The Wall Street Journal - USA (2020-12-02)

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL. Wednesday, December 2, 2020 |A

P

resident Trump has made
clear his determination to
reduce America’s military
footprint in Afghanistan,
regardless of the conse-
quences. The most recent version of
Mr. Trump’s plan—a reduction to
2,500 troops by early January—may
not satisfy those pushing for a com-
plete withdrawal, but it will go fur-
ther than most of Trump’s military
advisers and the GOP leadership in
Congress want to go. Only his most
ardent supporters will be truly
happy.

For all the talk of war-weariness,
bring-them-home sentiment doesn’t
appear to be forcing Mr. Trump’s
hand. The American public’s atti-
tudes toward Afghanistan are nu-
anced, according to a National Opin-
ion Research Center survey
conducted on our behalf in Septem-
ber and October. After 19 years of
fighting, the war in Afghanistan has
been called America’s longest, but
many American’s don’t seem to be
paying attention. Forty-one percent
of our respondents had no opinion
on whether the U.S. has accom-

The Myth of ‘War Weary’ Americans

plished its goals in Afghanistan.

This lack of awareness feeds the

withdrawal narrative: Why stay if

we aren’t accomplishing anything?

But it may also reflect the ambiva-

lence of two successive U.S. presi-

dents who wanted out of the Af-

ghanistan conflict. Barack Obama

spoke enthusiastically about the im-

portance of the Afghan mission as a

candidate in 2008. But since Decem-

ber 2009, when he announced a

temporary surge of troops coupled

with a fixed and arbitrary timeline

for their withdrawal, White House

messaging in support of the war has

been rare.

There is support for withdrawing

some troops, especially among Mr.

Trump’s base: 53% of Trump sup-

porters in our poll favor troop re-

ductions and 16% oppose them. But

support is limited among the

broader public: 34% of respondents

support troop withdrawals, while

25% oppose them. Even this tepid

support may be conditional. Our

survey asked about troop reductions

in exchange for counterterrorism

assurances the Taliban made as part

of the deal, but so far they have

failed to live up to their commit-

ments.

The results of our survey suggest

some interesting civil-military di-

vides. Veterans (44%) expressed

greater support for troop reduc-

tions than the general public (33%).

Opposition to reductions was also

higher among veterans (31%) than

civilians (24%). A plurality of civil-

ian respondents (43%) expressed no

opinion. There was also a notable

generational divide among veterans.

Forty percent of veterans who

served before 9/11 support troop re-

ductions, while 32% oppose them.

Among post-9/11 veterans, support

is higher; 54% of post-9/11 veterans

in our sample favor troop draw-

downs in the context of the Taliban

agreement and 29% don’t.

Few Americans believe that 19

years of war in Afghanistan have

been successful. Overall, only 22%

of respondents told us they believed

the U.S. had achieved its goals in

Afghanistan, with post-9/11 veterans

roughly twice as likely to say so at

44%. And again, no opinion (39%)

was the most common answer

among civilian respondents.

Whom do Americans hold re-

sponsible for the situation in Af-

ghanistan? Veterans assessed the

performance of civilian and military

leaders roughly the same. Approxi-

mately 60% of veterans thought ci-

vilian political leaders had a good

plan, listened to military advice as

much as they should have, and inte-

grated military and nonmilitary

tools effectively. Roughly the same

number of veterans thought military

leaders did the same things effec-

tively.

Civilian respondents were less

likely to credit military leaders on

their performance, again because

many civilians didn’t even offer an

opinion. Civilian respondents also

were more critical of civilian politi-

cal leaders than veterans were,

largely because partisanship shaped

their answers. Democrats credited

Democratic civilian political leaders

for their role in planning and execu-

tion of war plans in Afghanistan,

but blamed Republican political

leaders for theirs. The opposite was

true for Republicans. Independents,

on the other hand, blamed civilian

political leaders from both parties.

Which brings us back to Presi-

dent Trump’s current Afghanistan

endgame. By splitting the baby, Mr.

Trump probably has avoided the

full-blown civil-military crisis with

his commanders that a more draco-

nian “all the troops home by Christ-

mas” order would have generated.

