From Tel Aviv to Milwaukee

Plus, tariffs and merit; Supreme Court term limits; AP grade-inflation

Trump accepts the Republican nomination as word spreads of an attack on Tel Aviv.

As President Trump was winding down his rambling and uncharacteristically low-energy remarks at the end of an otherwise mostly crisp and effective Republican convention, word was spreading on social media of a deadly drone attack in Tel Aviv near the former American embassy there.

It made the case against President Biden more powerfully than any convention speech or video—and that is saying a lot, as there were a lot of devastating speeches at the convention. (Doug Schoen called it “among the best, if not the best, choreographed and produced shows I have seen in 50 years of watching American political conventions.”)

Remember this anecdote from a July 3 front-page New York Times article, also well marked by Joshua Muravchik in a July 16 Wall Street Journal piece. From the Times account:

Aides present in the Situation Room the night that Iran hurled a barrage of missiles and drones at Israel portrayed a president in commanding form, lecturing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu by phone to avoid a retaliatory escalation that would have inflamed the Middle East. “Let me be crystal clear,” Mr. Biden said. “If you launch a big attack on Iran, you’re on your own.”

Mr. Netanyahu pushed back hard, citing the need to respond in kind to deter future attacks. “You do this,” Mr. Biden said forcefully, “and I’m out.” Ultimately, the aides noted, Mr. Netanyahu scaled back his response."

(The Times article wasn’t mainly about Israel or Iran policy, but was supposed to demonstrate that Biden isn’t yet ready for a nursing home.) Whatever concerns one has about the Trump-Vance team’s foreign policy ideas or executive competence, it seems fairly clear, in retrospect, that in that Situation Room conversation, if the Times has it accurately, that Netanyahu was right, and Biden was wrong. And that there were consequences.

“This was an Iranian UAV,” the Israel Defense Forces spokesman, Admiral Daniel Hagari, said after the Tel Aviv attack, using the shorthand for an unmanned aerial vehicle. “We are fighting a multi-front war. Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the militias in Iraq and Syria, as well as the Houthis in Yemen, all the Iranian proxies, and Iran itself. Iran is funding, arming, and directing its terror proxies in their attacks on Israel and the wider world.” 

“I don’t have wars,” Trump declared in his acceptance speech. Secretary of State Pompeo reinforced the point at the convention, speaking of Trump’s first term: “There were no new American wars.” 

At the moment Iran is at war against Israel, America, and its allies. Whether Trump and his team will understand that and fight back is to be seen. Israel, for sure, does understand it, as Admiral Hagari’s comments indicate. At this point, it could be an improvement just to have someone in the Situation Room who isn’t trying to hold Israel back.

You can skip all the Milwaukee convention speeches. The WhatsApp chat with people describing, in real time, the impact of the Tel Aviv attack—near their kids’ daycare, or audible from their apartment—tells you, in combination with that New York Times Situation Room anecdote, enough.

Tariffs are an attack on merit: A smart point from David Brooks, writing in the New York Times: “Raising tariffs, as Trump wants to do, would not only raise costs on American consumers, it would also breed laziness and mediocrity within those sectors cosseted from competition.”

I’m open to taxes that would prevent America from relying on goods made in enemy countries such as Communist China, where people can get thrown in prison, or worse, for trying to form an independent labor union or for trying to change the system to allow for such unions. (Though my preferred longer-term strategy involves working to help free the country, not merely raising taxes on its exports). Yet Brooks’ point about mediocrity resonates. 

The topic comes up in Trump’s Bloomberg Businessweek interview, when he’s talking taxes on tractors, talking about the competition between Komatsu and Caterpillar (or, he could have mentioned John Deere, or Case). “You look at Komatsu and these tractor companies. They make a good product,” Trump says. 

Does it really make economic sense to tax a tractor made in Japan to make it more expensive than an American-made tractor? Before long, companies are spending their time gaming the tariffs—what if we assemble the Chinese-made parts in the U.S., what if the Chinese company sets up a factory in Michigan—rather than trying to make better products more efficiently. Some of this is happening already. The Wall Street Journal has a piece: 

Jobin Cai, 33, who entered the U.S. through the southern border, first made his way to the large Chinese neighborhood in Brooklyn’s Sunset Park, where he lived temporarily with a cousin. He paid $500 to intern for two weeks at a Chinese nail salon, then another $500 to learn from a sushi chef at a restaurant in Connecticut.

