CONTROLLING THE POLITICAL PIPELINE.

It's Friday, and a reinforcement of a frequent Cold Spring Shops theme, "Perhaps, instead of asking 'who is John Galt?,' dear reader, ask 'who is running for school board or mayor' and 'what is she proposing?'" is in order.

Town Hall's Ashley Evdokimo suggests that the Donk establishment enabled the Democratic Socialists (who might not really be socialists, but I digress) to position a lot of candidates through their Ahab-like obsession with the Golden Golem of Greatness rather than, to use the Sunday show locution, paying attention to the issues the American people care about.

While Republicans and Democrats have poured enormous amounts of energy into presidential politics, media cycles, and national messaging, the DSA has invested in something much less glamorous—but arguably much more important.

The political pipeline.

School boards become city councils. City councils become state legislatures. State legislators become members of Congress. Members of Congress become committee chairs, governors, Cabinet officials, and eventually party leaders. Politics has always been a farm system, and the DSA understands that.

Ironically, while much of the Democratic establishment spent years defining itself in opposition to Donald Trump, the DSA spent those same years defining the future of the Democratic Party. And unless Democrats outright say they’re against it, we can’t “trust” their alliances.

The emergence of Michael Harrington's disciples is also giving Never Trump conservatives heartburn, as they are personae non grata among Republicans and the irritated rump flexing among the Donks will have no truck with them.

REMEMBERING GORDON WOOD.

Steven Hayward mourns his passing.  "Now we shall mark the occasion next month without his cheerful demeanor and fund of hard-earned wisdom and knowledge, which finds no intellectual equal in this nation of equal citizens. It will not be the same without his presence."  By all means, read his eulogy in full, and pay close attention to his arguments noting that "radicalism" does not have to mean "leftward ho."

It is hard to avoid wondering whether the shocking news of the ghastly accidental death of historian Gordon S. Wood, struck down by a motorist in a shopping center parking lot, is a bad omen, coming within a month of our observance of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Wood has been enjoying a much-deserved spotlight in the runup to the sesquicentennial, but now his voice will be absent on July 4.

Widely acknowledged as the pre-eminent historian of the American Founding in our time, Wood was virtually without peer within academic American history today. There is, however, an arc to his career and thought as a historian that offers encouragement that, in this time of doubt and division about the character and future of American democracy, it is possible to capture and celebrate America’s complex and enduring foundations.

Wood burst onto the scene in 1969 with the publication of The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787, a capacious 653-page exploration of the ideas that crystallized into the American Revolution and the Constitution eleven years after the Declaration. Wood had been a student of Bernard Bailyn, one of the leading historians of American political thought in the mid-twentieth century, and Wood built upon Bailyn’s well-regarded Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, but can be said to have advanced and refined a bold new interpretive strand of American historiography—the “civic republican school.”

The civic republican school argued that modern democracy owed less to Lockean liberalism than to a more classically inspired tradition centering on “civic virtue.” It was an explicit alternative to the liberal tradition of natural rights and rugged individualism. Although Wood was restrained in staking out a clear position, his book offered considerable backup for the civic republicans, many of whom were openly seeking an alternative for understanding America and to displace the “liberal tradition” as defended by Louis Hartz and other mid-century historians.

Mr Hayward's colleague at Power Line Scott Johnson offers Hillsdale's Wilfred McClay an opportunity to extend.

[Professor Wood] may have spent his life working mainly in the Ivy League, but he was no blueblood. He was an affable, hardworking guy from a working-class family in Concord, [Massachusetts], and you could hear his origins in his unmistakable Yankee accent. A great historian could also be a regular guy.

Although he studied at Harvard under the august Bernard Bailyn, and excelled in all he did, he acquired none of the mandarin manners of the higher professoriate, but remained himself. His sympathy for the lives and ways of ordinary people informed his most important work, and was part of his visceral love of democratic America.

