism, and not just in the political sense. I value being recognized and regarded as nor mal, not being seen when I walk down the street as different and remarkable.”

dinate every conflicting political consideration to racial integration, a housing czar could assign people homes in specific locations. By embracing the standard that African-Americans should con stitute 12 percent of the residents of each block, he could use his unchecked power to integrate every zip code and census tract. Yet, if the goal is to increase the number of communities where blacks amount to one-fifth or half of the local population, there’s an obvious limit to what he could do, given that they constitute just oneeighth of the national population. Even the most obsessive social engineer would eventually run out of blacks to integrate, leaving some places in tegrated according to the more expansive defini tion of the term and many others with few or no African-American residents.

Step outside this thought experiment, back to the reality where Americans have consider able latitude to move from place to place, and it becomes even harder to spell out what integra tion means and how we achieve it. Integration in the real world requires public policies, economic professor Elizabeth Anderson, contends that in tegration “promotes greater equality and democ racy” by enlarging the shared civic realm from “particularistic ethno-racial identities” to “identi fication with a larger, nationwide community.”

Suppose the housing czar accedes to those blacks who want to live in a predominantly black area. If they amount to 43 percent of the U.S. black population, the zero-sum problem be comes even more acute. Few communities will ever be “truly integrated and balanced,” by any definition, if only 57 percent of black Ameri cans—6.9 percent of all Americans—are avail able for the czar’s integration project.

At one point, however, after endorsing vari ous government measures to promote integra tion, Rothstein admits that it’s “appropriate to wonder why we should go to great expense to persuade people to follow a policy that nobody, black or white, seems to want.” One attorney told him: “I am a middle-class African-American pro fessional woman, and I want to live where I can be comfortable, where there are salons that know how to cut my hair, where I can easily get to my church, and where there are supermarkets where I can buy collard greens.” And the evidence for anti-integration sentiment goes beyond anec dotes. Rothstein cites surveys showing that most whites and blacks speak favorably about inte gration in the abstract. But the data immediately reveal a difficulty: whites consider a neighbor hood integrated when the proportion of blacks residing there is around 10 percent, close to the present national total of 12.1 percent. (Roth stein ascribes this preference to whites’ desire to “dominate.”)

The more promising course, then, may be to heed the advice offered on many Prius bumpers: think globally but act locally. One of the most durable and, by its own standards, successful ef forts to achieve a stable integrated community can be found in Oak Park, Illinois, a suburb of some 55,000 residents abutting Chicago’s border, eight miles west of the Loop. Oak Park was 99 percent white in 1970, but blacks accounted for 11 percent of its resi dents in 1980 and 18.5 percent by 1990. Based on the pattern estab lished in many other Chicago neighbor hoods and suburbs, as well as in communi ties across the coun try, Oak Park should have been poised for “white flight,” as the black population’s growth reached a “tipping point” that saw the slow departure of whites turn into a rush for the exits. Instead, Oak Park’s demographics have changed only slightly. In 2021, the village’s population was 18.4 percent black. (As such, it satisfies Rothstein’s criterion for integration, since African-Americans account for 16.7 percent of metropolitan Chicago’s popu lation.) The modest decline in Oak Park’s white population, from 76.9 percent in 1990 to 66.1 per cent in 2021, corresponds to a rising number of Hispanic and Asian residents. To achieve this degree of integration and then sustain it for decades is as unusual in northeast ern Illinois as it is throughout the United States. You won’t find it anywhere in Oak Park’s im mediate vicinity, which is made up of other communities that were also nearly all-white for most of the twentieth century. An adjacent village, River Forest, remains 83 percent white and 7 percent black. Cicero and Berwyn, to Oak Park’s south, are now predominantly Hispanic, with small minorities of non-Hispanic whites and even smaller ones of non-Hispanic blacks. Just west of Oak Park, Maywood and Bellwood “Polls show

Rothstein defines a “stable integrated com munity” as a suburb with a black population no more than 10 percentage points over, but also no less than 10 under, the proportion of blacks in an entire metropolitan area. In greater New York, where 15 per cent of the residents are African-Ameri can, the boundaries would be 5 percent and 25 percent, and they’re between 22 percent and 42 per cent in metropolitan Atlanta, where the figure is 32 percent.

SUMMER 2022 103 incentives, and social pressures that induce some people to relocate and some to stay put. Otherwise, it’s highly likely to meet a Chicago alderman’s cynical, but empirically grounded, definition of integration: the transitional period that commences when the first black family moves into a neighborhood and concludes when the last white family moves out.

Rothstein’s proposals for achieving this goal do not lack for audacity. One is for the federal government to purchase, at market rate, houses for sale in suburbs where African-Americans are underrepresented, and then sell them to black buyers at steeply discounted prices. An other calls on Congress to “amend the tax code to deny the mortgage interest deduction” to all homeowners in a suburb where the proportion of black residents falls more than 10 percentage points below the metropolitan average. He implicitly acknowledges that a Catch-22 will impede such programs. Such sweeping proposals won’t be politically feasible until a widespread “sense of outrage” exists, based on the acceptance of his thesis about housing seg regation’s causes and effects. This is the climate of opinion that we might expect in an America where a political party could win congressional majorities by promising to suspend the mortgage interest deduction in insufficiently integrated suburbs. In that country, though, Rothstein’s policy agenda would be redundant. That version of America would already comprise thousands and thousands of predominantly “white commu nities whose interracial hospitality,” as he terms it, had become “widely known.”

African-Americansthatsee a community as integrated when blacks are 20–50 percent of inhabitants.”

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Oak Park also offered, beginning in 1978, the Equity Assurance Program, an insurance pol icy providing protection from housing-market changes related to integration. In Chicago neigh borhoods that had resegregated, either the fact or fear of demographic change had led many homeowners to sell at a loss. The Equity Assur ance Program guaranteed policyholders that they would be compensated if they found them selves selling their home at a price below what they paid for it. Perhaps the best evidence for the success of Oak Park’s effort to stabilize integration is that no claims have ever been made under this insurance program. Instead, property values rose steadily as Oak Park became one of the most affluent sub urbs in western Cook County. Breymaier writes that diversity is among Oak Park’s “core values,” central to its “identity and sense of place,” as well as the village’s “brand.” Integration, in this view, is sustained by a virtuous circle: it draws people of all ethnicities who value life in a diverse com munity, and then gives them a stake in preserv ing it. The steadily climbing property values, in turn, guarantee that homeowners of any ethnic ity are likely to be upper-middle-class profes sionals with compatible outlooks and concerns.

McKenzie and Ruby observed that 81 percent of Oak Park’s blocks had at least one black family in 2000. This is, they say, “an achievement that few communities have realized.” It is also, how ever, an effort consistent with writer Steve Sail er’s derisive opinion that managed integration amounts to making sure that there is “one black per block” but as few as possible in excess of that. Initially, Oak Park’s managed integration ef fort focused on homeowners, seeking simulta

CITY JOURNAL104 Can We Manage to Integrate?

neously to encourage “fair housing”—a nondis criminatory real-estate market—and discourage white flight. To keep the sight of For Sale signs on lawns from triggering panic selling, as had occurred in Austin and other Chicago neighbor hoods, Oak Park prohibited them. A 1977 Su preme Court ruling held that such bans violated the First Amendment, but because no Oak Park real-estate agent has challenged it in court, the prohibition remains in effect as a practical matter.

