A Coup in South Korea

And other news from a wild week.

Shock on the World Stage

In a twist nobody anticipated, on December 3^rd, President Yoon Suk Yeol of South Korea declared martial law and ordered the arrest of various opponents. In courageous defiance, 190 members of the South Korean legislature gathered in the national assembly hall and voted unanimously to lift martial law. Yoon blinked. The military stood down and impeachment proceedings were begun against him. As of this drafting, he has not resigned, but I fully anticipate he will resign or be removed from office in short order. Americans can be glad that our vital ally did not succumb to an attempted coup. South Korea proved that democracy can be strong and resilient when it wants to be.

Meanwhile, in Syrian, Islamist rebels began a breakthrough assault which rapidly won them territory which hadn’t been contested for years. The speed of their advance blindsided everyone, including American observers, but especially Bashar al-Assad. Those of us who remember well the beginning of the war in 2011 and the turn it took during Obama’s second term woke up Sunday to a new world, a world in which Assad had fled to Russia and the rebels had taken Damascus. It remains to be seen whether the Islamist rebels will be more friendly to the United States than Assad (unlikely), but at the very least, we can be glad that an evil man has finally been dethroned. It is a shame he escaped before he could meet a violent end.

A CEO's Assassination

In a disturbing turn of events last week, Brian Thompson - the CEO of United Healthcare - was assassinated in broad daylight in New York City. The killing appears to have been premeditated. Bullets were found with words like "deny." There were no other victims.

Immediately, conspiracy theories swirled online about the cause. Was it a disgruntled customer whose claim was denied? Did it have something to do with the financial misdealing Thompson is accused of? On Monday of this week, the killer was apprehended when a McDonalds’ employee did the right thing and turned him in. In the coming weeks no doubt, more facts will continue to trickle out about him.

In addition to rumors, some noxious gloating circulated on the Web (especially Twitter). Some celebrated his death and others made comments to the effect that “the real tragedy is all the people whose claims his company denied." For the record, celebrating Thompson's death is sick. It's a sign of a diseased mind. It's evil. Anyone who went so far as to say he had it coming has been thoroughly corrupted by the logic of envy and egalitarianism. I'm sure that I don't agree with all of the decisions he made, or that his company made. But that doesn't justify murder, and it certainly doesn't condone callousness towards his grieving widow and children.

As has been noted elsewhere, a supermajority of Americans are happy with their insurance. If I had my way, insurance (and the government) would cover only the most catastrophic scenarios and we would pay out of pocket for the rest (which would bring costs down - third-party payment systems inevitably drive costs higher and higher). But this is not the time for each of us to vent about our frustrations with the healthcare market. It is a time for prayers for his family.

The UK Votes To Allow Assisted Suicide

We're supposed to call it "medically-assisted dying" or "MAID," but let's be clear - we are talking about suicide. This is a difficult topic about which I feel conflicted. I personally believe suicide condemns a person to Hell. But I also believe that it is not the government's job to enforce this. However, it very much is the government's job to prevent people from killing people other than themselves. Some would say this is about the only thing government is supposed to do. And the trouble with MAID, whenever I have looked into what goes on in countries which have legalized it, is that there seems to be a blurring of the line between "voluntarily chosen” and "coerced." If someone voluntarily chooses to die, that's suicide. But if he or she was pressured or encouraged by relatives, friends, family, or (worst of all) bureaucrats and doctors, that isn't suicide anymore. Some people support the death penalty in principle and oppose it in practice. In principle, I don't think the government should second-guess a person's choice to take his or her own life. In practice, there are an awful lot of scenarios in which it wasn't entirely the person's choice. Which is morally repugnant.

I thought National Review’s Michael Brendan Dougherty hit the right note when he wrote:

Block Quotation: “In the fight against legal suicide, Christians have to confront the fact that the perceived ‘senselessness of suffering’ at the end of life is the product of a materialist worldview. To champion the dignity of life — even life marked by dependence, suffering, and senility — we have to recover the Christian vision that sees that the humiliations of old age and infirmity are not meaningless.”

He admits that there can be tough cases. Some end-of-life suffering is enough to make anyone wish for death. But it’s important for Christians to make the case that even in these circumstances, life is valuable and is not to be thrown away lightly. The proponents of MAID talk about dignified dying. Well, there is dignity too in facing the end with grace, knowing the suffering that is to come, and enduring what must be endured, bearing what must be borne, until the very end.

Property Rights

Speaking of National Review, they published an editorial last week which flew a little under the radar, but which I wanted to highlight. “Trump Blocking U.S. Steel Deal Would Be a Mistake” lays out the case (again) that American politicians shouldn’t meddle in the decisions of shareholders of U.S. Steel to sell their company to the Japanese firm Nippon Steel. A lot of folks these days seem to believe that we should prioritize American ownership of businesses here in the United States. And there’s something to be said for American business.