His book The Radicalism of the American Revolution was in large measure a tribute to the Revolution’s astonishing achievement in ushering in a genuinely new world, one in which feudalism and monarchy were a dead letter, the elite values of pre-Revolutionary classical republicanism had lost their appeal, and there was a general awareness that, in Jefferson’s famous words, “the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God.”

Instead, Wood wrote, America would find its greatness in a new way: “by creating a prosperous free society belonging to obscure people with their workaday concerns and their pecuniary pursuits of happiness—common people with their common interests in making money and getting ahead.”

Such sentiments are what one might expect from Power Line, which argues from an institutional-conservative seasoned lightly with populism.

WOULD I HAVE SIGNED MY OWN DEATH WARRANT?

Kevin McCullough notes the gravity of pledging "our Lives, our Fortunes, and our Sacred Honor."

Liberty, worth more than comfort.

What united them wasn't that they agreed about everything.

It was that they agreed on one breathtaking truth.

Our rights do not come from government.

They come from God.

That single idea changed the course of history.

Kings believed rights flowed from the throne. Governments believed liberty existed only because governments allowed it. The Declaration turned that thinking upside down. Government exists to protect rights it did not create.

That idea remains every bit as revolutionary today as it was two hundred and fifty years ago.

Now, honesty requires us to acknowledge something else. The nation they launched did not immediately live up to its own creed. Slavery stood in direct contradiction to the words, "all men are created equal.”

History shouldn't pretend otherwise.

But history should also recognize that the Founders wrote down a principle greater than themselves. Because they did, future generations possessed a standard by which America could be challenged, corrected, and improved.

Yes, and everyone who is born here or lives here lives better because that revolutionary idea took root here first, rather than somewhere else where those people would be enjoying the head start of securing the blessings of liberty.

Something about that essay got me hearing "who more than self their country loved" and "confirm thy soul in self-control."  For your perusal, all the stanzas of America the Beautiful.

A LAMENT FOR THE AMERICAN HIGH.

In "The GOP and the Corporate Dems Can’t Red-Bait Their Way Out of a Reckoning," Thom Hartmann argues that the recent successes of so-called democratic socialists in Democrat primaries are another spin on Making America Great, "again" optional.

Strip away the scare word and what’s left is far more truly and anciently American than frightening: a country where a person who works 40 hours a week, no matter how complicated or how humble that work might be, can afford a home and a car, take the family on a vacation every year, put the kids through school and college, see a doctor without going bankrupt, and retire with dignity.

That’s the entire “radical” program that Republicans, corporate Democrats, and our billionaire oligarchs are so flipped out about.

Americans have wanted those things for a very long time.

Put "on one income" in that first sentence and you might be writing about what I call The America That Worked^(TM) or perhaps the American High, which was designed away by Wise Experts.  "I devote a lot of space to documenting the ways in which the Trendy and the Deep Thinkers destroyed The America That Worked^(TM), supposedly in the interest of Social Progress or Inclusion or something similarly high-minded."

CODIFY THE LIABILITY, CONSERVE THE TRANSACTION COSTS.

Sometimes I'll speak in riddles, and with all the algorithms combing through Cold Spring Shops these days, maybe now is a good time to serve an oldie up.  Twenty years ago, frustrated by Student Affairs types continually putting more special education responsibilities on faculty, I proposed to codify the liability the common schools were saddling higher education with.

Perhaps the most salutary reform the public universities could obtain would be to announce something like "Effective 15 April 2007, admission to Enormous State University (flagship, land-grant, compass-direction alike) is contingent on passing the mathematics and writing placement tests. Enormous will no longer offer no-credit remedial mathematics, writing, and speaking courses for high school graduates who have not really received a high school education. Furthermore, Enormous State's Office of Institutional Research will report placement test passage rates by school district." My sometimes sparring partner at Anonymous Community would no doubt be a bit unhappy to receive additional remedial students at the same time that his state is griping about having to pay for the same courses twice. Fine. As part of the reform, bill the school districts for those remedial courses and reimburse the community colleges. Principals now have a choice: offer token academic courses and suffer a budget cut, or spend money to improve their academic content.

