Ron DeSantis Wades Into Ukraine Policy

What type of foreign policy leader would he be?

Mar 14

There’s a gap between what you are able to say as a primary candidate, a general election candidate, and a commander in chief. In DeSantis’s case, nothing about his past record in Congress indicates that he is anything but a fairly conventional Republican on foreign policy matters. But in the case of Ukraine, he reads the tea leaves as indicating an appetite for more skepticism.
If actually applied, it’s hard to tell how DeSantis’s approach would be all that different from Joe Biden’s except in the amount of dollars in question (though practically speaking, he’d likely face an altogether different war upon arriving at the White House than the circumstances on the ground today). But getting there requires competing and winning votes among Republicans who are clearly torn on the subject. Ask GOP voters if they support weapons for Ukraine, and most say yes; ask if they support money for Ukraine, and they say no. They’re opposed to blank checks, but they want the war to end as soon as possible. And saying that China and the southern border are more significant security threats doesn’t eliminate the need for a clear Ukraine policy.
DeSantis is known for his contributions to many areas of policy — Covid, education, culture war issues, and more. But on foreign policy, security policy, and trade policy, his positions are more vague. Speaking about such deeply important matters in ways that clarify instead of confuse is very important, especially if he wants to avoid the national pitfalls experienced by Republican governors before him.
There is an appetite on the right for someone who will stand up forcefully for the interests of the West. The leaderless nature of the world at the moment contributes to the feeling of deep unease, a feeling that has only been cemented since the disaster of the botched Afghanistan withdrawal. Joe Biden has made clear he is not that leader. Making the case that you are that leader could provide a huge boost to whichever candidate can send that message, not as a matter of signaling or positioning but as an authentic declaration of intent.

Townhall.com @townhallcom

Tucker Carlson requested that potential GOP presidential candidates clarify their positions on U.S. aid to Ukraine. Donald Trump, Mike Pence, Ron DeSantis, Vivek Ramaswamy, Kristi Noem, Greg Abbott, Tim Scott, and Chris Christie provided responses. Here's what they said.

Who’s To Blame For SVB Collapse?

Nicole Gelinas.

Last year, when FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried lost control of the massive cryptocurrency Ponzi scheme he had allegedly created, he ran home to mom and dad. A federal judge granted him bail on the multiple criminal charges he faces after his professor parents promised to keep an eye on their mischievous boy in their Palo Alto house. Now, all of move-fast-and-break-things Silicon Valley is running home to mom and dad because the Valley actually broke something that it needed. The only thing keeping hundreds of start-ups, as well as some more established tech firms, afloat right now is the fact that the federal government has bailed out all large depositors in the West Coast tech industry’s favored financial institution, Silicon Valley Bank (SVB). This state of affairs seems ironic, but it’s not. The trillions in easy money the federal government has pumped into the economy since the 2008 financial crisis in turn created the undisciplined tech sector.
The collapse of Silicon Valley Bank last Friday isn’t particularly interesting. A financial institution created 40 years ago to serve the emerging California tech world, SVB failed for the same reason that failed banks typically fail: it borrowed short-term, taking in money from depositors, and lent long-term. This strategy works—all banks do it—but SVB took it too far, too fast, with zero room for error. The bank’s deposits had tripled in just four years, the Financial Times reported, to nearly $200 billion. The bank took advantage of its status as being just under the threshold for heightened federal regulation to take enormous risk. It invested its short-term deposits—that is, money that customers could withdraw at any time from their checking and savings accounts—in long-term Treasury bonds, at a time when doing so was dangerous. The Federal Reserve has been raising interest rates, meaning that the value of older Treasury bonds issued at lower interest rates—the bonds that SVB held—was falling.
That might have been okay, except that SVB’s customers withdrew their money just as the value of SVB’s Treasury bonds was falling. Depositors asked for their money back partly because, as start-up investment has dried up in recent months, due partly to the rising interest rates, the tech firms face their own funding squeeze. These withdrawals forced SVB to sell its Treasury investments at a significant loss. That, too, could have been okay (sort of): banks around the country are nursing $600 billion in such losses.
Except: unlike at most banks, most of SVB’s depositors had more than $250,000 held at the bank. That’s above the FDIC’s normal insurance guarantee in case of bank failure. As word traveled through Silicon Valley that SVB was in distress, these large depositors began to yank their money—so quickly that, last Friday, regulators seized the bank. On Sunday night, regulators seized another medium-large bank, Signature, with a similar profile: large uninsured deposits, a tech-heavy customer base. In an effort to prevent runs on other mid-size banks, the FDIC said Sunday night that it would retroactively protect all depositors at the two failed banks, not just smaller, insured, depositors. The Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department also said that banks facing similar situations—having to sell Treasury securities to meet deposits—could instead borrow from the Fed (or “meet the needs of all their depositors,” in the Fed’s pleasant phrase) using the Treasury securities as collateral.
Yes, these steps represent a bailout, despite President Biden’s words to the contrary. (Hint: anything federal regulators do all of a sudden, on a Sunday night, is a bailout.) As with all bailouts, compelling reasons exist to take the steps in the short term: companies parked money at SVB just to pay their employees and suppliers, and allowing everyday payments to be disrupted just means more tech-industry layoffs and turmoil, at a time when the industry is already laying off hundreds of thousands of people.

The Debate WFB Lost, And Hugh Hefner Won

Jane Coaston.

