Making clown shows out of serious matters
The Right needs a whole different set of spokespersons to address Leftist folly
Nothing is more frustrating than to watch someone attempt to refute a position that it just plain wrong with such ineffectiveness that he or she becomes a distraction and the topic of any further conversation about the wrong position.
Republican politicians and populist media outlets do this routinely nowadays. And then the Left assumes an air of having the high ground in the competition to persuade the general public.
Take the UK Daily Mail’s claim that Biden’s climate plan is going to limit Americans’ meat consumption to one hamburger a month. The story was a supremely shoddy piece of journalism. The “recent studies” promised at the outset turn out to be one academic paper from well over a year ago that says lowering meat consumption on a mass scale could cut greenhouse gas emissions. Various Fox News programs picked up on the claim and then had to backtrack. This became the central current topic of the ongoing - as in tedious and interminable - society-wide conversation about the global climate, and allowed the Left to have a good har-dee-har-har over how those science deniers get in a lather over the most easily debunked fallacies.
Thus do we still not get any closer to basing policy on the actual truth, which is that the global climate is not in any kind of crisis. Hurricanes are no more frequent than they were a century ago, Greenland’s ice sheet is not shrinking at any faster pace than it was 80 years ago, and the global area burned by wildfires has declined 25 percent since 2003. Because we got mired in a yuk-yuk about hamburgers, Joe Biden gets to pave the way for more government control over the economy and retardation of human advancement, based on a falsehood.
Then there is the sullying of an important discussion to be had about corporate wokeness, which is actually a thing, by trying to mix it into an argument that the Republican Party needs to brand itself as a working-class outfit. Marco Rubio has been spearheading this effort, most recently in a New York Post op-ed in which he conflates concern about corporate preoccupation with "equity," inclusiveness and the global climate with the kind of nostalgic yearning for the thriving factory towns of a bygone era that was a key component of Trumpism, trotting out the protectionist lines about "moving good jobs out of our nation," "prioritizing offshoring" and "with the profits came a corporate duty to care for the strength of the nation and its citizens." Where in the federal code is that found? Those were the whines of the populists well before the woke-ism element became such a problem. Jim Banks and Josh Hawley are also using the party-of-the-working-class rhetoric.
The two issues must be disentangled for any kind of meaningful discussion about either of them to be had.
Rubio, Banks, Hawley and their ilk need to pay proper heed to the phenomenon of creative destruction. The concept was fleshed out by Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter, but the term appears to have been coined some years earlier by the German sociologist Werner Sombart. Simply put, it refers to the constant evolution of the economic landscape due to human ingenuity. Buggy whip makers going out of business as cars became prevalent and all that. The average lifespan of a company listed in the S&P Index of leading US companies decreased from 67 years in the 1920s to 15 years in 2012. Supply chains have become irreversibly global. This is the nature of market dynamics. A governmental industrial policy is not only inimical to freedom, it can’t work in practice.
Wokeness is a distinct issue. And it is real and pernicious. It’s been going on for years. When Indiana passed its religious-freedom law in 2015, Indiana corporations such as Ball Corporation, Cummins, Angie’s List and Eli Lilly waxed indignant. The following year, when the North Carolina legislature passed a law saying that students in the state’s schools had to use the restrooms designated for the sex that the students’ DNA and genitals made clear they were, Deutsche Bank froze expansion plans and PayPal withdrew plans for a $3.6 million operations center near Charlotte. The Business Roundtable’s Statement on the Purpose of a Corporation replaces the long-held understanding that a corporation existed to show its owners a return on investment with a notion known as “stakeholder capitalism.” Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, IBM, IKEA, Lockheed Martin, Ericsson and Deloitte are among the partners in an initiative cooked up by the World Economic Forum called the Great Reset. It’s the idea that, in the words of JPMorganChase CEO Jaimie Dimon, “Capitalism must be modified to do a better job of creating a healthier society, one that is more inclusive and creates more opportunity for more people.” That translates into “affordable health care policies, substantial infrastructure investment, and . . . sensible climate policies” and blah blah blah. Then there are the numerous chiming-in of corporate executives over the last year over racially-charged shooting incidents as well as Georgia’s recently passed election law. There’s also Coca-Cola’s course for employees on understanding whiteness.
So it’s not a figment of the imagination. Corporate wokeness is affecting our culture in profound and insidious ways.
Then there are the incidents involving long-beloved popular culture products such as Mr. Potato Head, whose maker, Hasbro, felt the need to make him “gender neutral” in the name of “greater inclusiveness,” and six of the works of Dr, Seuss, the children’s book author whose rhymes and unmistakable illustrations have enchanted generations of readers. The publisher of the Dr. Suess collection has pulled the six books due to depictions of people in other cultures that seem to have upset modern sensibilities. Ted Cruz and Kevin McCarthy each took the opportunity to grandstand regarding the Dr. Seuess situation, and Matt Gaetz used his appearance at CPAC to rant about Mr. Potato Head.
These stunts play not only into the hands of leftists, but sort-of conservatives who talk about preoccupations with culture-war trivialities being a distraction from serious focus on policy. They have a point - to a point. Elected legislators are not effective or appropriate figures for addressing this kind of thing. Their time is properly spent on what should and should not become laws written into the federal code. But these two developments are indeed emblematic of what is happening to the nation on a cultural level. Everything must be sanitized to the standards of a self-appointed cabal of arbiters. And the sort-of conservatives are gun-shy of wading into that realm.
So we have real issues that ought to be given an articulate and well-thought-out examination. Given the nature of the age, though - an age of soundbites, instant outrage, and exaltation of celebrity status - it may be too much to ask.