Our Cities Are Run by Schmucks

There’s almost a surprising bit of good news in there if you squint: As hard as it is to believe, Eric Adams is the first sitting mayor of New York City to be indicted on federal charges. I’d have thought he’d be the fifth or the sixth or something. 

New York, our greatest city, is also our exemplary city, both at its best and at its worst. For 20 glorious years, New York showed the lesser American cities what a real urban renaissance looked like, with an economic boom and a complementary cultural revival. A generation of young people whose parents had prioritized getting the hell out of Brooklyn or Upper Manhattan moved into the city and turned around neighborhoods that once had been bywords for urban dysfunction. And then, for most of the past decade or so, New York showed the rest of the country how easy it is to piss away all those hard-won gains. Say what you will about the pathetic figure Rudy Giuliani has become or the weird-rich-dude obsessions of Mike Bloomberg, for a couple of decades there you could ride the subway after midnight without feeling the need for Kevlar or some kind of psychiatric SWAT team. 

Mayor Adams is accused of (blah blah blah, innocent until proven guilty, yadda yadda yadda) accepting favors from the Turkish government, gifts and benefits amounting to bribes for favorable treatment of businesses connected to the regime of Turkish strongman Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and the Turkish government itself. The allegations include a straw-donor scheme for laundering foreign money into Adams’ mayoral campaign. If the indictment is accurate, the whole thing was conducted with hilarious incompetence and pettiness. 

Longtime observers of American municipal politics will not be entirely shocked by the suggestion that a mayor applied some political pressure on behalf of a campaign donor. That happens all the time, and it is rarely prosecuted as a crime. A bribery charge requires a quid pro quo, and it is the pro that is the problem even when the quid and the quo are caught on tape or matters of public record: You can easily prove that the donation was made and that the favor was done, but proving that the favor was done in exchange for the donation is difficult unless somebody was dumb enough to put it in writing or to allow himself to be recorded describing the bribe. The case against Adams is a little easier to make, because those foreign donations would be illegal in the first place and would require an illegal coverup. 

Another way of saying that is that what Adams is accused of is in no small part only a more extreme version of business as usual in American municipal government. There are things that can be achieved as readily through noncriminal means as through criminal ones, and whether a given municipal official chooses criminal or noncriminal means often is simply a pragmatic calculation. If you are a clique of corrupt education bureaucrats who want to keep teachers from getting docked for poor performance, you can either cheat on the standardized tests like they did in Atlanta and elsewhere (which is fraud) or you can just gut performance-based compensation programs like they did in New York (which is politics, not crime). The mutually enriching revolving-door relationship between elected office, public-sector unions, and politically connected businesses in states such as California is gross and immoral, but most of it isn’t anything you could charge as a crime. 

There’s a lot of obvious corruption in politics at all levels, but not all of it is criminal: You can take petty bribes like Bob Menendez did, or you can set up a foundation like the Clintons did and use it to pay your private-jet bills, an especially enticing proposition if you can count on a political ally such as Barack Obama to quash any investigation into possible financial wrongdoing. If Adams is in trouble for doing illegally that which he might have done legally, his real crime isn’t corruption—it is stupidity. 

But there’s a lot of that stupidity to go around: In municipal governance writ large (local government per se, police departments, public schools, and quasi-public agencies) there have been dozens and dozens of corruption charges and convictions over the past several decades. Adams may be the first New York mayor indicted, but over the years the feds have convicted mayors from Newark (more than one of them), Hoboken, Secaucus, Jersey City, Camden, Atlantic City, Gloucester, Passaic—and that’s just New Jersey!—to say nothing of Miami Beach, Compton, Providence, Bridgeport, all the way down to White Castle, Louisiana. You could fill a cell block with the Chicago aldermen who have gone down on federal charges (at least 26 of them), and set up another one for the Philadelphia judges and city councilmen, the Clark County (meaning Las Vegas) county commissioners, the Boston school-committee members, etc. If past is prologue, we can expect 4 out of 10 Illinois governors to go to the pokey.

I prefer a policy of subsidiarity—of distributing both the responsibility for mitigating social problems and the resources to work on those problems to the most local and intimately connected institutions: We begin with family, friends, and civil society, and then move on to government, beginning with government at the local level. Subsidiarity is the right policy most of the time (but not usually for national defense or international relations, which is why our constitutional architecture reserves these to the national government) but the fact that it is close enough to keep an eye on doesn’t keep local government clean or smart. There is plenty of incompetence at the local level—tyranny, too. 

