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The Charles C. W. Cooke Newsletter |
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Good morning,
Recently, I've received a few emails whose writers have agreed with me on the question of student loan "forgiveness," but have asked why — beyond my broader objections to illegal executive actions and my general fiscal conservatism — I am so incandescently angry about this issue in particular.
It's a good question, and one I've thought a good deal about since it was first posed. I thought I'd try to answer it as best I can in this newsletter.
As far as I can tell, there are two big reasons that this rubs me the wrong way. The first reason is that I am the first male in the history of my family to go to university. The second is that I am an immigrant. I'll take these one by one.
As regular readers of mine will know, I believe that the elite class within the United States is at grave risk of fetishizing college, and the credentials it produces, and of creating a two-tier society as a result. In 2019, I wrote a magazine piece, in which I lamented "the presumptions that underpin our present scramble for diplomas," which are:
that it would be a good thing if more people went to college; that going to college is the best — or perhaps the only — way to get ahead in life, leading, as it supposedly does, to automatic improvement of one’s lot; that, irrespective of what it does to the job market and to productivity, our society is materially improved by having more people with paper degrees in their possession; and that, in consequence of all of these things, it represents a major scandal that people who wish to educate themselves further are obliged to pay to do so. Alongside these presumptions are a set of implications that, while rarely acknowledged openly, are present nevertheless: that those who do not go to college have in some way failed — or that they have been failed; that every time a person declines to attend college, he is making America a little stupider on aggregate; and, by extension, that people who lack college degrees but nevertheless are successful are not demonstrating an alternative way of living their lives so much as muddling through as best they can absent vital instruction from their superiors.
If anything, this has got worse since that time.
I didn't like school, but I enjoyed going to university. I am not, in any meaningful way, "anti-college." But I am also not especially pro-college, and, as I wrote in 2019, I do not consider it "at all obvious that the average liberal-arts graduate is more educated, more capable, more useful, and more rounded than is, say, the average electrician."
Worse still, I think that we badly, badly undervalue the average electrician:
Have you ever watched a plumber work? I don’t mean, “Have you ever buzzed around the house doing other things on your cell phone while a plumber got on with his job in the background?” I mean have you ever really watched him work? And have you ever considered what would happen to your home if he got that work wrong?
What about a mechanic? Or a carpenter? Or the guy who fixes your air conditioner in August? Have you ever watched a group of builders putting up a house? These are real skills, the product of real care and expertise.
Does the president of the United States — a man who persists in his belief that he is Good Ol' Working Class Joe — believe this? I'm not sure he does, because, if he did, he would see how utterly outrageous — how utterly unhinged and revolting and divisive — it is to propose taxing those people to pay off the debts of people who made different choices. Why, why, why would we do that? Why — unless we believe that it is more worthwhile to go to college than to be a plumber or an entrepreneur or a chef? And if we do, then shame on us.
A lot of the criticism of student debt transference focuses on how regressive it is. And that's fine. It would, of course, be entirely absurd for the federal government to force a waitress to help pay off the $17,000 in student debt that is still held by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who makes $174,000 per year and drives a Tesla. But it's not just about the money; it's also about occupations, and about what such a policy would say about which we value and which we do not.
Assume twin brothers. We'll call one of them James, and the other one Edward. When James hits 18, he goes to a college in-state, and he takes out $50,000 in loans to pay for it. When Edward hits 18, he decides to start a landscaping business, and he takes out $50,000 to buy equipment and a used Ford F-150. A few years later, Joe Biden comes along and . . . gives James $10,000.
Why? Is James better than Edward? Is he more useful? Is he more moral? Is he of a better cut? As I say: I was the first man in the history of my family to go to college. Before me, every single person had done something else: They worked on the railways or in the airports; they were carpenters or piano tuners; they were chauffeurs or textile workers; they were farmers; they served in the Army and Air Force; they started their own businesses — some of which did okay, some of which did not. Were those people lesser than me? I can tell you right now: they were not.
