40 Years Wandering in the "Norms" Desert?

And more from this week...

If you’re in the New York area, come to our event at the 92nd Street Y on June 5 at 8:30pm for the launch of my new book, The New Conservatives: Restoring America’s Commitment to Family, Community, and Industry. I’ll be talking about it with Walter Isaacson, renowned author of biographies including Einstein, Steve Jobs, and Elon Musk. Get Tickets Here.

(And if you haven’t already, pre-order your copy of the book now!)

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Speaking of books… On Tuesday, Alex Thompson and Jake Tapper released Original Sin, their devastating book about the efforts to hide Joe Biden’s descent into senility. You should read it. But far more evocative than any of its detailed reporting is the voice of the president himself, on tapes also released last week from his interviews with special counsel Robert Hur in October 2023. So, your one thing to listen to this week is four minutes of Joe Biden speaking, featured in this Axios article.

You may think you already know what Biden sounds like, maybe you saw him in the infamous debate. You don’t. Go listen to the four minutes. As you’re listening, remind yourself that these interviews took place on the two days after the horrific Hamas attacks in Israel, as the Middle East teetered on a knife’s edge. Imagine the person on the tape attempting to conduct diplomacy, or evaluate coherently the options available to the United States, or make a decision, or give an order.

More importantly, imagine being one of the people around somebody whose mental faculties had reached this point, and imagine thinking that this person could continue to fulfill the duties of the presidency for another day, let alone for another five years. Imagine thinking this was an effective way to Defend Democracy(tm).

I belabor the point because all of America has gone, or should go, through this same exercise. And having done so, see if you can reach any conclusion except that the very people insisting most vigorously that the fate of democracy hung in the balance were the ones most egregiously acting against our democracy’s interests. The very media figures that continue to laud themselves as brave, truth-telling checks on power were the ones running vicious interference for the lies. All of which makes it impossible to take seriously the notion of “norms” as anything more than a foolish game of Calvinball.

I say this with sorrow, not glee. There are many people out there who like to mock the very notion of norms and seem to take great pleasure in eroding them or dispensing with them entirely. Not me. I think our markets, our communities, and our democracy all require strong norms—indeed, that seems rather foundational to any coherent conservatism.

But what I will not do is pretend that norms are something a society’s elites can simply shred, then enforce, then shred, then enforce, as they see fit. Those with greatest responsibility for upholding norms perpetrated a fraud on the American people, in a futile effort to keep their team (and, ultimately, themselves) in power, self-righteously shaming anyone who pointed out the absurdity of the situation. The odds of anyone now respecting their admonishments to go back to respecting norms, when that will better allow them to maintain power, is roughly zero. Norms have nothing to sustain them but their ability to be taken seriously, which means that for now they have nothing.

I don’t know how the situation rights itself. Maybe trust in the same leadership class could be rebuilt gradually. Or maybe, like the Israelites wandering the desert for 40 years, an entire generation must pass on before the Promised Land can be reclaimed. Either way, in the meantime, anyone hoping to make a case for how we should conduct politics will need to find a new vocabulary and set of arguments.

BONUS LINK: What the Hur Recordings Tell Us About Biden’s Memory Decline | James Fanelli & Annie Linskey, Wall Street Journal

WHAT ELSE SHOULD YOU BE READING?

JD Vance on His Faith and Trump’s Most Controversial Policies | Ross Douthat, New York Times

This is a fascinating conversation between Douthat and Vance on a range of topics, and notable in particular I think for how well the Vice President articulates the goals of the administration’s trade policy and the metrics he wants to watch:

What does success look like? Look, does it mean that we have more manufacturing jobs than we do right now? Yes. I think that’s one of the things that we want. Now, it’s going to take a little while to get there.

One very important metric of success, which I think you already saw in the Q1 numbers, which is way more important than this sort of weird artifact of measurement on G.D.P., was how much private capital investment is coming into the country. You saw a very significant increase. …

I think the best way of measuring where we’re headed here is whether we still have a $1.2 or $1.3 trillion trade deficit. Not next year, because it takes a while. You’ve got to build factories, you’ve got to change the trading regime with other countries.

