Bret Stephens

Johnson might be half-inclined to agree. As he once said of himself: “You can’t rule out the possibility that beneath the elaborately constructed veneer of a blithering idiot, there lurks a blithering idiot.”

I’ve always had a vague distaste for Johnson, based mainly on his history as a journalistic fabulist, as well as the unflattering testimony of friends who’ve dealt with him personally. Also, I opposed Brexit, which Johnson recklessly championed in 2016 and which he now promises to see through, one way or another, by the end of October.

But I’m rooting for him, hard, as you should, too. And there’s reason to suspect that, this time, the man might be suited for the challenge and the hour.

I’m rooting for him, first, because the alternatives are much worse. Waiting to feast on the entrails of a failed Johnson premiership are, from the left, Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn — a man who called for closing down NATO, eulogized Hugo Chávez, and kept company with Holocaust deniers — and, from the right, Brexit Party leader Nigel Farage — a man who said he’d get rid of anti-discrimination employment laws because “there should be a presumption for British employers in favor of them employing British people as opposed to somebody from Poland.”

As between (a) an anti-Semitic bigot and (c) an anti-immigrant bigot, I’ll choose (b): Boris, who has even called for amnesty for some illegal immigrants.

I’m rooting for him, second, because Britain needs a successful Brexit, and he may be the only political figure in Britain who can do it.

It would be nice to think that the U.K. could simply hold a second referendum and that the “Remain” camp would prevail this time. Yet there’s no guarantee it will. And even if it did, a second referendum leading to a different result would convince nearly half the country that they had been cheated of their democratic due.

That could only energize, radicalize and even weaponize the populist right, at a moment when populism is a swelling force in global politics.

Britain voted for Brexit, foolishly, but Brexit is what Britain now needs to get.

I’m rooting for him, third, because the United States not only needs Great Britain. It needs Britain great.

One of the frequent criticisms of Johnson and other Brexiteers is that, like Victorians born a century late, they have an exaggerated sense of the U.K.’s significance. Yet for all of its relative decline, Britain has four of the world’s 10 best universities, the fifth-largest economy, the fourth-largest navy (by tonnage), and a globally deployed military. It is second only to the U.S. in Nobel laureates, just as London is second only to New York as a global financial capital. Its literary and artistic scenes remain fecund and globally influential, and its political leaders, until dismal Theresa May, always punched above their weight.

All this means Britain remains a pillar of the Western world. If Johnson fails badly, more than just his mandate or career go down with him.

And yet I have an inkling that he isn’t going to fail. His mistakes are many, but many of them are venial: He was sacked by The Times of London, for instance, for making up a quote concerning the love life of King Edward II (1284-1327). He has loads of enemies, but by many accounts he has a gift for personal friendship and, unlike his three immediate predecessors, a deep political base. He has a profound sense of history, and writes remarkably well about it. His two terms as mayor of London involved some harebrained schemes, but he still managed to leave office with a near-60% approval rating in a city that leans left. His close association with the Brexit campaign gives him a chance, as May never had, to command its allegiance.

He has charisma. He’s eloquent and disarming. He is capable of winning people over.

He’ll need to, if he’s going to bring Britain out of the political deadlock that led to the crushing defeats of May’s Brexit plan. He’ll need it, too, to negotiate a trade deal with the United States, which Johnson has promised and which post-Brexit Britain cannot do without. For once, Britons should be grateful that Johnson, who in 2015 described Donald Trump as “clearly out of his mind,” has done so much to cultivate a relationship with the president.

Johnson is often compared to Trump, but it’s inapt. Trump is a lout masquerading as a political virtuoso. There’s reason to suspect the new prime minister is much closer to the opposite. For Britain’s sake, but not just Britain’s, I hope that’s true.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/25/opinion/boris-johnson-britain.html" id="4b1ef5b1-62d3-3a4a-a3e3-8a5f73dece5b">The New York Times</a>.

Boris Johnson has been Britain’s prime minister for not quite a day, and the reviews are in. He’s a disaster! A fraud! A Trumpy toff and shameless showman whose ego is inversely correlated to his merit and whose tenure of office won’t just be bad for the United Kingdom, but very possibly the death of it.

Why I'm Rooting for Boris Johnson

The novel, set mostly in late 19th-century Nebraska, tells the story of Ántonia Shimerda — the first name is pronounced An’-ton-ee-ah — the eldest daughter of a family from Bohemia, in what would now be the Czech Republic. The Shimerdas are immigrants who know very little about farming. And Nebraska isn’t yet the global breadbasket it would later become.

“There was nothing but land,” Cather writes. “Not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made.”

Ántonia’s family sets out to make the country, alongside immigrants named Pavel and Peter, Otto and Ole, Lena and Yulka. In 1888, the Nebraska State Journal noted that “the great west has received the largest share of the immigration which has poured into this country since the last census was taken,” roughly doubling populations in the Western states.

These were the people who made the Midwest great. Their English, on arrival, was generally poor or nonexistent. Their skills were often ill-suited to the needs of the places to which they came. Their religious beliefs were not those of their American neighbors. They were often accused of being clannish, and they were not always grateful to be here.

“He not want to come, nev-er!” Ántonia says of her father, after the young American narrator in the story opines, “People who don’t like this country ought to stay at home.” That sounds familiar.

The immigrants came, for the most part, because they were fleeing hard circumstances, much as immigrants from Central America do today. But they also came because our borders were practically open until 1882, when the Chinese Exclusion Act was shamefully passed.

Otherwise, the American dream was available to anyone who could pay a 50-cent tax (about $12 in current dollars) and was not a “convict, lunatic, idiot or any person unable to take care of himself or herself without becoming a public charge.” The Immigration Act of 1891 slightly expanded the list of proscribed persons, but not by much, and went out of its way to welcome political asylees.

To fourth- or fifth-generation Americans who now say their ancestors came here legally, unlike today’s unauthorized workers, that’s largely because the getting in was easy. Today, the average wait-time for an immigrant visa is about six years and can stretch past a decade, according to the Cato Institute’s David Bier — time desperate people usually don’t have.

What hasn’t changed is that immigrants, on the whole, succeed. “Foreign farmers in our county were the first to become prosperous,” Cather’s (grown-up) narrator notes. “After the fathers were out of debt, the daughters married the sons of neighbors — usually of like nationality — and the girls who once worked in … kitchens are to-day managing big farms and fine families of their own.” Yet many of the locals saw them as “ignorant people who couldn’t speak English.” That sounds familiar, too.