There are real American cities—lookin’ at you, San Bernardino—that have long been governed by the most useless, weedy thickets of human vegetation you could imagine. New York doesn’t have to be one—it chooses to be.

Conflating the Sacramental and the Sentimental

I spent a fair bit of a recent episode of The Remnant shouting at Jonah Goldberg, meaning shouting at the dashboard of my truck, and wanting very much to throttle Sam Harris. 

Harris seems like a nice enough guy. He once sent me a gift basket out of the blue–I was never quite sure what for. I don’t want to drop bombs on him … but. 

I don’t care that Harris is an atheist. Some of my best friends are atheists (Hey, Charlie!) and many are somewhere on the atheism spectrum: atheist, agnostic, Episcopalian. I do care that Harris sometimes talks like his head apparently is entirely full of mush and insists on talking as though he is ignorant—though he isn’t—of so many of the basic issues of religion, a subject about which he speaks and writes a great deal. 

I’ll limit myself to one example here. Harris argues that science offers a better way of doing things than religion does because science can self-correct, whereas religion—in this case, he’s talking about Christianity—cannot do the same, because its practitioners regard its founding documents as inerrant by definition, so these cannot be changed in light of new facts. He offers as an example the trials and executions of supposed witches, which is, in fact, a terrific example in that it illustrates precisely the opposite of the point that Harris is trying to make. Like most atheists in the Western world, Harris has an essentially Anglo-Protestant sensibility (Christopher Hitchens could have been a very happy Anglican) and, as such, he connects witch trials such as the ones we had in New England … some centuries ago … to the Bible. But, as anybody familiar with the history of magic in the Anglo-Saxon world would be happy to tell you—and as Harris seems to know without understanding the significance of the fact—the folk characters we call “witches” have almost nothing to do with the “sorcerers” and “diviners” and such of the Bible, though of course biblical injunctions against these were cited in witchcraft statutes, notably in Alfred the Great’s lawbook. We don’t have very much in the way of relevant records of the pre-Christian era in the British Isles (and not especially good records of Britain pre-Norman Conquest, for that matter) but it is very likely that our Puritans’ Anglo-Saxon forebears had witches on the brain a thousand years or more before the birth of Christ. Belief in witches and witchy characters is widespread across many cultures, as Harris himself notes. 

The focus on Scripture is an admirable part of many Protestant traditions, and one that my fellow Catholics would do well to learn from, but the Bible did not create Christianity—it was quite the other way around, and whole generations of Christians came and went before there was any such thing as the Bible as we know it today. As Christianity spread, it absorbed certain flavors from the terroir in which it was planted. British culture did not get its belief in witches and witchcraft from British Christianity—British Christianity got its beliefs about witchcraft from British culture, from pre-Christian, pagan sources from which Christian culture has drawn so much (like Christmas trees and Easter eggs). The oldest surviving charms from the British Isles aren’t directed at seeking the aid of Satan—they petition Woden, because they were invented by people who had never heard of Christianity, and their original authors (I mean the authors of the underlying source material) probably lived long before Jesus did. Harris concedes that belief in magic and witchcraft is something close to a cultural universal but does not consider how this fact makes an irrelevancy of his claim—an overblown claim—about the role of foundational documents, and attitudes toward those documents, in the public lives of religiously informed cultures. 

(“Religiously informed culture” is another way of writing “culture.”)

I’ve had this experience before. I like Bill Maher, who is in real life a much more gracious man than the character he plays on television, but I also think that a guy who made a whole film about the implausibility of religious claims ought to have taken the time to learn something about them. I remember a conversation I had with him in which he was surprised to learn—and was very skeptical of the claim—that the kind of biblical literalism associated with American Evangelical Protestantism is a relatively new phenomenon, and that the Jewish sages of old and Christian scholars of the Middle Ages took a distinctly different approach to the interpretation of Scripture, as indeed do contemporary thinkers in many different branches of Christian thinking. The notion that all of humanity is descended from two original parents, for example, is far from universally held and probably is a minority opinion among Christian intellectuals. That doesn’t mean that these thinkers demote the Bible to the position of folklore, only that they do not treat Scripture as a kind of magic in literary form. Christian scholars even have a word for the quaint superstitious belief prevalent among certain American Christians that one can simply crack open a Bible and expect to be directed to a solution for any of the modern world’s particular problems and dilemmas: “bibliomancy,” which, as the word suggests, is a form of magical thinking. 

Science really is more useful than religion in the sense that a pipe wrench is more useful than a bouquet of roses if you are trying to fix a pipe. “Non-overlapping magisteria” is how Stephen Jay Gould described the situation: different instruments for different things. The question of fact is distinct from the question of what to do about the fact. 