I am worried that our government thinks otherwise — that it thinks, for whatever reason, that people who went to university are not only better than those who do not go to university, but that they are so much better that everyone else should be forced to give them cash. In that 2019 piece, I proposed that:
If we reach a point at which our elites — almost all of whom have college degrees, and almost all of whom credit those degrees as the reason for their success — begin to disdain and dismiss those who do not have degrees, we will reach a point at which we have created a de facto cultural underclass. In a nation premised upon equality, this would be a disastrous social development; pace Singapore, we do not want to create two discrete classes of people in this country — one that has the “correct” credentials and, with them, access to the upper echelons, and one that does not.
Are we closer to that than we were three years ago? I believe that we are. |
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Now, for the second reason.
When I moved to America in 2011, I had no money. I was not — and I had never been — a hard-luck case. I grew up comfortably middle-class, in a safe and free country, with wonderful parents and friends. I received a good education, even if I didn't especially enjoy it. I traveled. I was introduced to music and art and sports. I was, in the grand scheme of human history, extremely privileged, and I am grateful for it.
But, when I moved, I didn't have any money. Indeed, I had negative money, because, to pay for the move, I had to use the overdraft in my British checking account. And it sucked.
Most people don't know this — why would they? — but when you move from Britain to the United States, you can't bring your credit rating with you. It just . . . resets. At the best of times, this would have been a problem. But in 2011, in the aftermath of the financial crash, it made things pretty difficult for a while. I couldn't get a credit card unless I put the same amount as I wanted to borrow into escrow — which completely defeated the point. I couldn't get an apartment, because every landlord wanted a deposit and at least three months' rent upfront. I couldn't even get a cell phone contract. Over and over again, I watched people run my credit score, frown at the 0 that came up on the screen, and then say that they couldn't help. For a short period during my internship with National Review, I secretly slept under my desk.
Over time, I slowly got myself out of this hole. I raised $1,500 or so by having my parents sell every last possession I had left in England. I convinced a bank to give me a credit line of $1,000 if I put the same amount in escrow, so that I could build up a few "PAID" notices on my blank credit report. I found a sublet in a fifth-floor walkup, which allowed me to get around the upfront payment of rent. And I got a pay-as-you go SIM card and hacked my British phone so that it would work with it. Bit-by-bit, month-by-month, things got better, until I eventually had enough room to pay off my U.K. overdraft, get a proper credit card from American Express, put my own name on my apartment lease, and convince AT&T to give me a contract (for years, I had an Albany phone number, because that's where I happened to be when I finally had good enough credit to get a proper line). Two years after I'd moved to America, at the age of 28, I got back to where I'd been when I left England.
I relate all this not because I think that anyone should feel sorry for me — they shouldn't — or because I think that I was owed anything as a voluntary newcomer to someone else's country — I wasn't, and am not — but because it underscores a core truth about life, which is that we are all responsible for our own decisions, and that some of those decisions will make life tough for a while. To me, this is very, very simple: If you want something, you pay for it. If you take out a loan, you pay it back. If you accept a set of tradeoffs, you respect both sides of the deal.
I wanted to live in America, and to work as an intern at National Review, and there were certain costs attached to doing both of those things. It would have been outrageous if I had pocketed the living-in-America-and-writing-at-National-Review bit and asked other people to take care of the downsides. So it is with student loans. At present, our political culture is chock full of privileged people complaining that they have to honor their agreements. They want to keep the education they have received, but for someone else to pay the costs they agreed to bear in return. Some of these people, as the Bulwark's Charlie Sykes has noted, are downright preposterous — insisting, as they are, that a gift of $10,000 would be a "slap in the face" and that cosmic justice requires that they be awarded $50,000 or more. A lot of these people earn a lot of money now, and will earn a lot of money in the future, but they don't care. They've been told they're part of a better class, they've come over time to believe that, and now they're asking everyone else to shower them with gifts in recognition of it.
The answer to this request must be "No." No, no, no, no, no. As there was nothing special about me, there is nothing special about college graduates. They made their desk, and now they must lie under it.
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On Wednesday, I responded to an absurd piece in the Washington Post that claimed that:
The interpretation that the Second Amendment extends to individuals’ rights to own guns only became mainstream in 2008, when the Supreme Court ruled in a landmark gun case, District of Columbia vs. Heller, that Americans have a constitutional right to own guns in their homes, knocking down the District’s handgun ban.