To read “My Ántonia” more than a century after its publication is a reminder of the timelessness of America’s bigotries, whose loudest and most dangerous champion sits in the White House.

But, more powerfully, Cather’s novel is a story of a country that can overcome prejudice. The narrator’s grandfather offers succor to the destitute Shimerdas, forgives them their debts, puts petty quarrels aside, and consoles them in their grief. After Ántonia’s father commits suicide, he prays “that if any man there had been remiss toward the stranger come to a far country, God would forgive him and soften his heart.”

It’s in such moments that “My Ántonia” becomes an education in what it means to be American: to have come from elsewhere, with very little; to be mindful, amid every trapping of prosperity, of how little we once had, and were; to protect and nurture those newly arrived, wherever from, as if they were our own immigrant ancestors — equally scared, equally humble, and equally determined.

That’s the “real America” that today’s immigrant-bashers, starting with the president, pretend to venerate and constantly traduce. You don’t have to favor sanctuary cities and the abolition of ICE to be on the right side of this debate. But you do have to recognize that the newest immigrants have as much claim to the country and its lawful freedoms as any other American. That would certainly include Minnesota’s Rep. Ilhan Omar, whose rights must be defended every bit as vigorously as many of her views should be opposed.

That we have a president who doesn’t believe this, and a party bending constantly to his prejudices, is a stain on the United States. We can erase it by recalling what we’re really about, starting by rereading “My Ántonia.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/19/opinion/trump-presidency-immigration.html" id="c6d932f3-9dd8-3b53-a5ff-2d85cf6533fb">The New York Times</a>.

When I was in high school I read Willa Cather’s “My Ántonia” and loved it for the love story it told. This week, I borrowed my daughter’s copy and read it again. It turns out to be a book for our times — and the perfect antidote to our president.

The Perfect Antidote to Trump

None of these arguments is tenable today. Anyone seriously interested in defeating Trump at the polls next year should stop making them.

The very pleasant reality of the U.S. economy was neatly captured in the headline of Neil Irwin’s analysis last Friday in The New York Times: “The Economy That Wasn’t Supposed to Happen: Booming Jobs, Low Inflation.” Unemployment is at 3.6%, a 50-year low. Job creation remains strong. Average hourly earnings are up 3.2% over last year. Inflation is 1.6%.

“After more than two years of the Trump administration, warnings that trade wars and erratic management style would throw the economy off course have proved wrong so far,” Irwin writes, “and tax cuts and deregulation are most likely part of the reason for the strong growth rates in 2018 and the beginning of 2019.”

Irwin allows that the economy could slow as the effects of the tax cuts fade. That’s always possible. But for now, the economy is in even better shape than the headline data suggest.

There have been more job openings than job seekers for 13 straight months. Workers without college degrees have seen significant gains in their wages. Productivity growth is up, unusual at this point in an almost decade-long expansion. There are no obvious bubbles in tech, real estate or other industries, and the Dow has mostly recovered from last year’s swoon.

And as an astute friend pointed out to me recently, Trump’s scary tweets even seem to have the effect of tempering market exuberance, acting as a kind of check in lieu of interest-rate hikes.

How should Democrats deal with the good news? Denial can’t work forever.

In 2017, denial took the form of emphasizing the issue of wage stagnation — but then wages stopped stagnating. In 2018 the critics said the tax bill would provide nothing more than a sugar high for the economy, and yet the recovery has, if anything, accelerated. Earlier this year, we had “the incredible shrinking Trump boom” — until the data showed no shrinkage.

Now the Often-Wrong-But-Never-Humbled Department tells us the boom is really just a big fat Keynesian stimulus incurred at the cost of our ballooning budget deficits. Perhaps it is, but then how does the department explain the last 30 months of its doom-saying?

Eventually, of course, a recession will come. Recessions always do. The problem for Democrats is that there’s no guarantee that it will come before the election. In the meantime, they’ve left a trail of bad forecasts that make them look silly and out-of-touch — which the Trump campaign will gleefully use against them.

More importantly, it creates the perception that Democrats (at least those of the more ideological variety) are secretly hoping for a downturn, both to help their electoral chances and vindicate their own past predictions.

It’s unbecoming. It suggests a party led by people for whom questions of job creation and growth will always be abstractions, since their own jobs and prospects will always be safe. It’s what The Wall Street Journal’s Peggy Noonan shrewdly described in 2016 as the “protected class” — the people who make policies but never really have to live with the consequences.

In 2016, Hillary Clinton was the candidate of the protected class, Trump of the unprotected. If Democrats decide to run against prosperity — either by pretending it isn’t really happening or that it doesn’t matter — it will only send a message to the voters they lost last time that the party still doesn’t get it.

There’s a reason Trump’s approval rating is now at 46% — the highest of his presidency, according to Gallup — despite all the Democratic thundering about William Barr’s testimony to Congress and the renewed talk of impeachment. Wittingly or not, Trump is delivering on the core promise of the presidency.

There’s also a reason that Joe Biden has taken a commanding early lead in the race for the Democratic nomination. His central theme is that he’s a regular guy who will restore regular order to Washington and regular behavior in the White House without mucking things up through a grand redesign of American capitalism. It isn’t clear that Biden will be able to get through the primary without putting both feet in his mouth and falling flat on his face. But that’s the right theory of the race.

Democrats need a candidate who gets this. They need someone who will work to enlarge our prosperity, not redistribute it. They need someone who can communicate and deliver, without embarrassing and frightening normal people the way Trump does.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/09/opinion/trump-economy-democrats-2020.html" id="dec03567-f473-3c5d-a75e-3fcbaf02ae7c">The New York Times</a>.

For more than two years, Democrats and their media friends have confidently insisted the U.S. economy under President Donald Trump (a) would crash and burn; or (b) benefits only the few; or (c) was fake; or, failing all of that, was just (d) the lucky beneficiary of policies put into place under Barack Obama.

Democrats, the Economy, and the Election

The surprise was as complete as it was devastating. Only this was an Army-Navy war game, the attackers were American pilots operating from the carriers Saratoga and Lexington, and the bombs they dropped were sacks of flour.

The lesson of “Grand Joint Exercise 4,” as it was called, is that forewarned is not always forearmed. It took the actual sinking of much of the U.S. battle fleet nearly a decade later to bring the lesson home to U.S. military planners that the age of the carrier had arrived.

