Lowry

By Rich Lowry

Syndicated Columnist

The economy is in robust good health, but our social fabric isn’t.

By two basic measures of social vitality, births and deaths, American society is faltering. Both the fertility rate and life expectancy are declining, in a sign that people feel less secure and, in some cases, have no hope at all.

We are attuned to headline-grabbing economic statistics — GDP growth, the unemployment rate, wages — as monthly and quarterly metrics of American well-being, but they aren’t as telling as these more fundamental indicators.

To put it bluntly, contemporary America is characterized by less pro-creation and more self-destruction. This suggests something is profoundly wrong with the state of the union, although it doesn’t receive the attention and the debate it deserves.

The fertility rate in 2018 dropped for the fourth straight year. It has hit a record low, and has fallen 15% since 2007. With the recovery after the Great Recession, the rate bumped up a little in 2014 before receding again.

Part of the story is a steep drop over the years in teenage pregnancy, a welcome and long-sought development. Women in their 20s have also been having fewer children, though. The trend is toward women delaying having children and having fewer of them.

As demographer Lyman Stone notes, the survey data tends to show that women still want kids, in fact perhaps more children than before. But later-in-life childbearing is inherently more difficult, and student debt, high housing costs and intense parental investment in children make having kids more burdensome (or at least feel that way).

While we now have fewer births, the death rate is increasing. A new study published in JAMA notes that after stalling out in 2010, life expectancy in the country has been declining since 2014, down from 78.9 years to 78.6 in 2017.

The U.S. has been losing ground to other countries in life expectancy since the 1980s. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, it now has the lowest life expectancy among comparable advanced nations. The decline isn’t hitting older Americans, who are still making improvements, but is cutting down people in the prime of their life, ages 25-64. “The odds,” Lyman Stone writes, “that a 32-year-old will die in a given year rose by almost 25% between 2012-14 and 2015-17. American adulthood has suddenly become more lethal than it has been in decades.”

Drug overdoses are a major driver (midlife mortality from drug overdoses has increased almost 400% over the past 20 years), with liver disease and suicide also contributing.

In 2017, an astonishing 150,000 Americans died from drug or alcohol abuse and suicide, more than U.S. combat deaths in World War I, the Korean War and the Vietnam War combined. Evidence suggests that the increased mortality is concentrated among persons with lower levels of educations and income.

If we can get a handle on the opioid crisis, it will make an enormous difference, but the trends in life expectancy and fertility ought to occasion soul-searching. How is it that a society as technologically advanced and affluent as ours can’t provide a more inviting environment for childbearing or the supports to keep people from doing themselves grievous harm?

Even if there are no ready policy answers, the question must be asked.

Rich Lowry is editor of the National Review.(c) 2019 by King Features Synd., Inc.

By Rich Lowry

Syndicated Columnist

Nancy Pelosi said she undertook impeachment “prayerfully,” and apparently what she was praying was that she could get it over with as soon as possible.

The House is preparing to send a flagrantly incomplete factual record to the Senate as the basis of an effort to remove a sitting president for the first time in our history.

Pelosi has affected a posture of heavy-heartedness since the outset of the process, saying that “there’s no joy in this” and urging a somber spirit as Democrats pursue the facts wherever they may take them — so long as that’s not too far into an election year.

In substantive terms, the Democrats had a good set of public hearings before Adam Schiff’s intelligence committee in recent weeks — with one gaping hole. They didn’t have anyone with first-hand knowledge of Trump’s directives on Ukraine or his state of mind. The closest was EU ambassador Gordon Sondland, who, still, could only “presume” a quid pro quo over the defense aid.

There are people who probably don’t have to presume, and Sondland named some of them: Trump’s personal counsel Rudy Giuliani, acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, Vice President Mike Pence and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. They all were closer to this than Sondland, yet Democrats are happy to make the guy from the outer bounds of the inner circle their “star witness” and forgo the inner circle. To get the more central witnesses requires litigation since they all have at least colorable claims of privilege. The Democrats don’t want to wait for the courts.