Which brings us right back to the issue of witches and witchcraft: As C.S. Lewis very amusingly argued, the error at work in those long-ago witch trials wasn’t a moral error at all, but an error of fact. Lewis argues that if there really were people doing what witches were accused of doing—using diabolical powers to kill their neighbors or to make them ill, to cause miscarriages, to cause crop failures, etc.—then they would be more deserving of severe punishment than practically any other class of criminals: “quislings,” he called them, a serious charge against the backdrop of World War II. The problem wasn’t the moral judgment but the misjudgment of fact. The witches of the Anglo-Saxon tradition are not real but are characters from the popular imagination. 

And, contrary to Harris’ claims and expectations, American Christianity did correct that error. The last execution of a supposed witch in the United States happened before there was a United States, way back in 1692. Lesson learnt—and not because somebody published an important paper in Nature in 1693. Europe learned, too, if a bit more slowly: The Swiss executed a supposed witch in 1782 and the Prussians in 1811, though it is important to note that in neither case was the condemned executed for—or even charged with—witchcraft, that having ceased to exist as a criminal offense long before those cases. Of course, in another sense the witch trials never really ended, we just stopped calling them witch trials when they mutated into the Satanic-daycare cases of the 1980s and 1990s—and it bears noting that the ritual-abuse panic was brought to us with a big assist from Harris’ idol of choice, the scientific consensus, kicked off by a graduate of the McGill University medical school and carried forward by psychiatrists working from approximately squat in the way of real evidence. Medical science, one of the most relevant branches of science for many people, remains absolutely full of quackery in our time, and, as with the case of religion, the quackery gets quackier as it approaches political power, which is why we see things like the Affordable Care Act entrenching the status of pseudoscientific “medicine” like chiropractic and acupuncture. 

The scientific consensus in favor of eugenic homicide and sterilization, depending on how you look at it, lasted either until about the day before yesterday in the historical record or endures still today. The last execution of a supposed witch in what is now the United States was nearly three and a half centuries ago—while the most recent eugenic homicide conducted under the auspices of science was probably about three and a half minutes ago. 

Harris and others of his stripe ought to have the courage of their convictions—and spare us the mushy-headed nonsense about “spiritual depth” and “self-transcendence” and “the sacred” and the rest of the New Age goo he so often traffics in. If we take the scientific view as the controlling view, setting the limits of reality—and there is an excellent case for doing so!—then there is no such thing as “spiritual depth” or “spiritual” anything, because there is no such thing as spirit, only a kind of cultivated emotionalism with its origins in neurochemical processes. There is no “self-transcendence” because the notion of transcending the self is in that situation literally meaningless, there being no state or situation to transcend into or toward—we are in that case talking about nothing more than moods. There is no such thing as “the sacred,” only the sentimental. All the psychedelics in the world aren’t going to change that. 

(Take it from one who knows.)

Harris argues that the secular world needs to develop better offerings to mark hallmark events such as marriage and death—but why would there be such a thing as marriage at all in the rationalists’ ideal world? And why would we mark death, which should be understood as simply another ordinary biological event, no more significant than passing gas? Why wouldn’t we instead try to educate people out of their irrational belief that these events have some transcendent (that word again!) significance? One suspects that so many of these crusading atheists turn either to numbing hedonism (Hitchens and his Johnnie Walker) or to pseudo-spiritual malarkey one step removed from the horoscope page (Harris and his mindfulness) because they cannot bear to live in the world they are constructing for themselves. That is intellectual cowardice. 

You buy the ticket, you take the ride. 

And it’s not like we need some gooey new philosophy to deal with the situation: Marcus Aurelius had this figured out 2,000 years ago: You live the life you have, doing your best to do your duty as a reasonable man, then you die, at which point there will either be an afterlife or annihilation, and, for the purposes of living your daily life, it doesn’t much matter which, because your legacy will fade and everybody who ever knew you will be dead soon enough, your progeny will die out, and your name will be forgotten—so there’s no point in getting very attached to the world, which isn’t very attached to you. That isn’t a despairing nihilism, or, at least, it doesn’t have to be—Marcus’ version of Stoicism is a perfectly adequate philosophy for living a decent life while we’re waiting around for the heat death of the universe. It’s a better philosophy than the default mental setting of the median meathead meandering about these fruited plains.

