If the core conservative truth is that we do not know very much, and should temper our expectations and ambitions, then the core liberal truth is that progress is still possible and shouldn’t be abandoned. I think both traditions are integral to our success as a liberal democracy. But it seems to me that 2023 was a year for conservatives. It was a year when several illusions evaporated.
Herewith, then, some of the unpleasant, brutal truths we need to face in 2024.
Donald Trump is likely to be the next president of the United States.
There has been no comeback like this since Nixon. Trump now leads Biden in the swing states, and in the country at large. His issues — inflation, immigration, crime — are ascendant again. The multiple lawsuits against him have backfired, shoring up his Republican support, and lending credence to his largely spurious, but rhetorically effective, claim that he is the target of a witch hunt. (The new court ruling in Colorado is likely to have the same effect.) He has played this jujitsu masterfully, keeping the focus on himself, bobbing and weaving in a stream of countless lies and threats, taking his authoritarian pitch to new heights.
“Dictator on Day One” sounds like a branding the Democrats might have deployed to destroy him. In fact, it’s helping him win the GOP nomination in a landslide. On the GOP’s most vulnerable issues — abortion and entitlements — he has inoculated himself. It’s his election to lose. The Resistance turned out to be one of his greatest assets.
It may be that his unique noxiousness could derail his momentum, as the prospect of four more years of chaos looms. The New Hampshire primary may change the atmosphere, as it has in the past, and a Haley candidacy would be lethal against Biden. But it’s beyond clear now that the way to beat Trump is to compete on policy grounds — controlling mass migration, intensifying law enforcement, touting legislative wins like the CHIPS Act — rather than to disqualify him on grounds that the American public has largely rejected.
Ukraine will never win back its lost territory.
The most delusional Ukraine supporters were telling us not so long ago that total victory was in sight. It wasn’t and isn’t. Obama’s key insight remains true: Ukraine will always matter far more to Russia than to Europe or the US, and so, “we have to be very clear about what our core interests are and what we are willing to go to war for.” 2023 revealed the cold truth of this. The “crippling sanctions” designed to bring Russia to its knees have failed. Putin appears to have consolidated power at home. The summer Ukraine counter-offensive failed. The Europeans are hamstrung by Orbán and their own paltry defense industry. In the US, the war is no longer bipartisan, and Trump’s re-emergence has given Putin every incentive to wait this out some more. If Trump pledges to end the war by carving up Ukraine, it will be a campaign asset, not liability.
The two-state solution in Israel/Palestine is dead.
The horrors of the last few months — the depraved, anti-Semitic terror attacks of Hamas and the devastating IDF campaign in response — have changed Israel. The vulnerability exposed on October 7 will ensure that no serious Palestinian state or even entity will win majority Israeli support in the future. I think this has been plain for a very long time, but now it’s indisputable. That giant tunnel close to the Gaza border? A symbol of what Israelis will never want to tolerate again.
Netanyahu, moreover, has devoted his entire career to preventing a two-state solution; the intensity of settlement activity and ethnic cleansing in the West Bank is as great now as ever; and the generations who have suffered several months of indescribable, random death will never forgive Israel for such a staggering slaughter of civilians, especially children. The mounting evidence suggests at best a cavalier attitude toward civilian casualties, and at worst, some truly ugly revenge fantasies. The question before us is whether Israel can sustain Western support while preventing any dignified future for the Palestinians. I doubt it. The younger generations in the West seem particularly unforgiving.
DEI is incompatible with a free society.
On the surface, making our democracy more inclusive and diverse seems like a no-brainer. And it is! We should do all we can to maximize opportunities for everyone, regardless of background, race, sex, and so on.
But what DEI does, as more people are beginning to understand, is very different. It replaces individual rights with group rights; it turns every human activity into a zero-sum struggle of identities; far from reducing racism, it intensifies it, by its obsession with what divides us over what unites us. In places of learning, it places the demands of “social justice” above the pursuit of truth, and so it has not so much enhanced education as replaced it with ideological conformity.
The extreme left, frustrated that the class struggle would never liberate America, has turned to race and racism as its means of revolution — drawing on the deep well of racist ideology in this country’s past, and deploying it for a future dedicated to the victimization of whites, Jews, Asians and any black or Latino American who still believes in merit. The anti-Semitism within it is not a bug; it’s a feature of an ideology built squarely on racial hatred and resentment.