Impractical?  Perhaps.  Get pushback?  I did.  "That changes may appear 'pretty screwy' is not necessarily reason to stop thinking along those lines, particularly when the status quo is not working."

STOP CLUTTERING OUR UNIFORMS.

"Minor league baseball team cancels Pride Night game after players refuse to wear rainbows."  We're not talking about the players objecting to some sponsor's logo.  "Fewer than nine players on the 28-man roster were willing to uniforms that featured a rainbow design on their sleeves, a team official said."

IF IT'S THE WEEKEND, THERE MUST BE AN IRAN DEAL.

Here. We. Go. Again.  Again.  "Here.  We.  Go.  Again.  Holding meetings to establish a framework to develop a process will not yield a single gram of fissile material, although it is probably a good way to keep the likes of Danny in McMansions in McLean.  Might be time to punch the mullahs in the mouth again, and let them know that once they turn over the fissile material the anaconda's coils can be loosened."  That was toward the end of May.  Toward the end of last week it was "Here comes another weekend of 'an agreement is near.' The hardliners in Iran and among the Militant Normals are not prepared to be patient."

CHANGING THE DIVERSITY THAT MERITS CELEBRATION?

In the (Not Detroit) Free Press, Maeve Halligan rains on the pride parade.

Somewhere along the way, the movement that fought for gay liberation decided that gay people were the problem.

The original struggle for gay and lesbian rights was not misguided. Progress has been made. But the activist movement that was built to protect those same people has, in significant and measurable ways, abandoned them. And those paying the highest price for that abandonment are, increasingly, also, children.

Dear reader, I'm going to have to behave myself. Raining on parades?  Eating itself?

The movement has begun attacking its own. Consider the registered charity LGB Alliance—founded by two longtime left-wing lesbian activists whose sole aim is advocacy for same-sex attracted people. A murky coalition of LGBTQ+ organizations took the LGB Alliance to court simply for doing so. Their position: LGB people organizing on the basis of sex is transphobic. The movement eats itself.

That case failed, but the fact it was brought tells you everything. Gay and lesbian people across the world have drawn the obvious conclusion: The movement no longer represents them. When a community starts building escape hatches, ask what they’re escaping from.

And somewhere Riley Gaines takes a break from caring for her little girl and nods.

The organization that once marched for gay liberation now runs seminars on overcoming lesbians’ resistance to men. Many words come to mind. “Progressive” is not one of them.

By the way, let’s be clear: Over 80 percent of males who identify as transgender lesbians retain their male anatomy. The majority are, by any prior definition, heterosexual men. The movement that was supposed to protect lesbians is instead providing ideological cover for them to be coerced into accepting male-bodied partners rebranded as a matter of inclusivity.

Then there are the children.

It's not as if the Militant Normals haven't been calling attention for years.

What happens to gay and lesbian people when sex stops meaning anything? What happens to the children who may then grow up to be same-sex attracted? They’re being failed by the people who claimed to protect them.

Those who disagree with this argument are not bad people. They have been sold a story in which being “progressive” means never questioning the dominant institutional line—one in which compassion is equated with compliance. But real compassion asks hard questions. Real advocacy protects the people it claims to represent, even when that is inconvenient. Real activism does not silence lesbians, medicalize gay children, or tell a little boy who plays with dolls that he is a girl.

None of this is activism. It’s ideological enforcement, language policing, nasty online abuse, and regressive demands dressed up as virtue. And there are children—questioning, vulnerable children—who are paying the price for our collective reluctance to say so.

 It’s not bigotry to notice. It’s not cruelty to object. It’s not backward to ask who, exactly, modern LGBTQ+ activism is for.

 Be brave. Question the narrative you’re being fed. Kindness that involves lying to and medicalizing kids, betraying lesbian and gay people, rolling back women’s hard-fought rights, and threatening those who object is not kindness at all.