Fast forward to 2006, when a small Chinese diesel-electric submarine surfaced well within torpedo-firing range from the 80,000-ton Kitty Hawk, having gone undetected by the carrier and her escorts. That incident ought to have been a loud wake-up call to the Navy that the age of the supercarrier is drawing to a close just as surely as the age of the battleship was coming to an end by the 1930s.

The only question is whether we will learn the lesson for ourselves, or — as we did Dec. 7, 1941 — have an adversary teach it to us.

The question is also at the heart of an incisive and important essay in the forthcoming issue of Foreign Affairs by Christian Brose, the former staff director of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

“The traditional model of U.S. military power is being disrupted, the way Blockbuster’s business model was amid the rise of Amazon and Netflix,” Brose writes. “A military made up of small numbers of large, expensive, heavily manned, and hard-to-replace systems will not survive on future battlefields, where swarms of intelligent machines will deliver violence at a greater volume and higher velocity than ever before.”

The logic here is the same as the one that decided the Battle of Agincourt, where the humble and effective English longbow made short work of the expensive and vulnerable French cavalry. Today’s version of that cavalry consists of aircraft carriers priced at $13 billion apiece and fighter jets that go for $90 million (and cost $30,000 an hour to fly).

These systems are all beset by the usual technological hurdles, cost overruns and bureaucratic pitfalls. Still, they’d be worth their enormous price if they conferred a long-term, decisive edge over our adversaries, as U.S. technological superiority over the Soviets did during the Cold War.

The problem is that they no longer do. On the one hand, we are burning through billions of dollars by deploying state-of-the-art resources against technologically primitive enemies in the Middle East and Africa. Why? Because, for example, an Air Force obsessed with acquiring fifth-generation stealth fighters still can’t bring itself to purchase a squadron of cheap turboprop planes to patrol, say, the skies of northern Iraq.

On the other hand, we are burning through trillions in order to build a relatively small number of ultrasophisticated platforms that are increasingly vulnerable to detection and destruction by near-peer adversaries like China and Russia. “Put simply,” Brose writes, “U.S. rivals are fielding large quantities of multimillion-dollar weapons to destroy the United States’ multibillion-dollar military systems.”

That’s a recipe for strategic failure on budgetary grounds alone. The coming of technologies like hypersonic propulsion, space-based weapons and quantum sensors (able to detect minute disruptions of air or water) makes it a recipe for rapid military defeat as well — at least if nothing changes.

The answer, Brose argues, is to radically increase the numbers of military platforms, lower their costs and — within ethical limits — enhance their autonomy. This puts fewer war fighters in harm’s way, creates more (and more difficult) targets for an enemy to track, and makes the loss of any one of them far easier to bear. Right now the Navy is straining to reach a target of 355 ships. It should be aiming for a significantly higher number, much of it unmanned.

So what stops it? The answer is what Brose’s old boss, the late John McCain, called the military-industrial-congressional complex.

“Military pilots and ship drivers are no more eager to lose their jobs to intelligent machines than factory workers are,” Brose writes. “Defense companies that make billions selling traditional systems are as welcoming of disruptions to their business model as the taxi cab industry has been of Uber and Lyft. And as all this resistance inevitably translates into disgruntled constituents, members of Congress will have enormous incentives to stymie change.”

It doesn’t have to be this way. A Pentagon with a visionary and independent leader, a Congress ruled by a non-parochial and bipartisan spirit, and a serious president capable of long-term thinking could change the way America prepares for the next war — to prevent it if possible, to win it if necessary.

For that, we’ll have to wait for a future administration. In the meantime, the risk of being on the losing side of our own Agincourt grows.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/25/opinion/us-military.html" id="c4cdcab3-2a14-3fab-ab6c-96d630e3da66">The New York Times</a>.

Early on a Sunday morning in 1932, a fleet of some 150 fighters, dive-bombers and torpedo planes struck the naval base at Pearl Harbor. The ships lying at anchor on Battleship Row sustained direct hits. Also hit were the base’s fuel storage tanks and the Army Air Corps planes parked nearby at Hickam Field.

The U.S. Military: Like the French at Agincourt?

“Statements are made about me by certain people in the Crazy Mueller Report, in itself written by 18 Angry Democrat Trump Haters, which are fabricated &amp; totally untrue,” the president tweeted Friday morning. He went on to denounce the “Report” — scare quotes in the original — for containing statements that “are total bullshit &amp; only given to make the other person look good (or me to look bad).”

So the Mueller report is now, in the official White House version, “total exoneration,” except when it’s “total bullshit.” Got that?

In June 2017, The Wall Street Journal editorial board, long a skeptic of Mueller’s probe, offered the central argument for why an investigation was necessary. “Russian meddling in U.S. elections is a serious matter and Americans need to know what happened,” they wrote. “If Mr. Trump or key associates canoodled with the Russians to steal an election, then he must face the likely consequence of impeachment.”

That’s exactly right. And it’s why an investigation by a partisan-controlled House or Senate committee would never have sufficed, either for the purposes of establishing the facts or affording the president the vindication he now claims. Would, say, the “Nunes Report” have convinced anyone who wasn’t already planning to vote for Trump that no collusion had taken place? Would a decision by the president to fire Mueller in 2017 — as he very nearly did — have allayed suspicions, much less put the matter behind us?

Only Mueller, with his reputation for probity and credibility among Democrats, could have prevented the collusion narrative from achieving the status of unshakable faith among millions of Americans, akin to the false “Bush lied, people died” narrative that still dogs the 43rd president. That required the no-stone-left-unturned approach manifest in the long investigation and 448-page report. Anything else would have been dismissed as a whitewash.

So why aren’t conservatives grateful?

From the beginning of the investigation, conservatives have been invested in a counter-narrative that is as flawed as the collusion narrative itself. This has various elements, from Trump’s repeated attempts to cast doubt on Russian interference, to the belief that the investigation had its genesis in Christopher Steele’s salacious dossier, to the equally spurious idea that there can be no obstruction of justice without an underlying crime — a point that ought to be obvious to anyone who supported impeaching Bill Clinton for lying under oath about a noncriminal act.

Most absurd: The claim, repeated Thursday by Attorney General William Barr, that the White House fully cooperated with the investigation. For more on that, read the part of the report where then-White House counsel Don McGahn opted to quit instead of participating in the firing of Mueller.

