John F. Harris explains why Mayor Buttbandit is failing to capture the hearts of the democrat party’s pierced and tattooed, Pabst-swilling millennial constituency.
Buttigieg is still 17 months younger than Macaulay Culkin of “Home Alone†fame, an attentive reader notes. After all these years, that is a gap that shows no sign of narrowing. On the other hand, he is now a full three years older than Mozart—another prodigy, but who never served one term as mayor of South Bend, Ind., much less two—was at the time of his death.
As early middle age inches into view, Buttigieg is welcoming a new year filled with dazzling possibilities. He’s bunched in the top tier of Democratic presidential candidates in Iowa and New Hampshire. But he’s also experiencing a change in the weather that must be uncomfortable for someone who has known since early boyhood that he is very smart and that the Big People invariably find him impressive.
“Buttigieg hate is tightly concentrated among the young,†a writer at the Atlantic observed. “Why Pete Buttigieg Enrages the Young Left,†read a headline in POLITICO Magazine. “Swing Voter Really Relates to Buttigieg’s Complete Lack of Conviction,†said a headline in The Onion. For months, the satirical site has been vicious toward him in ways that evoke the wisecracking cool kids at the back of the class mocking the preening overachiever in the front row.
The Buttigieg backlash, by my lights, flows from origins that are less ideological than psychological. I noticed it some time ago with some—certainly not all—younger journalistic colleagues in particular. He torques them in ways that seem personal.
They are well-acquainted with the Buttigieg type. They find his patter and polish annoying. They regard his career to date—Harvard, Oxford, McKinsey, the mayoralty—as a facile exercise in box-checking: A Portrait of the Bullshit Artist as a Young Man.
Above all, they wonder why the artifice and calculation that seem obvious to them are somehow lost on others.
These Buttigieg skeptics, in my experience, typically overlook another possibility: His admirers aren’t oblivious to the fact that he’s partly B.S.-ing. It just doesn’t much bother them. I’ll go a step further: Viewed in the right light, his teacher’s-pet glibness and implacable careerism are desirable traits.
While Yale University has been pushing for an increased diversity of staff based on race, gender, and sexual orientation, some faculty members are speaking out about the lack of political diversity.
The Yale Daily News spoke with professors at the Ivy League institution for their perspectives on data from the school’s Office of Institutional Research showing that faculty diversity is on the rise when it comes to gender and culture.
Many criticized what they claimed to be a lack of effort to have a faculty body surrounding the current political ideology seen throughout the nation. The publication referenced a 2017 survey revealing that close to 75 percent of Yale professors self-identify as liberal with less than 10 percent identifying as conservative.
“Yale talks a lot of diversity, but basically all that diversity means here is skin color… there’s definitely no diversity here when it comes to politics,†said history professor Carlos Eire.â€
“The liberal point of view is taken to be objective-not an opinion, not a set of beliefs, said Eire, adding that his own views are nonpartisan, “There’s an assumption that goes unquestioned that if you’re not part of the herd groupthink there’s something wrong with you.â€
“[It’s] not helpful if you want to have an open society with creative and productive political dialogue… if everything you say is immediately invalid because you are not virtuous then there’s no dialogue,†Eire added.
Computer science professor David Gelernter agreed with his colleague, saying that the political diversity at Yale is “0 percent†and that there are “few conservatives, including prominent ones.â€
“Of course, not many conservatives exist in most academic fields. But there’s no competition to get them either,†Gelernter added.
English professor Mark Oppenheimer spoke of his experience attending Yale as a student and compared it to the state of affairs today.
“My sense today is that the social cost that one would pay for having certain conservative views is very strong… and that effectively is a form of censorship, because to say people can say what they want, but they might pay for it by having far fewer friends, or being shunned, is not really to say that they can say what they want.â€
Today is the 213th birthday of Robert E. Lee, General-in-Chief of the Armies of the Confederate States, and one of the greatest American military commanders ever to pull on boots. This photograph, taken in late February-early March 1864 by Julian Vannerson, is among my favorites. Lee is shown in the Confederate colonel’s coat he habitually wore and the photograph certainly supports the diarist Mary Chesnut’s description of the General as “cold, quiet and grand.â€
When this photo was taken, Gettysburg was eight months in the past. Lee knows that the gigantic US Army of the Potomac is coming south again. He is consumed with anxiety because a third of his army is detached, away in east Tennessee; his own greatly outnumbered army’s horses, and soldiers, are tired and ill-fed; and the Confederate States is reaching the end of its resources. Winter is ending, the enemy will be moving very soon. . .
In 1864, Lee would do his finest work, stymying Grant in the “Overland Campaign†(The Wilderness, Spotsylvania Court House, Yellow Tavern, Cold Harbor and other battles) — Lee keeping Grant out of Richmond despite frequently being outnumbered by almost two to one. The Southern war for independence was lost by that November. . .but not because of events in Virginia.
Volumes have been written on Lee the general, and as many on Lee the man. But I think the General speaks best for himself, and that his own writing shows the true measure of the man. Here is his letter to his sister Anne Marshall (a passionate Unionist and thus not on Lee’s side), written in April 1861, just after his resignation from the US Army:
Arlington, Virginia
April 20, 1861
My Dear Sister,
I am grieved at my inability to see you. I have been waiting for a more convenient season, which has brought to many before me deep and lasting regret. Now we are in a state of war which will yield to nothing. The whole South is in a state of revolution, into which Virginia, after a long struggle, has been drawn; and though I recognize no necessity for this state of things, and would have forborne and pleaded to the end for redress of grievances, real or supposed, yet in my own person I had to meet the question whether I should take part against my native State.
