A National Thanksgiving

A National Thanksgiving: President Washington and America’s National Holiday

Richard Samuelson, Law Liberty

Editor’s note: This essay originally appeared on Thanksgiving Day, 2014.

Thanksgiving is a peculiar holiday, at least in the modern world. Its roots are religious, and the American nation is, at least in law, secular. Its very name speaks of thanks, or gratitude, and gratitude is an ancient virtue. Indeed, Aristotle speaks highly of it. Even so, or perhaps for that reason, it is very American. In his Thanksgiving address in 1922, President Coolidge called it “perhaps the most characteristic of our national observances.” He was not wrong for, as Chesterton wrote, America is “a nation with the soul of a church,” and Abraham Lincoln called us an “almost chosen people.”

The holiday reminds us, in other words, of the peculiar character of the American nation, and of the President’s role in it. Strictly speaking, to be an American is to be an American citizen. When one calls someone an American, the first definition one usually has in mind is political. By contrast, when one says that someone is Chinese or Turkish, the first thought is of an ethnic or racial identity. Even so, there is an American culture. Hence it is very common to say that something is “very American.” Thanksgiving itself deserves that moniker. Is it a constitutional observance?  That’s an open question.

In this holiday we see how the peculiar character of the Presidency compliments our exceptional nationality. Constitutionally speaking, the President is merely the American CEO. His job is to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed,” and in his oath, he swears to “execute the office of the President” and pledges to “preserve, protect and defend the constitution of the United States.”  The oath says nothing about the American “nation.” Indeed the word “nation” does not appear in the Constitution, except in Article I, Section 8 when discussing relations with “foreign nations” and the “law of nations.” Strictly speaking, the President’s job is to put into effect the laws that Congress passes and to defend the “supreme law of the land.” Even so, the President is, in fact, head of state, and the leader of the American people. It is no surprise that the American president has, in time, acquired the trappings of a monarch—think of the entourage he travels with, the way he’s treated at the State of the Union address, the language with which we discuss the “White House’ and its parts, such as the “West Wing.” And a monarch is more than a CEO. He is the leader of the nation, in the classical sense of the nation.

George Washington set the tone for the office in many ways, none more so than in his Thanksgiving Proclamation, given in October, 1789, seven months after he took the oath of office. Why have such a proclamation at all? Where in Article I, Section 8 (the section that lists the powers the people gave the federal government) is the power to proclaim a federal holiday? In 1791 James Madison would criticize Alexander Hamilton’s assertion that the U.S. government has the authority to create a national bank, for nowhere in the Constitution did the people give the federal government the right to create a bank or to create a corporation (an entity that had traditionally been regarded as a “person” in the eyes of the law).   And fourteen years later, the Louisiana Purchase would tie President Jefferson in knots, for nowhere did the people give the U.S. government the right to acquire territory. Yet Madison lost the national bank argument in 1791 and by 1816 he had changed his mind about its constitutionality. Meanwhile, Jefferson didn’t stop the Senate from ratifying the Louisiana Purchase. In other words, he and Madison implicitly accepted that there are some powers that belong to government due to the nature of the thing, and when the people created the U.S. government they, of necessity, allowed it those powers without which no government can function.

The authority to proclaim a Thanksgiving might seem trivial to us—mere words, and an idle declaration.  But it is, in fact, fraught with meaning, for the assumption of such authority highlights the degree to which a President is, by nature, much like a monarch—albeit an elected one. Similarly, it points us to the limits of secular nationalism.

Consider President Washington’s Thanksgiving Proclamation. He begins with the universal “duty of all nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey His will, to be grateful for His benefits, and humbly to implore His protection and favor.” But then he stops, as if he knew some might ask why the President is involved. Washington goes on, “Whereas both Houses of Congress have, by their joint committee, requested me ‘to recommend to the people of the United States a day of public thanksgiving and prayer to be observed by acknowledging with grateful hearts the many and signal favors of Almighty God, especially by affording them an opportunity peaceably to establish a a form of government for their safety and happiness.’” Congress asked Washington to proclaim the day. An interesting request. Congress did not pass a law proclaiming a day of Thanksgiving. Such an act may, according to some constructions of the Constitution, have crossed over into an establishment of religion. Instead, they have merely asked the President to “recommend” such an observance to the people. But if it’s not a law, wherefore does the authority come from? It must adhere in the nature of the thing.