One Year in DC | Thomas Hochman, Green Tape

Hochman is a super-sharp young policy wonk who we’ve had the pleasure of hosting on the American Compass podcast. His observations here almost all ring true to me, especially ones focused on the many ways the incentive structure of the typical non-profit think tank is very poorly aligned with the goal of accomplishing anything.

Bond Market to Washington: We’ll Make You Pay | Greg Ip, Wall Street Journal

The 2010s was characterized by a global savings glut, which colored our intuitions about what “investment” means, where it comes from, and how trade and fiscal imbalances might affect it. The Tax Foundation, famously, assumes that the United States has access to an infinite supply of foreign lending that has no effect on domestic economic performance. If corporations bought back their shares instead of deploying cash productively, and the resources they returned to the market got absorbed into federal spending, that was just capital finding its best use. But now deficits are rising around the world and corporate interest in deploying capital is rising too. Something is going to have to give.

How the U.S. Public and AI Experts View Artificial Intelligence | Collen McClain et al, Pew Research Center

Whatever the tech industry is doing to promote AI, it’s not working. Public attitudes are incredibly negative about AI’s potential effects. This mirrors research that American Compass has conducted but not yet published, which found AI and data-center investment to be, by far, the least popular form of investment in reindustrialization.

CRINGE CORNER

Elites killed my pro-growth agenda. Trump can’t let them stop his. | Liz Truss, Washington Post

Who knew Truss was a Trumpian populist? Apparently, the Conservative Party “had already got rid of Boris Johnson with a view to installing the former Goldman Sachs banker Rishi Sunak. I got in the way of their plans.” Bonus points for listing “embrace bitcoin” as a key to “liberating the supply side of the economy.”

In the Future, China Will Be Dominant. The U.S. Will Be Irrelevant. | Kyle Chan, New York Times

One tell-tale failure of a lot of criticism of the Trump administration’s agenda is the typical insistence that what the United States really needs in order to solve its problems is… to do exactly the set of things it was doing as that set of problems emerged. In this telling, China has risen to global industrial dominance by protecting its market, manipulating corporations, and leveraging its geoeconomic power, which is why the U.S. must do none of those things. Instead, we must make policy choices

that should be obvious and already have bipartisan support: investing in research and development; supporting academic, scientific and corporate innovation; forging economic ties with countries around the world; and creating a welcoming and attractive climate for international talent and capital.

I’m not opposed to any of those things, but as an agenda it has the shortcoming of having already proved itself woefully inadequate.

Democrats Throw Money at a Problem: Countering G.O.P. Clout Online | Theodore Schleifer, New York Times

This one really speaks for itself. I’ll just add that it’s especially funny to see Democrats get so upset at losing dominance in a single cultural sphere. They’ve got the media, they’ve got Hollywood, they’ve got academia, at this point they’ve got corporate America… but they feel like they just don’t stand a chance without the most popular podcast too. Imagine how they’d feel if they didn’t dominate any of these spheres.

Hooray, a Justin Wolfers Tweet: “Trump's tariff threat on Apple knocked its stock down 2.75%, which for a company valued at nearly $3 trillion, amounts to the destruction of $80 billion of value. Or to put this in more human terms, it's an effective tax of nearly $250 per American.” This is why he’s the best.

AND AT COMMONPLACE

A nice range of stuff this week on education, on labor and family, on conservative populism around the world, and on the business models that lead to good jobs:

Should Illiterate High School Graduates Sue the Schools that Failed Them by Helen Andrews. Lawfare is a bad way to set education policy.

Can American Labor Law Be Renewed? by Daniel Kishi. New polling reveals bipartisan support for labor reforms.

Labor Policy is Family Policy by John Ehrett. Support for American families won’t be impactful unless it considers our new labor dynamics.

From Washington to Warsaw by Anthony Constantini. Conservative populists should celebrate the project’s international victories.

Where did all the good jobs go? Zeynep Ton, professor at MIT's Sloan School of Management, joined me on the American Compass Podcast to answer this question and discuss how to create more jobs with dignity and stability in our services-oriented economy.

Visit commonplace.org, follow us on X @commonplc, and subscribe for regular articles directly in your inbox.

Enjoy the long weekend!