None of it ever was kindness.

ABOUT TIME, TOO.

Joanne Jacobs offers a plea from California's (checks notes) college professors.  "Don't make us reteach middle-school math, say STEM profs at 'test-free' UC."

Apparently the college boards, let alone mathematics placement tests, were exclusionary, or something.

Dropping standardized test scores for admissions was supposed to expand equity, writes Gabrielle Temaat on College Fix. The University of California system stopped requiring standardized test scores for admission in 2020, and many other universities did the same.

However, highly selective universities such as Yale, Brown, Dartmouth and Penn have reinstated the SAT requirement, "after studies found standardized test scores to be the best predictor of students’ future academic performance." Princeton will reinstate the requirement starting with the 2027–28 admissions cycle, she writes.

That might help with faculty morale, although the government schools are perpetuating a different sort of fraud on the admissions offices.  “A lot of students have taken precalculus or calculus in high school, and they've basically been lied to by their school systems. They don't actually know these subjects at all."  That could be from that open letter signed by multiple California system professors calling attention to the Distressed Material matriculating despite not being able to do middle school arithmetic, or perhaps from an internal Berkeley report noting the same things.

California might not yet be where Wisconsin is, with legislation requiring the state's universities to identify the sources of Distressed Material.  First you have to recognize you have a problem, then you have to work the problem.  Thus far, nobody has implemented the next step, which is to send the school districts that didn't do it right the first time the bill for staffing those remedial, er, developmental, classes.

PRODUCTIVELY TEACHING THE CONTROVERSIES.

In "Beyond Coddling and Canceling," a trio of contributors to a useful Inside Higher Ed column suggest that waging culture wars over snowflakery is not productive.

Faculty responses to students’ concerns about engaging with material they find disturbing often fall into two camps. Those in the first camp assert that students lack resilience as a result of being coddled their entire lives and so have a tendency to frame everyday struggles as catastrophic or traumatic when they are not. This may lead to the view that we need not take these concerns seriously, that students must attend classes or events covering this content or face the consequences.

The second camp argues that students’ claims of experiencing trauma, distress, discomfort or offense necessitate a university-level response. This may take the form of “trigger warnings,” policies that allow students to avoid content without consequences or even prohibitions on sensitive content altogether. Although they have very different perspectives, these camps share some common ground in that each is deciding whether an experience can or should be coded as disturbing or traumatic enough to warrant action.

A university classroom ought to be a place to grapple with ideas, including dangerous ideas, and these authors might be recognizing that a danger properly prepared for is something to be respected but not feared.  "Our concern is with ... the growing expectation that universities should shield students from difficult content as a matter of course."

EKPYROSIS, UNDER WAY?

Roger "Tenured Radicals" Kimball sees the fires.  "Labour’s Rout, MAGA’s Surge, and Iran’s Slow Surrender."  James "Long Emergency" Kunstler also sees them.  "The Earth Moves Just a Bit."  Buckle in, he suggests.  Let's see what his Friday analysis of Our President's state visit to China looks like.

Most importantly, the Credentialed Elite's worship-words no longer have purchase.  "Republicans have finally figured out how to use [power]. We’re not going to be constrained by alleged norms and alleged principles and alleged guardrails anymore. You can call us racist all you want, and we don’t care. You might as well call us hamsters. It doesn’t matter to us because it’s all baloney. It’s all a scam. This is a bare-knuckle political fight, and we’re finally throwing fists."

GIVE EMERGENCE A CHANCE.

The latest issue of Journal of Economic Perspectives, which the American Economic Association post on the public viewing part of their web pages, features a "Competition in Health Care" Symposium in the latest issue.  It is that Journal's practice to group several papers into a themed symposium, and the papers address a multiplicity of ways in which trade-tested betterments might emerge, or not.

YOU SAY YOU WANT SOME DEVOLUTION?

