Why I’ll (Probably) Vote Next Week 
My 50-Year Transition Towards Conservatism

Brett, the young man who cuts my hair every three weeks, was an early voter this year. We talked about his choices – the votes he cast for the presidency, as well as those he cast for propositions on the Florida ballot.

I was surprised by how much study he told me he did before voting on the propositions, but he said that he felt that if he was going to vote, he should know what he was voting for or against. And I was more than a little humbled by our conversation.

I know Brett as a person with strong sentiments about most of the issues that divide American voters – freedom, equality, taxation, welfare, war, and more recently inflation, immigration, social justice, and abortion. So, I assumed he would cast his vote the way most Americans do: along party lines.

The fact that he had gone online and spent hours studying the pros and cons of all the propositions on the ballot reminded me of something I had gradually come to realize over the 54 years I’ve had the right to vote: I had little to no idea about who or what I was voting for.

During my 20s and 30s, I was a regular voter. I never spent any time studying the candidates or the issues I was voting for. I felt that I knew all I needed to know based on what I knew about the inclinations of my parents and favorite teachers – which were very much on the left.

I was, like so many young people today, a professed Communist and a card-carrying Conscientious Objector during my college years. I continued to protest the Vietnam War until it ended. And even then, as so many of my friends returned from their stints as soldiers and told me their stories, I developed an uncomfortable and disappointing distrust of my government and politics generally, not just the politicians that supported that war.

I declared myself an Independent. And I described my political views as many Independents do today: fiscally conservative, but socially liberal. That felt good. Even virtuous. But it was never helpful in making voting decisions because the Democrats at the time represented social liberalism while the Republicans were the party of fiscal restraint.

I tried to find a solution for this dilemma by, among other things, reading both The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. But that only made things worse. Because I felt that the most important political issue was the question of war or peace, it became clear to me that President Eisenhower had been right when he warned Americans against the Military Industrial Complex, and I began to see both parties as pilgrims marching to the same Holy Site, just wearing differently colored clothes.

This led to several decades of mostly not voting. I could see clearly that both parties were aligned in supporting and extending the Cold War that had started soon after I was born, and that, for the most part, social welfare spending and taxes were going up regardless of which party was in office and/or dominant in the legislature.

When my youthful goal of becoming a writer morphed into becoming a publisher, I was forced to understand economics as it operates where the economy takes place – i.e., in business, rather than in government and non-profit institutions and academia.

And that changed my perspective a third time. I was still a fiscal conservative. And although I was still a strong believer in the sharing of wealth (all forms of wealth), I no longer believed that government could ever do a good job of that. On the contrary, my beliefs about the effective way to share wealth were almost entirely opposed to the philosophy that drives the social welfare programs of government and even most of the largest non-profit charities.

I am thinking seriously about voting this year, but although I feel like I know enough to make the right choice for the presidency, I haven’t done any work on Florida’s propositions – as Brett has – and I feel obliged to get that done before I make my final decision.

And this brings us to three of the things that I hope you’ll pay particular attention to in this issue, all of which might influence your decisions (present and future) as a voter: a quiz, a video lesson on basic economic theory, and a book review (one of the four book reviews in this issue) about the ideas of one of the world’s greatest economists.

Who’s Controlling the Information You Get Online? 

Zuckerberg just emptied out the whole can of beans. Prior to the 2020 election, the FBI and the Justice Department intimidated Facebook into flagging scientific studies whose results were critical of the COVID vaccines as fake news and burying news negative to President Biden (including Hunter’s laptop story and that the president’s son was paid tens of millions of dollars by Ukraine, Russia, and China to influence his father during Obama’s tenure).

If you limit your news to the establishment press, you may have missed all that. But it’s true and it’s documented and eventually it will be accepted as true, as other social media insiders feel free to tell the truth and more of the facts from the X files are reported on.

But the gaslighting and censorship go beyond the big social media forums. Senior executives at Google are beginning to talk about the bias built into the search engine’s algorithms. And most recently, Wikipedia co-founder Dr. Larry Sanger complained about the drift towards the left in the platform’s information gathering and fact checking. He lamented that Wikipedia, which once “allowed people to work together and represent a global array of perspectives on every topic” now just represents the establishment’s point of view.