By the time McKenzie and Ruby examined Oak Park’s managed integration program, nearly 30 years after its inception, it had “become so com plicated that few Oak Parkers fully understand it.” There’s nothing esoteric about a crucial ele ment, however. Oak Park is an older inner-ring suburb, unlike those around the country that saw subdivisions of single-family homes spring up in the years after World War II. As a result, it has fewer homeowners and more renters than most have large African-American majorities, as does Austin, the Chicago neighborhood immediately east of Oak Park, which is 84 percent black and 4 percentAustin’swhite.transformation from middle-class and predominantly white (more than 99 percent white in 1960) to poor and predominantly black (over 86 percent black in 1990) was the proxi mate cause of Oak Park’s decision to confront and control its demographic change. “Reconsid ering the Oak Park Strategy,” an academic paper written in 2002 by Evan McKenzie, a political sci entist, and Jay Ruby, an anthropologist, states: “The 1970s witnessed classic block-by-block re segregation in Austin, an event that had enor mous psychological impact on Oak Parkers.” As a result, “Austin became a negative example for many Oak Parkers, who were determined to chart a different course.” That course became “managed integration,” also known as “integration maintenance” or “in tentional integration.” The policy was carried out by the village government, advisory boards, civic groups, and, above all, the nonprofit Oak Park Regional Housing Center (OPRHC), created in 1972. The goal was to assist people seeking to move into Oak Park, especially blacks, while re assuring those thinking about leaving Oak Park, especially whites. Beyond stabilizing Oak Park’s demographic profile to resemble closely that of the Chicago metropolitan area, the managed integration pro gram worked to prevent the emergence of any predominantly black or white neighborhoods within the suburb. As J. Robert Breymaier, exec utive director of OPRHC from 2006 to 2018, has written, the goal is to encourage as many relo cations as possible that will “sustain or improve the integration of a particular building or block.”

Breymaier estimates that OPRHC brokered 40 percent of the leases signed in Oak Park over the five years from 2010 through 2014. OPRHC, in turn, engages in “affirmative escort ing” or “reverse steering” when an apartmentseeker contacts it to inquire about vacancies.

1988 Chicago Reader article on Bobbie Raymond, OPRHC’s founder, described the goal less clinically: for clients to end up in “appropriate apartments.” That is, “whites are usually given listings on the east side of the village, next to Chicago’s mostly black Austin neighborhood.”

A

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In addition, McKenzie and Ruby write, DAP “pays the owner rent for leaving apartments empty until a tenant of the proper race can be found—i.e., a white tenant for a predominantly black building, or a black tenant for one that is predominantly white.”

The city government has used sticks, such as building inspections and the threat of fines, and carrots, including loans and other financial benefits, to motivate landlords to use OPRHC as their rental agent. Through the city’s Diversity Assurance Program (DAP), for example, owners of apartment buildings can receive low-interest loans to make upgrades in exchange for a fiveyear commitment to do business with OPRHC.

It’s unclear why, given Oak Park’s prosperity and seeming harmony, integration has been managed for 50 years without becoming self-sustaining, and apparently needs to be managed for decades to come.

Blacks, conversely, “are sent to white neighbor hoods in the center and west of Oak Park, or referred to other suburbs with newer housing.”

Breymaier calculates that 68 percent of reloca tions that OPRHC facilitates are “affirmative moves”—ones that increase a block’s or a build ing’s racial integration. By his estimation, only 25 percent of relocations taking place on the open market, without OPRHC involvement, are affirmative moves. suburbs. Breymaier reports that when the man aged integration effort began in the 1970s, half of Oak Park’s residential units were rental proper ties; 40 percent remain so. Most of these rental units are apartments in small buildings, managed by “mom-and-pop” landlords who own, at most, a handful of additional apartment buildings.

At least they’re still at it. Chicago’s South Shore neighborhood also tried to stabilize its demographic mix in the 1960s. The endeavor, studied in sociologist Harvey Molotch’s Man aged Integration: Dilemmas of Doing Good in the City (1972), was admirably earnest—and utterly ineffective. “The efforts of the South Shore Commission and the public resources allocated to Ωsave≈ South Shore were,” Molotch concludes, “wasted.” South Shore went from nearly all-white to nearly all-black over the course of 20 years, just like many other South Side and, later, West Side neighborhoods. If anything, managed integration accelerated re segregation. The commission’s public-relations campaigns about the satisfactions of life in a multiracial neighborhood neither induced whites to move in nor dissuaded them from moving out. Circulars about improved schools and parks did, however, help persuade black people living elsewhere in Chicago to relocate to South McKenzieShore.and Ruby have the better argument when they contend that Oak Park cannot be an integration template, since its success rests on a unique mix of factors: “proximity to a depressed urban neighborhood, aging housing stock, a high percentage of apartment buildings, and a small, affluent, politically independent liberal community that has the means to be proactive.” They note that Republican presidential nominee George W. Bush won 23 percent of the vote in the 2000 election, losing all 70 precincts in what a Chicago Tribune columnist calls “the People’s Re public of Oak Park.”

CITY JOURNAL106 Can We Manage to Integrate?

As Breymaier carefully stipulates, “Landlords do not have the same legal ability to engage in inte gration activity that the nonprofit and propertyfree Housing Center enjoys.” Translated, this means that an Oak Park landlord would invite endless trouble by rejecting an application from a tenant of the “wrong” racial or ethnic group. OPRHC, by contrast, has spent 50 years telling clients, based on their race, that they should con sider this neighborhood rather than that one, and has done so without incurring lawsuits or bad publicity. “It is through direct, face-to-face conversation that OPRHC addresses irrational fears, provides missing information, replaces myths and stereotypes with facts, and engages in gentle persuasion to consider new options,” in Breymaier’s account of the coaching process. “This results in a much different housing search than would occur without OPRHC.”

I ts long-term success in stabilizing integra tion makes Oak Park an exception. But what rule does it prove? It’s clear to Breymaier that, because managed integration has bequeathed “strong and stable property values” and “a foun dation for community harmony,” Oak Park has “provided a replicable model for other commu nities.”Ifthis is true, why have only a few other places tried the Oak Park strategy, and why has none replicated its success? Presumably, thou sands of localities would be pleased to combine strong, stable property values with community harmony. And Oak Park’s achievement is well documented and widely known. Yet even localities that launched versions of managed integration before Oak Park did have scaled back or given up. Like Oak Park, the Cleveland suburb of Shaker Heights regards “healthy race relations” as “a cornerstone of the community’s identity,” according to a 2019 Wash ington Post story. Yet, in Breymaier’s assessment, Shaker Heights’s programs, which predate Oak Park’s by more than a decade, have abandoned the integration of individual neighborhoods, re treating to stabilization of the city’s aggregate demographic makeup.

The more pressing question, in McKenzie and Ruby’s view, is not whether the Oak Park Strat egy can be implemented elsewhere, but how long it can continue in Oak Park itself. In a round about way, Breymaier confirms those doubts. If not for OPRHC’s programs, he told the Washing ton Post in 2015, “Oak Park would probably re main diverse, but it would start segregating very quickly.” But it’s unclear why, given Oak Park’s prosperity and alleged harmony, integration has been managed for 50 years without becoming self-sustaining, and apparently needs to be man aged for decades to come, with no prospect of persisting on its own. Managed integration operates in a gray area.

SUMMER 2022 107 siding in Starrett City—not just overall, but in each building, and even on each floor. Within its first years of operation, however, managed integration came to mean that black applicants for a Starrett City apartment were placed on a waiting list eight times as long as the one for white applicants.

This circumscribed hospitality, implicit in a managed integration program relying on com plexity and euphemism, becomes explicit when every decision about who moves in gets made by a single entity. Starrett City Associates, owner and manager of a 5,800-unit Brooklyn rental apartment complex that opened in 1974, was committed to integration, which it pursued by maintaining fixed percentages of the major demographic groups re “Beyond maintaining ethnic ratios, curating a suburb’s population entails screening prospective residents.”

Lawsuits by private parties and the Justice Department resulted in federal court rulings that these quotas violated the 1968 Fair Hous ing Act. “Although integration maintenance pro grams are consistent with the spirit of residential desegregation,” sociologist Douglas S. Massey wrote in American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass (1993), “ul timately they operate by restricting black residential choice and violating the letter of the Fair Housing Act.” When managed integration does not constrain blacks’ housing options directly with quotas, it does so indirectly, says Massey, “through a series of tactics designed to control the rate of black entry.”