2023 showed us the mindless grift of Kendi’s scam at BU, the end of affirmative action in the Ivies, the mediocrity of Claudine Gay, and the racial hatred that will always come when certain entire groups of people are deemed oppressors, and others deemed oppressed. This is not about college crazies. It’s about the core foundations of liberal democracy — which DEI and its guiding philosophy of critical race theory specifically aims to destroy.
Joe Biden is too old to be re-elected.
Let’s be fair: he has his moments of lucidity. He has passed significant legislation beyond anything his predecessor did. He is, at heart, a decent guy, and that counts for something. He has done his duty in saving us from a second Trump term in 2020, but is now liable to undo that very achievement by running again in 2024, and losing, possibly badly. As Jack Shafer notes, Biden was never that popular in the first place — and when prices rocketed over the past few years, he took what looks like a mortal, political blow. He wanders around stiffly and aimlessly; he peers into the teleprompter as if he can’t see the script; his voice turns into a whispery mumble whenever he tries to make a point. He’s becoming Young Mr. Grace. Reagan won re-election at the age of 73, only to suffer from Alzheimers before the end of his term. The idea that this 81-year-old man could command the country in four years’ time is as delusional as the blithe self-confidence of his team.
Here, of course, comes the caveat. This time next year, I may be writing a piece about Biden’s astonishing comeback, Ukraine’s surprise military breakthrough, Trump’s conviction in Georgia, the Palestinian Authority’s takeover of Gaza, and Ibram X Kendi becoming President Harris’ new Education Secretary. And I expect you all to roast me for it. In which case, I look forward to the humiliation. And a happy new year to you too.
New On The Dishcast: Joe Klein
Joe is a journalist, author, old-school blogger, and an old friend. He’s written seven books, most famously Primary Colors, and he was a longtime columnist for Time magazine. This year he launched a must-read substack called “Sanity Clause,” and he just started a podcast with the great John Ellis called “Wise Owls.” We had fun.
Listen to the episode here. There you can find two clips of our convo — on Trump getting more political savvy, and the NYT’s propaganda on domestic issues. That link also takes you to commentary on our episodes with David Leonhardt, Cat Bohannon, and Graeme Wood, along with continued debate over Israel. Plus, Bowie art!
The Gay Science
Watching Harvard president Claudine Gay twist in the wind has not been an edifying spectacle. You’d be inhuman not to feel for her. But it is now inescapably clear that, in her parsimonious and unremarkable publications, she violated Harvard’s own student standards on what Harvard now (hilariously) calls “duplicative language” and the NYT calls “insufficient citation.” She couldn’t even come up with her own phrases in an acknowledgment! Her sins are not the most egregious type of plagiarism, but they cannot be excused by saying, as the Harvard Corporation does, that they were unintentional. While it’s lovely to see a CRT-based institution recognize intent as a valid category — try that on the pomo left! — the rules forbid plagiarism among students “whether you do it intentionally or not.” For Harvard faculty, however, we have found out that the standard is lower! You can commit the sin students get expelled for, as long as it does not rise to the level of “research misconduct,” and you didn’t mean to rip someone else off. That’s how Gay has escaped accountability.
You might imagine that the actual president of Harvard should have an unimpeachable scholarly record. She is the public face of the entire place, after all. You might imagine that a person with these red flags in her own work would have been selected only after a thorough review of alternatives. But nah. She was appointed in record speed, and is now being defended by Harvard, even if it costs billions of dollars of donor money.
Why? We all know why. Her real qualifications are her sex and race and ideology. None of that has changed, so Harvard sees no reason to discipline her. (A plagiarizing president in South Carolina resigned over much less.) Marinated in privilege, this Exeter alum’s primary focus as dean and now president has been finding ways to marginalize and discriminate against “oppressor” groups at Harvard. Her entire academic career, such as it is, has been rooted in this successor ideology. Last year she led an effort to “dename” any “space, program, or other entity” deemed racist. Even after Harvard was busted for anti-Asian discrimination this year, she insisted that DEI would remain. What matters at Harvard, we are now being emphatically told, is not intellectual inquiry, nor free thought, nor academic excellence, let alone “Veritas” — but the making of a new racialized and radicalized elite.
It is maddening that donors and alums only really woke up when the anti-white, anti-Asian, anti-oppressor animus came for the Jews, but it’s a moment of reckoning nonetheless. And it isn’t that new — this preference for religious orthodoxy over intellectual inquiry. Harvard was founded by Puritans to inculcate religion in the first place, and for centuries, focused on training an elite in theology, even as it protected the liberal arts. From 1810 until 1933, for example, every Harvard president was a Unitarian, and several of them were ministers. Gay’s adherence to the religion of critical theory is in some ways a reboot of this illiberal past.