With all my devotion to the Union, and the feeling of loyalty and duty of an American citizen, I have not been able to make up my mind to raise my hand against my relatives, my children, my home. I have, therefore, resigned my commission in the Army, and save in the defense of my native State (with the sincere hope that my poor services may never be needed) I hope I may never be called upon to draw my sword.
I know you will blame me, but you must think as kindly as you can, and believe that I have endeavored to do what I thought right. To show you the feeling and struggle it has cost me, I send you a copy of my letter of resignation. I have no time for more. May God guard and protect you and yours and shower upon you everlasting blessings, is the prayer of
Your devoted brother,
R.E. Lee
(From “The Wartime Papers of Robert E. Lee” (Clifford Dowdey, Louis H. Manarin, eds., Da Capo, 1987) pp. 9-10.
In his excellent King Arthur’s Wars: The Anglo-Saxon Conquest of England (2016), retired British officer Jim Storr (now teaching at the Norwegian Military Academy in Oslo) puts the astonishing Roman technological achievements into perspective.
Roman engineers… were astonishingly skillful. In the years just before the birth of Christ they built an underground tunnel to bring water to Bologna in Italy. The tunnel was 20 kilometres long. Hundreds of years earlier they had drained the Pontine marshes south east of Rome. In the second century A.D. they brought water to a city in what is now Syria from a source over 130 kilometres away. It had an average gradient of just 3 centimetres’ fall in every kilometre. Many kilometers of it still exist today. In several cities in Europe, Roman aqueducts still provide water from several kilometres away. The world-famous Trevi fountain in Rome is supplied by the Virgo aqueduct, 22 kilometres long and built in 19 BC. The Pantheon in Rome was built in about 126 A.D. It is the world’s first large mass-concrete dome building. It is over 40 metres high and is visited by thousands of tourists, in complete safety, every day: almost 2000 years later.
Roman engineers were not just good builders. They were also world-class surveyors. If you walk south from London Bridge today, you soon reach Kennington Park Road (the A3). As you look along it you are looking in the precise direction of the east gate of Chichester, 59.84 Roman miles from the end of London Bridge. The surveyors who first laid out that road, probably in the first century A.D., knew precisely which direction Chichester lay in. There are two major rows of hills (the North and South Downs) in between.
In about 155 A.D. Roman surveyors re-aligned a section of 82 kilometres of frontier defenses in southern Germany. The southernmost 29 kilometres ran over several heavily wooded ridges, yet none of the forts (a Roman mile apart, with turrets in between) is off the direct line between start and finish by more than 1.9 metres. That is a deviation of less than five minutes of arc (five sixtieth of a degree). The accuracy which Roman surveyors achieved was phenomenal. It was only bettered with the invention of surveying instruments with magnifying optics (such as the theodolite) in the 17th century. Yet, as far as is known, Roman surveyors did not even have an instrument for observing and copying angles directly (such as a protractor). However, by about the year 500 or so, nobody could even build in stone, let alone lay out aqueducts or build in concrete. Concrete only came back into use in the late 18th century.
Thousands of U.S. soldiers depleted all of the beer in Iceland’s capital over the weekend.
More than 6,000 soldiers were in Reykjavik for four days participating in the Trident Juncture 18 – a NATO-led military exercise. After their drills, the troops reportedly visited the city’s downtown bars, where they finished off the entire beer supply.
According to Icelandinc magazine Visir, the brewery Ölgerð Egils SkallagrÃmssonar had to send emergency beer cases to the bars.
Niko J. Kallianiotis, “Lights On,†between Shenandoah and Mahanoy City, Pennsylvania (2016).
Niko J. Kallianiotis makes a specialty of photographs capturing the surreal quality of economically-abandoned Pennsylvania small towns. A lot of his work focuses on the Anthracite Coal Region.
I was in the “Rather Put My Face in the Blender than Watch This Thing” camp and put on a saved Gordon Ramsay after just a few minutes, but Monica Showalter was clearly made of sterner stuff, and she describes for the rest of us the “best moments” of the the dems’ debate.
Amy Klobuchar pretty well came off as a boob by saying she was all in for Iran negotiations because Iran wasn’t following its agreements made in…negotiations:
Sen. Klobuchar, if you become president, it’s very possible there won’t be an Iran nuclear deal for the United States to rejoin. Given that, how would you prevent Iran from gaining a nuclear weapon?
KLOBUCHAR: I would start negotiations again. And I won’t take that as a given, given that our European partners are still trying to hold the agreement together. My issue is that, because of the actions of Donald Trump, we are in a situation where they are now starting — Iran is starting to enrich uranium again in violation of the original agreement.
So what I would do is negotiate. I would bring people together, just as President Obama did years ago, and I think that we can get this done. But you have to have a president that sees this as a number-one goal.
And in answer to the original question you asked the mayor, I would not allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon. And then you have to get an agreement in place. I think there are changes you can make to the agreement that are sunset, some changes to the inspections, but overall, that is what we should do.
And I am the one person on this debate stage, on the first night of the very first debate, when we were asked what we saw as the biggest threat to our world, I said China on the economy, but I said Iran, because of Donald Trump. Because I feared that exactly what happened would happen: enrichment of uranium, escalation of tensions, leaving frayed relations with our allies. We can bring them back, understanding this is a terrorist regime that we cannot allow to have a nuclear weapon.
OK, so let’s get this straight. Iran was violating its treaty it negotiated, so the solution is more negotiations? The mullahs would roll this stupid woman like a Persian carpet if she ever made it into the White House. If Iran’s ignoring the agreements made in past negotiations and getting itself a nuclear weapon instead, why would “bringing people together” make them act any different? They’d negotiate with her, snicker up their sleeves, and go make a bomb. File under woman who has no idea what she’s talking about.