But U.S. Steel, despite its name, is not owned and operated by the United States of America. It is owned by its shareholders, many of whom are American citizens but who, importantly, have the sole decision-making power over whether or not the company is bought and sold. For the American government to block the deal (and, let’s face it, U.S. Steel is not really a major player in the American economy anymore despite nostalgic beliefs to the contrary), would be an unjust infringement upon property rights out of a cynical desire for political gain (on the behalf of politicians) and a sentimental desire on the part of American citizens who feel that they should have a say in what U.S. Steel does or does not do merely because it offends their sensibilities that it would be owned by a Japanese company.

If the right doesn’t defend property rights, I don’t know what we have a right for. I do not own stock in U.S. Steel, and therefore I have no opinion on whether or not they should sell to Nippon Steel. I do know that the purpose of the U.S. Steel corporation is not to please the fancies of American voters, but to further the bottom line of U.S. Steel shareholders who are, after all, the ones taking one hundred percent of the risk for U.S. Steel’s operations.

A New Christian Right?

Strictly speaking, this isn't punditry, but I wanted to comment on an intellectual development on the right (so-called) last week. James Lindsay - formerly a New Atheist (who supported Barack Obama), now turned critic of wokeness – published a manifesto called "The Liberal Consensus and the New Christian Right" in American Reformer, a publication of the New Right. Upon first reading, it appeared shot through with left-wing assumptions and logic. My sense was that Lindsay - though sure himself that he has converted to "true" traditionalism – had never really left his left-wing roots behind, especially on foreign policy, economics, and his basic framework for how the world works. The use of the word “machine” for liberalism or capitalism smacked of Marxism.

And, it turned out, this assumption was correct. Or, at least, it was correct to say that the manifesto was shot through with left-wing assumptions and logic because it was. Lindsay, famous for the “grievance studies affair,” in which he and Helen Pluckrose submitted hoax articles to various left-wing journals (including, hilariously, text lifted from Mein Kampf with some feminist buzzwords inserted, which was actually published), was up to his old trick again. American Reformer published the article back in November attributed to the alias “Marcus Carlson.” Lindsay revealed last week that the manifesto was another hoax. This time the text was repurposed passages of Karl Marx’s The Communist Manifesto, with “new Christian right” or “true Christian right” replacing references to communism and “post-war liberal consensus” replacing references to capitalism.

Given that Marx was understood in his own day to be an opponent of liberalism, and that his criticism of capitalism was a criticism of liberalism, this is perhaps less of a change than it seems. Indeed, some of us have criticized the New Right from the very beginning for being essentially a form of leftism with socially-conservative characteristics. Aaron Renn, cofounder of the journal which published Lindsay's manifesto, has said that he is "not a conservative," but rather "half-reactionary, half-progressive." That seems to be a fair summary of most of the New Right. In an essay from last week, Lindsay refers to the targets of his latest hoax as the “Woke Right,” and wonders aloud if they’re meaningfully right-wing at all.

Once you move past the grandiosity and the intentionallyconfusing rhetoric, there isn't much substance to the manifesto. It evokes concepts which aren’t explained. There are exhortations about men and hierarchy and old orders and older ways of life and community. But only in the vaguest sense. It reads as academic, as though obscurity were the point and anyone who deserves to understand (who is smart enough to understand) will. Which, quite frankly, is silly. Any manifesto aimed at explicating an ideological movement with which the majority of people are unfamiliar, needs to come out and say what exactly it is for. Otherwise, it is just an exercise in whipping up pre-existing ideological allies and swaying the gullible with rhetoric that stirs their hearts without clearing their minds. I’m surprised American Reformer published it.

Of course, the reason it served its intended purpose anyway, and the reason it made it past the editors, is that nobody knowsexactly what this "true Right" is. Nobody on the New Right can lay out a clear ideology the way Frank Meyer could. Yoram Hazony stutters and stumbles when asked to explain what National Conservatism will look like ("something something... sort of like Hungary" is not a compelling answer). Patrick Deneen's Regime Change is chock-full of basic historical inaccuracies, blatant misrepresentations, quotations taken out of context, and passages which make one wonder if the author is as well-read as everyone assumes he is. Adrian Vermeule tries to play coy sometimes about what post-liberal integralism will mean in practice. And the rest of the New Right spend more time pumping themselves up than laying out any kind of clear vision. Because there isn't one. The New Right has no clear vision. To the extent that certain factions have one, they disagree with each other as much as they do with anyone else. They are united only in their hatred of neoconservatives and libertarians (importantly, both of whom they hate more than they hate the left).

I would take the New Right more seriously if they took themselves a little less seriously. Hopefully this prank will move the needle in the right direction in that regard.

In closing, the other reason it worked is that there is less substance to The Communist Manifesto than some people think. The Communist Manifesto is long on exhortation and short on laying out a clear vision for how a communist society could be achieved (i.e., after the proletariat rise up and seize the means of production). It was meant to be a call to action. But Marx suffered from the same problem many of his admirers on the New Right (including those who pretend they don’t admire him) suffer: he lacked a clear plan for how to go from seizing power to establishing a communist utopia. Like Marx, much of the New Right seems to think achieving power is more important than figuring out how to use it to achieve what they think they want.