AC/DC as a Fetish

The pursuit of electricity as a climate relief strategy has become rather a fetish on the left, even in quarters where you’d expect more skepticism about any power source. Mainstream media are fully on board. There’s an all-out push in Washington and around the country for subsidizing battery-powered vehicles, even though 1) combustion engines are growing remarkably more fuel efficient and less polluting; 2) batteries have uncertain technology and risks, the kinds that progressive normally worry much about; and 3) their charging has to come from electricity that, for all we know, long will be substantially from burning fossils in many jurisdictions that lack hydro or dreaded nuclear power. (Hydrogen fuel cells are an iffy alternative.) Then there is the push, starting in Berkeley in 2019 and spreading nationwide, to curb “natural” gas hookups in residences. Los Angeles is the focus of this Real Deal story but you see the same in other big metros, including New York. Those of us old enough to remember “All Electric, Gold Medallion” homes from the 1960s, when we thought such power would be too cheap to meter (sorry, nuclear) can feel a dark deja vu. Fossil gas may be “clean” (and great for cooking) but it puts out CO2 for warming we don’t want. Heating oil and propane are similarly marked for extinction–heat pumps (electric, again) are in vogue. Thomas Edison & Co. never had it so good, but I wonder about the rest of us in the near term.

LA Aims to Gut Gas In Favor Of Electric Appliances

Aspiring chefs in Los Angeles can toss aside their prized cast-iron skillets. The city aims to ban gas appliances in new residential developments.

Soon to be Overrun With the Old

When media spotlight “existential crises” they often are referring to some resource whose supply is in peril for future generations. Usually this has some environmental element, such as species depletion or food supply, or any other angle of climate change. But in First World societies there’s a demographic “timebomb” as the baby boomers and successive cohorts reach ages of infirmity even as sustained lower birth-rates now provide no obvious source of personalized elder care. Numerous wonkish studies have charted the problem; today the Wall Street Journal publishes this short humane observation. As long as most adults are no longer disposed to take in doddering parents as a family obligation, we’re left with these eventualities: 1) Innovation, in the form of pharmaceutical treatments for dementia and robotic aids for physical incapacities, might be of some aid; 2) these and other, existing forms of assistance will be most available to households of means–others will have to scramble; 3) governments can tax more to sustain socialized-care systems that are of uneven quality; 4) immigration barriers can be adjusted to admit more service workers who are temperamentally and economically inspired to offer eldercare. Any of these options will lead to rough outcomes that trigger many complaints. But democratic peoples will have to accept some combination of them, as well as lots more episodes such as the op-ed describes.

Opinion | Many Baby Boomers Will Soon Need Adult Supervision

The shortage of caregivers for the elderly is becoming a crisis.

Hamptons Traffic and the Road Not Taken

My interest in land-use policy 50 years ago on Long Island was piqued when I learned offhand*  of a state highway that was to have been built back then, not far from where our home now sits in Water Mill. How could that have been the case, over a route that today features much larger homes selling in the multimillions of dollars?  What were they thinking in Albany?

That is the reaction of most contemporary Hamptonites when they, too, hear of what was known as the Sunrise Highway extension or bypass. This thoroughfare—it was a limited-access, four-lane road in the state plans—would have extended from where the Sunrise now dumps into County Road 39 in Southampton, all the way east to the beginnings of the hamlet of Amagansett. Various map alternatives were floated, but the most likely 23-mile course was over a wooded moraine that at the time sported only the occasional and modest human habitats. Most structures back then went up closer to coastlines.

Road building was the default mode in the post-World War II days. The state had already taken the Long Island Expressway from New York City to deep into Suffolk County, and in the early 1970s would complete the remaining high-speed pavement to Southampton. The villages of the island’s South Fork, which except for hosting the “summer people” and a few year-round artists had been sleepy hubs for a fishing and farming community, were wary of what greater day traffic from around the metropolitan area could mean. Well into the 1960s, the citizenry and civic groups** were egging the state highway planners on. A bypass around the quaint town centers strips made sense to many locals.

But the consciousness about highways, as about so much else, was changing as the Hamptons began to attract affluent weekenders. The idea of anything that could attract more visitors, especially day trippers into the eastern reaches, was now repellant. Environmentalism was on the rise, and asphalt a villain. Besides, the gathering consensus among planners and other urbanologists was that new roadways never relieved the congestion elsewhere, they just filled up with traffic of their own. Even if a parkway was tucked away scenically (the state would later fall back on a two-lane proposal for the bypass), it simply would invite new development, commercialization and bottlenecks wherever it had exits.