I did not know Christopher Hitchens (I encountered him only once—in church, strangely enough) but I read most of his sophomoric writing on religion, and I never was convinced that he was an atheist at all. It wasn’t that he didn’t believe in God—it was that he was angry at God and (much more understandably) at God’s supposed representatives on Earth, like a grown man who never got over the teenaged boy’s inevitable disappointment by his father, his discovery that his church is full of imperfect people and at least a few active hypocrites, the revelation that many of his teachers are just killing time waiting for their pensions, etc. Hitchens was a brilliant man in many other ways, but, on that subject, he wasn’t Diogenes—he was a permanent adolescent. Harris, by contrast, is a guy with one foot in scientism and one foot in the guru game—and, really, wasn’t one Timothy Leary enough? 

(Terence McKenna in his time already was a redundancy.)

If you’re an atheist, go be a happy atheist. But shovel that happy horses—t somewhere else. 

Words About Words

How do you pronounce “Nazism”? 

I mean: How do you pronounce Nazism? 

The most common way among modern Americans, I think, is: not-zee-is-em, four syllables. But people who speak a more precise English often say: nots-is-em, three syllables. For comparison, think about Sufism: Here, most people use the more correct-sounding (to my ear, I mean) soof-is-em, three syllables, while some people use the clumsier-sounding soof-ee-is-em, four syllables. 

Nazi is from the German Nationalsozialist. The “sozialist” part of that word was sometimes abbreviated “sozi,” which literally means “social” but was understood in context to mean “socialist,” which gave rise to Nati-Sozi and thence to Nazi. With the -i already on there, it was natural—to many English writers—to just drop the -sm on the end. But that wasn’t the universal practice, and you can find literature from the 1930s and 1940s that spells the word Naziism. 

The German is Nazismus, three syllables, not not-zee-is-mus. So I suppose that argues for the three-syllable version in English. 

And then there’s the vowel issue: Most of us say not-zee, but in the 1930s and 1940s, you hear English speakers more often saying nat-zee—or na-zee, as Winston Churchill did. People who learned the word during the war years often maintained that pronunciation throughout their lives, which would sometimes be jarring in conversation. 

More Wordiness

Washington Post headline: “Tampa region emerges as epicenter of Florida’s death toll from Helene.”

To repeat: The epicenter is not the center. That’s why there’s an epi- on the front of the word. Earthquakes have epicenters; hurricanes do not. Somebody should tell the Washington Post. 

Slate Is Edited by Dumb People: A Series

A headline: “Well, This Letter From a Billionaire Conservative Kingmaker Is Downright Chilling!”

The article is about Leonard Leo, the head of the Federalist Society. Leo isn’t a billionaire. He’s a lawyer and a nonprofit executive. One of the organizations he runs has more than $1 billion in assets that it can use to make grants. Leo is no more a billionaire than the fellow who administers the endowment at Princeton is.

Slate’s other take is that Leo is a scary Catholic maniac. (You’ll not be surprised to learn that Opus Dei comes into the conversation.) Maybe. But the reason his fund has more than $1 billion in assets to do things with is that it received a very large gift from Barre Seid, a Jewish businessman from Chicago who also donates to pro-Israel causes, orchestras and operas, and to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, among other worthy causes. Real life isn’t The Da Vinci Code. But taking any meaningful account of the facts would get in the way of the story being told in this case. 

Journalism: How does it work? 

The article and headline were corrected after I sent my—what, 54^th?—email to Slate, which sometimes corrects its errors and sometimes tries to brazen through them, which is always a mistake. I should start billing these incompetents. 

Economics for English Majors

My old National Review colleague Rich Lowry writes about the situation in Springfield, Ohio:

The New York Times reports that consultations began to take three times as long at the local community health center. The head of the clinic told the paper, “We lost productivity. We had huge burnout of staff.” It hired six Haitian Creole speakers, and annual spending on translation services increased from $43,000 in 2020 to $436,000.

Rich isn’t wrong about the numbers, but it is worth pointing out that that $436,000 is less than 2 percent of the institution’s budget. So, real money, but not an extraordinarily heavy institutional lift, either. Scale matters. Proportion matters. 

In Other Economic News … 

Writing in That August Journalistic Institution, Oren Cass has offered up another headache-inducingly stupid article in defense of industrial policy, in this case insisting that tariffs—because Donald Trump loves tariffs, and somebody has to act as his apologist—are a useful policy in that they address an “externality.” 

Tariffs address a different externality. The basic premise is that domestic production has value beyond what market prices reflect. A corporation deciding whether to close a factory in Ohio and relocate manufacturing to China, or a consumer deciding whether to stop buying a made-in-America brand in favor of cheaper imports, will probably not consider the broader importance of making things in America. To the individual actor, the logical choice is to do whatever saves the most money. But those individual decisions add up to collective economic, political, and societal harms. To the extent that tariffs combat those harms, they accordingly bring collective benefits.

