The View from Right Field

#Coronavirus Travel Bans and Keeping the United States a Single Noun

I agree with Steve Chapman in today’s Chicago Tribune (“The right to travel within the US should not be a casualty of the coronavirus”) that the travel bans some governors are trying to impose on residents of other states are wrong – and almost certainly illegal [see Update below].  Before the Civil War, United States was a plural noun, as in “the United States are.”  The Civil War and Abraham Lincoln made the United States into a single noun, as in “the United States is.” 

In his Second Inaugural, Lincoln called on all of us “to bind up the nation’s wounds.”  That is what we need to do today.  We must not let Covid-19, and our reaction to it, turn back the clock.  We are in this as a country, and by helping each other, we can get through it as a country.
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UPDATE (4/5/20 10:10 am): My comment about these travel bans being "almost certainly illegal" was wrong.  Per Eugene Volokh, who knows what he is talking about, they "are likely to be upheld."  Sorry for getting it wrong.

We Didn’t Ask Our Parents About World War II – Or Our Grandparents About the Spanish Flu

As our parents in the Greatest Generation have died, we have berated ourselves for not asking them what it was like during World War II.  Not just our fathers, who went to war, but also our mothers, who stayed at home.¹ 

But as coronavirus/Covid-19 spreads, I am feeling another missed opportunity:  Not only did we fail to ask our parents about what it was like during World War II, we didn’t ask our grandparents or great-grandparents what it was like during World War I² and the Spanish Flu.   The Spanish Flu is estimated to have killed 50 million people around the world from January 1918 to December 1920, including 675,000 in the United States.  The former was double the number of deaths in World War I.  The latter was more than five times the number of deaths the United States suffered in the war. 

Hong Kong: Freedom’s Light Still Shines

Three weeks ago, on the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, people were wondering what went wrong.  Democracy is on the decline in eastern Europe and elsewhere, while nasty populism is rising all over the world, including the United States.

But then, when things seem dark, a tiny ray of light shines, a delicate little flower blooms.  In 1977, it was Vaclav Havel and Charter ’77 in Communist East Europe.  In the 1970s, it was Spain, Portugal and Greece leaving dictatorships behind and becoming free.  Next were Taiwan and South Korea.  In 1994, it was Nelson Mandela in the South Africa of apartheid.

“For Laws and Lech, Basil and Borders Opened – Thanks!” – Joan Beck’s 1989 Thanksgiving Column

As I mentioned back in 2009 (and 2010 and 2011), each year at Thanksgiving, Joan Beck, a columnist for the Chicago Tribune (among other things), would write a special column of Thanks.  This year being the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, I thought it appropriate to reprint her column from Thanksgiving, 1989:

“As we gather together to count the Lord’s blessings, 368 years after the first Thanksgiving Day, we are grateful, O God, for perestroika if it works and glasnost if it’s real, for the liberating breaches in the Berlin Wall and the integrated beaches in South Africa, for summits and summers and sunrises and symphonies and for the innate yearning to be free that no regime can trample forever.

Scaredy-Cat Protestors – And the Role of the Press

With the Donald Trump impeachment hearings on the TV and all over the news, there is plenty of time to do other things.  But let me talk about something possibly related to the news on the impeachment of President Trump: the media and who to believe.  There was a brouhaha over the weekend at the student-run Daily Northwestern, in Evanston, Illinois.  The editorial staff at the paper ran an editorial apologizing for the harm they supposedly caused when the paper ran/tweeted photos of people protesting a speech by former Attorney General Jeff Sessions.  Apparently, some of the people in these photos felt they were harmed by the publication of the photos.  On Sunday, the paper apologized, saying in part:

“We recognize that we contributed to the harm students experienced, and we wanted to apologize for and address the mistakes that we made that night – along with how we plan to move forward.”

The Fall of the Berlin Wall: 30 Years On. #BerlinWall30

This Saturday is the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.  Readers of this blog will know that I have written about the Wall a lot.  You can find what I wrote on the 20th and 25th anniversaries of the fall of the Wall by clicking on “Berlin” in the list of Categories in the right margin.  The 25th anniversary, which we were lucky enough to be in Berlin for, was especially great.  But things seem to have changed since then.

