Hello and happy Saturday. You might have noticed that a recurring theme here at The Dispatch is that institutions are failing because people don’t want to do the hard work needed to maintain them, much less help them thrive. Congress has forfeited its authority to the executive branch, and our representatives spend their time jostling for cable-news hits and posting on social media. Neither party is willing to discuss the painful decisions looming if we don’t reform entitlements or rein in federal spending—and few voters want to listen.
I’ve been thinking about all of that a lot since Kevin D. Williamson kicked off the week with a really great essay reminding us that we live in a time of amazing abundance and wealth compared with the living standards of our forebears mere centuries ago. We also live in a time of great progress, and we’ve come to take many things for granted. So when things get even a little bad—like the inflation of the past few years—it really hurts. Kevin writes:
The good news is that our main economic problems can be mitigated through fairly straightforward policy changes. The bad news is that nobody wants those policy changes to be made, because they would mean reduced government benefits, higher taxes on the middle class as well as on the affluent, less access to subsidized credit for higher education or buying houses, and a period of economic adjustment that probably would be at least as painful as the one Americans went through at the end of the Jimmy Carter years and the beginning of the first Ronald Reagan term.
Things did get better under Reagan, thanks to what Kevin calls a “relatively responsible governing class acting under the leadership of Fed chairman Paul Volcker” and he reminds us that, “While Americans in the 1980s sure as heck did not enjoy the process of fixing the inflation problem they really, really enjoyed having fixed it.”
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Contributor Dean Lockwood touched on a similar theme in an essay he wrote critiquing the America First populists who long to return to the days of one-income households and white picket fences. He discusses growing up in San Diego, a city in a region that is “ill-suited to support human life. … We have to compete with a natural world that doesn’t want us to live here. That is what makes our culture so great—it’s made up of the people who are actively choosing to fight for it. “ But, he notes:
Populists have given up the fight. The discomfort of a competitive world has broken them down, and they are panicking. They’re telling us that women entering the legal profession has completely destroyed the rule of law. They’re telling me that my salary is the equivalent of a poverty wage. They’re telling us that salvation is impossible, that the battle is already lost, that we have to hoard what little we have left. But what will that leave us with?
…
If we love our homes and our communities, we must understand that they are not to be taken for granted. They will not be handed to us on a silver platter. We cannot defend them by winning culture wars or “owning” our opponents. We can only preserve them if we are willing to compete—with other citizens, with other countries, and with nature itself.
The right-wing populists Lockwood critiques are frustrated by what they view as unfairness, and want the government to fix the problems that have created unlevel playing fields—by restricting immigration, kicking foreign students out of our schools, etc. But right-wing populists aren’t the only ones railing against perceived unfairness. Tal Fortang wrote this week on the left’s embrace of New York Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani and the crowd of “fawning admirers” that has sprung up to support Luigi Mangione, who allegedly murdered UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson one year ago.
After an anti-Israel organization protested outside of a synagogue in an attempt to intimidate Jews interested in moving to Israel, Mamdani issued a statement saying that, “Every New Yorker should be free to enter a house of worship without intimidation,” but also accused the synagogue of “[promoting] activities in violation of international law,” presumably because an organization hosting an event at the synagogue recognizes the West Bank as part of Israel. Fortang criticized Mamdani’s “wink-and-nod approach to intimidation” and writes that such behavior chips away at our moral intuition. He notes that Mamdani and Mangione and their followers suffer from a juvenile mindset and believe that “dramatic gestures can substitute for the hard work of persuasion and reform.” Fortang writes:
It’s a small problem, all things considered, that there are man-children who would discard millennia of civilization brick by brick as part of a tantrum about unfairness. It’s a huge problem that the supposed adults in the room are more interested in humoring them than putting them in timeout. In Mamdani’s case, enough people in New York City were willing to look past his refrain that he’d like to seize the means of production and conspiracy theories about Israeli influence everywhere that he was elected mayor. And in Mangione’s case, a sympathetic ecosystem has revealed itself willing and able to rationalize and even lionize murder, as though we’re supposed to breeze past the decision that condemned Thompson’s children to grow up fatherless and engage with the underlying frustrations, as if Mangione had a serious claim—as some lawmakers implied—to self-defense.
Thank you for reading, and have a lovely weekend.
The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices met last week for the third time since Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. fired its previous members and packed the panel with allies, skeptics, and openly anti-vaccine advocates. Past ACIP convenings featured structured and dispassionate discussions of the vaccine schedule. Their recommendations are always consequential, but their meetings were typically jargony and boring. This meeting was different. A chaotic two-day session punctuated by shouting matches, passive-aggressive insults, and confusion about the agenda did not stop a majority of the panel from removing a 35-year-old recommendation for a routine birth dose of the hepatitis B vaccine. Anti-vaccine advocates gave presentations that public health researchers and major medical associations criticized as distorted, inaccurate, and misleading. The committee is now poised to deliver similar treatment to the entire childhood vaccine schedule. The meeting made explicit what was already becoming apparent: The iconoclasts are in charge and pursuing a campaign against public health guidance, as such.
The movement of people began when the earliest humans learned to walk. For hundreds of thousands of years, people have migrated. The first migrants were in search of a better food supply, and that basic instinct for survival continues to motivate migration, whether the trigger is hunger or politics. Some migrations, like the Atlantic slave trade, were involuntary; some, like the movement of Hindus and Muslims after the Indian Partition in 1947, were both voluntary and involuntary. And some, like the “great migration” of black Americans from the South to the North, which lasted roughly from about 1910 to about 1970, were a combination of seeking economic opportunity and escaping oppression. As people move to new places, they come into contact with people who are already there. Throughout history this often led to violence and competition, but it also led to positive change. Isolation tends not to foster change; on the contrary it leads to stagnation, reducing the need to adapt and innovate. In short, we would not be where we are today without migration. Today, migration is taking place at a pace and in ways and numbers never before seen. Last year more than 300 million people were considered migrants by demographers, an increase of 10.5 percent between 2020 and 2024. They migrate legally and illegally, voluntarily and forcibly, by boat, on foot, and by air.
There’s a reason presidents need authorization from Congress to launch a war.
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