“He called his lawyer, drove to the White House, packed up his office, prepared to submit a resignation letter with his chief of staff, told [Reince] Priebus that the President had asked him to ‘do crazy shit,’ and informed Priebus and [Steve] Bannon that he was leaving.”

Here’s what conservatives have largely failed to acknowledge: Trump’s absolution by Mueller didn’t come about because his intentions were innocent but because his aims were thwarted or his methods were incompetent.

If his own staff hadn’t blocked him from firing Mueller, he would have done so. If Don Jr. had been delivered a crate full of stolen Clinton documents at that Trump Tower meeting with a shady Russian lawyer, he would have taken it. If The New York Times hadn’t exposed Paul Manafort for taking illicit cash from Ukraine’s president, he might well have wound up as a senior U.S. official vulnerable to Russian blackmail. If the Senate hadn’t blocked Trump from easing sanctions on Russia, or public opinion hadn’t revolted over his performance at Helsinki, he would have cozied up to Vladimir Putin.

Trump is the guy who keeps getting saved from walking into oncoming traffic, only to complain that someone yanked his collar. This makes Mueller the latest in a long list of figures whose scrupulousness saved Trump from the consequences of his unscrupulousness. For this, the special counsel will get no thanks from the president, much less an apology from all the two-bit talking heads who spent the past 23 months questioning his motives and impugning his integrity.

The good news in all this is that the rule of law and reason still function in the Age of Trump — despite Trump. Responsible officials checked a dangerous president. Political pressure allowed Mueller to finish his report and ensured its release. Americans got a comprehensive presentation and analysis of the facts, which may have exonerated the president legally but which clearly indict him morally. Ultimately the matter will be settled at the polls in November 2020.

The system, as they say, worked. Conservatives who claim to believe in that system should be grateful they didn’t get their wish when they sought to tear it down.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/19/opinion/mueller-report-donald-trump-2020.html" id="d564e8a0-20d5-385f-a1e9-45f1d8fcf799">The New York Times</a>.

For the better part of two years, President Donald Trump and his partisans did everything they could to denigrate and discredit Robert Mueller and his investigation.

Conservatives Should Thank Mueller

(1) The Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 was “something some people did.”

(2) Last month’s attack on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, was “something someone did.”

(3) The 2015 massacre at a black church in Charleston, South Carolina, was “something someone did.”

Now imagine that a public figure with a history of making racially inflammatory remarks — someone like Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, or, better yet, President Donald Trump — had said any of this. (Neither of them did.) Would you not be appalled?

Of course you would. You would be insulted by the evasiveness of the something and someone. You’d be revolted that a right-wing politician would fail to speak forcefully against the bigotries too often found among his followers and fellow travelers. You would be disgusted by the deliberate attempt to conceal the scale of the horror, the identity of the perpetrators, and the racist ideology that motivated them.

And you would make no allowances for the possibility that the politician in question might have merely misspoken, especially if he failed to apologize, clarify or correct himself. With political power comes rhetorical responsibility.

So it is that one should think about the furor — and counter-furor — over Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar’s claim, in a speech last month in California, that the Council on American-Islamic Relations “was founded after 9/11, because they recognized that some people did something, and that all of us were starting to lose access to our civil liberties.”

The bulk of Omar’s speech was devoted to preaching political empowerment for American Muslims and denouncing Islamophobia. That’s fine as far as it goes.

But contrary to claims by some of her apologists, the remark is not taken out of context, it is not contradicted by anything else she says in the speech, and it is not marred merely because it is factually mistaken. (CAIR was founded seven years before 9/11.) Nor is the problem a matter of inapt phrasing: Omar is a confident public speaker with a precise command of language and a knack for turning a phrase.

The problem is that the remark is foul, in exactly the same way that the hypothetical remarks listed above are foul. I live in lower Manhattan, near the Sept. 11 memorial and museum. No decent person can look at the portraits of the 2,983 victims of Islamist terrorists and say, by-the-by, that this was “something” that “some people did.”

The problem is also that the remarks didn’t come from just anyone. Just as Trump has repeatedly made his ethnic prejudices plain, so has Omar. She has demonized Israel, and American supporters of Israel, in terms that are unmistakably anti-Semitic. She has been reproached by fellow Democrats, claimed ignorance by way of apology, and then slurred Jews again — without apology. And despite claiming to be a champion of human rights, she has been oddly selective about the human-rights issues that elicit her outrage.

Now Omar’s defenders are keen to paint her as a victim of Islamophobia, which no doubt she is. In this case, however, a victim of bigotry is also a major and unflinching bigot in her own right. That the president has chosen to target Omar may smack of rank hypocrisy, but it would be political malpractice for him not to pick the fight. Her views as a public figure, and what they signify for the party she represents, are fair game.

All the more so as progressives rush to her defense. Omar is not a significant figure in her own right. And the House of Representatives has never lacked for cranks, knaves, fools and bigots.

What is significant is that Omar’s defenders don’t consider her prejudices about Jews as particularly disqualifying, morally or politically, at least not when weighed against the things they like about her (and hate about her enemies). As for her views about Israel, she’s practically mainstream for her segment of the Democratic Party — a harbinger of what’s to come as the old guard of pro-Israel liberals like House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer gives way to the anti-Israel wokesters typified by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Oh, right: the early days of Trump, when millions of Republican primary voters heard the candidate denounce Mexicans as drug dealers, criminals and rapists, and said to themselves, “We like that.” The central lesson of the moral collapse that followed for the GOP isn’t that conservatives are a uniquely perfidious bunch. It’s that partisans of any stripe are always susceptible to demagoguery, particularly when the demagogue refuses to back down in the face of outrage. Shamelessness has a way of inspiring a following, and Omar is in the process of cornering the market on the left.

Still, let’s not be entirely negative about the congresswoman. Toward the end of her speech, she said it was vital “to make sure that we are not only holding people that we don’t like accountable: We must also hold those that we love, have shared values with, accountable.”

Those words, at least, are wise. The best thing Democrats could do now is apply them to Omar herself.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/18/opinion/ilhan-omar-anti-semitic-israel.html" id="78f9a66e-d8e0-3947-adbc-e6628cd3631b">The New York Times</a>.

Spot the problem with the quoted remarks:

Ilhan Omar, Harbinger of Democratic Decline?

Sanders has plenty of company. In 2018 there were 10.23 million U.S. households with a net worth of between $1 million and $5 million, not including their primary residence. That’s an increase of about 250,000 from 2017. Another 1.4 million households are worth between $5 million and $25 million, and 173,000 households are still north of that.