Events are going the wrong direction in parts of eastern Europe and eastern Germany.  Viktor Orban is solidifying control in Hungary.  Law and Justice recently won re-election in Poland.  And in eastern Germany, the AfD increased its vote in state elections.  The populism that has come to the West is also increasing in eastern Europe.  

The “Silent Majority” Speech: Fifty Years On

Fifty years ago today, Richard Nixon gave his “Silent Majority” speech, one of his most famous speeches and source of his, almost certainly, most famous phrase.  Unlike presidents today, and before, President Nixon wrote the “Silent Majority” speech himself and came up with the phrase, “the silent majority,” himself.

For the speech itself, see here:

Evan Thomas, former Newsweek editor and best-selling author, notes that President Nixon’s approval rating went up from 52% to 68% after the speech.  For Mr. Thomas’s comments on the speech and more about President Nixon, listen to this podcast from the Richard Nixon Foundation.

For more on the Silent Majority speech, see Pat Buchanan, Nixon aide and speechwriter, here and this article/video from the Nixon Library and Museum. 

Does this Really Disqualify Joe Biden?

Joe Biden is thinking about running for president.  In fact, he recently just about announced, apparently by mistake, that he is running for president.  But, as he has been getting ready to announce, he has been hit with a number of complaints from women about the somewhat weird things he has done in the past.  One woman, who I think was a Bernie Sanders supporter in 2016, said the former Vice President came up and smelled her hair and kissed her on the back of the head.  Other women have said similar things.  Clearly, former Vice President Biden hasn’t had a good understanding of personal space and the things you should and should not do.  But, so far, the complaints have been about things he did in public, things that were a little creepy and not what people do today, but that’s about it.

Still, it appears a fair number of people, in theory on his side of the political spectrum, think these things should disqualify Joe Biden from running for president. 

Happy Birthday, NATO

NATO has a birthday coming up.  On April 4, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization will turn 70.  The North Atlantic Treaty was signed on April 4, 1949.  Its first twelve members were Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, the United Kingdom, and the United States.  Greece and Turkey joined in 1952, and West Germany in 1955.  Post-Franco Spain joined in 1982.  With the fall of the Berlin Wall, countries in eastern Europe rushed to join, thirteen more so far, with North Macedonia being the thirtieth soon.

There will be a number of articles on NATO’s anniversary in the next few days.  The Economist has already published a lengthy piece on “NATO at 70” in its March 16 issue.  Ivo Daalder, former ambassador to NATO and now president of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. wrote an excellent article in last Friday’s Chicago Tribune.  While these articles cover the subject of NATO and its future better than I can, I would like to add a few thoughts to the birthday celebration for what has been best defensive military alliance in history, thoughts related to its future.

Concerns about NATO’s future have increased, especially among the foreign policy elite, since Donald Trump was elected president 2016.  President Trump, after all, said NATO was obsolete while on the campaign trail in 2016,¹ and he has been pretty obnoxious since then about the failure of many NATO countries to increase up their defense spending in line with commitments they have made in 2014 to get their defense spending up to 2% of GDP by 2024.

A Few Comments on Where We Are Going With Our Defense Policy

An article in last week’s Economist, “Bringing out the big guns,” described the shift in direction that is taking place in the U.S. military as it “prepares for life after the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.”  Some of the changes are good and necessary.  Others are more questionable.  Let me quote some sections from the article and then comment on them.

“In January 2018 the Trump administration published its National Defence Strategy (NDS).  Officials lamented that nearly two decades of whack-a-mole against insurgents and jihadists had eroded the country’s military edge, resulting in exhausted and under-trained units armed for the wrong enemy.  So the NDS decreed that America would henceforth focus on ‘long-term, strategic competition between nations’ – namely, China and Russia.”

If the military was “exhausted and under-trained,” it was because it wasn’t big enough and was not given enough money for the task(s) it was being asked to do under the George W. Bush and Obama administrations.  It is understandable that the military can be stretched for some period of time.  Emergencies happen and the military has to respond.  But to be stretched for almost two decades is a choice – a choice to not properly fund the military.  And to continually ask the people in the military to do more than they should have to do because you don’t want to spend more money on defense is wrong.