Culture critic: Ukraine Brings Reality to West

The war in Ukraine “implicitly issues a challenge to the unseriousness, the smallness, of what passes for public life in the 21st-century West,” declares Spiked’s Brendan O’Neill. “As everyday Ukrainians pull together and arm themselves with guns and petrol bombs, Britain’s military top brass have rather different concerns. Such as why you should avoid using words like ‘manpower’, ‘strong’ and ‘grip.’ ” It once “took war to hurt us; now it only takes words.” This war on European soil confirms “history is coming violently back to life, and that, morally, politically and physically, we are not prepared for it.”

Liberal: Dems Losing the Working Class

“In a loose sense,” warns Ruy Teixeira at The Liberal Patriot, Republicans are already “the party of the multiracial working class”: In 2020, “Trump carried the overall working class (noncollege) vote by 4 points.” And the GOP won that vote for Congress “in three of the last four elections,” with a tie in 2018. Dems presume it’s “purely a matter of white working class voters,” but “since 2012, nonwhite working class voters have shifted away from the Democrats by 18 margin points.” This “should be unacceptable”: “What is the point of a left party that cannot command the loyalty of the working class and therefore plausibly claim to represent its interests?” Dems must “rebrand themselves on cultural issues, where they are decidedly out of step with working class opinion on issues around crime, immigration, race, gender, schools and language policing.” 

Libertarian: Warren’s Demented Gas-Price Fix

Sen. Elizabeth Warren “says the solution to high gas prices is higher taxes on oil companies,” notes Reason’s Ronald Bailey, but “history shows that imposing a windfall profits tax on oil is particularly shortsighted.” When “the Iran oil shock” tripled prices in 1979, “President Jimmy Carter championed the Crude Oil Windfall Profit Tax of 1980.” But it “raised far less money than projected” while “reducing the amount of oil that would have otherwise been supplied.” Warren’s proposal would have the same results: “less domestic production, more dependence on foreign oil, higher prices at the pump, and negligible tax revenue.” In fact, the “prospect of higher profit margins is already encouraging investment in domestic oil production.” 

Conservative: Trans Radicals Alienate Americans

“Transgender activists won’t experience the level of rapid success that gay-rights activists enjoyed over the past several decades,” predicts National Review’s Philip Klein. “The women’s sports issue is the one most likely to backfire on the transgender movement as more people witness what it means in practice.” Klein points to University of Pennsylvania swimmer Lia Thomas, “who was ranked 462 as a male swimmer but shot up to No. 1” after transitioning and allowed to compete against collegiate women. When transgender activists call for “more tolerance and compassion,” the public is supportive. But they risk pushback when their agenda runs counter to “Americans’ understanding of human biology as well as their appreciation for basic fairness.”

Identity watch: Why Not To Capitalize “Black”

My newsletter team has “obviously made the decision” not to capitalize “black,” writes Glenn Loury at The Glenn Show. Why? The choice indicates “the writer’s alignment with one of two hazily defined but still distinguishable political positions regarding the coherence of racial identity.” Few capitalize “white,” for example, because doing so “treats whites as a coherent, unified people, an idea that has its roots, to my mind, in white identity politics of the most virulent kind. But if all the disparate groups that constitute ‘whites’ don’t comprise a single people, why should all the disparate groups that constitute ‘blacks’ do so?” It’s hard to see “the sociological similarities between” a “wealthy member of Lagos’s business class and a man on Chicago’s South Side working three part-time jobs just to pay his rent. Learning that both are black” says “precisely nothing.”

— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board