What is the power of a Presidential “recommendation”? Quite a bit, actually. And that is because the President is, as a practical matter, a national father figure. Those of us who are theoretically minded may fuss and fume that there is nothing in the Constitution suggesting such a role, and it is certainly true that there are many Americans who do not see it that way. It is nonetheless true that the President has always had such authority for a significant portion of the country. Even those who object to a particular President or his policies are often reacting as an unhappy child. And that is why a Presidential “recommendation” even of a merely ceremonial sort is simply the nature of the thing. (I am not referring to the modern practice of the President or his minions “recommending” to businesses or Universities that they adopt certain practices. There is no implicit Presidential “or else” in this kind of proclamation.) A few states tried operating without a unitary executive in the years after 1776. The experiment was a failure. By the early 1790s, even Pennsylvania gave up on the effort. And once there is such an executive for the nation as a whole, he becomes “his elective majesty” even if we Americans are loathe to admit it.

That is what is so significant about the opening line of Washington’s Proclamation. He speaks of the “duty of all nations.” Such a declaration implies that nations are all alike in some ways. No nation is or can be exceptional in that regard. A nation, by nature, is a being in a moral universe. In the middle of the Thanksgiving Proclamation, Washington points back to the Declaration of Independence, noting that Americans are grateful “for the peaceable and rational manner in which we have been enabled to establish constitutions of government for our safety and happiness.” Americans should be grateful for the American experiment, the effort to show that men are capable of creating governments based upon “reflection and choice” as the first Federalist puts it. Even nations with governments under constitutions that are delegations of powers by the people cannot change the nature of the thing. And that means that national morality is a fundamental concern. At the start of the Defence of the Constitutions John Adams would link the two: “The people of America have now the best opportunity and the greatest trust in their hands, that Providence ever committed to so small a number since the transgression of the first pair. If they betray their trust, their guilt will merit even greater punishment than other nations have suffered, and the indignation of heaven.”

As Washington noted in his First inaugural Address, nations and individuals alike are judged by a common standard. The Universe being moral, nations that stink with injustice will, almost invariably (the ways of the Almighty being mysterious) suffer, just as individuals who do evil are punished, “since there is no truth more thoroughly established than that there exists in the economy and course of nature an indissoluble union between virtue and happiness; between duty and advantage; between the genuine maxims of an honest and magnanimous policy and the solid rewards of public prosperity and felicity;  . . . the propitious smiles of Heaven can never be expected on a nation that disregards the eternal rules of order and right which Heaven itself has ordained.” President Lincoln would quote the Gospel saying much the same thing “Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh.” In other words, just as a national government has certain powers because of the nature of the thing so, too, is it the case that nations must, by nature, behave in certain ways if they wish to flourish and prosper. That being the case, it is fitting that we, the American people, pause at periodic intervals and give thanks to the being who Created us, and who, in Washington’s words, we hope will “grant unto all mankind such a degree of temporal prosperity as He alone knows to be best.” Happy Thanksgiving.

Richard Samuelson is associate professor of government in Hillsdale College’s Van Andel Graduate School of Statesmanship.

Finally, Good Sign for GOPers in 2024

 Finally, Good Sign for GOPers in 2024

Michael Barone, Jewish World Review

One of the puzzles in this year's surprising and unpredicted (including by me) off-year election results is why the Republicans' 51% to 47% win in the popular vote for House of Representatives did not produce a majority bigger than the apparent 221-214 result. (All numbers here are subject to revision in line with final returns.)

That 51% to 47% margin is identical to Joe Biden's and Barack Obama's popular vote margins in 2020 and 2012, respectively. It is just one digit off from George W. Bush's 51% to 48% win in 2004. It's almost identical to House Democrats' 51% to 48% popular vote margin in 2020, which yielded them an almost identical 222-213 majority.

The big contrast is with 2012, when Democrats carried the House popular vote 49% to 48% but won only 201 seats to the Republicans' 234. How could a party win a 33-seat majority while losing the popular vote, then win only a seven-seat majority while carrying the popular vote by 4 points?

One answer is differential turnout. In 2012, Democrats' popular vote edge owed much to heavy Black voter turnout to reelect the first Black president. But many of those votes came in overwhelmingly Black districts and did nothing to elect Democrats elsewhere.