Mr. Trump will own the decision,

but he’ll probably be gone before

the negative consequences material-

ize. His national-security team—the

newcomers and the veterans of pre-

vious Afghan policy fights—has

united behind him, however grudg-

ingly. The military units left behind

in Afghanistan may face acute vul-

nerabilities reminiscent of Dien Bien

Phu and even Benghazi, but the in-

coming Biden team at least will

have some remaining options.

The fight over Afghanistan policy

will go another round—and in the

next round, the civil-military ques-

tions and partisan blame games

that have been mostly suppressed

until now could become the main

action.

Mr. Feaver is a political-science

professor at Duke University. Mr.

Golby, a retired U.S. Army lieuten-

ant colonel, is a senior fellow at

the University of Texas’ Clements

Center for National Security.

By Peter D. Feaver
And Jim Golby

OLIVIER DOULIERY/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

Our poll finds the public

ambivalent about the war

in Afghanistan, not in a

hurry for withdrawal.

Trump greets troops at Afghanistan’s Bagram Airfield, Nov. 28.

OPINION

How to Understand Trump’s Democrats

Even as Donald
Trump prepares to
leave the White
House next month—
without conceding
defeat, it appears—
many Democrats
and members of the
press haven’t come
to terms with how
he got there in the
first place.
For four years, the president’s de-
tractors have blamed Russian inter-
ference, sexism, white nationalists,
James Comey—or some combination
thereof—for Hillary Clinton’s shock-
ing loss in 2016. What they’ve failed
to do is seriously consider how Mr.
Trump managed to flip millions of
voters who had previously sup-
ported Barack Obama. It was these
Trump Democrats, not Moscow she-
nanigans or the alt-right, who put
Mr. Trump in the Oval Office. And
these voters not only stayed loyal to
Mr. Trump in his re-election bid but
grew in number and delivered all
manner of down-ballot victories to
Republicans. Mr. Trump may be
(noisily) exiting the stage, but his
supporters are well-positioned to
make their presence felt in politics

long after he’s gone.

Massive party switching isn’t un-

heard of, as readers old enough to

remember Nixon Democrats in 1972

and Reagan Democrats in 1984 can

attest. But Richard Nixon and Ron-

ald Reagan won in landslides. What

was unique about Mr. Trump’s vic-

tory in 2016 is that he lost the na-

tional popular vote yet managed to

win some of the deepest blue areas

in the country. In their revealing

new book, “Trump’s Democrats,”

Stephanie Muravchik and Jon A.

Shields explain why so many stead-

fast Democrats decided to abandon

the party for Mr. Trump and have

stood by him notwithstanding the

disapproving glares from liberal

elites.

Ms. Muravchik and Mr. Shields

are married academics—she’s a his-

torian, he’s a political scientist. They

describe the book as an “ethno-

graphic study,” but don’t let that

scare you. It reads like the best kind

of long-form journalism. The report-

ing is excellent, while the writing is

clear and largely objective. The au-

thors aren’t Trump supporters but

are respectful of people who are,

and they avoid the liberal disdain

and condescension that we’ve grown

accustomed to from mainstream me-

dia outlets.

“Wearestruck...bythefact

that the dominant explanations of

Trump’s appeal all have one thing in

common: they all assume that some-

thing must be seriously wrong with

Trump enthusiasts,” they write.

“Trump won, we are told, either be-

cause of racial prejudices or eco-

nomic distress or various diseases of

social despair, such as drug abuse,

family breakdown, and suicide. Thus,

in these accounts, Trump voters are

driven by resentment or anger or

desperation. How else could one

cast a vote for Trump? Though it is

never stated explicitly, such views

rest on the assumption that any

well-adjusted, healthy, flourishing

citizen would reject Trump.”

Ms. Muravchik and Mr. Shields

argue that cultural and geographic

isolation may explain why Trump

supporters have been such a conun-

drum for pollsters and the Washing-

ton press. To address this problem,

they conducted field research in

three Democratic strongholds that

went for Mr. Trump in 2016. Ot-

tumwa, Iowa, is part of the Rust Belt

and had consistently voted Demo-

crat since 1972. Johnston, R.I., is a

suburb of Providence that last voted

Republican in 1984. And Elliott

County, Ky., a small rural community

in Appalachia, had never voted for a

Republican candidate since it was

formed in the 1860s. Yet “Trump

won 70 percent of the vote in Elliott

County—a place where the ratio of

registered Democrats to Republicans

is similar to San Francisco’s,” the

authors write.

