Sorry about the false start yesterday: JVL’s Substack talk with Heather Cox Richardson had to be postponed due to some unfortunately timed outages on the Substack app. They’ll be going live tomorrow at 3 p.m. EDT instead. Watch for more details in The Triad today. Happy Tuesday.

Failure Is a Possibility

by William Kristol

As I waded this morning through the torrent of disheartening news washing over us, a remark of Mary Ellen O’Connell, a University of Notre Dame professor of international law, struck me. O’Connell told the New York Times that the new killing by U.S. armed forces of alleged drug smugglers at sea “appears as problematic as the first,” which certainly seems to be the case. Then O’Connell made this observation: “International lawyers uniformly found his first such attack on Sept. 2 unlawful. All of the criticism and warning of blowback has had no impact. People are dead again in killings that violate the law.”

The line kept coming back to me: “All of the criticism and warning of blowback has had no impact.”

It’s chilling. And for now, as well, it certainly seems to be true.

One would like to think that criticisms and warnings—if the criticisms are well-grounded and the warnings justified—might have some impact in a nation that, as Federalist No. 1 put it, is intended to vindicate the proposition that “societies of men are really capable . . . of establishing good government from reflection and choice” rather than being “forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.”

But as the Founders understood—as we should understand today—“government from reflection and choice” is difficult both to establish and to maintain. So far, we’ve had a pretty decent track record in this endeavor. One might even call it an exceptional track record.

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But all good things come to an end. Perhaps this generation of Americans will turn out not to have been very good at resisting an authoritarian movement. Perhaps this generation won’t be moved by criticisms and warnings. After all, many other nations haven’t been.

Failure is a possibility. And it’s pretty difficult to read the news, and to reflect on where things seem to be going, and not to wonder if that possibility isn’t approaching a probability. Certainly I felt that way as I continued my morning labors, making my way through the rest of the news: The vice president of the United States threatening opponents of the Trump administration; the attorney general of the United States assaulting the right of free speech; and leading Democrats squabbling about what to say about their nominee for mayor of New York, and about what to do about a possible government shutdown only two weeks away.

But politics, like life, is full of twists and turns. Just as a healthy confidence in our national well-being can become an unhealthy complacency, so can understandable discouragement about our situation turn into unwarranted despair.

There are levers of resistance, from state governments to the private sector, from elite organizations to popular mobilization. There are models of resistance to injustice and authoritarianism in our own history, of course, and abroad—in Ukraine today for example. The authoritarians have vulnerabilities, even if they work diligently to hide them.

Since the murder of Charlie Kirk, I’ve been asked by lots of young people if this moment felt like the late 1960s. I answer, truthfully, that I was in high school then, and don’t think I had a very good sense of what the real world felt like. But I do remember what it felt like a few years later.

By the mid 1970s, we’d had two failed presidencies in a row, Johnson and Nixon. The nation seemed ungovernable, the public at once polarized and bewildered. Vietnam had fallen, perhaps marking our first true military defeat. The slaughter in Cambodia had begun. The Soviet Union seemed to be on the march. The U.S. economy and the global economy were in a severe recession.

And in September 1975, fifty years ago this month, there were two assassination attempts against President Gerald Ford. On September 5, a follower of jailed cult leader Charles Manson stood a few feet from the president as he walked through a crowd near the California State Capitol building in Sacramento, pointed a pistol at his chest and pulled the trigger. Thankfully, she had failed to operate the slide mechanism correctly.

Seventeen days later, on September 22, 1975, Ford survived a second assassination attempt, this time in San Francisco. Oliver Sipple, a 33-year old disabled former Marine and Vietnam War veteran, grabbed the shooter’s arm after she’d fired one shot at the president outside the St. F