This year, differential turnout worked against Democrats. Central city turnout was way down, as compared to the last off-year election in 2018 — down 19% in New York City but up 0.3% in the suburbs and upstate; down 13% in Philadelphia, but up 8% elsewhere in Pennsylvania; down 15% in Detroit's Wayne County, but up 6% elsewhere in Michigan; down 12% in Milwaukee County, but up 1% elsewhere in Wisconsin; down 24% in Chicago's Cook County, down only 8% in Chicago's collar counties and downstate.

That reflects population loss in central cities, particularly from Black voters leaving the industrial Midwest for the more economically vibrant and culturally congenial metro Atlanta — making Georgia, with the nation's third highest Black percentage, a target state. It also reflects, after four years of skyrocketing crime and stringent lockdowns, waning enthusiasm among heavily Democratic electorates. That's not a favorable sign for Democratic turnout in 2024.

The second reason is that Republicans failed to harvest significant gains in House seats from their significant gain in popular votes in redistricting. Republicans had a big advantage in partisan redistricting following the 2010 census but only a minimal advantage following the 2020 census.

In particular, Democratic mapmakers and supposedly nonpartisan but liberal-leaning redistricting commissions have no longer felt bound by the Voting Rights Act to pack Black people into black-majority districts — a tactic Republicans have encouraged since the 1990 election cycle because it leaves fewer Democratic voters in adjacent districts.

Abandonment of this supposedly immutable principle is responsible, for example, for the fact that Michigan elected zero Black Democratic congressmen for the first time since 1952. (A Black Republican was elected in mostly white, suburban Macomb County.) Democrats also won a state Senate majority for the first time since 1983 by winning districts that linked heavily Black neighborhoods in Detroit with affluent, mostly white suburbs.

The most important reason for the Republicans' reduced harvest of House seats has been a reduction in clustering. Previously, heavily Democratic voters — Blacks, Hispanics and gentry liberals — have been clustered geographically in central cities, sympathetic suburbs and university towns, while Republican voters have been spread more evenly around the rest of the country.

The effect of clustering can be seen in the number of House districts carried by different presidents. Both Bush and Obama were reelected with 51% of the popular vote. That enabled Bush in 2004 to carry 255 of the 435 House districts. But Obama in 2012 carried only 209. Biden, with 51% in 2020, raised that number to 226.

Democratic clustering has diminished in recent years. Part of the reason is that Democratic groups have become less Democratic. Hispanics voted 29% Republican in 2012 but 39% Republican in 2022. The Asian Republican percentage increased from 25% to around 40%, and the Black Republican percentage increased from 6% to 13%.

Meanwhile, Republican clustering has increased in the wide-open spaces between the Appalachians and the Rockies, from far-out exurbs and in Walmart and Dollar General country beyond.

You can see the evidence from which party won seats with supermajorities. In 2012, 71 Democrats and only 32 Republicans were elected to the House with 70% or more of the vote. Twenty-eight Democrats got 80% or more, whereas only three Republicans did.

This year, by my preliminary count, the 70-plus percent districts moved closer to parity — 58 Democrats and 39 Republicans. Only 18 Democrats and five Republicans won with 80% or more.

Thus, the Republicans' 51% of the total House vote produced a disappointing number of House seats.

However, it also signaled a residual Republican strength. Republican House candidates had a hard time dislodging Democrats in marginal districts. But relatively few were weighted down by highly publicized endorsements of Donald Trump's backward-looking insistence that the 2020 presidential election was stolen; the few identified with that view ran significantly behind the many who didn't.

Instead, Republican House candidates ran ahead of their party's Senate candidates in such states as Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada. They also ran strongly in tandem with landslide winners Ron DeSantis and Marco Rubio in Florida.

Republican House candidates won 58% of the popular vote in the South and 53% in the Midwest, two regions that together account for 298 of the 538 electoral votes. Duplicating that support is one way an unproblematic Republican nominee could top 270 electoral votes in 2024.

The Pathetic Democratic Pantheon

The Pathetic Democratic Pantheon

Victor Davis Hanson, American Greatness

Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and Nancy Pelosi are of no use to the Left in the midterms because it is their radical ideology that was finally enacted and wrecked the country.