So the Halt the Highway campaign sprang up from the South Fork preservationist circles that were battling other growth buds. (See above a scare ad from the Halloween 1974 edition of the Southampton Press.) The protesters found new Gov. Hugh Carey, a Democrat with a close ear to East Hampton***, a welcome change from Nelson Rockefeller and the go-go era of New York Republicanism.  Forward movement on the Sunrise stopped in the mid-1970s–a state spending crunch figured in–and the idea was finally killed off early in the following decade. There would be no more major road construction on the East End of Long Island. (A similar fate met plans for an expressway on the North Fork.)

The problem was, however, that development in the Hamptons didn’t stop. Yes, sizable parcels of land were preserved and zoning was changed to limit how many and what kinds of homes were built. But, sure as wealth was being generated in the big city, it would find its way out east. And the newcomers, with their bigger minimum lot sizes, would pour their minor fortunes into grander “estates”: look-alike mansions with lavish landscaping. That ensured an endless trades parade: construction traffic followed by designers and repairmen and more and more gardeners to look after the grounds. On top of it all: today’s delivery and garbage-pickup armada. One traffic expert puts the vehicle increase—in unit terms, forget weight—at 50% over the two recent decades.

In 2020, I hadn’t yet connected the dots when I sat down with Tom Halsey, a longtime agricultural and civic leader in Southampton.  Halsey held positions in the ‘70s and ‘80s that put him in the middle of contentious development approvals. Although partial to the traditional South Fork, he honored property rights (including those of fellow farmers who chose to sell off their lands) and was sometimes at odds with the new crowd’s ways to freeze-frame their adopted retreat. In conversation, he didn’t want to fight old battles but still had one bone to pick:  the bypass highway. He regretted its demise, blaming a movement that stoked any fear including, he noted ruefully, “that it would destroy the habitat of the white-tailed deer.” (The creatures were not then the common scourge of home gardens, as they numerously are now.)

Halsey’s view, though once mainstream, was one I hadn’t heard voiced in these times. After the 1970s and especially the Hamptons rush of the roaring 1980s, when so many crude development plays were afoot that land-preservationists were frantic to stop whatever they could, the narrative shifted for good. Anything not disturbed became a victory for the good Hamptons way of life. (This ground is now shifting on the matter of affordable housing.)

Back then, the highway debate was mostly centered around the seasonal visitor jams, and if it had just been that, maybe a dozen weeks a year, maybe there was no need to plow through thousands of acres of countryside. But what happened in the Hamptons as new wealth met “living large” changed the picture. Especially after the mass introduction of GPS vehicle software, the engorged and nearly year-round traffic has found bypasses of its own, on the winding two-lane back roads that snake their way west and east. Pounding and often speeding commercial vehicles—along with plenty of entitled elite in their luxury SUVs—shoot past countless home driveways. Dreading not only the noise but the danger to any living thing that occupies the road, neighbors conjure various pleading signs and in rare circumstances get official restrictions to forestall the onslaught. But they haven’t succeeded as an overall political force.

Of course, we don’t know that a bypass could have been laid without incentivizing even more cubic footage nearby than what we have now. Certainly a speedier corridor to the easternmost stretches would have added to pressures there. What were to become greenbelts and hiking trails would have been affected. But the towns have had the same zoning powers all along, if they cared to use them. In containing  the current traffic menace, these levers are now inadequate.

Probably this was fated, because as Tom Halsey said to me, “it was the most ridiculous argument, that if you don’t build roads the people won’t come.” They did come, and are still coming as long as they have a spare million or two to spend on remaining buildable lots. And they are bringing all their paid helpers with them. They are finding their ways through Southampton to East Hampton town, extending out to Amagansett and Montauk. If some kind of thruway was in, akin to the truck route that is used on the North Fork, most would use that and not residential streets like mine. The protective impulse of 50 years ago just bought us more trouble today.

                                                                                                                                    –June 21, 2022

*This came in a lunch chat a few years ago with Donald Louchheim, who these days is stepping down as longtime mayor of Sagaponack Village but previously was owner of the Southampton Press and a former foreign correspondent for the Washington Post. I came to him for journalism tales but when I inquired about issues he confronted after acquiring the Press, he mentioned the highway controversy, and I was all ears. The period is not much covered in local reference works.

**For examples, the ladies auxiliaries of both East Hampton and Southampton villages; longtime New York City planner Goodhue Livingston Jr., a summer resident (his father was the architect of Southampton Hospital); the East Hampton town board (which in its 1965 endorsement thought the road was “possible in four years if all goes well”), and even, through the 1960s, the East Hampton Star newspaper—soon to be an ardent foe of development—which in 1969 editorialized that a bypass “now seems a safe bet” within the next decade.