There's no other way to describe this than as:
a ridiculous, contemptuous, malicious lie, a myth, or, if you prefer to use a phrase that has become popular of late, disinformation. It has never — at any point in the history of the United States — been “mainstream” to interpret the Second Amendment as anything other than a protection of “individuals’ rights to own guns.” The decision in Heller was, indeed, “landmark.” But it was so only because it represented the first time that the Supreme Court had been asked a direct question about the meaning of the amendment that, for more than two centuries up to then, had not needed to be asked.
In 2008, before Heller was decided, 73 percent of Americans — including a majority of gun owners — told Gallup that the Second Amendment guarantees the rights of Americans to own guns,” with just 20 percent contending that it “only guarantees members of state militias such as National Guard units the right to own guns.” And of course they did, because:
the alternative interpretation represents a preposterous conspiracy theory. To be within that 20 percent minority, one must ignore all of the history before the Second Amendment’s passage; all of the contemporary commentary as to its meaning; James Madison’s intention to insert it into the Constitution next to the other individual rights in Article I, Section 9, rather than next to the militia clause in Article I, Section 8, clause 16; the 45 state-level rights to keep and bear arms, many of which predated the Second Amendment; the meaning of “the people” everywhere else in the Bill of Rights; the fact that it would make no sense at all to give an individual a “right” to join a state-run institution from which the federal government could bar him; and all evidence of what the United States was actually like prior to 2008.
I've been asked before why this lie annoys me so much, and I think it's because it's so unutterably brazen — equivalent in kind to saying that, before 1980, cars didn't have wheels. There is just no point in American history at which this has been accepted, outside of the handful of mid-19th-century academics who, as Sanford Levinson noted in 1989, based their theory not on anything concrete, but on "a mixture of sheer opposition to the idea of private ownership of guns and the perhaps subconscious fear that altogether plausible, perhaps even ‘winning,’ interpretations of the Second Amendment would present real hurdles to those of us supporting prohibitory regulation.”
Go back to any point in American history, and you'll find the reflexive understanding that the right to keep and bear arms applies to the individual. You'll find it in 1982, in 1960, in 1880, in 1868, in 1803, in 1791, in 1776, and beyond. I understand that a lot of people in America would like to change the status quo around guns, and I respect that, even if I usually disagree. What I cannot respect, however, is the rewriting of history. And so, as I concluded in my piece:
I will reiterate my plea to the press: Please, stop it. You’re not fooling the American public. You’re not fooling the courts. You’re just making fools of yourselves, and of the handful of motivated reasoners whom you’re misinforming. Democracy, Darkness — you know the rest.
Also on Wednesday, I noted a piece in Mother Jones about a group that calls itself the "Debt Collective," and that seems to believe that repaying one's loans is optional. It's not:
This really isn’t that difficult to grasp: If you take out loans to pay for a service you want, you must pay those loans back in full per the schedule you agree to when you took out those loans. Americans with student-loan debt have borrowed that money from taxpayers. If they don’t pay it back, those taxpayers will have to eat the cost. Not only is that unjust, it’s entirely self-serving. Amazingly enough, taxpayers don’t seem to be covered by the “not carved in stone” standard that Debt Collective has invented out of whole cloth. That builder who didn’t go to college, but who is now saddled with someone else’s debt? He still has to pay his taxes. As far as the IRS is concerned, those taxes are “carved in stone.”
Frankly, these people need to be cast into a volcano:
Where do these people think money comes from? Every dollar that isn’t paid back has to come from somewhere else — either in the form of taxes on everyone else, or in the form of yet more federal debt. It gets boring pointing this out, but the case for student-loan transference is no more noble than that some people would like other people to give them lots of money. That’s it. That’s the whole policy. They borrowed money to pay for a service. They got — and benefited from — that service. And now they’d like someone else to write them a big check so that they don’t have to keep their side of the bargain. It’s utterly revolting.
Here's hoping the president sees sense. |
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On Thursday, I asked what Nancy Pelosi expects to gain from a failed attempt to push a ban on the most commonly owned rifles in the United States through the House of Representatives:
Last time a ban on so-called “assault weapons” was introduced, the Democrats controlled 53 seats in the Senate. Despite this, the provision got just 40 votes. I don’t know how many votes it would get this time, but it sure as hell ain’t 50.