In the last four or five years, I’ve noticed this bias and noted that it’s been getting worse. I have noticed it this past year with Wikipedia, too. Data and stories that I found and read in the past are impossible to locate, and some of Wikipedia’s content is starting to sound like it’s been filtered through a DEI screen.

Read more from Dr. Sanger here.

The Greatness and Difficulty of English 

English is spoken in the big cities of just about any country an American tourist might visit. Do anything touristy, like check in to a hotel or go to a restaurant or go shopping, and you will find people that can speak to you in English – and it’s not only because it helps them relieve you of your American dollars.

One reason English is so widely spoken is, of course, because the US dollar is the world’s go-to currency and American tourists spend more dollars while traveling overseas than any other nationality.

But there is another reason that language experts say is equally or more important. Among the major languages of the world, English is one of the easiest to learn. Its grammar is simpler than that of the Romance languages (French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and Romanian). And its diction is easier than German.

If you’ve ever compared the length of books written in English to versions translated into other languages, you may also have noticed that the English versions are usually considerably more compact. This is because English has a comparatively huge vocabulary due to its long history of readily incorporating words from other languages, including languages as diverse as Chinese, Japanese, Farsi, Hindi, and Native American dialects.

The worldwide acceptance of English is a benefit that English speakers that don’t travel abroad don’t have the opportunity to appreciate. If you want to say something and be understood in distant parts of the globe, English is always your best bet.

But there is a problem with English as a lingua franca that is seldom discussed. I’m talking about communication between English speakers with different accents. I’ve been to most of the world’s countries where English is at least one of its official languages. And I can tell you that communicating in some of those countries is not easy.

For example, I have great difficulty understanding the English spoken in northern England, Ireland, and Scotland. In parts of the Caribbean – I’m thinking of Grand Cayman, Bermuda, the Bahamas, and the British Virgin Islands – I have considerably fewer problems than I have in northern England, Ireland, and Scotland. But I have more difficulty in Jamaica, Trinidad, and Tobago, as well as the Turks and Caicos. It may surprise you to know that, for me, the easiest English-speaking countries are in Africa, e.g., Nigeria, Zimbabwe, and Kenya.

I’m thinking about this because of a short email exchange I had yesterday with CF, one of my three brothers. At the end of our discussion about his son’s birthday, he signed off, saying: “I am about to go into a meeting with my Indian programmers.”

I replied: “Have a good meeting… Hope you understand everything they say!”

He picked up on that and wrote, “Well, of course they speak English, and probably better than I do. But their accent is so strong that my most common response is: ‘Mahesh, you have a beautiful voice and I’m sure it’s just my aged hearing, but can you repeat that and say it a bit slower.’”

“I know that very well from my visits to our Indian office in Mumbai,” I wrote back. “My partners and I would be meeting with six or eight people – all smart, college educated, etc. But there was always one whose accent was so thick that I could not understand a word. Like you do, I would politely ask him to repeat what he had just said. And he would… exactly the way he had said it the first time. Because everyone else in the room had seemed to understand him perfectly, he had no reason to think my problem was his accent. He probably thought my mind had drifted. So I’d say something like, ‘I sort of see what you mean, but I’m not sure. Can you please say it again?’ He would look at me oddly, then repeat what he had just said – and again, I would comprehend nothing. At that point, thoroughly embarrassed, I would just smile appreciatively, nod, and say, ‘Ahah.’”

I am no longer directly involved in that business. But sometimes, when I think back on those conversations and the important issues we were discussing, I wonder what my embarrassment cost our business in profits. How many bad projects were approved by my “Ahahs,” and how many good projects were aborted?

How Much Do You Know About US Debt? 

Question: Do you know what the current level of US government debt is?

Answer: $35 trillion in national debt – which is $105,000 for every individual and $270,000 for every US household.

Question: Do you know how much of that debt was acquired during the last 12 months?

Answer: $2.3 trillion. That’s about $6.4 billion every single day, roughly $266.7 million an hour, and around $4.44 million a minute.

