Quote of the Day (Peggy Noonan, on the Fallout From the Growth of AI)

“My very human prediction: The spectacular costs associated with AI [i.e., unemployment, shifts in insurance and retirement income] will force a debate on the sharing of its profits. The wealthy and powerful who own the AI companies won’t like that. But those who wished and failed to see the social media companies declared a public utility 10 years ago, and who drew support from the populist left and populist right—they would like that a lot. This will become one of the great political battles of the late 2020s and beyond.”—Former Presidential speechwriter and Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Peggy Noonan, “AI Is Here, and a Quiet Havoc Has Begun,” The Wall Street Journal, Aug. 9-10, 2025

Quote of the Day (Mike Davis, on How Southern California ‘Transgressed Environmental Common Sense’)

“Los Angeles has deliberately put itself in harm’s way. For generations, market-driven urbanization has transgressed environmental common sense. Historic wildfire corridors have been turned into view-lot suburbs, wetland liquefaction zones into marinas, and floodplains into industrial districts and housing tracts. Monolithic public works have been substituted for regional planning and a responsible land ethic. As a result, Southern California has reaped flood, fire and earthquake tragedies that were as avoidable, as unnatural, as the beating of Rodney King and the ensuing explosion in the streets.”— Urban theorist and historian Mike Davis (1946-2022), Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster (1998)

In this weekend’s Wall Street Journal, columnist Peggy Noonan, remembering how her family’s house in New Jersey burned down over 50 years ago, observes that “you never get over a fire.” More problematically, she contends that “All disasters have political reverberations,” and, in particular, that after the Palisades wildfires of this past week, there will likely be “a new shift, a reorientation toward reality.”

I have the utmost respect for the writing style that won Ms. Noonan a Pulitzer Prize, and sometimes find myself agreeing with her arguments. But her most recent column epitomizes so much of the mistaken and misdirected commentary that has raged, high and low, in the wake of this catastrophe that has already burned more than 90,000 acres, displaced 92,000 residents and cost more than two dozen lives.

Although her latest reflections show no understanding of either the long history or still relatively recent events that have led Southern California to this pass, what is truly shocking is that so many other comments in the public and private sphere are far worse—ranging from the wildly irrelevant to the astonishingly ill-informed.

This past Sunday, a priest in my parish related how dumbfounded he felt when a friend called to claim that God was punishing California for all the abortions in the state. From the opposite side of the political spectrum, some have seen this as God’s judgment on the U.S. for abetting the enormous loss of life in Gaza.

A few days ago, a member of a Facebook group devoted to the work of novelist and Christian apologist C.S. Lewis set off a ferocious debate by posting a meme with a fake photo of an Oscar statuette burnt to a crisp—presumably representing divine judgment on liberal, godless Hollywood.

For sure, L.A. Mayor Karen Bass should be embarrassed for making a trip to Ghana that broke her campaign promise to stick close to home—and this at a time when the area’s weather condition had become increasingly vulnerable. But just as surely, her responsibility for the disaster is being exaggerated by rivals past and present, outside and inside her party, who dream of occupying her office themselves someday.

More important, though the level of the disaster might be unprecedented, its occurrence is anything but. It might, in fact, be more proper to speak of the recurrence of wildfires.

Which brings us to Mike Davis and the above quote.

Upon his death two years ago, the British paper The Guardian hailed him for offering “prophetic warnings” about so much related to Southern California’s environment. But I doubt that Davis would claim any such powers of divination.

If anything, he would say, he was only pointing out that disasters had already happened in the state, that they had happened again, and—based on that record and the unrestrained growth spurring it in the first place—it was practically guaranteed that disaster would strike again.

Ms. Noonan faults progressive California politicians for preoccupation with “unquantifiable secondary and tertiary issues” like climate change.