Nor is Sanders alone in Congress, even — or especially — among Democrats. About half of all Senate Democrats in 2018 were millionaires. That includes Virginia’s Mark Warner (worth $90.2 million, according to Roll Call), Connecticut’s Richard Blumenthal ($70 million) and California’s Dianne Feinstein ($58.5 million).

At the time, Sanders’ net worth came to zero, a sum that was at least consistent with his worldview (though he did somehow manage to own three homes). But now he’s flush, and destined to pay higher taxes, so maybe his opinions will change. In his biography of Harry Truman, David McCullough noted that the 33rd president was shocked by how little money was left to him after he had to pay 67 percent of his hard-won earnings in state and federal taxes.

With Sanders, I won’t get my hopes up. But his experience of sudden wealth ought at least to temper the hard and ugly edges of his class-war politics. Getting rich is not a form of theft. As often as not, it’s the result of a service. Being rich is not a sin. Typically, it’s the result of long labor, patient saving, prudent investment, gutsy risk-taking and some stroke of originality.

And becoming richer is no shame. Wealth and philanthropy tend to correlate. Of America’s 10 richest people, four have given away at least $1 billion and/or 20 percent of their net worth to charity. In terms of charitable donations by individuals as a percentage of GDP, the United States is by far the most generous, giving $410 billion to charity in 2017. The average American gives nearly twice as much to charity as the average New Zealander, the runner-up among giving nations.

A Sanders supporter might concede some of this, while rejoining that great wealth is inherently corrupting (and unnecessary), and that great inequality is inherently dangerous to democracy (and just plain wrong). That’s the thinking that now animates the movement on the left to get rid of billionaires altogether, or at least cut them down to size with punitive taxation.

Yet it’s never been clear why it’s immoral to be a billionaire but not a mere millionaire — other than, perhaps, the envy that those whose income is in the 95th percentile (college professors, for instance) tend to feel toward those in the 99th (finance people). Is there a consistent moral principle that distinguishes the relative goodness of five, six or even seven zeros in your portfolio versus the badness of eight or a full nine?

It’s also unclear how Steve Jobs’ or Bill Gates’ fortunes ever denied anyone a penny, except for the dollars voluntarily shelled out to purchase iPhones and Windows. In the U.S., billionaires don’t take wealth, as Russian oligarchs, Saudi princes, or Chinese officials do. They create it. And in creating it, they create jobs, opportunities, services, choice, equity, efficiencies, and sometimes even beauty — the reason why capitalist societies are invariably more attractive and dynamic than non-capitalist ones.

Is this an argument for unregulated capitalism? No. Is it a claim that billionaires have a superior claim to virtue? No. Does it suggest that the uber-rich should have greater title to our political life than the rest of us? No. Does it mean we can only find earthly fulfillment through profit-maximization rather then joy-optimization?

But the idea that people can be judged as individuals based on the economic class to which they belong is one of the foulest in history, matching if not exceeding in its murderous consequences the legacies of racism and colonialism combined. When Sanders inveighs against billyinaehs (millyinaehs being presumably no longer as odious to him today as they were just a few years ago) he is engaged in a form of stereotyping that is no less bigoted, or dangerous, for being aimed at so few.

Still, I won’t give up all hope that Sanders might not come to see the error of his thinking. After leaving the U.S. Senate, the late George McGovern — Sanders’ precursor in many ways — decided he would try his hand in the world of business by operating an inn and restaurant in Connecticut. It didn’t go so well.

“My business associates and I,” he wrote in a memorable 1992 Wall Street Journal op-ed, “also lived with federal, state and local rules that were all passed with the objective of helping employees, protecting the environment, raising tax dollars for schools, protecting our customers from fire hazards, etc. While I never have doubted the worthiness of any of these goals, the concept that most often eludes legislators is: ‘Can we make consumers pay the higher prices for the increased operating costs that accompany public regulation and government reporting requirements with reams of red tape.’ It is a simple concern that is nonetheless often ignored by legislators.”

The op-ed began with a line from Justice Felix Frankfurter: “Wisdom too often never comes, and so one ought not to reject it merely because it comes late.” For McGovern, wisdom came at the price of bankruptcy. For Sanders, maybe it will come with the rewards of wealth.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/11/opinion/bernie-sanders-wealth.html" id="b88d6793-23d7-3214-ad27-10c26b0d98c8">The New York Times</a>.

“I wrote a best-selling book. If you write a best-selling book, you can be a millionaire, too.” With those insouciant words, Bernie Sanders acknowledged Tuesday that he has joined the ranks of the “millionaires and billionaires” he has vilified for most of his career.

Millionaires and Billionaires and Bernie

Like many self-described progressives, Omar does not like Israel. That’s a shame, not least because Israel is the only country in its region that embraces the sorts of values the Democratic Party claims to champion. When was the last time there was a gay-pride parade in Ramallah, a women’s rights march in Gaza, or an opposition press in Tehran? In what Middle Eastern country other than Israel can an attorney general indict a popular and powerful prime minister on corruption charges?

But America is a free country, and Omar is within her rights to think what she will about Israel or any other state. Contrary to a self-serving myth among Israel’s detractors, there’s rarely a social or reputational penalty for publicly criticizing Israeli policies today. It’s ubiquitous on college campuses and commonplace in editorial pages. And contrary to some recent comments from Sen. Elizabeth Warren, no serious person claims criticism of Israel is ipso facto anti-Semitic. My last column called on Benjamin Netanyahu to resign. Last I checked, the Anti-Defamation League has not denounced me.

Omar, however, isn’t just a critic of Israel. As the joke has it, her objections to the Jewish state go well beyond what’s strictly necessary.

“Israel has hypnotized the world,” she tweeted in 2012. “May Allah awaken the people and help them see the evil doings of Israel.” Last month, she wrote that U.S. support for Israel was “all about the Benjamins baby.” A few weeks after that, she told an audience in D.C. that “I want to talk about the political influence in this country that says it is OK to push for allegiance to a foreign country.” Confronted with criticism about the remark from her fellow Democrat Nita Lowey, she replied: “I should not be expected to have allegiance/pledge support to a foreign country in order to serve my country in Congress or serve on committee.”

Under intense pressure, Omar recanted those first two tweets. But she’s standing her ground on her more recent comments. It’s a case study in the ease with which strident criticism of Israel shades into anti-Semitism.