Neither training yielded a job, but then a Chinese friend introduced him to a Chinese-run auto factory in Michigan that was hiring. Cai figured the pay—$15 an hour—would be better than any restaurant job so he flew out immediately without a work permit.

My reaction to that one was that maybe the Journal should skip the feel-good feature on Chinese migrants and go investigate the “Chinese-run auto factory in Michigan” that is employing undocumented migrants at $15 an hour. It’s going to take more than a tariff to solve that one. At least it’s an American manufacturing job, of some sort.

Recent work: “How About a Grand Bargain on Term Limits?” is the headline of my recent New York Sun column. The subheadline is, “In return for term limits on the goose of the Supreme Court, let’s limit the terms of ganders in Congress.” 

The column begins:

President Biden, who was first elected to the Senate in 1972, nearly 52 years ago, is reportedly considering proposing term limits on Supreme Court justices. The policy merits are debatable but the entertainment value is unquestionable.

It takes a certain brass for Mr. Biden, of all people, to seize as a signature issue the danger of sticking around in a government job beyond a sell-by date.

In researching the piece I came across an article by William Kristol, “Term Limitations: Breaking Up the Iron Triangle,” published in 1993 in the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy. It holds up pretty well for a 30-year-old article: “The current system of representation in America breeds resentment among the American people. Many citizens now feel disaffected and rebellious toward the very government that exists to serve them.” Also, “Competitive elections would not only make our political system more open and democratic, but they would also elevate the importance of merit, rather than access to power, in the election process. In this manner, term limits may encourage better-qualified people to run for Congress, and thus provide more capable legislators than we have today.”

Additional recent work: The Wall Street Journal published a letter to the editor I sent making some points similar to those I made in the July 15 issue of The Editors. The letter concludes: “The temptation to blame left-wing anti-Trump rhetoric for the attempt to assassinate Mr. Trump is understandable, but until and unless more evidence about the shooter’s motive emerges, principled conservatives would be better off resisting it. Not all stridently critical political speech amounts to incitement.”

Checker Finn on AP Scores: Before cranking out my July 12 piece headlined “Grade Inflation Sends AP Test Scores Soaring,” I spent a bit of time unsuccessfully looking for an email address for Chester E. Finn, Jr., who wrote a recent book about AP tests, hoping to check with him for an opinion on the situation. Now Finn has published, in Education Next, a piece of his own, “Are AP Exams Getting Easier?” He writes:

I’m not saying the College Board is monkeying with AP scores for non-psychometric reasons. I’m saying I understand why one might suspect that they are. And until they produce a transparent explanation of why they’re making these changes, along with clear evidence of why we should have greater confidence in the new system and the resultant higher scores than in the old, we must expect allegations that they’re defining educational deviancy down….

the AP program does not deserve to have “gold standard” replaced by “fool’s gold.” But is that gold standard a solid 24 karats or more like 18? Might it be headed toward 12 karats, like the lackluster grades given by our colleges and high schools? What I’m pretty sure of is that Moynihan’s oft-cited diagnosis of what’s weakening America is gaining another 24-karat example.

Finn, like Elliott Abrams, Penn Kemble, and Abram Shulsky, is a former aide to Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. It sent me back to reread Moynihan’s 1993 American Scholar essay “Defining Deviancy Down,” which Finn references in the piece. It’s somewhat recondite as Moynihan essays go—it begins with a reference to an 1895 text by Emile Durkheim, “The Rules of Sociological Method,” suggesting that there’s a stable, “normal” baseline level of crime. It concludes by observing, “the Durkheim constant, as I put it, is maintained by a dynamic process which adjusts upwards and downwards. Liberals have traditionally been alert for upward redefining that does injustice to individuals. Conservatives have been correspondingly sensitive to downward redefining that weakens societal standards.”

Finn’s point, at least as I read it, is that the recalibrating of previously failing AP test scores into passing ones is an example of what Moynihan called defining deviancy down, or “downward redefining that weakens societal standards.” 

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