***Between stretches as East Hampton town supervisor in the 1970s and ‘80s, Judith Hope served as a Carey aide. She would marry lawyer Tom Twomey, a Halt the Highway leader.

FTC Has Fetched a New Stick

The action in this latest Wall Street Journal story on the now-progressive Federal Trade Commission concerns veterinarians, but it is not a mere dog and pony show. It reflects a concerted push to rein in the nation’s private-equity firms, particularly those involved in mergers or “roll-ups” of businesses in the same type of enterprise. The FTC historically has focused on what were seen as threats to competition that could harm consumers—monopolies, for example. The new bent incorporates a wider net that may in fact give second fiddle to consumer welfare.  Here’s why: The dirty secret of many deals by private-equity, which likes to tout its role in funding enterprise growth, is that they’re designed to bleed out costs. Sometimes this is done by effectively combining operations and lowering the overhead.  In the process, however, some employees can be made worse off, including through job loss. Arguably there are additional social costs. The new mindset at the Democrat-dominated FTC sees these other factors as part of its mandate as well. So, if a combination might result in better dollar value for consumers—even after the private-equity owners take their cut–it could be nixed by the agency.  Without knowing in this case whether the animals or customers in California and Texas would be helped or not, or determining whether big private equity amounts to modern trusts that need busting, this is a bracing development:  Appointed but independent rule-makers in Washington have sweeping added reach into how American business transacts.

Antitrust Authorities Take Aim at Private-Equity Healthcare Deals

U.S. antitrust enforcers on Monday took action against a private-equity firm they say sought to stifle competition, in what regulators suggest could be the first strike against allegedly anticompetitive behavior by buyout firms in the healthcare sector.

Sociology’s Un-economic Impulse

In the agitated state of modern societies, a rebellion against “neo-liberalism” heralds some preferred order, usually a form of ostensibly democratic socialism. Inherent in this movement is a rejection of economics, which is the study of allocating scarce resources. This is a startling proposition, coming off a generation or two in which economics has been a dominant form of popular analysis and in fact the favorite choice of major at even many of our woke universities. It was addressed last month in an article in the New Yorker by Idrees Kahloon, who is fittingly the Washington correspondent of the news publication called The Economist. Kahloon takes off on a new book from Princeton University Press attacking the concept of economics in policymaking–naturally authored by a sociologist. The academic doesn’t like the idea of efficiency being a guide to establishing laws or fiscal practice. And, in fact, this belief underlies much of social-values bent of the modern left. In this mindset, various aims–equity foremost, but also unity, stability, status-protection, security, even “happiness”–trump the economist’s ideal of welfare optimality. As Kahloon writes, however, many economists have liberal or even egalitarian values at the heart of their models, the tools of their trade being just a way of best achieving those aims. I would go further, and say that without a measure of how and whether a government is carrying out its objectives, its enactments are capricious and authoritarian. Fair to say this dividing line is roughly between the economics and sociology departments.

The War on Economics

Many progressives view the dismal science as their adversary. Yet it has often proved to be a singularly powerful ally.

Beijing’s Man in Jakarta

Hard as it may be for Westerners to think that today’s People’s Republic of China, with all of its glaring repressions and slavishness over Covid, could be still a draw for emerging nations…it is. As this latest op-ed in the New York Times from an Australian think tank argues, China is actually gaining ground in much of Asia. A key element in its foreign-policy push is giant Indonesia.  Despite a tense history between the country’s native peoples and its sizable Chinese ethnic population, Beijing has remained a political lodestar for Jakarta. In recent years, as the Times op-ed alludes to, marine minister Luhut Binsar Pandjaitan has been a key conduit to the PRC. The Chinese foreign ministry keeps touting each engagement with him.  With each of the smaller Southeast Asian states under China’s sway to varying degrees, Indonesia’s lead in this regard is likely as important as any efforts by the Quad (Japan, India and Australia, plus the U.S.) to head off the Asian waters becoming a Chinese sea.

Opinion | China Is Winning in Asia. Biden’s Plans Won’t Change That.

Biden’s plans will do little to shore up U.S. leverage.

Big Media’s Mere Cameo in a Tale of Conservatism’s Shift

Matthew Continetti’s book, “The Right: The Hundred Year War for American Conservatism,” is getting much respectful attention from mainstream media. It is deservedly praised for an encyclopedic narrative of what has evolved into a greatly populist—disparaged as Trumpian–force in American politics. My beef with the work is that it largely misses a key element in that evolution: the Right’s alienation from and animus toward that very mainstream media.