For those who don’t get it, claims that Israel “hypnotizes” the world, or that it uses money to bend others to its will, or that its American supporters “push for allegiance to a foreign country,” repackage falsehoods commonly used against Jews for centuries. People can debate the case for Israel on the merits, but those who support the state should not have to face allegations that their sympathies have been purchased, or their brain hijacked, or their loyalties divided.

It’s also a case study in the insidious cunning and latent power of anti-Jewish bigotry — proof that anti-Semitism is not, after all, merely the socialism of fools. Omar, I suspect, knows exactly what she is doing. She pleads ignorance when it suits her, saying she was unaware that her references to hypnosis and “Benjamins” might be considered offensive. Or she wraps herself in the flag, sounding almost like Pat Buchanan when he called Congress “Israeli-occupied” territory. Or she invokes free speech, telling Lowey “our democracy is built on debate” — as if the debate she wants to force is as innocuous as a dispute over a spending bill.

As the criticism of Omar mounts, it becomes that much easier for her to seem like the victim of a smear campaign, rather than the instigator of a smear. The secret of anti-Semitism has always rested, in part, on creating the perception that the anti-Semite is, in fact, the victim of the Jews and their allies. Just which powers-that-be are orchestrating that campaign? Why are they afraid of open debate? And what about all the bigotry on their side?

The goal is not to win the argument, at least not anytime soon. Yet merely by refusing to fold, Omar stands to shift the range of acceptable discussion — the so-called Overton window — sharply in her direction. Ideas once thought of as intellectually uncouth and morally repulsive have suddenly become merely controversial. It’s how anti-Zionism has abruptly become an acceptable point of view in reputable circles. It’s why anti-Semitism is just outside the frame, bidding to get in.

House Democrats are now wrangling over the text of a resolution that was initially intended as a condemnation of anti-Semitism, with Omar as its implicit target. At this writing it is mired in predictable controversy, as members of the party’s progressive wing and black caucus rally to Omar’s side in the first open challenge to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s leadership. In the Senate, the presidential hopefuls Kamala Harris, Bernie Sanders and Warren have weighed in with statements that painted Omar as a victim of Islamophobia — which she is — without mentioning that she’s also a purveyor of anti-Semitic bigotry — which she surely is as well.

It says something about the progressive movement today that it has no trouble denouncing Republican racism, real and alleged, every day of the week but has so much trouble calling out naked anti-Semite in its own ranks. This is how progressivism becomes Corbynism. It’s how the left finds its own path toward legitimizing hate. It’s how self-declared anti-fascists develop their own forms of fascism.

If Pelosi can’t muster a powerful and unequivocal resolution condemning anti-Semitism, then Omar will have secured her political future and won a critical battle for the soul of the Democratic Party. At that point, the days when American Jews can live comfortablywithin the Democratic fold will be numbered.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/07/opinion/ilhan-omar-anti-semitism.html" id="b5e31e82-7e7d-381e-af1a-2d674dd11c82">The New York Times</a>.

There’s an old joke about upper-class British anti-Semitism: It means someone who hates Jews more than is strictly necessary. Ilhan Omar, the freshman representative from Minnesota, more than meets the progressive American version of that standard.

Ilhan Omar Knows Exactly What She Is Doing

The flaws came further to light Thursday when Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit announced that he would indict the prime minister on charges of bribery, fraud and breach of trust. Netanyahu called the inquiry “a witch hunt” and accused Mandelblit of being “weak,” sounding (surely not by coincidence) just like Donald Trump on the subject of Jeff Sessions and the Russia investigation.

Israeli law allows Netanyahu to contest the indictment through a hearing, a process that could take as long as a year. He has no intention of resigning and hopes to win a fifth term when elections are held April 9.

That’s not because Netanyahu is necessarily guilty, or guilty of much. Previous Israeli leaders, including Yitzhak Rabin, have been subject to legal inquests that hinge on relatively trivial crimes. The charges against Netanyahu — the most serious of which involves the claim that he helped a businessman obtain favorable regulatory decisions in exchange for positive media coverage — are still far from conclusive.

Then again, what was Watergate other than a third-rate burglary?

Just as the real crime of Watergate was the bungled cover-up, the real scandal of Bibigate has been the repugnant political patch-up. Until last month, Netanyahu looked as if he would coast to re-election. But the race became much tighter with the creation of the center-right Blue and White party, led by former army Chief of Staff Benny Gantz and former Finance Minister Yair Lapid. The pending indictment only increases Netanyahu’s political peril.

Netanyahu’s solution has been to scrounge for votes on the farther — and farthest — right. A few of those votes will come from Otzma Yehudit (or “Jewish Power”), a racist party descended from Rabbi Meir Kahane’s outlawed Kach Party. Its leader, Michael Ben-Ari, was denied a U.S. visa because Washington rightly considers Kach a terrorist organization. If Netanyahu manages to cobble together a ruling coalition, Ben-Ari could become a power broker within it.

That alone is reason enough to want to see Netanyahu given the boot. Add to the list his demagogic attacks on Israeli Arabs, his closeness to far-right European leaders such as Hungary’s Viktor Orban and his public sympathy for an Israeli soldier who killed a wounded Palestinian terrorist in cold blood, and a consistent picture emerges. Netanyahu is a man for whom no moral consideration comes before political interest and whose chief political interest is himself. He is a cynic wrapped in an ideology inside a scheme.

Nor is the blight simply moral. Jews the world over face a swelling and increasingly deadly tide of anti-Semitism, while Zionism has become a dirty word in left-wing circles. To have an Israeli prime minister lend credence to the slur that Zionism is a form of racism by prospectively bringing undoubted racists into his coalition is simply unforgivable. It emboldens the progressive assault on Israel. It leaves its defenders embarrassed and perplexed.

Most seriously, it weakens a central element in the defense of Israel and the Jews: moral self-confidence. Anti-Israel slanders may abound, but they will do little to hurt the state if a majority of Israelis understand they have no serious foundation in truth. Netanyahu’s behavior jeopardizes that confidence.

It’s a shame. As I noted last year, in matters of policy and execution, Netanyahu has been a remarkably effective prime minister. On his watch, Israel’s economy has thrived, its diplomatic horizons have grown, its borders have been defended and its enemies humiliated. Thanks to Donald Trump, whom he cultivated astutely and assiduously, he got his way on the Iran deal, brought the American Embassy to Jerusalem and pursued openings with the Arab world without making irreversible concessions to the Palestinians.