But as far back as 1998, Davis warned that Malibu was already “the wildfire capital of North America and, possibly, the world”:

“At least once a decade a blaze in the chaparral grows into a terrifying firestorm consuming hundreds of homes in an inexorable advance across the mountains to the sea. Since 1970 five such holocausts have destroyed more than one thousand luxury residences and inflicted more than $1 billion in property damage. Some unhappy homeowners have been burnt out twice in a generation, and there are individual patches of coastline or mountain, especially between Point Dume and Tuna Canyon, that have been incinerated as many as eight times since 1930.”

What lay behind all this, Davis wrote, was a “selfish, profit-driven presentism.” Politicians and developers rebuffed proposals to preserve parks, beaches, playgrounds and mountain reserves for the community, choosing instead an “artificial borderland of chaparral and suburb [that] magnified the natural fire danger while creating new perils for firefighters who now had to defend thousands of individual structures as well as battle the fire front itself.”

Ms. Noonan sees the three-decade dominance of the Democratic Party in the state as a major reason for the failure to contain the fire. I even agree with her that “A one-party state will yield one-party rule that encourages, sloth, carelessness and corruption.”

But she ignores the long postwar history when Republicans, at the state and federal level, were equally responsible as Democrats, if not more so, for the lack of control on growth. (And, if one-party rule poses grave difficulties for governance, she has been noticeably silent about the dangers posed by the current GOP control of the three branches of the federal government.)

Couple this destructive postwar development trend with the current months-long drought—among the “feedback loops” in the delicate ecosystem that Davis pointed out—and you have the necessary conditions for the most recent natural disaster.

Mother Nature belongs to no political party, Ms. Noonan, and will not be disrespected by either Republicans or Democrats. At long last, after so much time, Mother Nature has imposed such high costs associated with insurance and rebuilding that growth in Southern California may be halted, even reversed.

In the meantime, let’s not blame the most recent conflagration on an angry Almighty. And while we’re at it, let’s lay off the ecological Cassandras that tried to alert government officials, business professionals, and residents about what all too sadly, has now occurred.

Quote of the Day (Peggy Noonan, With a Prediction for the 2016 GOP Race)

“I can say what this [2016 Presidential] election will most assuredly be, at least on the Republican side: anything but boring. On the Democratic side Hillary Clinton may wind up debating herself on an empty stage with good lighting. But Republicans will have Scott Walker, Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, Mike Huckabee, Marco Rubio and probably John Kasich duking it out. Add Carly Fiorina, and some others….What a heck of a fight this will be.” —Pulitzer Prize-winning conservative columnist—and former Presidential speechwriter—Peggy Noonan, “The Too-Smooth Cruz,” The Wall Street Journal, Mar. 28-29, 2015

For some reason I don’t recall now, I clipped out the page where Ms. Noonan’s article was originally printed, put it aside, and then found it by chance only a week or so ago. As soon as I re-read this quote, I burst out laughing.

There’s an obvious name missing here—indeed in the entire article. I suppose you could say that Ms. Noonan did anticipate a candidate coming out of nowhere and making at least a momentary splash when she used that phrase “and some others,” as if recalling Herman Cain (remember him) from 2012. But that really would be stretching things, wouldn’t it?

Many of my friends on the liberal side of the spectrum will chortle at Ms. Noonan’s lack of foresight about the 2016 election. But I don’t offer this to ridicule her.

(Indeed, she warned early on that Donald Trump’s chances that year should not be airily dismissed, and she’s endured more than her share of brickbrats from him and the MAGA faithful since then for her periodic attacks on him—perhaps most memorably, in a direct hit on his emphasis on his “strength,” assailing his “whiny, weepy and self-pitying” character.) 

No, I put this out there to illustrate that the Washington establishment that Ms. Noonan joined in the Reagan administration is much like how Oscar-winning screenwriter William Goldman described Hollywood: “Nobody knows anything...... Not one person… knows for a certainty what's going to work. Every time out it's a guess and, if you're lucky, an educated one.”

It’s safe to say that, unlike what Ms. Noonan expected, Bernie Sanders gave Hillary Clinton an unexpectedly tough time in the Democratic primaries.