Question: Do you know how much of your income taxes were spent on interest on the national debt?

Answer: Last year, US Treasury net interest expense was $81 billion. That’s 43% of the $185 billion the government collected in income tax receipts.

I know. This is hard to believe if you trust the government. But if you trust the government, you haven’t thought seriously about it. The way our government works is that all the incentives of the political class favor endless borrowing and endlessly increasing debt. A debt bubble that will one day pop.

Here is Bill Bonner explaining why this is so.

Humanity’s Greatest Existential Threat 

From GM, a regular contributor:

“After witnessing the stupendous failure of the Secret Service in Butler, PA (and the press conferences), and not wishing to believe it was intentional, I sought to find another excuse. I believe I may have found the answer and am anxious to share. Many of you inherently know this, but even with non-life-threatening situations it is good to be armed (poor choice of words?) with this validating info. If you have ever had to call customer service, there is a 95% (my estimate) chance you will benefit by simply remembering (in advance) the following laws of human stupidity as laid out in an article from the Quartz website. My recent call to Comcast comes to mind.

In 1976, a professor of economic history at the University of California, Berkeley, published an essay outlining the fundamental laws of a force he perceived as humanity’s greatest existential threat: Stupidity.

Law 1: Always and inevitably, everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation.

Law 2: The probability that a certain person is stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person.

Law 3. A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses.

Law 4: Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals. In particular, non-stupid people constantly forget that at all times and places and under any circumstances to deal and/or associate with stupid people always turns out to be a costly mistake.

Law 5: A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person.

“Click here for a full explanation of the above.” – GM

Caveat Intellectualis 

My brother, who is a serious academic, once mentioned that one of the things he does to keep au courant on the literary news outside his specialty (Greek and Latin philology) is to read Literary Hub, an e-zine that covers everything from Gilgamesh to The Great Gatsby to Gone Girl.

I can see how, if you were teaching literature of whatever time and genre at a top college today, you’d want to have something clever to say about the latest literary scuttlebutt. And I have enjoyed reading Lit Hub for that. But in the last year or two, I can’t bear to even look at it because of how Woke its editorial policy has become.

Woke cultural concepts and trends are tailormade for busy executives and their party-planning spouses because they provide topical and politically correct opinions and rationales for people that don’t have time to think for themselves.

And that is why 15 minutes spent with a Woke primer like Lit Hub could be helpful for any up-and-climbing academic who has given the great majority of his waking hours to a very specific rabbit hole of literature. There simply isn’t time to find out what’s going on in the rest of the literary world, let alone identify what news bits will be conversation topics and what sort of wry or witty comment might allow one to manage one’s way through a cocktail party full of professors and graduate students without risking looking like a fool. (Which is exactly what most of the people there are hoping you will do.)

So if you work or socialize inside the world of literature, you may want to subscribe to the Lit Hub website. But I must warn you that at least 50% of everything they publish are pieces like the following:

* Andrea Freeman on the impact of systematic oppression on indigenous cuisine in the United States. (“Frybread arouses passionate feelings in its fans and detractors… but everyone agrees that it is a far cry from the pre-colonial foods.”) Click here.

* Mathangi Subramanian on how understanding her own neurodiverse character helped her understand herself. (“I fretted that, despite my diligence, my story was riddled with errors that would, at best, disappoint or, at worst, traumatize my readers.”) Click here.

For Whom the Bell Tolls

By Ernest Hemingway
Originally published in 1940
480 pages

After reading The Hemingway Stories, the collection I reviewed on May 13, I pulled an old copy of For Whom the Bells Tolls from my home library, read it over the weekend, and was not the least bit disappointed.

I know a few smart people that don’t like Hemingway. One of them restricts his reading to non-fiction books and considers fiction largely a waste of his time. When I convinced him to read a Hemingway novel a decade ago, he complained that he found Hemingway’s style “irritating.”

An otherwise well-read woman friend says she doesn’t like Hemingway’s fiction because it is too “macho.” She equates his machismo to an aspect of toxic masculinity – i.e., talking endlessly about things (such as fishing and hunting and bullfighting) that are, from her perspective, “irrelevant and superficial.”