Beyond maintaining neighborhoods’ eth nic ratios, curating a suburb’s population en tails screening prospective residents, managing the sort of people who move in as well as the number. Consider: Oak Park, with some 10,000 African-American residents, averages about one murder every three years. Chicago’s Austin neighborhood, home to about 84,000 AfricanAmericans, had more than 450 homicides from 2001 through 2012, a rate exceeding three per month, evidence that Austin is 100 times as vio lent as Oak Park. Given this contrast, it’s hard to doubt that Oak Park’s population is very dif ferent, socioeconomically, from Austin’s. It’s not much easier to believe that these differences came about spontaneously, or can be explained entirely by Oak Park’s higher housing costs. If, alternatively, Oak Park and Austin residents are not so different, we must believe that the expe rience of integration is profoundly pacifying, while enduring the trauma of diversity depriva tion incubates murderous rage. (And yet, River Breymaier’s explanation—managed integra tion “is not something we can stop doing” because without “an intention to promote integration, seg regation often just happens because of the way our society is built”—is too amorphous to resolve this paradox. Better insight begins with Nikole Hannah-Jones, famous for guiding the New York Times’s 1619 Project. In a 2016 article on race and public education in New York City, she wrote dis dainfully about the “carefully curated integration” that certain schools practiced in order to reassure whites by enrolling “some students of color, but not too many.” Such curation ap pears integral to the Oak Park strategy. OPRHC added the word “Regional” to its name in the 1990s, when it began “ex panding choices for its clients throughout the western suburbs,” according to the official history. The change en hanced OPRHC’s capacity to limit the number of blacks in Oak Park by affirmatively escort ing black clients to available properties beyond the village borders. For the black proportion of Oak Park’s population to “fluctuate” between 18 percent and 22 percent over a 31-year period is otherwise difficult to explain. Yet candidly ac knowledging this consideration would, McKen zie and Ruby say, come “perilously close to say ing that there should be a quota for blacks in Oak Park,” thereby implying “that black residents are no longer welcome, which is radically contrary to the village’s historic openness and racial lib eralism.”

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Forest, as white as Austin is black, has a crime rate lower than Oak Park’s.)

At another point, in a meeting of parents, teach ers, and administrators to discuss black students receiving, on average, lower test scores than kids in other demographic groups, one woman says that her son had graduated from the high school with “a sense of urgency to rediscover his iden tity.” In other words, “like a lot of other AfricanAmerican kids who left here, [he] couldn’t get to a historically black college and university fast enough. Because he needed to re-find himself.”

CITY JOURNAL108 Can We Manage to Integrate?

A ll told, the Oak Park strategy appears to be that rare phenomenon: a discouraging suc cess. Those who share the cautious temperament prized by philosopher Michael Oakeshott will conclude that Oak Park proves, again, that a con sensus that a certain social change should come about does not establish that there must be some way to bring it about. Nor does it guarantee that a policy approach that worked once, somewhere, can work everywhere else, or even anywhere else, without unacceptable costs or collateral damage.

Breymaier’s insistence that Oak Park must prop up its integration eternally suggests that there’s less to the village’s openness, liberalism, and harmony than meets the eye. This suspicion is fortified by a ten-part documentary, America to Me , first aired on cable television in 2018. It was directed by Steve James, best known for his 1994 movie Hoop Dreams . James lives in Oak Park, where his children attended Oak Park and River Forest High School, the village’s only public sec ondary school. It is the setting for America to Me , filmed over the course of the 2015–16 academic year. (River Forest’s population is one-fifth the size of Oak Park’s. A graphic in the first episode says that the high school’s student population is 55 percent white, 27 percent black, 9 percent La tino, 6 percent biracial, and 3 percent Asian.) Though affecting, the documentary leaves the impression of race relations that are more wary and tense than harmonious. America to Me men tions early on that white students and families were conspicuously reluctant to appear on cam era. At one point, an African-American educa tion consultant voices the sort of judgment that such families might well have feared. “What I’ve discovered about white liberal people is that their liberalness goes only as far as when it starts to challenge their situation personally. That’s the Oak Park–River Forest community.”

It appears that life in integrated Oak Park leaves some black residents with the same aversion as the South Shore banker’s to being seen, with uncom fortable regularity, as different and remarkable.

The zeal to do more—to transform—leads di rectly to what author Tanner Colby calls “in tegration fatigue.” As a black resident said after the Supreme Court put a failed Kansas City school desegregation program out of its misery in 1995, “We’re tired of chasing white people.”

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people who purchased homes in neighborhoods where most residents were of a different race.

Unless we jettison liberty for the sake of equality and fraternity, Americans will al ways find ways to vote with their feet against imposed integration. That reality should con strain our ingenuity, leading us to reject shoves in favor of nudges. Examples of the latter in clude Oak Park’s Equity Assurance Program and the Shaker Heights initiative of using pri vate grants to provide mortgage subsidies to Oak Park became one of the most affluent suburbs in western Cook County—and its steadily climbing property values ensured that homeowners of any ethnicity were likely to be upper-middle-class professionals with compatible concerns.

CITY JOURNAL110 powered by new buyers, many of them volatile, tasteless, commitment-phobic, and al ways clamoring for something new. He hated the triumph of irony in the 1960s as the basis for much new art. This was the grease on the skids that took art from the soulful to the soul less. He thought kitsch a waste of Kramertime. was best known in his day as a champion of Modernism in art. For him, Modernism was, first of all, a liberation movement. It over threw lots of things and pro duced a hundred styles. Pi casso, Matisse, Miró, Léger, Pollock, and Rothko—names we all know—show the range. All were rebels. Modernism in art belonged to a broad social, political, and economic move ment starting in the nineteenth century that was driven by the abandonment of disguises and fake distinctions. This move ment affected everything, in cluding aesthetics, and most of Kramer’s writing is concerned with aesthetics only. Modern ism was the confident, posi tive triumph of the individual (both artist and viewer) over officialdom, of progress over W hen I was an art history graduate student in the early 1990s, Hilton Kramer (1928–2012) was a peripheral figure for my colleagues and me. We didn’t read The New Criterion , which he cofounded and pub lished from 1982 to his retire ment in 2007. All of us were too young to remember his tenure from 1965 to 1982 with the New York Times , during which he wrote more than 1,000 reviews of exhibitions. He was the paper’s first art critic. Political correctness wasn’t pervasive enough in those days to paralyze our brains, so no one dismissed him as a right-winger, a Nazi, or a rac ist. Still, his take on contem porary culture made him seem antique. “We are still living in the aftermath,” he wrote in 1982, “of the insidious assault on the mind that was one of the most repulsive features of the radical movement of the Sixties.”Neither an art historian nor an academic, Kramer was a self-taught scholar, which made his view of art history fresh and quirky. He saw the art marketplace change from the 1960s through the 1980s, A Serious Critic for Unserious Times Brian Allen Hilton Kramer rejected political correctness to champion aesthetics and standards in art. senescence—always freewheel ing and inventive. It was a great tossing out of phoni ness, emperors with no clothes, cheap melodrama, and philis tinism of all stripes. Modernism was the discipline of freedom and truth. That’s the big idea. This didn’t mean that avantgarde artists were supposed to run out and shoot the first archduke they found. Modern ism in art was its own Drain the Swamp movement, but the hygiene was aesthetics. Kram er’s take on Pre-Raphaelite art is instructive. Its style and subjects—languid ladies with flowing hair, moral messag ing, decorative flourish, and tight finish—visually defined the Victorian zeitgeist. In his view, it took a water cannon to clean the “literary excres cences” that made it so awful. Good art wasn’t propaganda, and it was no one’s tool but the artist’s. The truth that a Modernist artist sought went beyond the mundane. Strange for a newspaperman to think this way, but Kramer believed that the daily headlines were the last things that should in terest an artist. After reading hundreds of his columns, I would call Kramer prescient. By the late 1960s, he had spotted the thennascent forces shaping high culture today. Political correct ness became the new jingoism. Diversity, boutique socialism, and privilege studies now rule the roost. Of the Whitney Bi ennial, he was blunt. It, along with most contemporary bien nial art exhibitions, “seem[s] to be governed by a positive

Kramer didn’t think that good art was a gimmick aimed at a giggle or a sneer. He had standards and believed in qual ity, but he wasn’t pompous, and he saw quality in many different things. He abhorred the invasion of semiotics, femi nism, Marxism, and multicul turalism in the study of art, feeling that they undermined aesthetics as the basic criteria for judging art; they made art a branch of social studies. His writing comes with a handicap now, since he was a serious person, and we live in an unserious time. He was also direct, and we live in an age of hypocrisy, convolution, and denial.

Urbanities hostility toward—and really visceral distaste for—anything that might conceivably engage the eye in a significant or plea surable visual experience.”