But this is what’s really wild: Trump beat 16 rivals for the GOP nomination that year, including those Ms. Noonan praised, in a case of being overly charitable, for being “serious talents with big accomplishments.”

Well, grant her this: nearly all of those 16 possessed governmental and/or national security experience that the eventual nominee conspicuously lacked. 

And all but one—retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson—had been answerable to the public, either voters or (in the case of Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina) shareholders in her company.

Instead, GOP primary voters embraced a private-company executive with no financial transparency and no board of directors that could remotely question his plans.

This year, 91 criminal counts on four indictments, not to mention two adverse decisions in civil courts, did nothing to dent Republican faith in Trump’s candidacy. 

Yet, even with a field significantly narrower than the divided one he conquered eight years ago, he still romped through the primaries.

Nothing like this has ever been remotely seen in the history of Presidential campaigning. No other candidate would be so shameless in defying scandal. No other electorate has ever ignored at such a high level the weight of so much evidence of bad faith, corruption, and basic lack of character.

To adapt a phrase from one of his scorned rivals, “low-energy Jeb” Bush, the former reality-show host did become “the chaos President.”

Famous not for being a great business executive but for playing one on TV, Trump was anything but the proverbial “dark horse” candidate. 

But he became (to borrow a phrase from the field of finance) “the black-swan” candidate—one elected through a series of unexpected, even close to unknowable, events.

That black-swan candidate found his rock-solid base—and is now slated to be a Presidential nominee for the third time—in a contingent that conservative Peter Wehner, in a New York Times opinion piece, termed “Fifth Avenue Republicans”—diehards who would support Trump even if, as he boasted back in 2016, he shot someone on that tony New York street.

We can’t begin to tell what this year’s events will be, especially now. That’s why polls are as good as useless at this point.

That’s also why maintaining vigilance about threats to democracy can be so frustrating. But, as Shakespeare would say, “the readiness is all.”

In one sense, Ms. Noonan was right: the 2016 GOP race, with Trump insulting rivals, lashing out at anyone remotely critical of him, and circulating falsehoods almost as often as he opened his mouth, was “anything but boring.” But now she’d probably agree with the adage about being careful what you wish for.

For myself, after the past eight exhausting years, I can’t wait to get back to “boring.” 

Photo of the Day: Peggy Noonan at Books and Greetings, Northvale, NJ

Thursday night, I drove to see conservative columnist Peggy Noonan, who has been on a tour promoting her collection of speeches and articles over the last 30 years, The Time of Our Lives. 

At Books and Greetings, a bookstore in Northern New Jersey, however, her appearance had something like the feeling of a welcome-home party: through much of her youth, she had grown up in Rutherford; she graduated from Fairleigh Dickinson University in the early 1970s; and at least several well-wishers from those days (including a brother) were in the audience.

I arrived about 15 minutes late for the start of her talk before the book-signing. All the seats were taken up front, and, among people waiting for her to sign their books, I was #56. I stood halfway in the back of the store, craning my neck and listening hard as she spoke.

I do not agree with all of Noonan’s positions; indeed, unlike many in the audience, I don’t think I agree with even half of them. But I found her account of working in the Reagan Administration, What I Saw at the Revolution, a political memoir of uncommon wit and verve, and her “Declarations” column is the first thing I turn to in each Saturday edition of The Wall Street Journal.

Unlike much of the conservative wing of the Republican Party, her criticism of Barack Obama is informed by sincere, thoughtful disagreement over his philosophy of government rather than by conspiratorial nonsense about what he is not, and her best work reflects her firsthand knowledge of the ideals and compromises made by those in government.

In the image accompanying this post, she is signing my copy of The Time of Our Lives and another book, On Speaking Well: How to Give a Speech With Style, Substance, and Clarity. 

(As someone whose work over the years has occasionally required writing speeches, I was intrigued by the latter—and, indeed, it looks as if my curiosity has paid off; after I got home, I marveled at her astute, line-by-line reading of Earl Charles Spencer’s eulogy for his sister, Princess Diana, and why Ms. Noonan felt, eight years into the decade, that it might be “so far the only great speech of the 1990s.”)

