Connect the Dots 101

The United States may be coming apart at the seams, as Tim Smith suggests in his column on June 25, but not for the reasons he claims.

His reasoning hangs on a misunderstanding of the Constitution, American history and a carefully nurtured sense of aggrievement.

Smith accuses the so-called “anti-Trump hater” of exacerbating the anger surrounding COVID-19 for partisan purposes. Does this leftist cabal of Trump haters include such groups as the Lincoln Project, Republican Voters Against Trump, and other Republican political action committees which oppose his re-election?

The Trump-hater is a standard character in the narrative, a straw man who characterizes opposition to his policies and behavior. Following recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions that protected gay and transgender workers and DACA participants, for instance, the president opined that the Supreme Court “didn’t like him” as if they were the popular kids who wouldn’t sit with him at lunch.

The election in November is about policy, not personality.

“Loyalty to the president”—cited by the president as a criterion for selecting Attorneys General and punishing whistle-blowers—is not recognized in the Constitution.

Similarly, public response to the COVID pandemic cannot be reduced to false equivalencies and politicization.

The disease did not disappear “just like that” as the president predicted, nor through any of the nostrums he pitched the public— hydroxychloroquine, ultraviolet light “brought inside the body, either through the skin or some other way” or disinfectant that “knocks it out in one minute.”

One can both hope for the economy to recover and for President Trump to be punished at the polls for the damage the economy has suffered as a result of his incompetence. That is not politicizing the issue.

Unlike the president and Attorney General Barr, Smith is fine with non-violent protests to the George Floyd murder but for some reason finds significance, not in the hundreds of thousands of Black Lives Matter protesters around the globe, but in protesters in six blocks of downtown Seattle.

“The push from the left to overturn the American culture and impose their vision on the nation is the hardest I have ever seen,” he writes, without providing a clue as to what he’s talking about.

There is no singular “American culture.” The American left and its various manifestations are a part of “American culture” by definition. And culture is rarely “imposed.”

An actual example of cultural imposition can be found in the Indian boarding schools of the late 19th and early 20th centuries where school policy attempted to complete the job of cultural obliteration not finished by forced migration and genocide. Students at these church and government-sponsored institutions had their names changed and their hair cut. They were forbidden to wear their own clothes or speak their native languages.

And then, of course, there’s two and a half centuries of African slavery.

That’s what imposing culture on others looks like.

As much as identity politics is condemned by the right—as though it were impolite to identify actual victims of racism and misogyny—it relies on superficial distinctions like party affiliation to maintain its sense of being an oppressed other.

This puzzling paragraph continues with what presumably are examples of malign left wing cultural influences: “Every policeman is bad (who says that?)…therefore we need to eliminate police in the most crime-ridden areas.”

The movement to defund police departments refers not to the permanent disbanding of the police anywhere but to a wide range of proposals to reform police departments everywhere by reconsidering resource allocation, everything from demilitarization to funding non-911 responses to mental health crises.

One hopes every model will also include enhanced psychological screening to protect the public from unsuitable candidates.Smith continues the description of an America on the ropes with the equal outcomes argument, an oldie but goodie from the cultural wars of the late 20th century. His illustration doesn’t even rise to the level of the apocryphal. He retells a lengthy joke, the butt of which is a presumably leftie professor who punishes a hardworking student (“who sounds Republican to him”) by deflating her course grade and inflating the grades of the undeserving.

“Do you want a society that levels outcomes so that the least productive among us share equally in the fruits of labor of the rest?” Smith asks.

In the real world of higher education, the academic playing field is not level and legacy admissions policies—where the children and relatives of alumni and wealthy donors are given a leg up in college admissions—have been the time-honored method for maintaining the slope.

Johns Hopkins President Ronald J. Daniels, in explaining why his institution discontinued the practice of “hereditary privilege,” found that “one in eight newly admitted students benefitted from preferences given to relatives of alumni….[B]ecause legacy students at America’s [selective universities] are more likely to be wealthy and white than non-legacy students, the very existence of legacy preferences limits access for high-achieving low- and middle income students, and also for African American, Latino, and Native American students.” (The Atlantic, January 18, 2020)

The newest twist on guaranteed outcomes for the undeserving—literally—was the conspiracy in which actress Lori Laughlin and 52 others were charged with racketeering, money laundering and related offenses for paying approximately $25 million to cheat their children’s way into college.

During a phone call with one parent, the mastermind said,”(W) hat we do is help the wealthiest families in the U.S. get their kids into school…My families want a guarantee.” He went on to outline a scheme to help get these students into college through a “side door” by a variety of methods including bribing standardized testing administrators and college coaches to manipulate test scores and manufacture fake athletic resumes.

For actual evidence of the management of outcomes—a genuine argument for America coming apart at the seams—look no further than the conduct of Trump Attorney General William Barr whose intervention in the Michael Flynn case was described by former federal judge John Gleeson as “gross prosecutorial abuse…an unconvincing effort to disguise as legitimate a decision to dismiss that is based solely on the fact that Flynn is a political ally of President Trump.”

The president recently fired federal prosecutor Geoffrey Berman who, should Trump lose the election in November, could have prosecuted him as the unnamed “Individual 1” in the case for which his former fixer Michael Cohen is serving time— the bribing of porn star Stormy Daniels and former Playboy model Karen McDougal to keep silent about alleged extramarital sexual encounters with President Trump.

This is the country Tim Smith fears will be upset by the left, “a country that provides equality of opportunity for all, law and order, an emphasis on education and freedom of choices, and personal responsibility for your successes and failures.”