Israel’s critics may like none of this, but from an Israeli standpoint they are considerable successes. Yet just as Nixon’s achievements in domestic and foreign policy were undone by skulduggery and paranoia, Netanyahu’s legacy has been permanently tarred by his apparent corruption, his appeals (or indifference) to bigotry and his demonization of his political opponents. Lest it be forgotten, both Gantz and Lapid are veterans of Netanyahu’s governments.

The good news is that through the planned indictments, Israel has again furnished proof that it’s a state governed by law. And with the creation of the first serious opposition party in a decade, Israelis have also shown that they are committed to competitive democratic institutions and a meaningful political alternative.

It’s time they seize it. The idea that Gantz and Lapid are leftist squishes is absurd. And the reign of King Bibi has gone on long enough.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/01/opinion/netanyahu-israel-indictment.html" id="4c9bd567-0b99-333d-aea6-2cf51f14b5c7">The New York Times</a>.

When the final chapter on Benjamin Netanyahu’s political life is written — and it may be a long time from now — he is likely to go down as the Richard Nixon of Israel: politically cunning, strategically canny, toxically flawed.

Time for Netanyahu to Go

“The green dream, or whatever they call it, nobody knows what it is, but they’re for it, right?” That was Pelosi talking about the deal as if it were a grandchild’s latest video game obsession. The San Francisco Democrat is nothing if not a political realist, and that kind of realism means that no Congress is going to mobilize the country to fight climate change as if it were an alien invasion, as my colleague Farhad Manjoo recently suggested.

Higher mileage standards, more subsidies for wind and solar, signing the Paris climate deal? Those are the sorts of policies Pelosi believes in and will happily endorse if stars align under a future Democratic president.

But obtaining 100 percent of America’s power needs through renewable energy, “upgrading all existing buildings in the United States” to meet “maximal” efficiency standards, and dealing with the issue of cow flatulence by reducing meat consumption, as the Green New Deal proposes? Fuhgeddaboudit.

Then again, if climate change is a potentially humanity-wrecking event, why shouldn’t we treat it as an alien-invasion equivalent? Let’s assume the most dire predictions are right and we don’t have a moment to lose in substantially decarbonizing the global economy, no matter what the financial cost or political pain. In that case, isn’t Pelosi’s incrementalist approach to climate absurdly inadequate?

Isn’t it, in fact, like trying to put out a forest fire with a plant mister?

Marxists of old liked to talk about the fundamental contradictions of capitalism. Today we should also reckon with the contradictions of climate policy. Are we dealing with a problem so severe that it requires the political and economic equivalent of war socialism? Or should we think of climate change roughly the same way we think about global poverty — a serious problem we can work patiently to solve without resort to extreme measures like ending capitalism or depriving equally serious priorities of the attention they deserve?

If it’s the former, then another windmill subsidy or carbon-trading scheme won’t do. We need to take extreme measures: to declare a national emergency, strictly ration every citizen’s carbon footprint, raise taxes on the rich and middle class alike to fund trillions of dollars in green infrastructure projects worldwide, and even impose economic sanctions on China and India if they don’t stop building coal plants.

If the latter, however, then can we at least end the apocalyptic talk, especially since we aren’t prepared to take more than piecemeal steps?

So far, activists have been able to elide this contradiction, claiming both that climate change is a World War III-level challenge and that we can deal with it relatively easily. That may do wonders for public awareness — do your part and bike to work! — but it is self-deceiving, if not dishonest. Whatever else might be said of it, the Green New Deal blows the lid off that delusion. It’s a remarkably honest attempt to offer a massive answer to what its authors see as an epochal problem.

Yet its virtue is also its undoing. The Green New Dealers may want to spend trillions on a climate moonshot (and trillions more on their other policy hobbyhorses). Most people don’t even want to spend pennies, at least if it’s their own money. In November, voters in Washington rejected a carbon fee by a margin of 12 percentage points. That’s a blue state. Endorsements of the Green New Deal may have rolled in from Democratic presidential hopefuls, but the chances of them enacting any of it if they take office are about as great as Scott Pruitt being elected to the board of the Sierra Club. Even Barack Obama didn’t endorse a gas tax when he had a chance to do so in 2009.

All of this means that climate activists should get wise to a central fact: If Pelosi is skeptical of their policies, where do they imagine the rest the country is? Those who believe climate change will become irreversible, uncontrollable and catastrophic in a few years should get to work on their fallout shelters. The EPA won’t be coming to the rescue.

By contrast, those who think climate change is a real but manageable problem would do well to say as much, too. Climate change means change, not doom. It shouldn’t be hard to make the case, even to conservatives, for large-scale investments in climate resilience, such as better coastal defenses. It shouldn’t be hard, either, to make the case even to liberals that dynamic market economies are essential for creating the kind of wealth that makes environmental protections affordable, along with the innovations that make environmental fixes possible.

Pelosi’s seal clap sealed the fate of the Green New Deal. Now it’s time to move climate policy beyond impractical radicalism and feckless virtue-signaling to something that can achieve a plausible, positive and bipartisan result.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/15/opinion/green-new-deal-climate-change-pelosi.html" id="b9dce29e-f208-3273-a53d-6ab5ef7347be">The New York Times</a>.

Is Nancy Pelosi a climate skeptic? Of course not — and I would know. But you might be excused for thinking so, given the curt wave-off the House speaker delivered to the liberally ballyhooed, legislatively stillborn Green New Deal.

Is Nancy Pelosi a Climate Skeptic?

“The depiction of him as fanatical, reactionary and the bearer of crude prejudices seems certainly and happily false,” Princeton’s Richard Falk wrote of the Ayatollah Khomeini in an op-ed for The New York Times on Feb. 16, 1979. “Having created a new model of popular revolution based, for the most part, on nonviolent tactics, Iran may yet provide us with a desperately-needed model of humane governance for a third-world country.”

A decade later, after a reign of unbridled terror that culminated with the infamous fatwa against Salman Rushdie and the 1988 mass murder of thousands of political prisoners, including children, there was another false dawn. Several, in fact.