On the one hand, I am perfectly happy to excuse their Hemingway-phobia as a case of each-to-his-own. On the other hand, I secretly believe there is something missing in their literary sensibility that is worthy of condemnation or pity.

But never mind. I’m recommending For Whom the Bell Tolls to everyone that either enjoys Hemingway or is undecided because they have never read him.

The Plot 

For Whom the Bell Tolls tells the story of Robert Jordan, an antifascist American volunteer fighting in the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s. It is based on Hemingway’s experiences as a reporter during that war for the North American Newspaper Alliance.

What I Liked About It

What I always like in Hemingway. His prose style, which includes his unique way of composing sentences and paragraphs. His characters and their development. The way he establishes the mise-en-scene. The precision of his diction, the detail of his descriptions, his discipline of showing not telling, and the way he is able to put the reader into the action as a sort of invisible eavesdropper. I even like the way Hemingway makes dialog spoken in Spanish sound foreign by using antiquated English adjectives and pronouns.

What I Didn’t Like 

As with all my favorite novelists – C. Dickens, M. Twain, J. Austen, W. Cather, Dostoevsky, V. Nabokov, G. Orwell, J. Conrad, F.S. Fitzgerald, D. Hammer, E. Waugh, R. Chandler, R.P. Warren, J. Steinbeck, G. Greene, and M. Amis, to name more than you wanted to hear – there is really nothing in Hemingway’s writing that I don’t like. (And I have a much longer list of novelists I like very much, but with reservations.)

Critical Reception 

“If the function of a writer is to reveal reality,” Maxwell Perkins wrote to Hemingway after reading the manuscript, “no one ever so completely performed it.”

Widely considered to be one of the best war novels of all time, the Pulitzer Prize committee for letters unanimously recommended For Whom the Bell Tolls be awarded the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel in 1941. The Pulitzer board agreed. However, Nicholas Murray Butler, president of Columbia University and ex officio head of the board at that time, found the novel offensive and persuaded the board to reverse its determination. As a result, no Pulitzer was given in that category that year.

Learning How to Forgive Yourself 

I recently delivered a video presentation to senior executives in a Japanese publishing company I write for titled “The Zen Secret for Never Regretting Your Business and Financial Decisions.” In that presentation, I spoke about how to set goals and be intentional about achieving them, but without attaching yourself emotionally to the results.

Following the presentation, I got a note from one of the attendees, who wrote:

As I was interpreting you confidently with my tone of “as if I’m doing it myself already,” I noticed I’m so not doing it. Suffering from what turned out to be the opposite of what I wanted it to turn out has been really big and I tend to blame myself.

But like you slightly touched on, it shouldn’t have been all because of me. There could have been some other natural forces that I couldn’t control that led to the unwanted result. When I think this way, I feel a little easier. I’d better detach myself from the result, and have Plan B.

was happy that I had communicated the thrust of my idea, but I was concerned about the statement that “there could have been some other natural forces that I couldn’t control.”

I realized that there should have been a Part II to my presentation: Learning how to forgive yourself without denying or diminishing responsibility.

So, this is what I wrote back…

What I Should Have Added to My Talk

After reading your note, I have another idea for you to consider. It goes something like this: “The moment you forgive yourself, the universe forgives you, too.”

Maybe that is too abstract – one of those statements that, while true, is nevertheless impossible to understand unless you have done it yourself or at least seen it done by others.

Your note inspired me to try to do a better job of expressing what I mean by it, so let me try again…

We must take responsibility for our actions. Trying to avoid that responsibility by blaming other people or other things cannot ease the pain we feel for something we regret doing.

So that’s the first step.

The second and perhaps more difficult step is to forgive yourself. For most people brave enough to take step one, this is not easy. We’ve all been taught as children to feel shame and regret. For all sorts of things.

And there is nothing wrong with having those feelings. They are part of the larger recognition that we are all part of an interconnected universe, and that everything we do has some effect, large or small, on everything else. We all damage things. We all hurt and/or damage other beings. We do it purposefully through action or accidentally through inaction. Feeling regret and/or shame about it is a natural response.