So why do it? It’s not as if the Democrats are in such a good position in the House that they can afford to put some of their members on the record for a controversial show vote. It’s not as if the public doesn’t know where Republicans stand on this question. And, because the Senate is firmly against, it doesn’t move the ball. What’s the point?
Presumably, the people who support banning “assault weapons” will say, “because it’s the right thing to do.” But is it? Leaving aside that it’s a terrible idea, and almost certainly unconstitutional, the most likely consequence of such a measure will be a spike in the sale of AR-15s — the very opposite outcome to the one that Pelosi wishes to achieve.
I also pointed to a podcast hosted by The Bulwark, in which the Washington Post's James Hohmann told Charlie Sykes that "there are a lot of people very close to the president who privately understand that" any attempt to transfer student loan debt from the people who took it out to the people who did not would be "a complete disaster," but that "the president is being pulled really hard by these woke leftists," such as Stacey Abrams, who believe that Democrats won't go out and vote if the president doesn't break the law in order to hand them gobs of other people's money. As I suggested:
If there are “a lot of people very close to the president who privately understand that this is a complete disaster for them,” then those people need to speak up now, before Biden commits a generational political mistake.
Again: Here's hoping the president sees sense. |
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On Friday, I wondered why John Cornyn finds it "embarrassing" that Congress hasn't passed any gun control legislation recently when he opposes all of the legislation that it wanted to pass:
Per Politico’s report, there doesn’t seem to be any particular “legislative response” that Cornyn believes will help. He just wants to avoid “the narrative that we can’t get things done.” What things? Who knows? At various points, Politico describes the coveted outcome as a “gun safety deal”; “a bill”; “the votes on guns”; “a successful gun vote”; a “bipartisan agreement”; “the plan”; “gun policy reforms”; “gun-talks”; “progress around gun safety”; “proposals”; “an agreement”; a “package”; “a deal with Democrats on an issue as elusive as guns”; “guns legislation”; and “any guns agreement.” And then it notes that, when pushed, “Cornyn declined to say” what he’d accept. Undeterred, the outlet briefly describes what other people might hope to achieve, and then moves on to a long discussion of what really matters here: the likelihood that “clinching a deal with Democrats” will help Cornyn succeed Mitch McConnell “as Senate GOP leader.”
If Cornyn had a bunch of ideas that he'd wanted to pass for a while, it would be different. But he doesn't:
Rather, he seems to be trying to work out what trinkets he and his party can give to the Democrats to make them go away. One can comprehend why this approach would make sense for the Chris Murphys of the world; Murphy wants to radically diminish the right to keep and bear arms, and he is happy to sign on to anything that helps him get closer to that goal. But Cornyn — who does not share Murphy’s assumptions about the problem, and who has said explicitly that he does not wish to restrict the Second Amendment — is a different kettle of fish.
So why is he playing the game?
Cornyn knows that the federal government cannot prevent mass shootings. He knows that the media’s assumption that Congress’s effectiveness is measured by how many new laws it passes is a silly one. He knows that there is no legislative appetite for the gun-control measures that Democrats truly want, and that it is beyond the federal government’s constitutional authority to enact the other measures being bandied about. But apparently, he doesn’t care. Instead, he plans to feel “embarrassed” until the Senate spends billions of dollars of taxpayers’ money to give the media its “successful gun vote.” Heavy lies the head that wants the crown.
For my full archive at National Review, you can click here. |
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I was on two episodes of The Editors this week. On the first, we discussed the police response in Uvalde, and President Biden’s peculiar ramblings. On the second, we talked about the president's recent comments on guns, the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee, and Pride month. You can subscribe to The Editors on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and more, or listen online at National Review. |
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Listening To: 'Reach Out' by The Four Tops |
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What a tour de force this song is. It has the same quality as Procul Harum's A Whiter Shade of Pale, Percy Sledge's When a Man Loves a Woman, and The Mamas and the Papas' California Dreamin' in that it screams "EPIC" at you from the very first second.
The band hated it at first, and, if you listen closely, you'll notice that Levi Stubbs is shouting as much as he's singing. But who cares? The addition of the piccolo and the flute are a masterstroke, and the fact that the vocals are distorted — which usually annoys me — just adds to the tension (the other song of which this is true is Go Now by the Moody Blues): |
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