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Kramer in 1975, when he was art critic for the New York Times

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Kramer was born in Glouces ter, on Cape Ann in northeast ern Massachusetts, in 1928 and majored in English at Syracuse University. He started writing for Partisan Review in 1952. The next year, he wrote a story for the magazine criticizing the culture critic Harold Rosen berg’s advocacy of Abstract Expressionism. Rosenberg, writing for Art News, said that art by Jackson Pollock, Franz

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Kramer loved Édouard Vuil lard (1868–1940) for his bal ance of exquisite chromatic ob servation, charm, and wealth of common experience with a toughness—a reduction of every form into a flat, though sometimes tiny, field of color.

Vuillard took Seurat’s cool, de tached observation and gave it affection and warmth. Vuillard was one last step to Matisse, who was the bigger, more in tense, artist—intelligent, abso lutely serious in his pursuit of harmony and order. Picasso, Kramer felt, got lost in his li bido, but Matisse stayed true to a vision of a serene paradise. Picasso might have mastered dissonance, but Matisse gave the eye’s satisfaction a spiritual dimension.Matissewas, for Kramer, the greatest painter of the twenti eth century. Matisse sought what the artist called “an art of balance, of purity and seren ity, an art devoid of troubling or depressing subject matter.”

CITY JOURNAL112 Kline, and Willem de Kooning was a “psychological event” driven by the artists’ individu al biographies, rather than an aesthetic act or an engagement with existing subject matter. Rosenberg approved of this; Kramer did not. If artists were making art as a psychologi cal event, he felt, this implied that the viewer would need to be a psychologist to access it. Such artists, Kramer argued, annihilated not only content butForreality.Kramer, just 25, the Par tisan Review essay was a feat of intuition translated into au thority. In those days, within the tiny art intelligentsia, ma no-a-mano moments like these were atomic. Rosenberg’s nemesis, Clement Greenberg, hired Kramer to write for Com mentary. Kramer later became editor-in-chief for Arts Maga zine and, in 1965, the art news editor at the New York Times. In 1974, he became the paper’s chief art Kramer’scritic.art history and sense of the start of what we call Modernism in art begins with J. M. W. Turner, the nine teenth-century British master of swirling, abstract seascapes. Kramer almost never wrote about the Old Masters; he may have thought that he was unqualified. Besides, the Old Masters weren’t really part of his Times beat. The galleries and museums rarely did Old Masters shows, and the art market for this work was based in Turner,London. he felt, divorced color from drawing. Color didn’t fill in the lines because Turner didn’t have lines, which for Kramer meant that he felt free to break rules. He con veyed less the visual content of nature, or nature dressed for display, than nature in the raw—not its simple look alone, but its energy. Turner painted from experience, and he strove to present the truth he con strued from that experience as profoundly and directly as he could.Kramer saw every work of art as a piece of fiction, an abstract of something real and tangible. Real objects ex ist, but the artist modifies, or interprets, how he perceives them. The best artists shed so cial constructions, distractions, and disguises until they reach something essential. That’s what makes Modernism a radi cal art movement. He thought Turner was onto something, but in exploring Modernism, Kramer’s founda tion was French. Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) was, for him, the ur-Modernist. A little later, Cé zanne’s artistic children, Henri Matisse (1869–1954), Pablo Pi casso (1881–1973), Piet Mon drian (1872–1944), and Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944), were the most analytical, serious, and influential figures in peak Modernism. Amid their differ ences, they were all essential ists and abolitionists of pomp andEachcant.chased a Modernist ethos in a different way, in Kramer’s view. Cézanne start ed the fragmentation of the subject in earnest. He made his buildings, landscapes, and people from cones, rectangles, and cubes—coolly seeking structure. Picasso fragmented further, giving us Cubism and, later, women carved to pieces and reassembled in a way that resembled violence. Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) at the Museum of Modern Art was his first big brothel pic ture, with fragmented women wearing African masks and looking like beasts.

Kramer loved The Red Studio (1911), which hangs at MoMA. He loved Matisse’s palette and considered him a brilliant Urbanities

Andy Warhol’s Pop Art style embodied what Kramer called “a cult of the facetious.”

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Kramer thought that de Koon ing (1904–97) had run out of steam by 1960. He found Roth ko increasingly sad and de pressing. Pollock (1912–56) had a brief period of triumph in the late 1940s but quickly became repetitious, decorative, and de flating. Kramer called his work after 1950 “Abstract Expression ist Salon painting.” For Kramer, that was a big insult. Two artists—Andrew Wyeth (1917–2009) and Salvador Dalí (1904–89)—were totems for much of what Kramer came to dislike most in contemporary art. He conceded their tech nical proficiency but felt that they had no real vision other than self-promotion. Wyeth offered an image of American life—“pastoral, innocent, and homespun—that bears about as much relation to reality as a Neiman Marcus boutique bears an individual’s upbringing and experience. Kramer, rather, saw the best art as rooted in ethics, those broadly held standards of best conduct—going beyond family, tribes, or taste—that make us a human community. Rigor, honesty, expressiveness, vision, yearning, and convic tion are at the center of the art he liked Kramerbest.didn’t write about religious belief often. He was Jewish—not observant, but religious feeling wasn’t far. He wasn’t dogmatic about faith but was keen on soulful ness. He considered the early Modernists like Kandinsky and Kazimir Malevich, the most extreme abstractionists, as not dogmatically religious artists but certainly searchers after God. They were willing to abandon direct, discernible references to recognizable ob jects to get beyond materialism and the desperation, unbelief, and lack of purpose that it fo ments. Kramer thought that the best art broached topics like immortality and the mean ing of life. A s his career unfolded, Kramer’s thinking became more explicitly social and political. In the 1970s, Kramer had grown more and more troubled by the left-wing drift of the Times , his employer, and by the 1990s, he had writ ten brilliant pieces on, among other literary figures, Whit taker Chambers, whom he admired, and Lillian Hellman and Susan Sontag, whom he didn’t. Kramer’s book The Twi colorist but also admired his quiet sense of order. Most early critics of Matisse thought that he was too decorative, in con trast with Picasso’s strength and passion. Kramer saw him as the ultimate heir of Giotto, Piero della Francesca, and Raphael. Matisse’s quest for balance, purity, and tranquil ity was the most egalitarian of journeys, spanning centuries and the full range of human emotion. For Kramer, Picasso and Matisse were the twenti eth century’s two Modernist giants—standing at opposite poles.Kramer tended to down play the polarity of abstrac tion and realism. Many people get tripped up by the notion that the two are separate uni verses. Since Modernism is the assertion of the individual, it doesn’t mean a single style or theme; it’s all over the place visually. Kramer sees the best artists, and the best of Mod ernism, as peeling an onion to get to deeper, fresher ele ments of the actual thing. This can take the artist far from the surface look, or keep him close to it. Impressionism, he be lieved, explored “the intensity of nature seen freshly.” Forms might have been indistinct and brushstrokes irregular, but the object remained, altered by the artist’s emotional response to it. It was emotionalism and ex pressionism leavened by dis cipline.The best art, Kramer be lieved, has what he called a moral purpose. I’d quibble with the word “moral.” Morals are personal and vary based on

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Urbanities light of the Intellectuals (1999) is about culture and politics dur ing the Cold War; its first sec tion is called “In the Service of Stalinism.”Inthe1970s, Kramer began to see broad cultural trends having a deleterious impact on art. Even in the 1960s, he wasn’t happy with what he was observing in New York’s top galleries and Ameri can museums. He felt that the truth-seeking mission of Modernism ran off the rails, probably because a surfeit of prosperity made people spoiled. Modernism in art might have been a liberation movement at one time, but things were getting muddy and directionless. And what direction he saw, he didn’t like.

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SUMMER 2022 115 Urbanities ness. In one of his many arti cles on Pop Art, Kramer quotes the architect Philip Johnson: “What good does it do you to believe in good things? It’s feudal and futile. . . . I think it much better to be nihilis tic and forget it all.” Kramer found this poisonous. He re jected Pop Art as a “cult of the facetious.” It takes Cézanne, Pi casso, Matisse, and Mondrian out to the trash, replacing them palled, but always delight ed, impressed, and—above all else—interested. He is a master showman who lavishes his real genius on the instruments of public Kramerrelations.saw Pop Art’s cele bration of kitsch and camp as a giddy repudiation of substance. It relieved high culture of its rectitude and critical conscious to the life of the old frontier.”