In 1966, William F. Buckley Jr., the founder of National Review, hosted Hugh Hefner, the founder of the wildly successful Playboy magazine, on Mr. Buckley’s weekly public affairs show, “Firing Line,” for a discussion of sexual ethics.
On the show, Mr. Buckley quoted Mr. Hefner as having argued that “man’s morality, like his religion, is a personal affair best left to his own conscience.” With Mr. Hefner dressed in a suit and Mr. Buckley sounding, as usual, like a parody of himself, Mr. Hefner described his view as “anti-puritanism, a response really to the puritan part of our culture.” Mr. Buckley did not like Mr. Hefner. Or, more accurately, he did not like his philosophy.
Mr. Buckley believed that “anti-puritanism” wasn’t just misinformed — he argued, both on the show and in print, that Mr. Hefner’s aim was to shatter the sexual values that he believed were conducive to what Mr. Buckley called a “viable existence.” On “Firing Line,” he sarcastically asked Mr. Hefner if he had “rewritten the ancient theological tablets.” If he had, “Oughtn’t you claim some sort of moral authority to do so, and if so, what is that moral authority?”
Hugh Hefner was a proud Democrat, but his brand of libertinism has jumped parties since that television interview. Sixty years later, in many ways, his view has won over the conservative movement that Mr. Buckley was so essential to. Trying to find a path that includes both defiant hedonism and the moralistic foundations of traditional, Buckleyesque conservatism has emerged as a central challenge of the movement.
Some conservatives seem to have decided that winning over a new constituency — one that hates rules and ordinances and loves hot people and cool ideas and sex, sex and ideally more sex — is worth changing what it means to be a conservative in the first place. Pursuing these voters is a perilous shift for conservatism, because the ethos relies not on a political ideology but on the lack of one: simply doing whatever one wants. A hornier conservative movement might be more electorally successful, but it will run headfirst into a wall of longstanding conservative policy commitments — to end abortion, eliminate pornography and reinforce the “nuclear family.” Goals that are, at the very least, not very horny.
Playboy magazine was marketed to men, and so is this particular brand of politics. Being a horny bro is not terribly unusual, or even bad. In fact, I’d argue that many men fall in this category — heterosexual men who think that liking sex and sexiness are generally good, uncomplicated things, and think that people who tell them that sex or sexiness is bad or sinful or problematic should be mocked or ignored. Some seemed to gravitate toward the ethos of Barstool Sports, the popular sports and betting media conglomerate.
The “Barstool conservative,” as Matthew Walther has argued, isn’t opposed to abortion; he’s opposed to political correctness. Mr. Walther wrote that Barstool conservatives are “people who, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, accept pornography, homosexuality, drug use, legalized gambling, and whatever Gamergate was about.” But what they do not accept, ever, is being told what to do, whether by “hectoring, schoolmarmish” politicians and media or by the federal government. This kind of conservative might not vote, or at least not vote on a consistent basis. But he does adhere to this specific, attitudinal type of politics. As my colleague Ross Douthat wrote in 2014, “This attitude is ‘liberal’ in that it regards sexual license as an unalloyed good, and treats any kind of social or religious conservatism as a dead letter. But at the same time it wants to rebel and lash out against the strictures it feels that feminism and political correctness have placed on male liberty, male rights.”
When the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last year, Barstool’s founder, Dave Portnoy, jumped on an “emergency press conference” on Twitter, saying: “It makes no sense how anybody thinks it’s their right to tell a woman what to do with her body. I just don’t get it. To take away the ability to make informed decisions on how they wanna live their lives is bananas.” Under the philosophical construct of horny bro-dom, the idea is that abortion isn’t good or bad, but it is an act that a woman wishes to commit, and nobody should tell anybody else what to do, or what not to do. In fact, in 1992, then-Gov. Bill Clinton (a noted horny bro) said something very much the same in a National Abortion Rights Action League survey: “The government simply has no right to interfere with decisions that must be made by women of America to make the right choice.”
Many conservatives disagreed with Mr. Portnoy on abortion (Mr. Portnoy declined my request for an interview). But they seemed to channel the “horny bro” perspective on a raft of other issues. While some conservatives want to ban pornography, others would welcome porn-film stars at right-wing conferences. In this, there’s been a subtle warping of the conservative movement as it sounds increasingly less like itself and more like its horny, libertine opposition, in the pursuit of electoral gains and cultural relevance.
The debate that Mr. Hefner and Mr. Buckley had about politics in the 1960s has become a defining question for the conservative movement: whether conservatism is a project intended to get people to do something (even things they do not wish to do) or to protect people from being told what to do.
There is a conservatism of ideology and the “three-legged stool” and there is a conservatism of “feels,” so to speak, a conservatism that doesn’t really care about tax credits or ethanol policy but has a distinct sense that there used to be something better than there is now and that what is to come is likely to be worse. But what if what used to be was something more libertine? What if some conservatives aren’t longing for Ronald Reagan’s heyday but for the time when women were hotter, you could put up a topless calendar in your cubicle at the office without fear of reprisal from some mean H.R. lady, and nobody told you what to do?
This has created peril for traditional Republicans. Attempting to come across as the “cool mom” of political persuasions — do whatever you want, just do it at home, and ideally, do it in a way that owns the teetotaling libs — is not the natural affect of movement conservatives.