Cass is involved in the usual motte-and-bailey stratagem, of course. The question isn’t “making things in America”—it is making these things in America at this price. The idiotic chorus of “We don’t make things in America anymore!” has never been louder—and, incidentally, it has never been more untrue: In 2023, the export of U.S.-manufactured goods hit an all-time high at more than $1 trillion; investment in manufacturing facilities hit an all-time high earlier this year; total manufacturing output is at record levels. 

We make all sorts of high-end things in the United States—airliners, Teslas, etc.—and we make a lot of low-tech stuff too: You can buy an American-made T-shirt from James Perse, if you are so inclined, though it might cost you a couple hundred bucks. There are other made-in-the-USA options at a more reasonable price, too. The question isn’t whether American firms can manufacture a $200 or $50 T-shirt in the United States–the question is whether we are going to deprive poor people of the option of buying a $5 T-shirt made in Bangladesh on the theory that Oren Cass’ consumer preferences should be made mandatory.  

More generally: We aren’t having an argument about whether we should—and certainly not about whether we can—manufacture things in the United States, a country that accounts for about 16 percent of all manufacturing on Earth, in wild disproportion to its share of world population. The question is whether we should do political favors for lumber companies and microchip manufacturers, asking American consumers to pay higher prices in order to make profitable businesses more profitable and to subsidize their access to the U.S. market. (One reason to manufacture in the United States is to be close to American workers and American capital; another reason is to be close to American consumers, which matters more for some products than for others.) Cass’ effort to intellectually sanctify Trumpist anti-intellectualism notwithstanding, this isn’t a question of national priorities at all—it is a question of political favors and cronyism. Donald Trump most of the time is (contrary to his nature) something approaching honest about that, that it is mainly a matter of favor-trading. 

We don’t grow a hell of a lot of bananas in the United States. And, yet, we are just covered up with bananas. Plentiful, cheap, delicious bananas. We get those bananas from places that are better suited to banana cultivation than Idaho is. I don’t think Oren Cass probably dreams of a world in which his children have the opportunity to work on an American banana plantation. 

If you blockade someone else’s ports, it is considered an act of war. Cass et al. would have us blockade our own ports, in order to protect Americans from—what? Abundance and low prices? The potential loss of jobs working in flip-flop factories now that we’re losing the flip-flop race to Vietnam or wherever? It was dumb and dishonest back when the English land barons (a lot of them literal barons) were trying to protect their markets from the nefarious French while hungry Englishmen were going without bread because of high prices. 

If you want to define “externality” that vaguely, you have a case for regulating everything. Trump et al., being totalitarians at heart, are okay with that. But Americans’ traditional seven-letter answer to Washington busybodies who want to boss them around, unprintable in this space, is the right one most of the time. 

Elsewhere … 

You can buy my most recent book, Big White Ghetto, here. 

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You can check out “How the World Works,” a series of interviews on work I’m doing for the Competitive Enterprise Institute, here.

In Conclusion 

I have written a great deal about actors and acting over the years, and the art remains a mystery to me. The death of Maggie Smith raised the question in my mind once more: How does this work? There are a million people, millions of people, who could have delivered Maggie Smith’s lines in any of her performances, but no one who could do it quite like her. What was it? It isn’t really a matter of facial expression, or tone of voice, or the inflection in the delivery, or anything you could really isolate. We don’t have good words for whatever it is. It’s probably related to understanding faces, at least in part, and we don’t have good words for that, either: Think of the face in this world that is most precious to you, and then think of how you would try to describe that face to someone who never had seen it. It doesn’t matter how articulate you are, you couldn’t describe the face well enough that the person would know what that face actually looks like.

My own view is that the fundamental human tragedy is that we are all trapped in our bubbles of radical subjectivity (“thinking of the key, each confirms a prison”), and the spaces between us are mysterious and dangerous places. That’s why shared experiences, and the performers who raise them to the state of art, are so powerful. People who can cross those interpersonal chasms or play in the spaces between us are rare and sort of magical. Even a very limited actor (say, a guy like Jason Statham, who can really do only the one thing) or musician (Hank Williams) has a kind of mysterious quality that is impossible to really explain. Maggie Smith, of genuinely beloved memory, had an unusual set of gifts and an admirable commitment to her work—and, fitting to the role for which she probably is most famous, a touch of magic too.