Of Dalí, Kramer writes: He understands very well the modern appetite for violence and scandal, and has made a career of catering to this appetite, spicing each successive dish with sufficient out rage and surprise to keep the public a little baffled, a little angry, a little ap In a 1976 New York Times essay, Kramer took a revisionist view of victims of the blacklist and McCarthy hearings of the 1950s.

CITY JOURNAL116 ture. He called the style “a new sphere of artistic creation without religious content and imbued with values of sponta neity, individual fantasy, de light in color and movement, and the expression of feeling that anticipate modern art.”

Kramer was appalled that an art historian would dispute the obvious role of religion in re ligious art while inflicting on Cézanne an entirely specula tive sexual agenda. Schapiro was happy to see aesthetic impulses as a reason to throw medieval spirituality under the bus, but even happier to jet tison Cézanne’s aesthetics for repressed impulses dating to the artist’s childhood. This, Kramer felt, was an intellectu ally dishonest double standard. It was the art historian, not the artist, who was repressed. A few years later, in The New Criterion , Kramer wrote “T. J. Clark and the Marxist Critique of Modern Painting,” a review of Clark’s just-pub lished book, The Painting of Modern Life, which he describes as “just another contribution to the propagation of the mythic phenomenon which lies at the heart of the Marxist concep tion of history: class conflict.”

Kramer took offense to Clark’s denial of “even the slightest degree of aesthetic indepen dence from the iron laws of history.” The Impressionist fascination with industry was a classist rebuke to labor. Im pressionists like Monet and Renoir, who depicted Paris’s boulevards, celebrating Bar on Haussmann’s redesign of Paris, cleansed the city of its reaches of the mind,” as he put it. Kramer memorably skew ered the field in “The ΩApples≈ of Meyer Schapiro,” a 1981 essay in The American Scholar Schapiro (1904–96) taught at Columbia for decades, fomenting a new art history that introduced class conflict and social upheaval as inter pretive contexts. Initially a scholar of Romanesque art, Schapiro became a central figure in Modernist scholar ship. He was a Jew, as well as a Marxist. He served as the éminence grise for younger art historians looking to make the field—a rarefied subject that demanded good taste and a travel budget—into a means to explore social, political, and economicReviewingproblems.acompendium

It’s striking that many of the artists Kramer prized the most in the 1970s and 1980s—Milet Andrejevic, Helen Torr, Morris Kantor, Elsie Driggs, Augus tus Vincent Tack, Mary Frank, Anne Arnold, and Richard Hunt, among others—never took off. Most are known to art insiders and niche collec tors. Besides their obscurity, these artists had a few things in common: superb crafts manship and a unique vision. Otherwise, these late favorites were all over the map. Arnold (1925–2014) created quirky sculptures of animals and peo ple, using wood. Andrejevic (1925–89) was a Realist painter of landscapes and scenes of everyday life. Kramer saw in his work “a purity of tone and a gravity of feeling” absent in the work of more “clam orous” Realists like Richard Estes, who were gaudy and not much more than tricky copyists. About Jean-Michel Basquiat, Jeff Koons, Cindy Sherman, Keith Haring, Rich ard Prince, and Barbara Kru ger—among the biggest names in 1980s art—he couldn’t have cared less. Kramer saw high culture as bearing three impossibly heavy structural burdens as it stum bled into the twenty-first cen tury. One was the state of art history—“so many minuscule talents burrowing in ever tinier Urbanities

of Schapiro’s scholarship pub lished in 1979, Kramer dis puted Schapiro’s reading of Cézanne’s The Apples. Cézanne, Schapiro believed, revealed a “displaced erotic interest” and “an unconscious symbolizing of a repressed desire” in the pic ture of two apples, which he considered surrogate breasts. Kramer felt that this reading was absurd, as was Schapiro’s intellectual justification, which began with Horace and Virgil, borrowed from Flaubert and Baudelaire, and ended with a flourish: psychologists studying dreams. The painting’s aesthet ic characteristics were buried, Kramer said, by blather and a falseEarlierreading.inhis career, Kram er noted, Schapiro was quick to drain religious fervor from Romanesque church sculp with a bemused sterility that Kramer associated most with Andy Warhol (1928–87): infantile, mercenary, and “half-straight, half-gag double talk.”

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SUMMER 2022 117 Urbanities of Impressionism was hosted at Wildenstein’s. The art market was small. Collectors tended to be serious and informed. Dealers were few, too, and developed long-term relation ships with artists and collec tors. News from the art market reached the separate worlds of money and media glacial ly. But glamour and celebrity had already begun to intrude, beginning in the 1960s. Soon Kramer saw this as a perver sion of art. T he second of high cul ture’s structural burdens for Kramer was the change in the art market. Until the 1970s, the best art exhibitions, including ambitious loan shows, were organized by dealers at their galleries. The landmark 1970 exhibition One Hundred Years restless, working-class slums, Clark wrote. Their choice of subjects—boulevards, leisure, train stations—grew from class allegiances. That all art is, first and foremost, sociological re portage, a symptom of social ills, or a weapon to change the world became gospel before too long. For Clark, the mea sure of an object began and ended with how well it ad vances or thwarts revolution. Kramer loved The Red Studio (1911) by Matisse, whom he considered the greatest artist of the twentieth century.

Kramer’s most controversial piece in the Times was a 1976 article, “The Blacklist and the Cold War,” which assessed the revisionist trend to rehabilitate the Communist sympathizers barred from working in Hol lywood in the early 1950s. He thought that his long article was balanced—presenting, as it did, the considerable com plexities of the time but also the many lies told by people who were clearly Communists, as well as the facts surrounding a lesser-known blacklist that Hollywood, the theater, book publishing, and newspapers would enforce against peers who were vocally anti-Com munist.Asthe 1970s proceeded, he was appalled by how thor oughly people in entertain ment, as well as historians and journalists, whitewashed an ugly episode of civic cannibal ism. He believed that many prominent cultural figures from the early Cold War years bore America ill will, and the re vised, official storyline was not only letting them off the hook but also praising their courage. If a Manhattan conservative is a liberal mugged by reality, then this was the new reality that mugged Kramer. Kramer was sharp-eyed when it came to spotting the perils to artists and art his torians of making their work political. Until the 1960s, Modernist artists were far re moved from politics. It sim marketplace success and chic came to define the canon. Kramer believed that money was an invasive species in the art world, treating its creations as mere Kramerinvestments.understood the value of the commercial art gallery in keeping standards elevat ed. Dealers take risks on art ists. They show courage. They make discoveries. They rotate shows often. They show art to the public for free. Dealers knew their artists in depth, and often supported them through rough patches. Museums make decisions slowly, by commit tee, and long after critics have vetted an artist. The collapse of the small and mid-level gallery economy and the current he gemony of a few big dealers would have distressed Kramer. The third burden was the state of museums, which Kram er saw as the traditional keep ers of standards. His bugaboo was Thomas Hoving, director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art from 1967 to 1977. Hov ing, he believed, started a trend in American museums that continues in fits and starts. Hoving made everything he touched, however serious or arcane or complex, a branch of show business. From there, museums slid into the realm of mass culture, competing with shopping malls, video games, television, and sports as just another source of entertain ment. But the entertainment industry already existed to give people what they wanted; it was the job of museums, Kramer believed, to give them what they needed. He was

CITY JOURNAL118 Urbanities ply wasn’t their sphere. They were focused, as was Kramer, on the imperatives of aesthet ics, which are nonpolitical. The politicization of art and art history reminded Kramer of culture behind the Iron Curtain. Culture has no pur pose for totalitarians except to serve the state. Art in the Soviet Union, but also in its doppelgänger Nazi Germany, was thoroughly debased as a consequence. In The Twilight of the Intellectuals , Kramer took many of America’s Cold War–era thinkers and writers to task as, at best, useful idi ots and, at worst, consciously complicit.Bythe1990s, he feared that the same thing was happening again. The arts issue that con cerned Kramer was the role of political correctness in demol ishing art criticism, since, fun damentally, it was an assault on quality. Kramer wrote: “In a culture now so largely domi nated by ideologies of race, class, and gender, where the doctrines of multiculturalism and political correctness have consigned the concept of qual ity in art to the netherworld of invidious discrimination and all criticism tends to be judged according to its conformity to current political orthodoxies, even to suggest . . . that aes thetic considerations be given priority in the evaluation of art is to invite the most categorical disapprobation.” I can imagine Kramer’s blood pressure rising as he wrote that long sentence in 1993, reviewing a new book collecting the writing of Clem ent Greenberg. right—though he sounded like an old Victorian to say it.