Reason's J. D. Tuccille gets to the heart of the matter.  "Government Shouldn't Be Important Enough To Fight Over."  Often it is, and his elaboration reinforces our stance on emphasizing the school board rather than the presidency.  He opens with a claim that might run counter to the sentiments in the Declaration of Independence about the Right of the People to alter destructive governments.

Government shouldn't be important enough to motivate people to kill others to gain control. Moreover, people willing to engage in violence to seize the means of governance have no business exercising political power. These are points we should be drumming home after the latest in a series of assassination attempts against President Donald Trump and other administration officials at a time of surging political violence in the United States.

You have to read through several paragraphs before it becomes clear his gripe is with Government from Washington.

The usual call, at this point, is for people to turn down the rhetoric. But that's pointless when Americans perceive that they're at risk from opponents who wield the vast power of government and plan to use it against them. That's not an irrational fear, and words aren't the danger here—the danger is government that reaches into all areas of life and which really is perilous in the hands of those motivated by malice.

"If in this country law has always been king, its empire has never been so expansive. More than ever, we turn to the law to address any problem we perceive. More than ever, we are inclined to use national authorities to dictate a single answer for the whole country," Supreme Court Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch and co-author Jane Nitze warned in a 2024 essay.

The "empire" that is "too expansive" is Government from Washington, and the discontents he invokes in getting to that assertion involve the national political parties treating slim governing majorities as an excuse to implement their most expansive policy wish-list, rather than as acting as a slightly more effective check on the implementations of the outgoing governing majority.  That, Mr Tuccille concludes, cannot end well.

At a time when Americans agree on so little—other than that they dislike each other—there are no "right" people to hold office and control the instruments of power. We've turned elections into existential threats to those who lose. We emphasized the "all" in "winner takes all," and we're paying the price.

Understandably fearful of government in the hands of enemies, Americans are literally fighting over political power. The violence won't stop, and will probably escalate, until there's no political danger worth fighting over.

Unfortunately, his essay ends there, rather than with a full-throated endorsement of enumerated, separated, and limited federal powers and an expansion of those policy decisions devolved to the several States and to the people.

REALITY ALWAYS WINS.

Intellectuals forget that models are abstractions.

Intellectuals are rewarded for their models, not reality. And the data and analysis that looks elegant on paper is often disastrous on the ground. Yet, when their models are contradicted by reality, most intellectuals don’t have the courage to accept the reality, instead they double down on their models…

…and this is what turns them into idiots.

Go.  Read.  Understand.  Engage with reality.

Time to log off and mow the grass.

THAT'S HOW IT IS WITH SACRED PRIORS.

I did not expect "For 'Sensitive Issues,' Read 'Sacred Priors'" to be validated so quickly or by an academician so highly placed.  And yet here we are.  "Garber Says He is ‘Disappointed’ by Student ‘Ignorance’ on Israel-Palestine Conflict."

Harvard President Alan M. Garber ’76 said he was “disappointed” by the widespread ignorance of Harvard students who expressed strong opinions on the Israel-Palestine conflict — and their disinterest in learning the facts of the issue.

Speaking at an event in Manhattan, Garber said he was struck both by students who held firm views without a grasp of the underlying history and by those who chose to avoid forming views altogether.

“If you’re going to have strong views about an issue,” he said, “I would hope that at a University you would have the curiosity to learn the facts.”

The remarks mark a shift in emphasis for Garber, who has spent much of the past year warning about deteriorating conditions for free expression on campus. In a December podcast appearance, he argued that Harvard “went wrong” by allowing faculty to inject their personal views into the classroom, a shift he said discouraged open disagreement.

On Monday, Garber made clear he sees the problem extending beyond faculty.

Garber described the attitude among students as “disturbing” and “ignorant,” saying he was especially troubled by a combination of shallow knowledge and reluctance to engage in disagreement.

“What I really felt was most disturbing as a Jewish president, but also somebody who cares personally a lot about the issues that were being discussed, is the level of ignorance among people on all sides of this issue,” he said.

