From the right: Reagan’s ‘Endless War’ Lesson
“There are two ways to end a war,” thunders The Wall Street Journal’s William McGurn: “win it” or “lose it.” “ ‘Endless war’ lies in between, when each side has the wherewithal to stave off defeat but not enough to secure victory.” President Biden’s GOP rivals flail in slamming his failures in Afghanistan and Ukraine because “most are handcuffed to the forever-war critique.” Republicans need to recognize “that the Ukrainian military is grinding down Mr. Putin’s war machine — and giving China second thoughts about invading Taiwan.” The Reagan approach to the seemingly endless Cold War “was simple: ‘We win, they lose’ ” — and so he did. So it “shouldn’t be hard for a Republican presidential candidate. The way to end an endless war is to win it.”
Schools watch: Learning Loss Continues
It didn’t end when schools reopened, warns Michael J. Petrilli at The New York Times: “American children continued backsliding over the most recent school year, making less progress in reading and math than their counterparts before the pandemic. Rather than catching up, our students are falling further behind.” The answer: “Bring some tough love back to American education.” “Schools that aren’t spending their federal largess wisely, and that aren’t doing enough to catch their kids up, should face stern consequences.” And: “Rethink our lax grading policies, make clear to parents that their children need to be at school and bring back high school graduation exams,” all “to ensure that students buckle down.” “Education matters. Achievement matters. We need leaders who are willing to say so, and educators who are willing to act like these simple propositions are true.”
Eye on academia: Un-Pluralist Political Science
As one of the “roughly” 10% “of political scientists” who “usually vote Republican,” Robert Maranto worries at The Hill that academia won’t “remain open to people like me and to the unique perspectives we bring” as the annual American Political Science Association meeting opens: “Pluralism is fading.” “Not a single open Republican now serves on the 31-member APSA governing council” and “no APSA annual meeting has occurred in a red state” since 2012. APSA also ended its long-time association with “right-wing Claremont Institute.” It is essential “scholars fight bad ideas of all political varieties with debate, not banishment” because “giving up on pluralism is giving up on the American Political Science Association, and on America itself.”
From the left: Wokeism Isn’t Liberalism
“The woke believe race is first and foremost the thing you should always see everywhere, which I find interesting because that used to be the position of the Ku Klux Klan,” Bill Maher pointed out on The Joe Rogan Experience. “The goal is to not see race at all anywhere for any reason. That is what liberals believed, all the way through Obama, going back to Kennedy, and Martin Luther King. That’s not what the woke believe,” but liberalism “is a different animal than woke. You can be woke with all the nonsense that now implies, but don’t say that somehow it is an extension of liberalism. It is most often an undoing of liberalism.”
Iconoclast: Democrats Ignore Free Speech
In “rage against former President Donald Trump in particular and conservatives in general,” progressives “have embraced repellent concepts in the effort to silence or even jail their opponents,” fumes Jonathan Turley at USA Today. Many Democrats “dismiss free speech concerns over the prosecution of Trump and his aides for their actions in challenging the 2020 election.” This effort “could lead in the future to the criminalization of election challenges by both parties.” “Perhaps the most dangerous movement is an effort to extend the 14th Amendment to bar Trump from the 2024 ballot.” Progressives are pushing the limit by “citing the same legal authority once used to justify imprisoning socialists and union organizers . . . transfixed on the enemy at hand rather than what they risk becoming themselves.”
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board
This story originally appeared on NYPost