A project of renewal might start with education, with sup porting classical and traditional music, art, theater, and dance more broadly and deeply, not just in New York and not just at the biggest venues. It might include think tanks adding art and culture to their roster of concerns. It would mean sup porting magazines, like The New Criterion , that defend high standards. As for the uni versity crisis, Kramer would probably attribute it in part to frightened leadership. “Grow a pair,” he might advise college presidents and trustees cowed by the outrage machines on campus. I’d certainly be happy to see more cojones on campus at Yale and Williams, where I studied art history. Tackling the tiresome fury among stu dents finding racism every where, the assaults on free dom of speech and thought, growing anti-Semitism, and political nihilism requires both common sense and courage. Hilton Kramer had both, and much else. hardly craggy. He was incisive and trenchant and less likely than other critics to suffer fools or phonies gladly. Despite his many years in Manhattan, he never lost personal traits that marked him as a New Eng lander.Kramer died in 2012 from many ailments, among them advanced dementia. Toward the end of his life, he moved to the Vicarage by the Sea in Harpswell, Maine, a small hos pice. Weaned from drugs, left to walk the seaside grounds and talk, even read, he died an apparently peaceful death. Writing a story focused on a single artist means getting into his or her head, as best the writ er can. It’s no different when one is focused on an art critic— and easier, too, since a critic like Kramer left us millions of words. What would he think today? That American society has gone bonkers. What would he propose? That’s a trickier question. Kramer didn’t think much of federal support for the arts, which he believed bol stered conventional left-wing thinking. He’d surely feel today that high culture is struggling. Cratering audiences; malprac tice in the classroom, leaving students ignorant of high cul ture and history; diminished numbers of discerning col lectors and specialist dealers; and the decline of serious art criticism—all have damaged theThesearts. days, Kramer might also ask, “Where is the Right?” The state of high culture and T hough Kramer admired Abe Rosenthal, the Times ’s executive editor, and had many cherished colleagues, by the late 1970s a new, younger tier of reporters and editors were shifting the paper ever left ward. Kramer viewed this with alarm and, eventually, disgust. He left the paper in 1982. His post- Times years spanned multiple acts. In the 1990s, he would toss TNT spit balls at his old employer via his “Times Watch” column in the New York Post. He aimed weekly at news media bias and incompetence profession-wide, but mostly at the Times . The paper, he wrote, didn’t mind “offending people so long as they’re white heterosexual males.”Thereal love and mission of his later years, however, was The New Criterion , which he cofounded with pianist and critic Samuel Lipman in 1982. Marking its 40th year in 2022 under longtime editor Roger Kimball, the journal remains devoted to “championing what is best and most humanely vital in our cultural inheri tance and of exposing what is mendacious, corrosive, and spurious”—a Kramerian direc tive, if ever there was one. In the end, Kramer’s vision was neither conservative nor liberal but, rather, catholic in its ap proach to high culture. There was nothing arbitrary about Kramer’s move to Dam ariscotta, Maine, toward the end of his life. Damariscotta isn’t far from Gloucester, where he grew up. Kramer was high ly cultured and erudite and

SUMMER 2022 119 Urbanities good taste should be of deep interest to conservatives. In Kramer’s day, art critics, art historians, and the art market together promoted high stan dards, a need for rigor, and the privileging of aesthetics. This served Modernism well. It has served creativity and high cul ture well, too, both modern and classical. Each of these sectors is now befuddled or lost. The Right, Kramer would likely warn, is too often an ab sentee landlord on the culture front. But conservatives ignore high culture at their peril.

Revisiting a controversial postwar British murder case and execution

Raven’s defense at his trial, conducted with considerable brilliance by John Maude, who later became a Conservative Member of Parliament and then a judge, was that in essence his story was true: that he had found his parents-in-law dead and that he had panicked. Such panic was understandable, if not exactly laudable. (I was re minded of a trial for murder in which I was a witness. A man had strangled his girlfriend in a jealous rage. Afterward, he put her in the trunk of his car. I was asked whether this was not indicative of an irrational state of mind. I replied that, never having had to make such a de cision, I could not really say; but it struck me as being as ra tional as any other action in the circumstances.)Maudesurmised that an in truder had killed the Goodmans, and then fled when Daniel arrived. In support of this hypothesis was the fact that the Goodmans’ main bedroom was in a state of disarrangement when their bodies were discov ered, but no blood was found in it, which suggested that it must have been disarranged have been mere chance or co incidence, but more likely it re vealed a mind long haunted by doubts or regrets. The facts were these. Raven’s wife, Gertrude, had just given birth in a private clinic. On the evening that the murders took place, Raven and his parents-inlaw, Leopold and Esther Good man, had visited her there. They left in two cars, more or less at the same time. The Goodmans had bought a house for their daughter and son-in-law that was near their own home—a gift that 70 years later would have been worth more than $1 million. Daniel Raven stopped off at the Goodmans’ house for a brief chat and then went home.According to his story, he returned to the Goodmans’ house about half an hour later (for reasons never explained) and found them dead, lying in their sitting room, their heads bashed in—Esther Goodman so brutally beaten that her face was no longer recognizable. Because he knelt beside them, he got blood on his trousers; instead of calling for help, he panicked, went home, and tried to burn his trousers. He said that he thought he would be a prime

Raven’s End Theodore Dalrymple

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O n October 11, 1949—the day I was born—a man named Daniel Raven, aged 23, was ar rested in a north London suburb and charged with the murder the previous evening of both of his parents-in-law. He was hanged in Pentonville Prison slightly less than three months later, public petitions to spare his life notwithstanding. Was he guilty? No eyewit nesses emerged, but the circum stantial evidence against him was strong, though perhaps not beyond doubt. There was also the question of his mental state if he did do the acts of which he was accused. This was not raised at the time of his trial because he insisted that he had not performed those acts; to have entered a plea of insanity would have diluted his claim to innocence of the actus reus, the guilty deed. The case troubled the pub lic conscience and also that of one of the detectives involved. The only book published about it (60 years later) was written by that detective’s son, Jeff Grout, who discovered after his father’s death that the only case on which he had kept documentation, though he had been involved in many famous or infamous cases, was that of Daniel Raven. This might suspect if he had called the po lice straightaway. It did not take the police long to find and question him. They discovered his trousers only partially burned, and what was left was spotted with blood of the AB group, which, though comparatively rare (just 2 per cent of the population), was that of both Goodmans. Raven demonstrably lied to the police during questioning, construed as further evidence of his guilt.

SUMMER 2022 121 before the murders were com mitted: the murderer, whoever he was, must have had consid erable blood upon him. (Maude had only to sow doubt in the jury’s mind, so he came up with a hypothetical alternative explanation.) In fact, the state of the bedroom remained for ever unexplained; burglary was unlikely, for money was lying around the bedroom untouched. Maude’s alternative explanation was that Leopold Goodman was a police informer who had once informed on an Austra lian immigrant for breaking the then-strict currency regulations, leading to the man’s deportation. The intruder, on this theory, was someone hired to take that man’s revenge: but there was no evidence of his existence. Fur bound to arise in a case such as this, in which a man with no known history of violence, and whose relations with his sup posed victims were close and friendly (if not always complete ly harmonious), suddenly acted with terrible ferocity. Since Daniel Raven’s defense was that he did not commit the act, no medical or psychiatric evidence was entered. Nowa days, with much less at stake because of the abolition of the death penalty, every murderer is examined medically and psychiatrically, irrespective of the wishes of the defense (who may, of course, ask for addition al reports). But in 1949, an ex amination had to be requested, ther, if the intruder had entered the house to wreak revenge, he surely would have come armed with a knife, gun, or crowbar. But the murder weapon was the base of a television antenna, in those days a heavy and clumsy piece of equipment. Surely no one would use such a weapon if he had a more efficient one? The prosecution insisted that, in English law, it had no requirement to prove motive, for murder was the deliberate killing of someone without law ful excuse, and that absence of motive was no bar to conviction for such a crime. The defense pointed out, however, that if the prosecution did have evi dence of motive, it would cer tainly have made the most of it; and the question of motive was People read notices on the case shortly before Raven was executed in Pentonville Prison.