Over the last few months the four icons of the Democratic Party—Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and Nancy Pelosi—have hit the campaign trail. 

They’ve weighed in on everything from “right-wing violence” and “election denialists” to the now tired “un-American” semi-fascist MAGA voter—and had nothing much to say about inflation, the border, crime, energy, or the Afghanistan debacle. In this, they remind us just how impoverished and calcified is this left-wing pantheon. 

So why should we take anything they say seriously, given their own records—and especially given their mastery of projecting their own shortcomings upon others as some sort of private exculpation or preemptive political strategy?

Still Hopin’ and Changin’? 

Barack Obama this past week has assumed the role of surrogate president. He is storming the country, while Joe Biden mopes at home or visits shrinking blue enclaves so he can claim post facto, “At least I was out there stumping.” 

Over the last six years, we have become accustomed to Obama’s periodic getaways from one of his three estates. It is always the same. From time to time, he reenters politics to remind us that he did not just cash in on his presidency to become a multi-millionaire. Instead, he is still the Chicago “community activist” of his youth. And so, Obama will not be overshadowed by the Biden crew that is enacting all the crazy things he as president had warned were a bit much even for him. 

At the funeral of the late John Lewis, Obama turned his eulogy into a political rant. He weighed in on the “racist” filibuster, the “Jim Crow relic” that he desperately sought in vain to use to stop the appointment of Justice Samuel Alito. 

At campaign stops, he deplores “divisions” that he, more than any modern figure, helped create. The entire left-wing vocabulary of disparagement for the white lower-working classes (e.g., deplorables, dregs, chumps, irredeemables, etc.) got its start with Obama’s putdown of Pennsylvania voters who rejected him in the 2008 primaries as “clingers.” 

In interviews, Obama suddenly now blasts harsh rhetoric—this from the wannabe tough guy who stole the “The Untouchables” line about bringing a knife to a gun fight. Well before crazy Maxine Waters’ calls to arms, Obama advised his supporters “get in their faces.”

Still, on the campaign trail, Obama appears not so much animated as stale. It is as if he has been suddenly stirred from a long coma that commenced in 2008. It’s the same old, same old—sleeves rolled up. He still resorts to the scripted outbursts of mock anger. And the nerdy prep school graduate still amateurishly modulates his patois—now policy wonk, now breaking into the Southern African-American pastor accent when an audience needs more preachy authenticity. 

He still tries to rev up his crowds with the familiar attacks: Republican demons will cut Social Security, the MAGA semi-fascists are captives of Donald Trump (as if the Democrats have not ceded their souls to woke hysterics), the Republican fanatics will all but kill women by denying abortions, and extremists unlike himself are dividing the country. 

On and on, Obama shouts about social justice. And then he wraps up and must decide to which of his mansions he will fly home (via private jet)—Kalorama, Martha’s Vineyard, Hyde Park, or soon the Waimanalo estate.

Obama offers no solutions much less hints at his own culpability in his sermons. There is nothing about the open border he helped birth. Nothing about Biden’s failed energy policies now bankrupting the middle class that were simply a reification of his energy secretary Steven Chu’s perverse wishes for European-priced gas (“Somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe.”). 

There is nothing about Obama’s old boasts about shutting down coal plants and skyrocketing electricity (“Under my plan . . . electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket.”). 

Nothing is said about the Skip Gates psychodrama and his blanket stereotyped attack on police, the tossing of his own grandmother under the racial bus, the Trayvon Martin racial editorialization, the Ferguson mythologies, and all his efforts to create a binary nation of oppressors and oppressed, as Obama himself determined who is the victim, who the victimizer.

The Role Model Pelosi

After the terrible attack on her husband, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s colleagues are rightly calling for an end to extremist rhetoric. If we are to follow the Democratic clarion call, what might Pelosi herself do to help us to lower the temperature?

Here are a few modest suggestions. 

Contrary to press reports, conservatives deplored the attack on Paul Pelosi. They want his attacker behind bars with no bail until his trial date. And if convicted they wish him to serve a long sentence before parole is even considered. Let us dish out a proper punishment to David DePape; one that can serve as a model to all such thugs who do his kind of devilish work daily against the innocent and weak—but unlike him, are usually exempt from punishment.