The minimum requirement of a historic impeachment case, only the fourth in our history, would seem to be a complete account of the facts. Schiff used to say as much: “We have to flesh out all of the facts for the American people. The seriousness of the matter and the danger to our country demands nothing less.” Now, the seriousness and the danger are demanding that Democrats rush things along so the president can be impeached by the end of the year.

No matter how often Democrats say, “Let’s honor the Constitution,” their actions say, “Let’s check the box.”

Democrats have had the difficulty from the beginning of trying to build an edifice of impeachment and removal atop the narrow foundation of the Ukraine episode, and now they aren’t even going to finish the edifice, content with what they could complete in a two-month investigation largely reliant on the testimony of people who weren’t around for the main events (former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch) or were out of the loop (former Trump Russia adviser Fiona Hill).

With every day that passes it becomes a little more absurd to say Trump should be impeached and removed when the public can make its own verdict in the election. Besides, Democrats know that impeachment is going nowhere in the Senate, so why bother locking down the case to make it worthy of the gravity of the process?

They might as well go with what they have, a partisan impeachment pursued on a political timetable. During Bill Clinton’s impeachment, it was his defenders who were saying, “Let’s move on.” Now, it’s Trump’s pursuers, who prayerfully and sorrowfully want to get impeachment over with.

Rich Lowry is editor of the National Review.(c) 2019 by King Features Synd., Inc.

By Rich Lowry

Syndicated Columnist

The clear loser of the Democratic primary is “Medicare for All.”

First, it demonstrated the unreliability of Kamala Harris out of the gate, when she endorsed it before quickly backing off. Now, it has blunted the momentum of Elizabeth Warren, made a mockery of her claim to be an uber-wonk and shredded her implicit appeal to Bernie Sanders supporters as an equally committed left-winger without the baggage.

Under pressure for weeks for details related to her version of the proposal, Warren has now backed all the way down to promising to pass Medicare for All by the end of the third year of her presidency.

This is an implicit concession that she won’t do it at all. No presidential candidate ever pledges to do something important in Year 3. That’s when, if history is any guide, a president has suffered a midterm drubbing and lost all legislative momentum. Warren wants us to believe that this would be the opportune time for her to pass perhaps the most sweepingly intrusive government measure in American history.

Warren’s fundamental mistake was to believe, like almost all the Democrats early in the race, that she had to chase Bernie Sanders around the track, which inevitably involved backing his signature health care proposal. But it became immediately evident that it’s one thing to promise to eliminate all private health insurance if you are a self-declared socialist; it’s quite another if you imagine yourself anything short of that.

As soon as another erstwhile Bernie band-wagoner, Harris, uttered out loud that she’d end private health insurance, it created a controversy that she was clearly uncomfortable with. As a way to wiggle out of it, she came up with her own plan.

Warren lasted longer. Her undoing was that her resolute unwillingness to say that she’d raise middle-class taxes to pay for the program undermined her self-image as a woman with a “plan for that.” She had to jerry-rig a financing program built on such outlandishly rosy assumptions about costs and revenues that even her journalistic cheerleaders have been skeptical. As she continued to take fire, Warren announced her “transition” plan, effectively saying the program is not a first-term priority.

In so doing, she has managed to bring on herself the worst of both worlds. Democratic purists will be disappointed in her, and Sanders voters feel confirmed in any doubts they already had about her commitment.

It should have been foreseeable that proposing a ruinously expensive, enormously coercive health program would present political problems. Even Democratic primary voters aren’t fully sold on a Medicare for All plan that eliminates all private insurance.

Sanders has gotten away with it because socialism is his brand and conviction. He hand-waves away questions on the specifics — what do they matter, when the revolution will make all things possible?

In contrast, Warren let the critics get into her head, just as she did over her purported Native American heritage, and stumbled into a messy, self-destructive response, just as she did with her DNA test last year. Democrats have to be wondering, over and above her struggles with Medicare for All, if this is really who they want to send up against the endlessly combative and needling Donald Trump next year.

Rich Lowry is editor of the National Review.(c) 2019 by King Features Synd., Inc.