But it is a more draconian and intolerant religion. Heretics are on notice. It’s telling that, as dean, Gay actually tried to revoke tenure for one of the most brilliant black professors at Harvard, Roland Fryer, in part because his research violated the religion’s tenets. When another black professor, Ronald Sullivan, joined the legal team for Harvey Weinstein, Gay orchestrated his removal as dean and lied about it. She also publicly scolded him for not taking a “pastoral role” with the students upset over a loathsome client getting legal counsel.
Harvard’s transformation is best illustrated by comparing a previous president, Larry Summers, with Gay. She has published eleven articles, half of which contained plagiarized material. Summers had published six books and well over 100 articles when he become president. But he was forced to resign, in part, because he railed against grade inflation and because he told the truth about minor sex differences in math aptitude among the extremely smart and extremely dumb. Harvard pushed him out, in other words, for upholding Harvard’s own motto, Veritas. “I would like nothing better than to be proved wrong,” Summers said. But proving something right or wrong is no longer Harvard’s defining principle. Social Justice is their guide, even if it means outright lying, suppression of facts, and the shutting down of debate.
When you contemplate how Harvard condescended to Gay, you can begin to imagine how even more condescending they are to members of other “oppressed” groups when they’re just regular students? Almost everyone gets an A or A-, so we’ll never know. But what the Gay episode proves beyond doubt is that a Harvard degree is no longer a reliable mark of excellence. It’s now simply a marker for ideological conformity, and being the correct race and sex. That’s why Claudine Gay is a near-perfect pick as president; and why Harvard will lie, euphemize and prevaricate further to avoid the ugly truth of what they have become.
Money Quotes For The Week
“I’m going to turn off the TV. I’m not going to watch the news, and I’m just going to enjoy Trump’s economy,” - a 2020 Biden voter who says he’ll vote for Trump next fall.
“The characteristic gift of a university is the gift of an interval. Here is an opportunity to put aside the hot allegiances of youth without the necessity of at once acquiring new loyalties to take their place. Here is a break in the tyrannical course of irreparable events; a period in which to look round upon the world and upon oneself without the sense of an enemy at one’s back or the insistent pressure to make up one’s mind. a moment to taste the mystery without the necessity of at once seeking a solution,” - Michael Oakeshott, “The Idea Of A University,” 1950.
“In the right state, [the scholar] is Man Thinking. In the degenerate state, when the victim of society, he tends to become a mere thinker or, still worse, the parrot of other men’s thinking,” - Ralph Waldo Emerson, a Harvard alum, in a 1837 speech at Harvard that criticized its president. He was banned from speaking on campus for three decades.
“[Reporting on Gay’s plagiarism] is part of this extreme right-wing attack on elite institutions. … If it came from some other quarter, I might be granting it some credence. But not from these people,” - Charles Fried, Harvard professor.
“Under [EducationCounsel’s] understanding of merit, presumably, a black student who writes his application essay about overcoming ‘systemic racism’ might be considered more intelligent and prepared for higher education than, say, a Korean-American student who gets a perfect score on the SAT,” - Renu Mukherjee on a push to redefine merit to include race after Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard.
“All of the talk about ‘white supremacy’ is as good an example of the paranoid style in American politics as any of the Bircheresque squeals about globalists and the ‘Deep State’ of the New Right,” - Jonah Goldberg.
“I took 10 tabs of acid, then went for a walk in a field. I ended up standing there talking to this horse for about an hour. In the end, the horse turned round and told me to fuck off. That was it for me,” - Ozzy Osborne.
“This is the most election in our lifetime,” - Kamala Harris, the Claudine Gay of politics.
“It is actually more often than not that a Christian can boldly speak truth, a truth the world finds offensive, without pridefully being asshole. The world still won’t like it. But it is possible to still speak the truth of God to the world without intending to be an asshole,” - Erick Erickson.
“Those who are determined to be ‘offended’ will discover a provocation somewhere. We cannot possibly adjust enough to please the fanatics, and it is degrading to make the attempt,” - Christopher Hitchens.
