Noted Appeaser Mike Pence Says Appeasement Never Works by Jonathan Chait

&c. by Jonathan Chait

 

 

Noted Appeaser Mike Pence Says Appeasement Never Works

 

Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photo: Shannon Finney/Getty Images

 

Appearing at the Heritage Foundation Wednesday, Mike Pence asserted that “appeasement has never worked in history.” He was trying to rebut the isolationist voices in the party and reassert the eternal truths of the hawkish Reagan-era foreign-policy posture.

Of course, the notion that appeasement has never worked is one of those chestnuts that can’t survive casual scrutiny. One of the key tasks of foreign policy is to distinguish between aggressors whose aims are limited to their current demands and those whose aims go beyond them. Hitler said he only wanted to revise the Versailles Treaty, but he really wanted to conquer all of Europe; Ho Chi Minh genuinely only wanted South Vietnam. The axiomatic belief that appeasement never works was one reason the United States kept fighting in Vietnam.

But what’s more interesting about Pence reciting the old right-wing canard about appeasement is that, while conservatives believe appeasement never works on authoritarians overseas, they believe it always works on authoritarians at home.

Like most members of the Republican Establishment, Pence regarded Trump as dangerous and immoral. But nearly all these figures decided drawing a line in the sand was impractical. There were career implications to weigh, taxes to be cut, etc. They would go along with just enough of his insanity to coax him away from his most dangerous impulses. “What’s the downside for humoring him?” a Republican staffer famously asked, by way of justifying their refusal to confront Trump over his insistence the election had been stolen.

Pence was of course the embodiment of this philosophy. His subservience to Trump was comical. He believed more than anybody else that supplying Trump with enough of his demands would give him reason not to demand the other things he obviously craved. Pence clung to this belief right until January 6.

It is fitting, in a way, that Pence emerged from four years of trembling sycophancy convinced appeasement never works. The connection seems to elude him.

This week, Ben Smith reports on some internal developments at the New York Times. The paper was convulsed by staff revolts on Twitter and Slack, which cowed the paper into a series of embarrassing steps to punish staffers who deviated from whatever progressive cause had been deemed holy that particular week. The important news in Smith’s column is that the Times management is deliberately setting out to prevent something similar from ever happening again.

While management is creating a layer of administrators focusing on DEI, culture, and so on, it is also “doing what they can to ensure that the insurgency of 2020 never happens again.” It has “announced changes to policy for Slack and social media aimed at ending freewheeling internal debates” and “assigned a set of skeptics to write about some of the most sensitive issues in the American arguments about race and health and identity.” In short, it is seeding writers who will critique left-wing social pieties and closing down channels for staffers to organize demands to punish heretics.

Meanwhile, Yale Law School, which has seen numerous episodes of students shouting down or demanding punishment of students or speakers who disagree with the left, has published “a message to our alumni on free speech at Yale Law School.” The new statement emphasizes strong support for free-speech norms:

➽ Last March, the Law School made unequivocally clear that attempts to disrupt events on campus are unacceptable and violate the norms of the School, the profession, and our community.

➽ The faculty revised our disciplinary code and adopted a policy prohibiting surreptitious recordings that mirrors policies that the University of Chicago and other peer institutions have put in place to encourage the free expression of ideas.

➽ We developed an online resource outlining our free speech policies and redesigned Orientation to center around discussions of free expression and the importance of respectful engagement. Virtually every member of the faculty spoke to their students about these values on the first day of class.

➽ We replaced our digital listserv with what alumni fondly remember as “the Wall” to encourage students to take time to reflect and resolve their differences face-to-face.

➽ We welcomed a new Dean of Students who is focused on ensuring students learn to resolve disagreements among themselves whenever possible rather than reflexively looking to the institution to serve as a referee.

I wrote a column earlier this year arguing that the wave of illiberalism that seemed to be sweeping through elite institutions had crested. Here we have America’s most prestigious journalistic organ and its most prestigious law school consciously enacting policies to prevent a recurrence of their recent abuses.

This doesn’t mean liberals should refrain from speaking out when abuses occur; pushing back is the only way to stop illiberal norms from taking hold. But the pushback is working. And the conservative case that post-liberal progressivism has permanently captured these institutions — a case that many right-wing authoritarians use to justify their own illiberalism — is looking increasingly hysterical.

Last week, President Biden criticized the Supreme Court at a fundraising speech. “The Supreme Court is more of an advocacy group these days than it is a — even-handed about it,” he said. This rather mild critique would hardly be worthy of notice, except that The Wall Street Journal devoted an entire editorial to it.

Accusing the president of undermining “democratic norms” by criticizing the Court’s rulings, WSJ cried:

Calling the Court an “advocacy group” that disdains “even-handed” justice undermines confidence in the rule of law. It’s every bit as corrosive as Donald Trump’s attacks on judges as partisans. Probably more so because it’s an attack on the entire Court, which gets the last word on the law under the Constitution.

Needless to say, the idea that accusing judges of (gasp!) ideological bias violates democratic norms is a made-up principle. It serves two purposes for the right. One is the classic anti-anti-Trump tactic of backhandedly excusing Trump’s most unhinged behavior by pretending Democrats have done the same thing.

The second purpose is to sacralize the Court. Conservatives spent years attacking judicial activists and robed masters. But now, having grasped ahold of a generational majority, they wish to turn the Court into a branch above the others whose wisdom cannot be questioned. Their definition of democracy is a system in which the legal wing of the conservative movement has absolute power to define the law as it sees fit, and for members of the elected branches to even suggest out loud that it might be abusing its power is akin to insurrection.