Continetti’s omission can be understood in terms of his perspective: He is a product of the thought industry that has grown up around policy tanks and the political journals that wholesale ideas in intellectual circles. (His seminal experience was at the late Weekly Standard in Washington.) He does not come out of the broader journalism world where notions and images are retailed to the American audience. He writes, “My focus is on the writers who set in motion the interplay of ideas and institutions, of ideology and politics…about the ways in which [intellectual] arguments responded and related to events.” So he looks at the significant tributaries but only passingly at the rivers that carry the waters to the electorate. I think this is an oversight. It matters enormously that Fox News and the New York Times are ideological poles in the increasingly cultural clash that Continetti describes—much more, arguably, than do many of the individual pointy-heads on whom he devotes most of his attention.

Of course, he knows the reach of the retailers—there are many citations of Fox, the Times and others in the national mix. But in nearly all cases they are momentary appearances, where others’ ideas surfaced or blared. Perhaps, from a pointy-head environment himself, Continetti would see these entities as just transoms to clear. But in the political maelstrom he is describing, they have become touchstones themselves, whether in digital text (forget print) or over what used to be called the airwaves. The people shaping that mass content deserve a deeper dive if the idea wars of our time are to be fully appreciated.

And that’s a fact going back decades, just as this book does. In some sense the Right’s distance from the elite media traces to the battle that “Mr. Republican” Robert Taft (on many pages here) had with the Eastern Establishment after World War II. Continetti usefully links Robert Welch—later the founder of the John Birch Society—to that fight, but skirts the significance of the Taft wing’s failure to gain acceptance from prestige press.  Conservatives long had a hold on most American publishers, but not in those precincts where the anointing of Dwight Eisenhower in 1952 took place. There, a new breed of press and punditry lord was forming.

In the 1960s there was the personal pique of Richard Nixon toward reporters and editors, ultimately channeled through Spiro Agnew, but it was during the Barry Goldwater campaign that the deep-seated antagonism toward “the networks” and the biggest dailies began to set in. By 1969, Reed Irvine (not cited in the book) had founded Accuracy in Media to target CBS and the Washington Post, and Allan Drury (also no cite) was turning his political novels into attacks on the very media milieu from which he emerged to win the Pulitzer Prize for “Advise and Consent.” Watergate, naturally, had its polarizing effects, but when the Reagan Administration came to Washington in 1981, the gloves really came off. Combat between the Right’s cultural crowd and the journalism universe has not ceased since.  Roger Ailes sensed the opening thus created for Fox News, and the other side has responded in kind, both via cable and social media. No political or policy idea really has an open field anymore—it will be framed in one mass partisan context or the other.

So yes, I’d argue the grievance against “media bias” deserves more than occasional mention in at least a half century of Continetti’s “hundred year war.” But I have what is now called a lived experience in this. For 12 years, I was employed by Robert L. Bartley, the head of the Wall Street Journal’s editorial pages for a generation until his death in 2003. Bartley is mentioned a few times in the book, but in regard to the well-worn story of his staffer Jude Wanniski’s early promotion of supply-side economics, and the appearance of eminent neo-con Irving Kristol’s columns on his pages. Bartley had a much greater place in popularizing conservative beliefs on foreign and domestic policy than that—particularly to American business and finance—and at his own newspaper, was embroiled in an internal conflict with the mostly-liberal newsroom that continues to this day. For the last two decades, Bartley’s mantle has been carried by Paul A. Gigot (no citation, again), who before that had been the editorial pages’ face in Washington. Is something seminal being missed here? A handful of Bartley’s hires over the years are referenced by Continetti, though interestingly most had become strays from his ideological fold.

Now, one could argue—and I suspect the author, based on how he has framed his narrative, would do so—that the WSJ editorial line has lost its grip on a Right that is now hostile to trade, immigration, corporatism, alliances and globalism generally. There’s good reason for thinking that, just as for saying the same of many of the pioneering idea mongers that Continetti spends his chapters on. Maybe carve out another, then? The big-media stage is the Broadway of U.S. politics. It is why Rupert Murdoch held not only the Weekly Standard, but the New York Post, Fox and (after Bartley’s death) the Wall Street Journal. If in the age of Donald Trump a wave has transformed conservatism, the directors and players in the grandest theaters are due more than cameos in the show. Did their long media fray get reshaped and in some respects made more bitter (try giving a Bartley or Gigot their Pulitzers in today’s climate) by the animating—consuming–passions of this new moment? Who will remain standing, on either side?