The View From Your Window
Iron Belt, Wisconsin, 4 pm
Dissents Of The Week
A reader writes:
While I certainly do not agree with the college presidents, I don’t see how this is an issue for Congress. Harvard, Yale, and MIT are private institutions and are free to set their own rules and teachings on a variety of subjects, as long as they follow state and federal laws. It’s really no different from institutions like Liberty University teaching that same-sex marriage and prostitution are evil. I don’t agree with them, but they are private universities and can teach whatever they want. Some private schools in the US still teach creationism and Congress hasn’t intervened.
I don’t think this should be a matter for the feds unless federal money is being used for purposes of systemic race and sex discrimination. Sadly, Harvard’s core commitment these days is systemic race and sex discrimination.
Another reader defends his alma mater:
I read your column about the congressional hearings for higher education and I’m sympathetic to most of the critique. However, I want to somewhat defend MIT from being lumped in:
Chocolate City, whatever you may think of it, is not new; it was founded in 1975, apparently as part of an effort to get people to move into the “New House” dorms. (By the time I attended MIT in the ‘90s, that dorm wasn’t exactly “New,” but students still called it New House.) I don’t know what residents thought of it (I was a white kid in another dorm), but it isn’t newly formed as a result of DEI efforts.
MIT did experiment with removing standardized testing, but (a) this was because the testing was hard to administer during COVID, and (b) MIT has already brought it back.
Another asks:
Why did you put gender identity in quotation marks? Do you reject that gender identity and gender dysphoria are real?
I definitely think gender dysphoria is real and some people are transgender. I worry about the term “gender identity” because it implies a nebulous, universal condition, and I’m not sure that’s true.
Here’s a dissent from San Francisco:
I realize that inside the Beltway it may be harder to make an intellectual case, rather than the visceral emotional case, for Trump as the lesser of two evils. However, from a distance, it seems clearer each week that we citizens face the choice between the petty tyranny of Trump and the totalitarian tyranny of an ever-more insular elite. (I can’t really say Biden, because it’s clear he isn’t directing this amorphous force.)
Trump is a deeply flawed narcissist who demands servile loyalty from those in power close to him, but the perception from here in SF is that he doesn’t care what the rest of us do. However, his opponents demand obedience from the rest of us, and appear willing to discard the First Amendment and all limits on government power in the effort to compel conformity from even the powerless and apolitical. Also, the elites will so viscerally resist Trump that it seems impossible he could co-opt and wield the power of the new censorship regime the elite has created.
Furthermore, SF’s recent clean-up for Xi’s APEC visit demonstrated that our elites prioritize other elites — even the dictator of a strategic competitor — and they really don’t care about ordinary citizens. This was emphatically not lost on us, including lifelong Democrats who are re-thinking their loyalties. Trump at least professes to care about ordinary citizens, while his competitors ignore and insult us.
You’re onto something. As always, thanks for all the dissents, and keep them coming: dish@andrewsullivan.com.
Mental Health Break
A raunchy rap song with the visuals of a Christmas classic:
In The ‘Stacks
One of the 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump calls the Colorado ruling “shameful.” Beutler differs.
Filipovic sounds the alarm over Texas banning late-term abortions.
Dreher predictably freaks out over the Pope’s permission for priests to bless same-sex couples: “What Francis is doing here is part of the abolition of man.”
Noah Smith details “four simple theories” on why the US economy nailed the soft landing. But the debt is still a Damocles sword.
The Houthis are heating up the Middle East.
The quagmire in Ukraine is crippling NATO. But Russia is also hobbled by the mighty efforts of the Ukrainians.
Glenn and John scrutinize the new documentary on George Floyd.
Cops need to cut it — “fuck” — out.
Rosie Spinks has an excellent essay on the crisis of modern friendships: they “feel strikingly similar to admin.”
When it comes to sex, why are so many dudes werewolves?
$5,600 to fix a tail light?
Bethel McGrew reviews The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God.
Ireland is caving to hate-speech laws.
Elle Griffin and a slew of writers defend Substack against a lame Atlantic piece and calls to de-platform “Nazis.” Substack isn’t caving.
The View From Your Window Contest
Where do you think? (The cartoon beagle is hiding an identifying sign.) Email your entry to contest@andrewsullivan.com. Please put the location — city and/or state first, then country — in the subject line. Bonus points for fun facts and stories. Proximity counts. The deadline for entries is Wednesday night at midnight (PST). The winner gets the choice of a View From Your Window book or two annual Dish subscriptions.
See you on January 12 after the holiday break — though we’ll probably have a podcast for you on January 5. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!