Ali-Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani, who became Iran’s president after Khomeini’s death, was viewed as a reformer. In truth he was a kleptocrat who orchestrated an international bombing and assassination campaign stretching from Buenos Aires to Berlin. Rafsanjani’s successor, Mohammad Khatami, was supposed to be a moderate. That didn’t stop the bloody crackdown on student protests in 1999 or Iran’s illicit pursuit of a nuclear weapons program during his tenure.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was one Iranian leader who got little international sympathy. Yet even under him Western reporters penned flattering tributes to Iran’s purported openness — right up until the moment the regime stole the 2009 election and brutally suppressed the failed, if inspiring, Green Movement that followed.

Next was Hassan Rouhani, a man the West imagined it could do business with. Business it did, in the form of the Iran nuclear deal and — until the Trump administration put an end to it — the lifting of sanctions.

Yet as goodwill flowed toward Iran, malice flowed out. In 2015 the government executed close to 1,000 people, roughly double the figure of 2010. Last month, it publicly hanged a 31-year-old man on charges of kidnapping and having sex with another man; he’s one of an estimated 5,000 gays and lesbians killed by the Islamic Republic.

Abroad, and not just in the Middle East, Iran and its proxies continue to plot violence. An Iranian attempt to bomb the meeting of an opposition group near Paris was foiled last summer. In October, Copenhagen recalled its ambassador to Tehran after another Iranian assassination attempt was prevented in Denmark. In January, Germany banned Iran’s Mahan Air because of its role in ferrying arms and fighters to commit atrocities in Syria. German intelligence officials have also accused Iran of trying to acquire nuclear materials in 2016, after the nuclear deal went into effect.

These are countries that want better relations with Iran and have made efforts to steer a course independent from the Trump administration. Tehran’s behavior gives the lie to the idea that it matches conciliation with conciliation. It matches conciliation with contempt.

Donald Trump’s foreign policy has mostly been shambolic, but credit where it is due: Other than the stunning folly of the announced withdrawal of U.S. forces from Syria, where they could help check Tehran’s regional ambitions, he has gotten Iran mostly right.

America’s withdrawal from the nuclear deal has not led Iran to resume its nuclear program (despite some gesturing to that effect). A tougher U.S. tone is likely behind the sharp drop in Iranian harassment of U.S. Navy ships in the Persian Gulf. The resumption of sanctions has put Iran under acute economic stress.

Most importantly, ordinary Iranians know where to pin the blame. Last summer, social media captured Iranian protesters chanting “Death to Palestine,” “No to Gaza, no to Lebanon,” and “Leave Syria and think of us.” These are people sick of going hungry and unpaid while singing the “Death to America” theme song.

The overarching goal of Western policy cannot be to appease Iran into making partial and temporary concessions on its nuclear program, purchased at the cost of financing its other malignant aims. The goal must be to put an end, finally, to 40 years of Persian night.

This should not be a military campaign. But it can be a campaign of economic pressure, to put Iran’s leaders to a fundamental choice between their ideological ambitions and the needs of their people. It can be a campaign of diplomatic pressure, to underscore that a regime that routinely flouts the rules of civilized countries can’t be treated as one itself. It can be an intelligence campaign, to continue to expose and subvert Iran’s efforts to acquire and field strategic arms.

Above all, it has to be a human-rights campaign. Liberals and progressives should not find it difficult to join conservatives in championing the rights of women in Iran, particularly women removing their headscarves in public and courageously facing the consequences. Nor should it be difficult for liberals and conservatives alike to call attention to the plight of Iran’s political prisoners, much as both sides were once moved to action by the plight of political prisoners in the Soviet Union or China or South Africa.

Back when there was an idea of something called the free world, led by the United States, Americans cared about such things and were willing to act. It is not too late for Americans to do so again, when so many are still in the dark.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/14/opinion/iran-forty-years-revolution-moderate.html" id="94a50770-edbc-382d-aa5c-eccd3a40326f">The New York Times</a>.

From its beginning 40 years ago this week, the Islamic Republic of Iran has enjoyed the generous benefit of the doubt from credulous observers in the West. History hasn’t been kind to their sympathy.

Iran's 40 Years of Darkness

In the 35 years between those two points he has, by all appearances, lived an upstanding life without a hint of racial bias. If we are going to embrace a politics where that’s not enough to save a sitting governor accused of no crime, we’re headed toward a dark place.

I write this as someone who isn’t a Democrat and doesn’t share many of Northam’s views. Nor do I think he covered himself in glory when he accused his Republican opponent, Ed Gillespie, of “racist rhetoric” during the 2017 gubernatorial race, while an advocacy group allied to his campaign ran an ad that made out Gillespie supporters to be homicidal bigots intent on harming minority kids. What goes around comes around, and the temptation for schadenfreude is great.

Then again, each of us might want to perform an internal audit before we join the cast-the-first-stone coalition.

Ever told — or laughed at — a bigoted joke? I have, and I cringe today at what I once found funny. Ever used one of the more common ethnic or sexist slurs — “gypped,” for instance, or “bitch” — or dropped the F-word as it commonly refers to gay people? I’ve been guilty of this, too, to my shame. Have ugly generalizations or snap judgments based on ethnic stereotypes perambulated through your mind, even if they didn’t fall out of your mouth? Guilty again.

I admit to all of this not as a form of moral — or immoral — exhibitionism, but because I think it’s true of the overwhelming majority of people irrespective of their race or gender. (If you don’t agree, audit yourself twice.) Few of us are proud of these lapses. Many of us are trying to be considerably more mindful about them. But most of us don’t rip ourselves to pieces over them, either.

That’s because we believe that our worst moments and dumbest utterances shouldn’t define us. That our youthful behavior is more of a reflection of what is around us than a representation of what’s inside. That we deserve to be judged by the decency of our intentions and the totality of our deeds. That we are entitled to a presumption of innocence, a measure of forgiveness, a sense for our times, and multiple opportunities for redemption.

We also believe in some version of what in Europe is called the right to be forgotten, based on a 2014 legal ruling against Google that your past sins, if they are no longer relevant to your present, shouldn’t haunt you forever — at least not digitally. That right doesn’t exist in the United States, and it wouldn’t apply anyway to a public figure such as Northam.

But how about a corollary to the right: A reasonable expectation of receding relevance, at least for noncriminal acts?

It’s probably for the best that Ralph Northam seems determined not to resign as governor of Virginia. He may have done something ugly and dumb many years ago, when he was a young man and prevailing notions of socially permissible behavior were uglier and dumber than they are today. In the face of a political and reputational disaster he has stumbled badly in explaining himself. If he weathers the scandal, it will mainly be because all his potential successors have grave compromises of their o...

Bret Stephens

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