Before signing books for the eager throng assembled, Ms. Noonan answered a variety of questions from the audience, including:

*What was it like to work for Ronald Reagan? (She felt “lucky” to have her speeches delivered by a man who had used his voice professionally, in acting and in politics, for 40 years, and that she had never felt that “a good man can also be a great man” until she worked for him.)

*Who were her literary influences? (Like mine, American novelists of the Twenties and Forties—notably Hemingway—and, a rediscovery of hers in recent years, the poet Robert Frost.)

*What did she think of Donald Trump? (She, like so many others, did not think he would enter the race, but did not dismiss his chances after his announcement because he had “hit a nerve on illegal immigration” with GOP primary voters. Still, she noted, his candidacy was not without dangers: “People ask me, ‘Can he win the nomination?’ Yes, he can. Or they’ll ask, ‘Can he split the party?’ Yes, he can.”)

Many progressive readers (including a number of those who read this blog) may wonder why I admire a writer with whom I often disagree with so profoundly. It’s simple, really: Ms. Noonan writes like an angel, and, in my view, that forgives a lot.

Not that, when you get down to it, she has anything to be forgiven for. In a time of angry polarization, Ms. Noonan writes with civility, a spirit that should be returned in kind. As Thomas Jefferson noted in his first Inaugural Address: “Every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle.”

Quote of the Day (Peggy Noonan, on Applause in State of the Union Speeches)

“[I]n the 1960s network anchors started noting how many times the president was ‘interrupted by applause’ [in the State of the Union address]. This made everyone in every White House since want to get their guy more applause than the previous guy. Congressmen pop up and down like manic gophers in an attempt to show support. A president is left standing up there for an hour and 20 minutes with the blood starting to pool in his calves and a look on his face that says, ‘I really want to look like I’m interested in what I’m saying, but we’re 22 minutes in and I’m just thinking about dinner.’ They eat lightly before the speech. They are hungry after.”— Peggy Noonan, “Declarations: How to Continue the Obama Upswing,” The Wall Street Journal, January 21, 2011

Those who can recall this weekend’s column by Peggy Noonan, in which she expressed the notion that Americans have stopped listening to President Obama, will likely think that the above article title is a misprint. But note the date: 2011. She turned out, at least in this instance, to display some shrewdness about the turn in his fortunes that would bring about his reelection.

But I’m not recalling that earlier column to show what a difference three years can make (her columns about Obama have become increasingly predictable: she's--surprise, surprise!--against him), but rather to highlight that she has caught onto something that people of all political stripes can recognize as true: the often-empty showmanship of State of the Union addresses. As policy pronouncements, they have become statements by committee, with everything of interest written by some poor scribe bleached of all vigor by some Cabinet undersecretary. Most of the time, it’s what Clinton speechwriter (and my college classmate) Michael Waldman accurately termed, in a fascinating interview on PBS in 2000, “very pre-scripted, stately symphonies.” 

Even when the President picks an individual out of the audience (a tradition begun by Noonan’s beloved old boss, Ronald Reagan), it’s not enough to enliven an address of such interminable length. “Imagine,” writes former Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau in a post on "The Daily Beast", “if a friend asked you to sit quietly for nearly an hour while he spoke with great detail and flourish about his many plans for the year ahead. Probably not, right?” (And this is a piece that still sees some benefit from these addresses!)

(The Waldman interview, by the way, reminded me of the first hint of partisan rudeness in the audience in these affairs. Rep. Joe Wilson’s outburst at Obama in the 2009 address—“You lie!”—earned him a censure vote from the House of Representatives, along largely partisan lines. Yet 16 years before that, a Newt Gingrich-led GOP had erupted in laughter at Bill Clinton’s call for campaign-finance reform. I did not agree with much of Clinton’s subsequent behavior in the Oval Office, but his improvised retort on this occasion-- "You know they're not laughing at home"—was as well-merited as it was effective.)

