Opinion

No lessons learned from 2016 and other commentary

Eye on 2020: No Lessons Learned From 2016

“Americans aren’t just fleeing liberal strongholds like California, Chicago and New York in droves. We are moving politically, too,” writes Bridget Phetasy at Spectator USA. She has “received hundreds of e-mails from others who feel politically homeless.” Ex-Democrats say “the ‘mostly peaceful protests’ were the pivotal moment that they abandoned the mainstream media and started seeking out other perspectives.” Finally learning how the media take President Trump’s remarks “out of context,” one man wrote, “I felt like I’d been lied to for almost four years.” Most Democrats voting for Trump this year report “being ostracized, shamed or losing a close friend or family member over politics.” After Hillary Clinton’s loss, Phetasy thought “the left would learn that bullying . . . tone-policing and punishing people for wrong-think” only alienates supporters. It hasn’t.

Libertarian: Brace for Soaring Debt

By 2050, America’s IOUs will zoom to twice GDP, warns Eric Boehm at Reason, citing a new Congressional Budget Office projection. By 2023, they are “expected to hit 107 percent” of economic output, matching the World War II record. Mushrooming debt will boost “the risk of a fiscal crisis,” says the CBO, and slow growth to an average 1.6 percent a year for the next three decades, almost a full point lower than during the past three. Americans face “decades in which living standards increase” more slowly. “Businesses will have a harder time expanding.” The feds can ­expect major problems balancing their “off-kilter finances.” Meanwhile, both President Trump and Joe Biden have indicated they will add more debt. “The bad news, it seems, will keep coming for a long while.”

Legal watch: SCOTUS Stakes Too High

Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death has led to a national “screaming fit,” ­observes Glenn Harlan Reynolds at USA Today. “When your political system can be thrown into hysteria by something as predictable as the death of an octogenarian with advanced cancer, there’s something wrong.” Why does RBG’s replacement on the Supreme Court “matter so much that even ‘respectable’ media figures are calling for violence in the streets if President Trump tries to replace her?” Because crucial issues, “from ­desegregation to abortion to presidential elections,” are decided there — and the court has lately become “a source of final and largely irrevocable authority that is immune to the ordinary winds of democratic change.”

McMaster: How To Counter the CCP

The Chinese Communist Party “views freedom of expression as a weakness to be suppressed at home and exploited abroad,” former National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster explains at National Review. “The free exchange of information and ideas, however, may be the greatest competitive ­advantage of our societies.” That means countering Beijing’s many propaganda agencies as we also “maximize positive interactions and experiences with the Chinese people” by, for example, ensuring the privacy and freedom of Chinese students studying here and making it safe “for Chinese expatriates to question the CCP’s policies and actions.” Indeed, expats have a unique ability “to counter the party’s predatory actions.” So in the wake of a Hong Kong crackdown, look at “offering visas or granting refugee status to those able to escape the repression.”

Culture critics: The Mob Comes for the Met

“Keith Christiansen, perhaps the single most distinguished curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, was beset by the mob” this summer, The New Criterion’s editors report. Commenting “on a drawing of the French archaeologist Alexandre Lenoir,” who “devoted himself to saving French monuments from the all-consuming maw of the French Revolution,” he said he was “grateful” for those who realized that artworks’ “value . . . extended beyond a defining moment of social and political upheaval and change.” The resulting outrage impelled Christiansen to delete the post and close his account, as the museum’s director, Max Hollein, declared his institution guilty of “white supremacy.” The editors call that “preposterous. The Met is a magnificent repository of masterpieces from around the globe. It has no need to apologize.”

— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board