But then we must move on.

And to move on, we must realize that the only way we can forgive ourselves is to give up the egoistic idea that we have control over everything we do – whether unconsciously, accidentally, or purposefully – and how it affects others.

We must be humble enough to accept our weaknesses and vulnerabilities. We must understand that, as imperfect beings with limited powers, we are no match for nature – that we should strive towards improving our awareness and behavior, but, at the same time, acknowledge that, however much progress we think we are making, we are, from the larger context of nature, bit-part actors in a very short scene of a very long play whose recurring principal themes are of tragedy and comedy with only a single thread that connects them. And that thread is irony, whose essential insight is, to paraphrase Newton, that each truth has an equal and opposite truth.

I’m writing this, as I sometimes do, as a hypocrite. I grew up secretly blaming myself for everything that wasn’t perfect in my life. I mentally tortured myself for every failure, every stumble, every disappointing outcome.

Looking back, I see that, at some egocentric level, I was seeing myself as a sort of heroic figure in a great struggle for human perfection. Not just for me, but for the rest of the world. Now I try to see myself more realistically, as a bit player in a cosmic comedy of never-ending moments of achievement and failure, love and loneliness, happiness and hurt.

But the failures and the loneliness and the hurt do not have to be constant and continuous. If we can see ourselves and our actions in the larger context, we can forgive ourselves – not to rationalize our mistakes or our limitations but to accept responsibility for the harm and damage we cause – and we can move ahead with humility and hope.

And if we can do that – if you can do that, even once in a while, you will notice that the world will be that much more ready to forgive you, too.

The Decline of the Convertible 

Something is going on in America that is not especially newsworthy, but it is intriguing. Because it must reflect some sort of larger social or economic change that perhaps is widely known.

Did you know that…

* In 2004, Americans bought 315,000 convertibles.

* In 2010, that number was down to 144,000.

* Between March 2023 and February 2024, sales plunged to 70,000.

* Today, they comprise less than one-half a percent of car purchases.

Meanwhile, purchases of SUVs have been climbing. What’s going on?

One unconvincing explanation: David Lucsko, a car historian, says automakers now design vehicles for consumers to seal themselves in. “I think the car has become more and more a cocoon where we go to be isolated from the world,” he says. “Driving a convertible means being exposed to the world.”

Another unconvincing explanation: Convertibles are often seen as easy targets for car theft. A thief can easily remove items out of a convertible or access the ignition if the top is down.

I suppose the real question this brings up is this: Why am I spending a half-hour of a beautiful, sunny, Florida day trying to figure this out?

Hate Speech? Or Legitimate Call for Resistance? 

SH sent me this article from The New York Times about Khymani James, a student at Columbia who was barred from the school’s campus after comments he made on social media went viral.

SH included this video of parts of James’ social media post.

“In my humble opinion,” SH said, “this is where social media has, again, a huge problem in allowing a totally misguided schmuck like this to post real ‘Hate’ online!”

I see it differently.

Because this jackass had his comments captured by social media, someone like SH can see them and be outraged, and then forward them to someone like me, who can then forward them to his friends or even publish them in his blog in a context that perhaps will wake up those people that still believe the pro-Palestinian movement is a socially conscious, liberal-minded cause.

What is going on right now on campuses all over the world is becoming, frighteningly and increasingly, a movement that has to remind us of the history of antisemitism in Germany and much of the rest of Europe prior to the Holocaust.

By now, we all understand what the pro-Palestinian chant – “From the river [Jordan] to the sea [Mediterranean], Palestine will be free” – means. It means: “Get rid of Israel.”

In recent months, these protests have become larger and more aggressive, with more specific antisemitic language, physical confrontations, and arrests.

What has also proliferated, according to Jarrett Stepman, a reporter for The Daily Signal, is the slogans themselves. The scariest one (for me): “There is only one solution: Intifada revolution!”

Click here to read Stepman’s account of an April 23 protest (participated in by NYU students and faculty) in New York’s Washington Square.