The New Republic has just come out with a list of the best State of the Union addresses, according to a panel of historians. But what strikes me, however, is how paradoxical the results are. 

A couple of the historians cited Lyndon Johnson’s 1964 address, in which he declared the War on Poverty and put the full backing of his office behind his epochal civil-rights program. But, in watching some of it on C-Span this weekend, I found his delivery dull and earnest, and understood why Kennedy aides had once derided him behind his back as “Uncle Cornpone.” It displayed not one iota of the powerful one-on-one “Johnson treatment” he used to convert recalcitrant legislators to his way of thinking. (To understand the full nature of this—including private pictures of him boring in, for all he's worth, on the overmatched Senator Theodore Green—see this post on the site “Dead Presidents,” by blogger Anthony Bergen.)

On the other hand, an address that surely must rank on any short list of the most rhetorically powerful addresses ever given by a President was also one of the most misconceived in terms of its intention. I’m talking about Abraham Lincoln’s 1862 State of the Union address, one whose closing still thrills me—and, I suspect, many students of the Presidency—to read:

“Fellow-citizens, we can not escape history. We of this Congress and this Administration will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance or insignificance can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass will light us down in honor or dishonor to the latest generation. We say we are for the Union. The world will not forget that we say this. We know how to save the Union. The world knows we do know how to save it. We, even we here, hold the power and bear the responsibility. In giving freedom to the slave we assure freedom to the free—honorable alike in what we give and what we preserve. We shall nobly save or meanly lose the last best hope of earth.”

But what was this measure the President called “plain, peaceful, generous, just—a way which if followed the world will forever applaud and God must forever bless”? A constitutional amendment authorizing voluntary colonization of blacks back to Africa and compensated emancipation for their slave masters. The proposal was uncharacteristically naïve of the normally politically surefooted Lincoln: Slaves and freedmen would not want to be wrenched from a land in which, for all its faults, they had put down roots, and even slaveholders in states that had stayed in the Union were proving resistant to any notion of manumitting their enormously lucrative properties. (You can read my analysis of the reasons for Lincoln’s bold move—and why it failed—in this prior post.)

Quote of the Day (Peggy Noonan, on the Iraq War’s Cost to the U.S. and GOP)

“No one quite knows or will probably ever know the exact financial cost of Iraq and Afghanistan, which is interesting in itself. Some estimates put it at $1 trillion, some $2 trillion…. [NBC national affairs writer Tom] Curry cites a Congressional Budget Office report saying the Iraq operation had cost $767 billion as of January 2012. Whatever the number, it added to deficits and debt, and along with the Bush administration's domestic spending helped erode the Republican Party's reputation for sobriety in fiscal affairs.”— Peggy Noonan, “Can the Republican Party Recover From Iraq?” The Wall Street Journal, March 23, 2013

You can read from here to eternity all the analyses of what ails the Republican Party. The general tone about its problems with Hispanics, gays, women, you name it—i.e., that the party has just sustained a huge gash in its well-heeled ocean liner, and that all aboard have spilled into the icy waters, where they’ll drown in the near future—sounds awfully familiar to me. I read similar obituaries about the GOP in 1977, after a shellacking over Watergate and an intraparty nomination slugfest left it without control of the White House and Congress. Come to think of it, I heard the same thing about them four years ago, before they assumed control of both houses of Congress. Much of the same wailing could be heard about the Democrats, in fact, in the 12 sorry years before Bill Clinton was elected.

Think of it another way: The party fielded a hapless candidate that New York Times columnist David Brooks rightly likened to Thurston Howell III of Gilligan’s Island, and it still polled 47% of the vote in the last Presidential campaign. A full-fledged economic or military disaster tagged to the Obama administration would put the Oops! (sorry, I mean Opposition) Party back in business.

But Peggy Noonan’s column, I think, is onto something important. Tones, even policies, on social issues can be adjusted. But the Iraq War delivered a body blow that the Republican Party, and the nation, could ill afford to sustain.