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The father was a chronic found er of failed businesses in various Raven’s defense attorney, John Maude, was a strong supporter of the death penalty, but he pleaded for his client’s life until the eve of the execution, expressing his “profound belief in irresponsibility in this case which I found overwhelming and terrible.”

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The most eminent expert in the country at the time, Dr. Denis Hill, reported that Raven’s elec troencephalograph was abnor mal, though the doctor was too cautious or scrupulous to claim that this had a direct bearing on his state of mind at the time of the killings (if, indeed, he com mitted them). It is possible that Raven had a form of epilepsy that manifested itself in irratio nal violence, but he hindered a defense based on this by in sisting on his own innocence of the killings and failing to mention any period of loss of consciousness at the relevant time. He might have killed in a state of post-seizure confusion and then, on recovering, found himself in the presence of two brutally killed people without any knowledge of what hap pened—after which it was only too plausible that he would have panicked and told lies. A ll murders are tragic, but one courtroom scene during the trial must have been almost un bearable to watch. Raven’s wife, Gertrude, took the stand as a witness for the defense. Accord ing to a newspaper report, she looked across at her husband and smiled at him. The only point on which she testified was that, when her parents and their son-in-law left the clinic parts of the country. By the time Daniel Raven was 12, he had attended six schools because of his father’s peripatetic lifestyle.

The boy was above average in tellectually but apparently high ly strung. He wet the bed until he was ten, feared the dark, had night terrors, and bit his nails until they bled. He was taken out of school at 14 because the family moved yet again. No doubt one might have claimed a connection between this disordered childhood and Raven’s subsequent violence. If the child is father to the man, then surely, the argument would go, his childhood con tained the key to his adulthood: and that childhood was a diffi cult one. The counterargument, of course, would be that not many unhappy childhoods lead to the murder of parents-in-law and that one could probably find an explanation for crimi nal behavior in any life—from parental overindulgence to pa rental neglect. Raven’s anxious personality would likewise not have helped his case: anxiety is so common that few people would want it to count as an excuse for, or even an extenua tion of, killing. A more promising approach might have observed that Ra ven was epileptic and commit ted the act in a state of epilep tic automatism. Though he had not acted violently before, he had exhibited irrational rages, disproportionate to any provo cation; he also supposedly suf fered from absences, when he seemed to lose contact with the world, from which he recovered without remembering anything. and both Daniel Raven and his father, who believed his son in nocent, firmly opposed making one.Would medical evidence have saved Raven from the gal lows? I think it would have, by casting enough doubt on his mental capacity at the time of the killings (assuming that he committed them), to have made commutation of his sentence, if not acquittal, likely. In 1949, only a half of death sentences in Britain were carried out, with the rest commuted—often with less reason than in this case—to life imprisonment. The doctors, if asked to provide evidence, might have spread more heat than light on the problem be cause they might have disagreed strongly with one another, but they would have sown suffi cient doubt in the minds of, if not the jury, at least that of the trial judge, who, though legally obliged to pass a death sentence, was entitled to recommend clemency. The home secretary, with the final say on commu tation, would surely not have ignored medical evidence, even if it were not unanimous. To execute someone who was mad rather than bad would be unjust and cruel: and the home secre tary at the time, James Chuter Ede, was not a cruel man. What would the doctors have said? Freudianism was at its high tide, and Raven’s upbring ing would have offered some clues. His father was unstable, given to violent and irrational rages, and beat his son, even after the boy was fully grown.

Another reporter claimed that the only thing anyone had heard her say at the trial, other than her largely monosyllabic testimony, was that she would “never believe that Danny mur dered my mother and father. Danny could never do such a thing.”Her mental agony must have been terrible, for she had to know that the case against her husband was strong. After the closing prosecution speech, a newspaper observed, “she raised a tired hand to her forehead and asked her friend to take her from the court. She was smuggled out of a side door”— reporters were as intrusive and unscrupulous then as they are today—“and driven away by police.”Ittook the jury no time to find Raven guilty, and he was duly sentenced to death. That Gertrude accepted the verdict is suggested by the fact that she neither wrote to, nor visit ed, him in the prison where he was held in the condemned cell for 40 days and 40 nights. It is difficult to imagine that any one could suffer more, at least in peacetime, than to have the man she loved kill the parents Though an advocate for the abolition of the death penalty, British Home Secretary James Chuter Ede (shown here inspecting the London Fire Brigade) felt that it was his duty to uphold the law as it stood.

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CITY JOURNAL124 Oh, to be in E ngland he sent the following telegram to the home secretary: YOU KNOW HOW DEEPLY I FEEL UPON THE MATTER ABOUT WHICH YOU SAW ME AND I NOW BEG YOU TO GIVE EFFECT TO ALL THE LONG HISTORY OF THE MANS ABNORMAL ITY STOP SIMPLY CAN NOT RID MYSELF OF A PROFOUND BELIEF IN IRRESPONSIBILITY IN THIS CASE WHICH I FOUND OVERWHELM ING AND TERRIBLE To this telegram (and the very word “telegram” is redolent of an age as bygone as that of horse-drawn carriages), Chuter Ede replied:RECEIVED AND CARE FULLY CONSIDERED YOUR TELEGRAPH BUT REGRET AM UNABLE TO ALTER MY DECISION This exchange speaks well of both men. Maude, who made a speech in Parliament endors ing the view that the death pen alty was a necessary deterrent to murder, was also obviously possessed of a strong sense of justice in each individual case and not merely of the social utility of the deterrent. When he said to the jury that it was the she loved. It is a thought from which the mind instinctively turns away. A fter the trial, a brief chal lenge to the verdict arose. One of the jury was Jewish—as were all the main characters in the story—and it turned out that he had taken his jury man’s oath on a New Testa ment. It was surmised, then, that he was not properly sworn, and therefore could not deliver a verdict, which at the time had to be unanimous (now only a majority of 10–2 is required); but a rabbi testified that the juror in question told him that he nevertheless stood by his oath, and the challenge faded away. One intriguing aspect of the case reveals how much attitudes have subsequently changed. Raven’s defense lawyer, John Maude, was strongly in favor of retention of the death penalty, while James Chuter Ede, the home secretary, was strongly for its abolition. Yet it was Maude who pleaded for Raven’s life and Chuter Ede who refused to commute.Itwasclear that Maude was emotionally, not merely pro fessionally, involved in the case. Once the trial was over, and Raven’s appeal had been turned down, Maude’s official duty was performed, but he went much further than he was obliged to do. He had done his best at the trial, and his closing address to the jury was brilliant, if unsuccessful. But he contin ued to advocate for Raven until the eve of his execution, when after visiting her, they appeared to be in a good mood, without evident conflict. The prosecution thought it wise not to cross-ex amine her, for this would have created sympathy for the ac cused. One reporter claimed that, after the court adjourned, he had asked Gertrude what she would do if her husband were acquitted. “Well,” she replied, “I suppose he would come home and I would make him a cup of tea.”

prosecution’s duty to prove its case beyond reasonable doubt, that is precisely what he meant: the accused was entitled to the benefit of any doubt, and he believed that he had cast suf ficient doubt on the prosecution to merit Chuteracquittal.Ede,for his part, had introduced before the war a motion in Parliament to abol ish the death penalty and was soon to vote for its temporary suspension while a commission reported on the measure (it fi nally recommended retention, but only under very restricted circumstances). Yet Chuter Ede also felt that it was his duty— no doubt painful—to uphold the law as it stood, which was more important as a principle than adherence to his personal convictions, however strong, on a matter about which more than one opinion was possible. Chuter Ede was a scrupulous man and had not come to his decision lightly; while Raven was in the condemned cell, the home secretary had asked three eminent psychiatrists, includ ing Hill (who thought that Ra ven was epileptic), for a report. They examined him in prison, and their report was not favor able to reprieve on psychiatric grounds. “We do not consider that Raven was insane at the time of the crime or that he is insane now. He is probably an anxious and nervous type of man, but we do not believe that he is suffering now, or was suf fering at the time of the crime, from any minor mental abnor mality which would justify us making any medical recommen dation.”