By Rich Lowry

Syndicated Columnist

If the impeachment effort isn’t taking the nation by storm, the Democrats have an answer — blame it on Latin. The use of a Latin term, quid pro quo, is now thought to be a damper on the impeachment cause because it sounds complex and technical.

Latin is one of the great legacies of the Roman Empire, influencing languages across Europe and giving us scientific, medical and legal terms that heretofore had been thought perfectly fitting. That was before Democrats felt they needed a more emotive phrase to characterize President Donald Trump’s conduct in the Ukraine controversy, and especially one that denotes a more grave offense.

Democratic Rep. Jim Himes, from Connecticut, made the case on “Meet the Press:” “When you’re trying to persuade the American people of something that is really pretty simple, which is that the president acted criminally and extorted, in the way a mob boss would extort somebody, a vulnerable foreign country, it’s probably best not to use Latin words to explain it.”

There’s a lot to unpack here. The first problem is that Ukraine is not nearly as simple, or as dramatic, as Democrats first hoped. It doesn’t have something memorable and inherently attention-grabbing at its heart, like the Watergate break-in or the Clinton-Lewinsky affair. It involved a pressure campaign on the Ukrainians that — once examined closely — was complicated, ambiguous and highly contested within the administration. No matter what word is applied to it — even the plainest, non-Latinate English word — this isn’t going to change.

Another problem is that it wasn’t criminal. Impeachment doesn’t require a crime, but it helps. The best card that Republicans had against Bill Clinton in their impeachment push in the 1990s was that he had flagrantly violated the law by perjuring himself repeatedly. Democrats wish they had Trump on similar violations. In their absence, they are attempting to create the impression of rank criminality, via metaphor.

This is why they want to shift to the terms “extortion” or “bribery” — and throw in references to mob bosses.

It can’t be that squeezing a foreign power is a criminal act, though, or every American president would be guilty of crimes in the course of the horse-trading of routine statecraft.

What makes the Ukraine matter different, and blameworthy, is that he wanted an investigation that touched on Joe and Hunter Biden. This was improper because it involved a mingling of presidential powers and U.S. resources with a goal that was, largely, personal and political in nature.

Once we are talking about an improper use of lawful powers, then things are less lurid and more complicated than a mafia-land crime. And once you factor in that the Ukrainians ultimately got their funding without investigating anyone or announcing an investigation into anyone, the picture is even less clear.

Impeachment and removal of a president requires a national consensus to get the two-thirds vote to convict in the Senate. This is why the Democrats need more than wrong and troubling and worthy of congressional investigation, a standard they’ve amply met; they need shocking to the conscience, which they aren’t going to meet on anything like the current universe of facts.

This is the political reality — in English, Latin or any other language.

Rich Lowry is editor of the National Review.(c) 2019 by King Features Synd., Inc.

By Rich Lowry

Syndicated Columnist

If there’s one thing that elite opinion tends to agree about on the left and the right, it’s that nationalism is a very bad thing. If anything, this view has become even more entrenched as nationalism has demonstrated its potency in recent years, from the election of Donald Trump to Britain’s vote to leave the European Union.

When President Trump first openly embraced the term “nationalist” at a 2018 campaign rally, commentators reacted in horror. Patriotism is about love, nationalism about hate, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof opined. Trump, insisted Jennifer Rubin of The Washington Post, is “normalizing a hateful political philosophy that is contrary to our deepest-held beliefs.”

As I write in my new book, “The Case for Nationalism,” this reflexive hostility to the concept is ill-informed and an attempt to deem nationalism a swearword and end all discussion on that basis.

At its most basic, the scholar Azar Gat writes, nationalism is “the doctrine and ideology that a people is bound together in solidarity, fate, and common political aspirations.” Historian Anthony Smith described the national ideal as “a belief that all those who shared a common history and culture should be autonomous, united and distinct in their recognized homelands.”

When Europe went off the rails in the early 20th century, nationalism as such didn’t cause its crash so much as social Darwinism, militarism and the cult of charismatic leadership. The aftermath of World War I added its own poison.