I’ve been encountering this rhetorical move frequently. I suspect we’ll be seeing it for a long time to come.

A common misapprehension about the national conservatives and other post-liberal factions on the right is that they are motivated by some sort of populist or anti-corporate concern. The National Conservatism Conference made it clear that the post-liberal right’s quarrel with corporations is entirely based on politics, not policy. They wish to use state power to intimidate corporations from opposing their agenda. But the agenda itself is not anti-corporate.

Michael Kranish has a detailed report from Florida, where Ron DeSantis is operating the state-of-the-art experiment in national conservatism. DeSantis throws around anti-corporate rhetoric, which is a perfectly rational thing for a Republican to do — while Republicans have always been the party of the wealthy, they have never advertised themselves as such. At the same time, he is raising “millions from major Florida industries including the lodging and tourism business; finance, security, and real-estate companies; and lawyers and lobbyists, according to campaign finance reports.”

Those companies understand that staying on DeSantis’s good side has rewards:

The message to Florida companies has been to stay out of the culture wars or pay the price — and many have continued opening their pocketbooks for him.

Al Cárdenas, a former chairman of the Florida Republican Party, said that many businesses believe DeSantis is “someone they will have to work with for the next four years, so donations are not drying up. I believe they are now more pragmatic.” …

Companies may be apprehensive about how DeSantis has gone after some of them but most have concluded that conduct is balanced by the state’s corporate-friendly tax and regulatory policies, said Cárdenas, noting his own opposition to the governor’s “provocative statements about immigration or Disney.”

“What the governor says, I don’t really see translating to policies that hurt the corporations in this state,” Cárdenas said.

There is no anti-business policy agenda here. There’s not even an expectation that corporations should stay out of political advocacy — advocacy is welcome, even expected, if it is made on the Republican Party’s behalf. The only change here is an undisguised willingness to use state retaliation to keep businesses in line.

Even though it was written five years ago, Anne Applebaum’s book, Red Famine, has deeply enriched my understanding of the war. Applebaum’s subject is the Holodomor, which was the forced famine in Ukraine by Soviet authorities in 1932–1933.

In case you aren’t familiar with this horrific episode, which has failed to receive anything close to the proper historical attention, the Soviet Union suffered an overall shortage of food due to its failed policy of agricultural collectivization. But Joseph Stalin, seeing Ukraine as a restive region, singled it out for punishment by forcibly confiscating nearly all the food from its rural areas, causing millions of Ukrainians to starve to death.

Applebaum shows how Stalin inherited his distrust of Ukraine from the original Bolsheviks, who in turn inherited it from the czars. They were all acting on a belief that Ukraine isn’t really a people or a distinct culture, and to the extent Ukrainians may believe they are, this belief is a form of anti-Russian aggression that must be snuffed out. Applebaum also shows how Russians denied and covered up the Holodomor, insisting ahistorically Ukraine suffered no worse than any other people and was not the target of specific punishment. Russia’s denial of Ukrainian nationalism and its denial of the Holodomor are deeply connected.

Having read all this, it was no surprise at all to learn Russian officials in occupied Mariupol this week removed a monument commemorating the Holodomor. Denial of this historical episode is one of the foundational elements of the Russian nationalist impulse to snuff out Ukrainian culture and self-understanding. Western observers have had difficulty grasping the self-destructive and apparently irrational nature of Putin’s invasion. It is easier to understand if you see it through the lens of his pathological impulse to carry out cultural genocide.

Recently, Kevin McCarthy casually told a reporter that if Republicans win the House, they won’t approve any more military aid for Ukraine. The issue is not that all, or even most, Republicans oppose it. It’s that a loud minority of Republicans has decided Ukraine is the bad guy in the conflict, and doing anything to help its people defend their country is an act of aggression.

The anti-anti-Russian position has spun off into increasingly elaborate and paranoid directions. Not long ago, The Federalist published a story denouncing Randi Weingarten’s visit to Ukraine. The column’s premise was that Weingarten might be killed, and the government would use her death as a pretext to declare war on Russia. Proceeding from that assumption, the author argued that she is not willing to die to avenge Weingarten:

Photo: The Federalist

 

Here are a few key passages from the author’s analysis:

What is the woman infamous for sentencing American children to school on screens doing in Ukraine other than making herself a Franz Ferdinand–like target and possibly violating the Logan Act? …

Already, American warmongers including President Joe Biden have threatened escalation if Russia continues its rampage in the East. The last thing the United States needs after funneling more than $67 billion to the Volodymyr Zelensky regime without any accountability or oversight is to have an American injured or dead thanks to their reckless travel. There’s no doubt that any incident of consequence would be used as an excuse to take U.S. involvement from proxy war to direct conflict.

There are many strange assumptions here, from the belief Weingarten is violating the Logan Act by making a humanitarian visit to an allied country, to the belief that Russia would plan to assassinate the head of the American teachers union. But the strangest is the author’s casual claim that there is “no doubt” Weingarten’s death in Ukraine would lead to “direct conflict” between the U.S. and Russia.

No doubt? None whatsoever? Isn’t there at least some chance that Joe Biden, discussing with his military advisers whether to declare war against a nuclear power to avenge the death of an elderly teachers-union president, would consider less escalatory measures?

Anyway, this is where conservative thinking on Ukraine is going these days, so it would be best for Congress to pass whatever aid Ukraine might need over the course of the war before January.