The Spring of Reason

It’s springtime and it’s starting to feel like the American middle is having a rebirth. Let us review.

Speaker Mike Johnson is turning out to be just what the doctor ordered. When the Freedom Caucus took down Kevin McCarthy I argued that Democrats should have saved him, not because I liked McCarthy but because it would have defanged the tiny hard-right cabal that was wagging the dog. McCarthy proved to be just too unpalatable and I got that. But now, Marjorie Taylor Greene, et. al., have met their match in Johnson, who had been one of them. He’s figured out that, if he can be assured of Democratic votes, their attempt to do a McCarthy on him will fail. And if they can’t take him down they can’t force him to dance to their tune either.

As a result of Johnson’s calculation he has been able to keep the government from shutting down and now he has engineered much-needed aid to Ukraine, Israel and other allies as well as humanitarian aid to Gaza. And, in the case of Ukraine, he actually listened to the American intelligence community and allowed himself to be persuaded by their information and arguments. That alone was a reassuring vote of confidence for American institutions that Donald Trump has debased. And speaking of Trump, Johnson took a trip to Mar a Lago and returned with his self-worth intact, something that McCarthy and others couldn’t pull off.

Over at the Supreme Court, Justice Amy Coney Barrett pushed back against arguments from a lawyer representing the State of Idaho in a case seeking to strike down its prohibition on abortions in most cases. The lawyer argued that a woman whose life was not in danger but who faced serious medical complications, including infertility, if her pregnancy went to term could still obtain an abortion. But Coney Barrett pressed him. “What if a prosecutor thought differently?” she asked. Idaho’s lawyer didn’t have a good answer. The case could still go in favor of Idaho, but the conservative Coney Barrett displayed an openness to arguments from the other side and it’s possible she’ll provide the swing vote that strikes down Idaho’s law.

At the local level, the experiments with a hard-left approach to crime (which basically is to just let it happen) are crumbling, even in some of the most liberal places in America. In turns out that the recall of San Francisco’s “progressive” prosecutor Chesa Boudin last year was just the start. Liberals who want to be reelected, like New York Gov. Kathy Hochul and San Francisco Mayor London Breed, are calling for a retreat from “progressive” crime strategies and a return to more common sense approaches. There are bad people in this world. They need to be locked up.

Meanwhile, the once fashionable diversity, equity and inclusion programs that had graced the pages of corporate annual reports are being deemphasized. We take a “mend it, don’t end it” view of DEI. For example, we’ve repeatedly called for a Legislative Audit Bureau deep dive into the UW and Wisconsin state government programs as an alternative to Speaker Robin Vos’ calls to eliminate DEI altogether. Diversity is a good thing. Nobody should be discriminated against and work environments should be welcoming places. But if you’re going to go carrying around pictures of Ibram X. Kendi, well, you ain’t going to make it with anybody, anyhow.

And at the voice of the hard-left, NPR is under pressure to self-correct back to its old liberal bias and away from its way, way, way liberal bias. Uri Berliner’s courageous piece in The Free Press called out NPR for what it has become: “the distilled world view of a very small segment of the U.S. population.” As you’d expect, he got forced out of his job, but that didn’t nearly end the tumult because it’s not just Berliner. Listenership at NPR has gone from 60 million a week in 2020 to 42 million now. Corporate sponsorships have plummeted. Much of that has to do with a drop off in radio listenership overall, but NPR’s losses have outpaced those of radio as a whole. And its attempt to attract a younger and more diverse audience through its hard-left programming have failed altogether. In my view, that’s because NPR was cluelessly appealing to college-educated, affluent, mostly white listeners. It didn’t understand that stories like how to “decolonize your bookshelf” didn’t appeal to anybody in the real world. NPR now faces open revolt from its member stations. All this should result in a complete and welcome reorganization and a movement away from advocacy reporting.

So, to sum up, the hard-right Freedom Caucus may have finally been put in its place and SCOTUS might reject an extreme state anti-abortion law while unrealistic hard-left ideas about how to fight crime are being ended in places that once embraced them, DEI may be improved through a needed pushback, and even the very heart of hard-left media may be undergoing a change back toward fairness.

It’s springtime for moderation.

That’s it for this week, folks. I’m going to try to get out on my bike between the storms this weekend. We’ve added a weekend feature (see below), but assuming you won’t read it (because why would you start now?), we’ll see you back here on Monday.

And an editorial note… Are you a fan of the Quote and Quiz, YSDA’s Friday news-quiz-with-embedded-wry-jokes feature? If so, you’re part of a discerning minority. The Q&Q is like a fine wine that can only be appreciated by the most educated pallets, which is another way of saying that its readership numbers are in the tank. We take this as a none-too-flattering commentary on you, the readers, not on the brilliant Q&Q. It’s you, it’s not us. So, we’re going to continue to produce this piece of sparkling writing, but we’re moving it to Saturdays, where it can do less damage to our monthly readership numbers.