Matthew Continetti early on credits other histories of the Right and seeks to differentiate his own aims. If he has chosen to leave the retail media aspect of the story for another day, someone should seize it. –May 8, 2022

Show-Offs and Their Big Houses

What primarily intrigues me about people who willingly show themselves and their oversized properties off in places like the Wall Street Journal’s Mansion section is…why? I know we are in the age of oversharing, but these are obviously wealthy people, usually with children–just the sorts you’d expect to want privacy. Of course, if they seek to peddle their supposed dream home, that would explain it, but often, as in this Mansion piece from last week from Montana and Idaho, the profiled households say they’re staying. So then I figure someone involved in the property–the architect, the designer, maybe the Realtor–leans on the homeowner to put their prize on parade. But if that’s the case, at least keep yourselves and especially your kids out of it. Not either of these bunches! Sometimes it must just come down to self-promotion, and this can suffer from embarrassing prose and images. The “feminine” Montana manse here is held by a “sprawling boutique” owner from L.A., now “a single mother of four,” who wanted to escape the Tinseltown glitz and dreads the thought that any trailing rich could invite “Louis Vuitton in downtown Whitefish.” As it happens, however, she herself has opened, just there, the “Boudoir Bar Cafe, a coffee shop and gelateria” (shown in two photographs). So maybe I have my why in her case.

Million-Dollar Lake Homes in Montana and Idaho Sell For Double What They Did Two Years Ago

Demand is high for luxury homes in northwestern lake regions, which have experienced an influx of buyers from “everywhere around the world.”

Beijing and the Big Bomb

Polling suggests widespread gloom among younger Americans over climate change, while other surveys pick up foreboding in the older population at the renewed prospect of nuclear war. Vladimir Putin’s saber-rattling at the West as he rips up Ukraine has jogged memories from a Cold War era extending through the 1980s when the “Day After” was dreaded in half of America, at least. Unfortunately it is not just a rearmed and seemingly maniacal Kremlin that is stoking fear, but its diplomatic abettor, the Chinese Communist Party. As this piece in the latest Foreign Affairs by one of the U.S. military-strategy gurus lays out, Beijing’s rapid nuclear (as well as conventional) buildup is going to change the macabre calculus that has, over 75 years, kept us from doomsday. Andrew Krepinevich describes how deterrence among three nuclear superpowers is considerably more treacherous than between two. In his view, it’s going to require ever more upgrading of the American arsenal, an outcome that will not sit well with most Democrats (or taxpayers in general). This is one more tragic result of the aggressive nationalism that Xi Jinping has embodied in China, of greater consequence globally than Putin’s extortions in Europe. The U.S., though of course not without its international manipulations at all times, has a century-long record of military slouch during eras of apparent peace. That it is needlessly being called back to the battlements is a sad fact of our present.

The New Nuclear Age

China’s growing nuclear arsenal threatens deterrence.

Reminder of ‘Our’ Rogue on the Nile

Any roundup of the world’s noxious right-wing authoritarians usually includes stops in Brazil, Hungary, India and take your pick in Africa…Uganda, maybe? Arguably Vladimir Putin fits within the proto-fascist collection, notwithstanding his rhetoric about “de-Nazifying” Ukraine. But no gallery would be complete without General al-Sisi of Egypt, as this tale from the latest edition of the Economist shows. Although military intrusions into a domestic economy are a familiar feature of the developing world, the diminutive Sisi doesn’t shrink from tall orders of that vein. And he gets away with nearly any bad behavior. Though a shadow of its onetime might, Egypt, with its generally peaceful stance toward Israel and opposition to fundamentalist Islam, is a difficult straddle for any normal American administration.  But then, so is Saudi Arabia, and under Joe Biden the U.S. has thrown shade on that relationship  (a pet cause of Donald Trump). When it comes to the Egyptian ruler, however, the extraordinary aid levels from Washington (going back to the Begin-Sadat pact of 1979) have been spared much interruption. Yes,  after early indulgence, the Biden White House has stiffened a bit of late, “reprogramming” $130 million of military aid to Cairo, but leaving billions on the table.  Sisi, nevertheless, has cozied up to Russia, although he did join in the U.N. vote objecting to Putin’s “special military operation” before then abstaining as usual in a tally on excluding Russia from the body’s Human Rights Council.  If the basis of much non-arms assistance to Egypt is to restart its crippled economy, the military meddling and other destructive policies from Cairo should be one more mark for pausing America’s decades of liberal largesse.

Why Egypt isn’t open for business

Despite pro-business talk, the army grabs whatever it wants