“Did the Iraq war hurt the GOP? Yes,” the former speechwriter for Ronald Reagan bluntly admits. “The war, and the crash of '08, half killed it. It's still digging out, and whether it can succeed is an open question.”

The damage to U.S. lives is, in comparison with other U.S. wars, not so steep: roughly 4,000 deaths, plus another 2,000 for Afghanistan. The two combined are roughly comparable to losses sustained in the Spanish-American War and the far less-well-known subsequent struggle to quash the Philippine independence movement. But they pale in comparison, both in absolute terms and as percentages of the total population, with deaths in the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War, the American Revolution, Korea, Vietnam, WWI, WWII, and the Civil War.

But the cost in other ways is as bad as these other wars, perhaps even more so. Noonan’s column—which should be required reading at GOP headquarters—takes note of how the war affected perceptions of its foreign policy, the meaning of conservatism, the dominance that began with Reagan, dissent within the party, and the reputation of its Washington establishment.

But the fiscal damage caused by the war—the one alluded to in this quote--might be most insidious. Following the war, no Republican really had the right to complain about deficits caused by President Obama—they began on George W. Bush’s watch. More than a few longtime party members knew this, which is why, for instance, Noonan's normal criticism of Democrats was considerably more muted in the '08 Presidential campaign, and why Christopher Buckley, son of the founder of the modern conservative movement, came out and actually endorsed Obama. The rising tide of right-wing discontent about Dubya’s domestic spending would not have risen so sharply without war-worsened budget deficits. That energized the libertarian/Tea Party wing of the GOP, with consequences its Establishment members are still trying to contain.

The low-level civil war now occurring among Republicans nearly claimed a prominent victim a few weeks ago. For years, Chuck Hagel had a well-deserved reputation for fiscal and social conservatism, and had even supported President Bush’s invasion of Iraq 10 years ago. But his increasing criticism of the conduct of the war and those who supported it left him, in a real sense, as a man without a party. His onetime Senate friends on the Republican side of the aisle can't abide that he was right to question the disastrous military policy perpetrated by Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, or that his disgust with the Iraq War was so complete that he refused to endorse old friend John McCain for Presidents. He begins his term as Secretary of Defense with neither bone-deep loyalty from Democrats nor good will from his former GOP colleagues.

There are other costs to the Iraq War, as we take stock this month 10 years after the Bush administration turned the War on Terror into a bridge too far:

*A more polarized electorate. Even as the GOP Establishment has been discredited and the Tea Party emboldened, the most socially liberal faction of the Democrats has taken firmer control on the other side of the partisan divide.  Increasingly limited space exists for political centrists of either party, not to mention the spirit of compromise.

* A politicized intelligence unit. Dick Cheney conclusively demonstrated how easy it was to shift intelligence estimates toward the conclusions that one highly influential administration official wished to draw. It is a foregone conclusion that the citizens of other nations, already ambivalent (or worse) about America, might recoil from any suggestion that we might be facing a mortal threat. Now, U.S. citizens, remembering those phantom WMDs, are likely to do so, too, even if the suggestion comes from a Democratic President.

* Strengthened isolationism. Reluctance to use military force is a good thing, but now that they are back in power, the Democrats are facing increasing pressures against using non-military means as well. At this point, foreign aid is squarely in the sight of budget-cutters. Now, it is China that is in a better position to use its financial resources to further geopolitical aims. Rest assured that those aims will not be for humanitarian purposes. And that brings us to the biggest victims of all in the Iraq War…

*The Iraqis themselves. Now, after a decade of death, dysfunction and division, they face their future—though the word “they” must be highly qualified in a country now experiencing the ethnic cleansing of Christians and other minorities by Islamic militants, harassment and worse against women’s rights activists, and a government still all too internally fractious.

God help the Iraqis—because, courtesy of a former Republican administration and its then-compliant, now-confused, Iraq-wrecked allies in the legislative branch--the United States is no longer of a mind to do so again anytime soon.