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Now, a civilized society must put a limit to the severity of a sentence that may in practice be imposed—a threshold above which we cannot go. Someone who kills ten people cannot be punished ten times more se verely than someone who kills only one, though the crime, in a sense, is considerably worse. But if the threshold for the most severe sentence is set too high, leniency throughout the system is the inevitable consequence. And the consequences of leni ency are obvious to all except criminologists.Still,theexecution of Daniel Raven horrifies me. A newspa per wrote shortly after his ex ecution: “The uproar over the hanging of Daniel Raven has been quite out of proportion to the facts of the case,” and the Liverpool man who wrote to Chuter Ede that the “mentality of the 16,000 folks who signed [a petition] for [a] mindless re prieve is a blot on our civilisa tion,” horrifies me also. Chuter Ede felt that he had no grounds for commutation of the sentence. Maude’s inner conviction that Raven was ei ther innocent of the actus reus or did not have the requisite mens rea (guilty mind) was not enough. The law had to take its course. On his last night alive, Raven wrote four letters: to his mother, his cousin Muriel, his sister Syl via, and one of his lawyers. He did not write to his wife, the mother of his child, either be cause she now thought of him as guilty and had forsaken him, or from a certain delicacy of feeling. As far as we know, he never confessed to the crimes. If Raven went to trial under current laws instead of those of 1949, and in the present state of medical knowledge, he would likely have been convicted of manslaughter, not murder. To establish the lesser charge, the defense would have had to prove, on the balance of prob abilities, that Raven suffered from a state of mind at the time of the killings so different from normal that it reduced his men tal responsibility for his acts. Doctors probably could have convinced a jury that this was so. If found guilty of the less er charge, Raven would either have been sent to a mental hos pital or sentenced to prison for fewer years than for a murder conviction. But even if found guilty of murder, he would have had his life spared and received a sentence of life im prisonment, with the possibility of parole after 15 years.

On the whole, this seems more humane than what actu ally happened. My one reserva tion is the following. If Raven were found guilty of murder, under these alternative circum stances, a sentence of (in effect) 15 years’ imprisonment would be inadequate, not because, once released, he might repeat his crimes but because it would exert a downward pressure on all sentencing. The severity of sentences must reflect, at least approximately, the seriousness of the crime or crimes commit ted: and to bash in the heads of two parents-in-law is a very serious crime indeed.

SUMMER 2022 127 C ontributors

Robert VerBruggen is a fel low at the Manhattan Institute. William Voegeli is the senior editor of the Claremont Review of Books and the author of Nev er Enough: America’s Limitless Welfare State

SethSoundings:Barron is managing edi tor of The American Mind and the author of The Last Days of New York. Benedict Beckeld is a New York–based philoso pher and the author of Western Self-Contempt: Oikophobia in the Decline of Civilizations

James B. Meigs is a senior fel low at the Manhattan Institute, a City Journal contributing edi tor, cohost of the How Do We Fix It? podcast, and the former edi tor of Popular Mechanics.

Andrey Mir is a media re searcher and the author of Postjournalism and the Death of Newspapers

. Milton Ezrati is a contributing editor at The National Interest, an affili ate of the Center for the Study of Human Capital at the Uni versity at Buffalo (SUNY), chief economist for Vested, and the author of Bite-Sized Investing

Brian Allen is the art critic for National Review

MarkArtists:Lennihan recently re tired as a staff photographer after four decades with the As sociated Press in New York. Alberto Mena is a graphic artist living in New York. For cover artist Robert Jones, see page 2.

. He directed the museum division of the NewYork Historical Society (2013–15) and the Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Acade my, in Andover, Massachusetts (2004–13). Theodore Dalrymple is a con tributing editor of City Journal, a senior fellow at the Manhat tan Institute, and the author of many books, including Out into the Beautiful World and Grief and Other Stories

. Martin Gurri is a former CIA analyst and the author of The Revolt of the Public and the Cri sis of Authority in the New Mil lennium

Nicole Gelinas is a City Jour nal contributing editor, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Insti tute, and the author of After the Fall: Saving Capitalism from Wall Street—and Washington Judge Glock is the chief pol icy officer at the Cicero Insti tute, a contributing editor of City Journal , and the author of The Dead Pledge: The Origins of the Mortgage Market and Federal Bailouts, 1913–1939

.

Harry Stein is a contributing editor of City Journal and the author of I Can’t Believe I’m Sit ting Next to a Republican! and other books

Heather Mac Donald is the Thomas W. Smith Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a contrib uting editor of City Journal, and the author of The Diversity Delu sion: How Race and Gender Pan dering Corrupt the University and Undermine Our Culture

. Connor O’Brien is a research and policy associate at the Eco nomic Innovation Group.

Daniel Edward Rosen is a writer whose work has ap peared in New York Magazine, Esquire, the New York Times, and other publications.

Steven Malanga is the senior editor of City Journal and the George M. Yeager Fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

CITY JOURNAL128 Hamptons D iarist

PersuasionFriendly

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“Uh, sorry, but I don’t think I can.”Instantly, there’s confusion on the other end, and with deep regret I explain myself: the candidate they’re pushing is simply not up to my hyperprogressive standards. It might be that he/she/they has not expressed him/her/themself with sufficient zeal in support of teaching critical race theory to kindergarteners. Or in sup port of trans athletes. Or of the green agenda. Or maybe I’m disturbed to have learned that the candidate eats meat. Or maybe I’ve heard that the can didate’s former spouse was in the military. Or—the one I’ve used most—the candidate is a man or straight and refused to step aside for a woman or gay in the Here’sprimary.thething: the Demo cratic activist never objects. Be cause the vital element of the whole business is that my at tack comes from the left, and I hold the moral high ground. The caller may halfheartedly go through the motions, but we both understand that no obligatory reading of talking points about guns, voter sup pression, or even abortion can change the fact that I am the better person. If anything, it is the caller whose faith in the Democratic candidate has been shaken.Who says that you can no longer have a productive con versation with anyone on the other side?

Harry Stein W ell, it’s election time again—in our house, that spe cial season when we get to toy with Democratic campaign callers.See,my wife and I are what you might call DINOs—Dems In Name Only. Or maybe DFTHOI—Dems For the Hell Of It. Not that we started out that way. When we first reg istered to vote in the halcyon days of the early 1970s, Rich ard Nixon was in the White House and Saturday nights meant Mary Tyler Moore. Who could imagine being anything else? Still, as the years passed and, as they say, the party left us , we remained Democrats on the books. Why? I’d like to say that it was so that we could work to nudge the party back toward its JFK and Tru manesque roots. But closer to the truth is that, when arguing with someone shrugging off the latest Dem outrage—say, the savaging of Robert Bork, or Clarence Thomas, or Brett Kavanaugh—we got to say, “Look, I’ve been a Democrat my whole life, but. . . .” Plus, as New Yorkers, we could vote in the only elec tion that really counts—the Democratic primary—and do our part to help our once-great party fully transform into ex actly what it seemed hell-bent on becoming. In 2004, I said, “Okay, guys, if this is really what you want”—and cast my presidential primary ballot for Al Sharpton. Rotten choice? Tell that to the 57,455 other Democrats who did the same, enabling the “civil rights lead er,” famed of Tawana Brawley and Freddy’s Fashion Mart, to run a strong third in a nineman field. Arguably, Sharpton was not the greatest moral rep robate in the bunch. John Ed wards finished second. So, my course was set. If I couldn’t alter the drift of the party, I could at least have fun at its expense. I don’t mean to be cynical. I know as well as every other Democrat that our democracy is under siege, and it dies in darkness, and . . . what is it that Biden’s deposed disin formation czarina trilled on TikTok? “It’s when a huckster takes some lies and makes them sound precocious ” I’m not sure what that means, but I think it pertains. Not that election season is the only time I enjoy myself at the expense of random callers. Whenever our landline rings, it’s a good bet that it will be someone concerned about our car’s lapsed warranty, or a South Asian named “Tom Johnson” who has detected a problem with our Internet ser vice. As a service to humanity, I’ll sometimes keep him on the line for 20 minutes or so, con vinced that he’s about to get my credit-card info. But all that’s practice for my favorite callers: the local Dem stalwarts. They’re always up beat at first because, hey, we’re on the same team. “Hi, Harry, just calling to remind you to be sure to vote Tuesday for [in sert Nancy Pelosi– or Charles Schumer–lite local pol].”

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