All three areas are overwhelm-

ingly white, household incomes tend

to be below average, and few inhab-

itants have college degrees. Never-

theless, when these voters looked at

the New York billionaire, they saw

someone with working-class politi-

cal sensibilities. His language, his at-

titude, his mannerisms—everything

that scandalized the Washington es-

tablishment—endeared him to these

voters. The president’s critics ac-

cused him of violating political

norms, but those were national po-

litical norms. To the Trump Demo-

crats, the president behaved like the

politicians they encountered locally

every day.

Mr. Trump recalled a kind of old-

school machine Democrat. He was a

nonideological, transactional pol

who cut deals to take care of his

own and demanded loyalty in return.

He was a relentless counterpuncher

who equated magnanimity with

weakness and never backed down.

The president’s choice of family

members to fill high-level advisory

positions normally reserved for peo-

ple with more expertise or experi-

ence is less common in the nation’s

capital but not considered out of the

ordinary in many of these local com-

munities that swung to Mr. Trump.

Time and again, Washington Demo-

crats were outraged, while Trump

Democrats shrugged.

There weren’t enough Obama-

Trump supporters to deliver the

president a second term, but there

are too many to ignore. Many reside

in states that currently decide na-

tional elections. Democrats will

want to win them back. Getting to

know them a little better might help.

A new book examines the

phenomenon that still has

political pros and the press

scratching their heads.

UPWARD
MOBILITY
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An Unfunny Thing Happened on the Way to 2021

H

umorlessness has become a na-
tional comorbidity. Besides the
other afflictions of 2020, the
country is suffering from a comic defi-
ciency that has weakened the social
immune system. “A horse walks into a
bar...”Forgetit—bars are closed.
Americans have sailed into an al-
most perfect storm of humorlessness.
I have not heard a single good joke
about the virus—and only a few bad
ones. In the past, anxiety, dread and
anger have sometimes been good for
laughs—but not this time. Fear of in-
visible floating drops, stifling masks,
the jittery adjustments of “social dis-
tance,” and the sense that life has got-
ten weird, normality as emergency and
emergency as normality, as if the uni-
verse had shifted a few inches while
we were sleeping—such immediate
dislocations merge with the larger, ex-
istential distress (isolation, claustro-
phobia, financial suffering, children at
home, mortgage or rent unpaid, empty
refrigerator) to produce an atmo-

sphere that is toxic to humor.

That’s only the beginning: Add the

bitter politics, the disputed presiden-

tial election, the yammering provoca-

tions of cable television news and the

surreal quality of the memes on social

media, of Rudy Giuliani, bug-eyed and

sweating streams of black hair dye.

Even before the masks and shut-

downs, American humor had been

suppressed by the totalitarian taboos.

Political correctness and cancel cul-

ture have woven entire new value

systems around a thousand griev-

ances, inflating them with self-impor-

tance, to produce an intensely intol-

erant and humorless new political

culture. Most comedians are nonideo-

logical. They will tell any joke that

works. Political correctness has

driven plenty of them out of the busi-

ness, to be replaced by earnest, stri-

dent partisans, some of whom host

late-night network TV shows.

Humor is a jack-in-the-box. A joke

depends on surprise. But orthodoxies

in America have become as drearily

predictable as those in East Germany.

When was the last time you were sur-

prised by someone’s political opin-

ion? Without surprise, there is no

laugh—and far less of the sanity that

ought to be the end result of laugh-

ter. No funny joke ever came with the

party’s seal of approval. Self-mockery

can be redemptive.

American politics has rarely been

as funny or as fun as we think we re-

member it was. But the context of

2020—the novelty of it, the here-be-

dragons, the near-hysteria on social

media—has made this year’s election

especially fraught.

Joe Biden is mostly good-hu-

mored, which is better than nothing,

but not the same as being funny. He’s

78, and one feels the touch of winter.