Recall that DePape should never have been in the United States. He is an illegal alien who violated his visa and should have had a warrant out for deportation, especially given his prior history of lawlessness. Would that the illegal alien who murdered innocent San Franciscan Kate Steinle had been subject to the likely punishment that now is awaiting DePape.

So yes, we all must lower the temperature. As speaker of the House, Pelosi can do her part in quieting passions, given half the country are her fellow Americans who do not live in the darkness of lies. She might ask Joe Biden to quit calling them semi-fascists and un-American. 

Pelosi herself should never again tear up her copy of the state of the union address on national television. In that congressional forum she was attacking the presidency, not just Donald Trump. Half the voters feel as strongly about Joe Biden as she does about Donald Trump. If, as House speaker, Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) were to follow Pelosi’s precedent and rip up the next Biden State of the Union, would Pelosi find that continuation of her precedent conducive to healing the nation’s wounds?

Pelosi herself should not use any more violent imagery in expressing her anger at a president of the opposite party, much less threaten to use physical violence. 

When she was asked to clarify what she meant in screaming about Trump (“I hope he comes. I want to punch him out. . . . I’ve been waiting for this . . . I’m going to punch him out, and I’m going to go to jail, and I’m going to be happy.”), she scoffed that she could not follow up on her threat only because Trump would never come to Congress to give her the opportunity. 

Whatever one thinks of Trump, Pelosi only lowers the bar when she boasts about feloniously striking a president of the United States. 

That Joe Biden had boasted twice about taking Trump behind the gym to beat him up, and others such as actor Robert DeNiro have echoed such threats (“I’d like to punch him in the face”) was no excuse for her reckless talk. After 2016 it was hard to calibrate all the ways the leftists had shouted ways of slaying Donald Trump—by stabbing, shooting, incineration, or decapitation.

Pelosi should never again delay legislation aimed at protecting Supreme Court justices from the sort of violence that occurred when Justice Brett Kavanaugh was run out of a restaurant, or anti-abortion protesters swarmed his home, or a would-be assassin showed up at his house. 

Why was Pelosi so fearful about expediting such added security? Would prompt action have empowered the factual narrative that the chief threat to Supreme Court justices now arises from radical abortion protestors?

Pelosi might have reminded Democrats to tone down their rhetoric after the near-fatal shooting of Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.). After all, the shooter was a highly political, left-wing activist and former Bernie Sanders’ volunteer. But she did no such thing.

She could have privately reprimanded her own daughter that it was not a funny thing to cheer on the violent attack against Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.), who suffered broken ribs, a collapsed lung, pneumonia, and had to undergo pulmonary surgery. 

When the younger Pelosi used her family name to gain traction by tweeting “Rand Paul’s neighbor was right,” (if she had used her married last name would anyone have read it?), it sent the message that there was a sort of happiness on the Left that a political opponent had been a target of violence. The Left is furious at Donald Trump, Jr. for crudely mocking the Pelosi assault, but he unfortunately followed a precedent long set by others.

She’s Back!

Hillary Clinton is occasionally asked to weigh in on the midterm campaigns, but never in a swing state or hotly contested race. Her presence, like that of Joe Biden’s, would immediately lose the endorser a critical 1-2 points. 

Clinton recently warned that the 2024 election likely will be illegitimate due to Republican instigated “voter fraud.” 

Her outburst can be translated into something like, “The midterm left-wing wipeout may be just a preliminary to a 2024 Democratic disaster.” Hillary preempted Biden who, in his third and latest McCarthyite speech, warned that the “Mega Maga” people are planning devilry years in advance and so, like Hillary, he can now cast doubt on the legitimacy of future elections the Democrats will lose. 

In truth, no one has done more in the last century to impugn the integrity of U.S. elections than Hillary Clinton. She has questioned the 2016, 2020, and 2024 elections, on the theory that any election Democrats might lose is an “attack on democracy.” 

Her sins go way beyond feloniously destroying subpoenaed emails and devices or leveraging her New York senatorial run by Bill Clinton’s presidential pardons or using her office to enrich her family’s foundation as in the case of Uranium One. 

When we return to sane times, historians will assess her 2016 efforts to destroy her opponent, his transition, and his presidency as the greatest election scandal in modern memory. She used three paywalls to hide her efforts to hire foreign national Christopher Steele (who was simultaneously working with the FBI). 