Regardless, American nationalism — which encompasses such diverse, rightly beloved figures as Alexander Hamilton, Abraham Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt — is not to be feared. As with so many other things about this country, it is more benign than the versions to be found in Europe and elsewhere.

This is true for a number of reasons. First, we are the inheritors of an Anglo-American tradition that has profound respect for the individual and the rule of law and is a fundamental part of our national identity.The sheet anchor of American sovereignty, the U.S. Constitution, makes it clear that authority ultimately resides with “we the people of the United States.” The Constitution also happens to be a durable mechanism of self-government and itself an object of patriotic loyalty and national pride.

Finally, the United States was never infected with the dream of universal empire that Europe inherited from Rome and that has lingered on in differing forms from Charlemagne to the European Union.The rise of Donald Trump has pushed the left further away from respect for nationalistic attitudes and even patriotic symbols. Democrats — and the country — would be much better served if they countered Trump’s nationalism with a version of their own.

On his own side of the aisle, Trump has made Republicans more nationalistic. Still, much of the party is quietly uncomfortable with this. If Trump loses in 2020, the party’s establishment may try to snap back to its pre-Trump disposition of relative indifference.

Yet, if there’s one clear political lesson from the long history of nationalism in this country and elsewhere, it is that a party interested in moving people and selling a program should make some sort of an appeal to it — even if conventional wisdom insists it is foolish and wrong.

Rich Lowry is editor of the National Review.(c) 2019 by King Features Synd., Inc.

By Rich Lowry

Syndicated Columnist

California is staying true to its reputation as the land of innovation — it is making blackouts, heretofore the signature of impoverished and war-torn lands, a routine feature of 21st-century American life.More than 2 million people are going without power in Northern and Central California, in the latest and biggest of the intentional blackouts that are, astonishingly, California’s best answer to the risk of runaway wildfires.

Power — and all the goods it makes possible — is synonymous with modern civilization. It shouldn’t be a negotiable for anyone living in a well-functioning society, or even in California, which, despite its stupendous wealth and natural splendor, has blighted itself over the decades with mis-governance and misplaced priorities.

The same California that has been the seedbed of world-famous companies that make it possible for people to send widely viewed short missives of 280 characters or less, and share and like images of grumpy cats, isn’t doing so well at keeping the lights on.

The same California that has boldly committed to transitioning to 50 percent renewable energy by 2025 — and 100 percent renewable energy by 2045 — can’t manage its existing energy infrastructure.

The same California that has pushed its electricity rates to the highest in the contiguous United States through its mandates and regulations doesn’t provide continuous access to that overpriced electricity.

California could have, if it wanted, pushed the utilities to focus on the resilience and safety of its current infrastructure — implicated in some of the state’s most fearsome recent fires — as a top priority. Instead, its public utilities commission forced costly renewable energy initiatives on the utilities. Who cares about something as mundane as properly maintained power lines if something as supposedly epically important — and politically fashionable — as saving the planet is at stake?

Meanwhile, California has had a decadeslong aversion to properly clearing forests. The state’s leaders have long been in thrall to the belief that cutting down trees is somehow an offense against nature, even though thinning helps create healthier forests. Biomass has been allowed to build up, and it becomes the kindling for catastrophic fires.

As Chuck DeVore of the Texas Public Policy Foundation points out, a report of the Western Governors’ Association warned of this effect more than a decade ago, noting that “over time the fire-prone forests that were not thinned, burn in uncharacteristically destructive wildfires.”In 2016, then-Gov. Jerry Brown actually vetoed a bill that unanimously passed the state Legislature to promote the clearing of trees dangerously close to power lines.

There shouldn’t be any doubt that California, susceptible to drought through its history and whipped by fierce, dry winds this time of year, is always going to have a fire problem. But there also shouldn’t be any doubt that dealing with it this poorly is the result of a series of foolish, unrealistic policy choices.

California’s overriding goal should have been safe, cheap and reliable power, a public good so basic that it’s easy to take for granted. The state’s focus on ideological fantasies has instead ensured it has none of the above.

Rich Lowry is editor of the National Review.(c) 2019 by King Features Synd., Inc.