Donald Trump is a showman, but

sometime after going into politics, he

buried his real sense of humor be-

neath layers of his other shtick—ego,

aggression, bad manners, scorn. Has

he ever emitted a truly spontaneous

laugh? His preferred idiom is sar-

casm, which grows tedious, relent-

less, mean. Spy magazine decades

ago nailed him as a “short-fingered

vulgarian,” but by the time he got to

the White House, he had become Hit-

ler—quite a leap. Both parties give

caricature a bad name. Alec Baldwin’s

impersonation of Mr. Trump on “Sat-

urday Night Live” is a lazy exaggera-

tion—unobservant, unfunny—and yet

it became a ritual favorite of the left,

like a “Punch and Judy” show.

To review the history: George

Washington was not funny. Our fun-

niest president, Abraham Lincoln,

was a depressive who managed jokes

during the country’s grimmest years.

Lyndon Johnson was a savagely

funny man, but he was King Lear as

cowpoke and in his regime the coun-

try practically fell apart. JFK was

witty. Richard Nixon was hopeless.

Ronald Reagan came to politics from

show business. His taste in jokes was

eclectic. One of the high points of my

life was hearing William F. Buckley

Jr., in his languid and unmistakable

upper-class drawl, try to imitate for

me Reagan’s delivery of an indelibly

stupid joke about an undertaker’s as-

sistant who hears a corpse in the

basement of the funeral home singing

“Danny Boy” through an improbable

orifice. In the middle of the joke,

Buckley was overcome with embar-

rassment at the crudity of it, which

made it even funnier.

Bill Clinton is neither here nor

there in the story of presidential hu-

mor. But his wife’s hammering hu-

morlessness (at least in public) be-

came historic: part of the reason

America got Donald Trump. Barack

Obama has a light touch; he is funny

in an elegantly self-centered way, in

the style of a 1930s comedy. For eight

years, his status as the first black

president gave him partial immunity

from the honest and probing ridicule

to which any American chief execu-

tive is entitled.

Laughter is the first casualty of

ideology, and here we are. The white

woke are incapable of humor; all

ideologues are asses. In the right-

wing neighborhoods, Tucker Carl-

son’s merry howls of derision may be

as good as the humor gets. His Fox

News colleague Sean Hannity, to say

the least, is not a comedian, and

Mark Levin is as grim as Robespierre

with a toothache.

Can anything bring American hu-

mor back? The country needs to be

deprogrammed. Everyone should

watch Henny Youngman videos for 10

minutes a day. It would be a start.

Those who can’t stand Youngman

should read P.G. Wodehouse.

Mr. Morrow is a senior fellow at

the Ethics and Public Policy Center.

His latest book is “God and Mammon:

Chronicles of American Money.”

By Lance Morrow

Polarization, political

correctness and Covid-

have produced a hostile

environment for humor.

John Tamny writing at RealClear-

Politics.com, Dec. 1:

Multi-billionaire Michael Bloom-

berg spent $100 million in Florida to

swing the state to Joe Biden in the

recently-concluded 2020 presidential

election. He failed.

Please consider Bloomberg’s miss

relative to reporting inThe New

Yorkerfrom late 2018. A sophisti-

cated magazine largely catering to

those politically and culturally on

the left, its readers were treated to

straight-faced analysis suggesting

that during the 2016 presidential

election, Facebook was captured by

“Russian agents who wanted to sow

political chaos and help Trump win.”

Supposedly the “Internet Research

Agency, a firm in St. Petersburg

working for the Kremlin,” had “an

astonishing impact” on the final re-

sult.

So while American citizens of the

billionaire kind routinely try and fail

to manipulate the voting patterns of

the U.S. electorate, the legendarily

incompetent Russians managed to

spend $100,000 on Facebook, some

of it after the election, only to au-

thor a Trump victory over Hillary

Clinton. Bloomberg and Sheldon

Adelson call your political opera-

tives! You’ve been ripped off. The

Russians (yes, theRussians)are so

savvy that they can control Ameri-

can elections for a microscopic frac-

tion of what you’ve been spending,

with ad buys on Facebook that are

nanorelative to the social network’s

annual advertising revenues.

Notable& Quotable: Russians