On spec, she used her own contacts such as Charles Dolan to fabricate a phony hit dossier against her opponent and then to seed it within the media and the Obama bureaucracy to smear Trump.

Not content with that failed and likely illegal effort, she then declared the duly elected president illegitimate and the 2016 election all but stolen. 

Her Hollywood friends cut videos begging electors to renounce their constitutional duties, ignore their state tallies, and vote instead for Hillary. Had they gotten their way, the entire federal election system as we know it would have been destroyed.

Then her surrogate, Green Party candidate Jill Stein, sued to overturn the election. Clinton bragged of joining #TheResistance in mock-heroic terms. As an arch-denialist, she urged Joe Biden under no circumstances to concede to Trump if he lost the 2020 vote. 

And now she warns us of others who might emulate her own denialism? 

What does Hillary fear in 2024? That a Trump or DeSantis will hire a Steele-like fraud to fabricate Democrat-Chinese collusion and smear a Democrat nominee? That the loser will not concede as she once urged, or the winner is illegitimate as she once insisted?

Good Old Joe Is Just Old Joe

Instead of a list of supposed communists, Joe Biden apparently has a roster of “election denialists” who he says are running for Senate and Congress and whom he fears will win next Tuesday. And he sets the example for others like House Majority Whip James Clyburn (D-S.C.)—himself a 2004-05 election denialist—who now smears his opponents as Nazis who, he fears, by democratically voting Democrats out of office nationwide will “destroy democracy.” 

What will Biden not lie about? The death of his son, the circumstances in which his first wife died in a car wreck, the fantasy congressional vote on his student-loan forgiveness scheme? The number of states (Joe says, 54, Obama used to swear there are 57)? The very century we are now in? Where he went to college?

Joe, our own Walter Mitty, has variously been a semi-truck driver, an arrested South-African street protestor against apartheid, a surrogate Puerto-Rican child, a black college enrollee, a Ciceronian populist orator, a coal miner’s scion, an honors student, a blue-chip collegiate athlete, a defender against inner-city Corn Poppers, and absolutely ignorant about the Biden family syndicate.

Recall that a non compos mentis Biden was nominated solely as the thin veneer to a hard Left agenda whose avatars were unelectable. Biden was to feign being the colorless, stand-in “moderate” who would “unify” the fractured country, tone down the Trump rhetoric, and let the Trump record sort of proceed on autopilot. 

Then when he played out that part and won, the leftist minders in this Faustian bargain took over to push through, on a one-vote senatorial margin, the most radical left-wing agenda in U.S. history. 

Biden, however, took his role too seriously. He reverted to the mean-spirited, pre-senile blowhard Joe—the obnoxious messenger thus now making the noxious message even more toxic. 

A retiring, silenced, good old Joe from Scranton was the script, not a doddering, incoherent, ”get off my lawn” old man shouting for the need of socialist policies that were the exact opposite of his previously supposed convictions. 

The Left got their Biden. And yes, he turned over the reins of government to them. And yes, they got their neo-socialism for two years. And yes, they are destroying America as we knew it. But in doing this, the people had the rare occasion to see fully and experience the nihilist Left. And they are now about to express their loathing for what the Left has wrought. 

The problem with the ossified Democratic Pantheon is that they are of no use to the Left in the midterms because it is their own radical ideology over the past two years that was finally enacted and wrecked the country. And all the shrieks about abortion, semi-fascists, and democracy dying cannot put back together what they shattered. 

Let’s Demand a Covid Mea Culpa

Let’s Demand a Covid Mea Culpa

Preadheep J. Shanker, National Review

Accountability is an essential part of learning from mistakes and must precede any talk of moving on.

The pandemic measures that closed businesses, churches, and, worst of all, schools had serious costs and caused real damage. We as a country cannot and should not allow our leaders to escape blame for their failures. As I wrote last week:

Democrats, including our president, chose poorly, and they should pay a political price for those mistakes. Their continuing lies about those past errors should not be allowed to stand. It is long past time for our political leaders, the education establishment, and public-health authorities to admit their failures and own up to them.