“The lack of knowledge and this unwillingness to have open dialogue pain me even more,” Garber added.

Where to begin?  What is the effect of nearly a half-century now of cracking down on speech that "creates a hostile environment" or is "harassing and demeaning?"  What is the effect of enabling some people to live their illusions because it is "their truth," and you get written up for questioning it, on that curiosity to learn the facts?  And how often have people learned that "dialogue" is a worship-word meaning the relevant deanlet gets to set the wrong-thinkers straight?

WHAT DOES VICTORY LOOK LIKE?

At the beginning of the month, Marc Thiessen with the American Enterprise Institute offered five steps for Our President to declare victory.

1.  Complete all remaining military tasks.
2.  Eliminate the remaining Iranian leaders who were spared for the purpose of negotiations.
3.  Unilaterally declare victory.
4.  Impose peace terms.
5.  Bar Iran from firing on protesters and set conditions for eventual regime collapse.

It's easier to sit at one's desk in Washington than it is to implement those things, but then, the thrust of his column is "accomplish enough to declare victory and go home."  The principal objectives of the United States are that the mullahs not acquire hot rocks and that Iran stop exporting politicized gangbangers throughout Asia Minor.  Those objectives align with those of Israel and the Gulf Arab states, although, as we repeatedly note, they are not congruent.

HOW IT STARTED.

Both television commentator Laura Ingraham and radio commentators Clay Travis and Buck Sexton have commended "How Trump Took the U.S. to War With Iran," which Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman filed in New York's Times.  Yes, that's a lot of black swans in flight at once, and here's why.

This account of how Mr. Trump took the United States into war is drawn from reporting for a forthcoming book, “Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump.” It reveals how the deliberations inside the administration highlighted the president’s instincts, his inner circle’s fractures and the way he runs the White House. It draws on extensive interviews conducted on the condition of anonymity to recount internal discussions and sensitive issues.

The reporting underscores how closely Mr. Trump’s hawkish thinking aligned with Mr. Netanyahu’s over many months, more so than even some of the president’s key advisers recognized. Their close association has been an enduring feature across two administrations, and that dynamic — however fraught at times — has fueled intense criticism and suspicion on both the left and the right of American politics.

Yes, there's a lot of the predictable, antagonistic ankle-biting in that passage.  Read on:

In the Situation Room on Feb. 11, Mr. Netanyahu made a hard sell, suggesting that Iran was ripe for regime change and expressing the belief that a joint U.S.-Israeli mission could finally bring an end to the Islamic Republic.

At one point, the Israelis played for Mr. Trump a brief video that included a montage of potential new leaders who could take over the country if the hard-line government fell. Among those featured was Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of Iran’s last shah, now a Washington-based dissident who had tried to position himself as a secular leader who could shepherd Iran toward a post-theocratic government.

Mr. Netanyahu and his team outlined conditions they portrayed as pointing to near-certain victory: Iran’s ballistic missile program could be destroyed in a few weeks. The regime would be so weakened that it could not choke off the Strait of Hormuz, and the likelihood that Iran would land blows against U.S. interests in neighboring countries was assessed as minimal.

Besides, Mossad’s intelligence indicated that street protests inside Iran would begin again and — with the impetus of the Israeli spy agency helping to foment riots and rebellion — an intense bombing campaign could foster the conditions for the Iranian opposition to overthrow the regime. The Israelis also raised the prospect of Iranian Kurdish fighters crossing the border from Iraq to open a ground front in the northwest, further stretching the regime’s forces and accelerating its collapse.

No, those hopes have not, six weeks in, proven out.

LET THE ANKLE-BITING BEGIN.

Our President gave a speech last night that probably changed exactly zero minds.  That might be because everybody who has been paying attention to the dismantling of the mullahs' tyranny is so wedded to his priors that there's no changing minds.  Consider "Trump's Iran Speech" by Outside the Beltway's James Joyner.  "Nineteen minutes. Zero answers."  Which conclusion he validates by citing all the usual founts of Establishmentarian Process Worship, i.e. New York's Times, Washington's Post, National "Public" Radio, The Associated Press (editorial takeaways rather than reporting), Reuters (same gripe), The British Broadcasting Corporation (This is Londonistan).  His complaint?  "While I’ve thought President Trump owed the public more explanation for the war effort than he’d given so far, scheduling a prime time address creates expectations that some major new development will be announced. Simply, as BBC put it, rehashing his social media posts falls well short of that. This was the classic meeting that could have been an email."

WILL THE THING BE PRESSED?

Our President is negotiating, or not, perhaps through an intermediary, with Iranian officials who are, or not, making decisions of state.  As we prepare for a weekend of recovery from the big O Scale show and determining the finalists in the basketball tournaments, Our President is hailing the passage of eight, or perhaps ten, oil tankers that he described as "a gift" and he has pledged not to make good on his threat to unleash the Air Force on Iran's power plants until April 6.  Iran's passage guarantees apparently didn't apply to at least two Chinese container ships.  His Secretary of State is still dickering with European diplomats who maintain a touching faith in the sort of diplomatic process that has worked so well for the past half century.  While the reality show president engages in the sort of showmanship that gets the Excessively Earnest People fretting, Israel's military continues to press its case.  "Defense Minister Israel Katz warned on Friday that Israel would ramp up its strikes on Iran in the coming days, citing continued Iranian ballistic missile fire at civilian targets in Israel, despite US President Donald Trump’s apparent efforts to bring the hostilities to a halt."

A SMALL STEP TOWARD A STATE OF GOOD REPAIR.

After a couple of weeks of unrelentingly gloomy posting, here's an encouraging development.  "Ruth's Chris Steakhouse Is Single Handedly Bringing Society Back From The Brink By Enforcing A Business Casual Dress Code And Not Allowing Hats In The Dining Room."  That's Barstool contributor Captain Cons, with a ringing endorsement of the house rule.

I, for one, am thrilled about this even if it's been a rule for a while. Unless you're new around here, you know I am in favor of enforcing guardrails on our society. I don't need to dive deep into the sociological impacts of how we speak, dress, and act, but plenty of folks far smarter than me have done the research. The research says if we comport ourselves better in public, society improves.

It is the cluster of institutions and norms that reinforce middle-class habits that matters.

There are still a few holdouts.  "Ruth’s Chris Asks Adults to Dress Like Adults, and the Internet Has a Full Meltdown."  Well, yes, and David Manney knows why.  "Twenty-five years ago, the very idea that a nice restaurant would even need to set a dress code for normal folks would've sounded completely ridiculous."

Chili's decided to distinguish themselves by mocking Ruth's Chris.

A chain restaurant built around burgers and margaritas took a shot at a steakhouse for having standards. The hypocrisy is thicker than their queso.

Ruth’s Chris made clear their policy reflects the experience they intend to provide, which includes maintaining an environment that matches the price point and expectations of their guests.

Business casual isn't a burden; it's the baseline for a place charging top dollar for eating cow.

This entire episode exposes how deranged parts of our culture have become. To many of our friends on the left these days, I'm apparently a male chauvinist because I open doors for women, help carry heavy bags, and still say, "Please, may I?" and "Thank you."

I taught my daughters those same habits without even realizing how much it mattered. Years ago, we stopped for gas in southern Ohio during a wedding trip. They used proper manners with the cashier, who stopped what she was doing, praised how well-mannered they were, and credited their upbringing. That moment sticks with me because it shows how rare basic courtesy has become.

Standards only disappear when people stop defending them.  Just as we have been saying for years.  "Perhaps that was necessary, there being reasons to question traditions being followed simply for their own sake, and that might have been what the Consciousness Revolution was all about.  But when evidence accumulates that your experiment against reality has failed, maybe it's time to restore the norms and the signals.  I repeat: restore.  It's not about turning clocks back, it is about achieving a state of good repair."