I am not necessarily calling for punishment for these mistakes. Some were honest mistakes, made at the height of a pandemic where no one really knew the right course of action. Others were more nefarious, and less scientifically defendable, such as the long closure of schools based on little or no data. But before we can accept and move on from the failures of our elected leaders, they must be called to account.

Because ours is a modern society with foundations in science and logic, we require honesty from these leaders, including open admission of their mistakes. We need accountability not only so we can put the pandemic crisis behind us, but so we can learn how to prevent or respond more effectively to the next one.

This week, Emily Oster, a respected economics professor at Brown University who has written extensively about the Covid-19 pandemic both in media outlets and in peer-reviewed scholastic journals, published a piece in the Atlantic under the title “Let’s Declare a Pandemic Amnesty.”  It was met with a maelstrom of angry reactions.

Many of the opinions Oster expresses are ones that would be widely embraced on the right. For example, her position on school closures:

Some of these choices turned out better than others. To take an example close to my own work, there is an emerging (if not universal) consensus that schools in the U.S. were closed for too long: The health risks of in-school spread were relatively low, whereas the costs to students’ well-being and educational progress were high. The latest figures on learning loss are alarming.  But in spring and summer 2020, we had only glimmers of information. Reasonable people—people who cared about children and teachers—advocated on both sides of the reopening debate.

Her argument is one I have made myself: Early on, being overly cautious was reasonable. At times of uncertainty and great risk, it is logical to be cautious. Oster, to her credit, has gone back and studied some of the decisions made about closures and lockdowns, and overall has found that many of those decisions were not reasonable and have caused widespread damage to our society.

But even knowing what she knows, Oster says we should move on:

We have to put these fights aside and declare a pandemic amnesty. We can leave out the willful purveyors of actual misinformation while forgiving the hard calls that people had no choice but to make with imperfect knowledge. Los Angeles County closed its beaches in summer 2020. Ex post facto, this makes no more sense than my family’s masked hiking trips. But we need to learn from our mistakes and then let them go. We need to forgive the attacks, too. Because I thought schools should reopen and argued that kids as a group were not at high risk, I was called a “teacher killer” and a “génocidaire.” It wasn’t pleasant, but feelings were high. And I certainly don’t need to dissect and rehash that time for the rest of my days.

What Oster is really suggesting is not a broad amnesty, but a highly subjective, selective one. This is where her argument falls apart. She proposes amnesty for those who made “hard calls” but exempts those who spread “misinformation.” So, which policy mistakes are amnesty-worthy, and which are not? Who will make these subjective calls? She doesn’t say.

Let’s take the issue of masks. Early in the pandemic, Dr. Anthony Fauci said the public didn’t need to wear them. He said this based on little evidence and no data. Later, he admitted to having misled the public about masks in order to preserve the supply of masks for health-care workers. Does that misinformation deserve amnesty or not? Then he came out strongly for masking, and at one point recommended double-masking. Was that misinformation too? How is the public supposed to judge? Is the erosion of public trust in health experts itself a pandemic error that deserves amnesty — or not?

On school closures, Oster herself has said that the costs of keeping children out of school were not sufficiently considered. Do the teachers’ unions who demanded continued school closures deserve amnesty? Or was that “nefarious,” to use her word? On lockdowns, do the elected officials whose policies drove some people out of business get absolved? The politicians who kept people from visiting their loved ones? The elected leaders who violated their own lockdown orders?

I believe Oster is approaching the post-pandemic period from an ethically and morally considered position. My interactions with her on Twitter have been few, but they have been thoughtful and respectful. I don’t think she is looking to excuse the worst mistakes. And I don’t think that Dr. Fauci was intentionally trying to cause harm when he made misleading and contradictory statements. But a fair number of those statements can only be characterized as misinformation. It’s simply impossible to pick and choose which actors are deserving of amnesty.

Oster concludes with the following:

The standard saying is that those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. But dwelling on the mistakes of history can lead to a repetitive doom loop as well. Let’s acknowledge that we made complicated choices in the face of deep uncertainty, and then try to work together to build back and move forward.

She is right, to a point. But unless we are honest about who spread misinformation and made disastrous decisions, we cannot really learn the lessons of the Covid-19 pandemic. Admitting that many politicians and public-health officials were dishonest with the American people and made grievous errors is part of the process. Without that kind of honesty and admission of guilt, any amnesty talk is a nonstarter.