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August 1, 2012 |
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By Jonathan V. Last |
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COLD OPEN |
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In case you missed it, what with the Olympics and the campaign and continuing awful economic news, the last few weeks have seen the Democratic party waging war on yet another American institution: Chick-fil-A.
Chick-fil-A is the nation’s finest purveyor of fast food—chicken sandwiches and chicken nuggets served with waffle-cut fries and lemonade in a mélange of goodness so wonderful it ought to be a sin. Chick-fil-A is a family-owned company, based in Atlanta, and its current president is Dan Cathy, the son of S. Truett Cathy, who founded the restaurant in 1967. The Cathys are a good, God-fearin' people who put their money where their Bibles are; Chick-fil-A foregoes millions of dollars a year in profits because it's always closed on Sundays, so as to observe the Lord’s day of rest.
Last month Dan Cathy was asked about his views on same-sex marriage by a Christian newspaper. He said that he was against gay marriage and "guilty as charged" in his support of traditional marriage. And so the floodgates opened.
The deluge began when Boston mayor Tom Menino sent a letter to Cathy warning his company to abandon its plans to open stores in town. "There is no place for discrimination on Boston’s Freedom Trail," Menino thundered, "and no place for your company alongside it."
Next came Chicago, where mayor Rahm Emanuel warned the company to stay away and one of the city's alderman, Joe Moreno, openly admitted that he was going to deny the company's applications to open restaurants in his ward.
And then there was San Francisco, whose mayor Edwin Lee wrote that the closest Chick-fil-A "to San Francisco is 40 miles away & I strongly recommend that they not try to come any closer."
When Washington’s corrupt mayor Vincent Gray started speaking out against Chick-fil-A, it was almost an afterthought.
There are many lessons in this little incident. One, for instance, is about the ways in which government can bully businesses—can you imagine elected officials publicly announcing that they were going to willfully and capriciously deny a company permits to operate?
Then there's the lesson about the left's commitment to the First Amendment: They'll fight to the death for an artist's right to be paid by the government to desecrate a crucifix, but a private citizen espousing a view which was held by President Obama three months ago? That's intolerable in the public square.
But for my money, the biggest lesson is about the differing responses from the left and the right to competing worldviews.
You see, just before Dan Cathy admitted that, as a private citizen, he held a view supported by half his countrymen, the heads of Google announced that they were devoting the publicly held company’s financial resources to a worldwide gay-rights campaign to "Legalize Love."
The folks at Google were not speaking as private citizens, understand. They were using their shareholders' money to undertake direct action in service of a view which is held by about the same percentage of people as its opposite.
And you know what didn't happen? The governors of Texas and Mississippi did not announce that all public computers will now have their web browsers reset so that Bing is the default search engine. YouTube was not banned on computers in Salt Lake's city hall. No major figures called for boycotts of Google.
I don't mind the left's pushback on Chick-fil-A—this is how you have big, national debates about important issues—except that the street only runs one way.
One final example: Another big, national chain, Office Depot, recently announced a partnership with Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way Foundation.” The foundation’s ostensible goal is to encourage bullied teens, though with a strong sub rosa message of gay rights and acceptance.
Without rendering any verdict on the foundation's work—and I think we can all agree that kids shouldn't get bullied for anything, not for being short or smart or awkward or gay—this doesn't seem like a natural philanthropic fit for Office Depot, a publicly held company that makes its money selling paperclips to other businesses.
So why in the world would Office Depot risk alienating any of its potential customers by embracing a cause that might, in any way, be seen as signing on to a particular ideological agenda?
Because the street only runs one way.
Can you imagine Office Depot joined forces with, say, a crisis counseling group which steers pregnant teens away from abortion? Even though both causes are, technically, non-ideological?
Me neither. |
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LOOKING BACK |
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"An ass-thumping president frantically fighting for the little guy—it's hard to imagine George Washington or Abraham Lincoln choosing to project an image of this kind. Barack Obama has managed a rare feat in American history: The longer he is president, the less presidential he has become. Obama has reversed the usual process of growth and maturation, appearing today far more like a candidate for the presidency—and a very ordinary one at that—than he did during the latter stages of his campaign."
—James W. Ceaser, "The Unpresidential President," from our August 2, 2010, issue.
Remember you get full access to THE WEEKLY STANDARD archive when you subscribe. |
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THE READING LIST |
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George Will on NOAA, the federal police, and whale harassment.
Charles Murray on why Americans have grown distrustful of capitalism—and how conservatives should defend the free market.
The strange story of Jack Harelson, an antiquities collector who became a grave robber. |
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INSTANT CLASSIC |
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"The focus has been on Obama’s words in the second paragraph: 'If you’ve got a business—you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen.' But this misses the point. Whether or not 'you didn't build that' refers to the 'roads and bridges' of the previous sentence is irrelevant.
"The truly revealing and disturbing idea is in the first paragraph, in which the president of the United States of America, the richest nation in the world, says he is 'always struck' by 'people who think' that individual smarts and hard work are responsible for success. The fools! Don't they know achievement is a function of lavish government contracts to education and construction unions? Can't they comprehend that innovation results from taxpayer-financed loan guarantees to companies owned by Democratic Party donors?"
—Matthew Continetti, Washington Free Beacon, July 27, 2012. |
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LOOKING AHEAD |
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We'll have articles on congressional races, Romney's international tour, and Batman in upcoming issues of THE WEEKLY STANDARD. |
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THE LAST WORD |
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While we're at it, you'll recall that when good-government liberals aren't harassing fast food joints, they're telling you what to drive. Remember: We live in the age of the electric car, and the government is going to give away as much of your money as it has to in order to get people to buy these things.
The barriers to success for electric cars have always been as large as they are obvious: no charging infrastructure exists; fossil fuels are too cheap to induce a massive change in consumption; and for every percentage point of market share that electric cars gain (that is, if they were to ever make it to a full point of market share), they'll depress demand for oil, thus making gasoline even cheaper.
In addition to all of these structural problems, there are physical problems. The performance of batteries varies greatly depending on environment. Even if electric cars made sense for Southern California, they'll probably never make sense for Wisconsin. And electric cars have a nasty habit of underperforming their promised specs. For instance, when GM rolled out the Chevrolet Volt, the miles-per-gallon performance in gas mode turned out to be
not quite what was advertised.
Well, now comes word that it's not just the Volt that’s having problems. Owners of Nissan's Leaf—which has sold almost 15,000 units in nearly two years!—are now reporting that in hot weather the car's losing range. How much range? You won’t believe it.
The Leaf was originally sold as the first electric car with a 100-mile range. It didn't work out that way. Once the car was in the wild Nissan admitted that range could vary by 40 percent—40 percent—depending on conditions, and the EPA rated its range as being 73 miles.
But that's only when the car is brand new. Leaf owners in Texas and California are now reporting "capacity losses" of up to 50 percent of their range. As Lando would say, this deal keeps getting worse all the time.
I mention all of this as one more example of why we should be skeptical not just of Big Government or Big Business, but of the marriages between the two.
Have a good rest of the week. As always, you can follow me on Twitter @JVLast you can always email me with tips, thoughts, etc., at editor@weeklystandard.com.
Best,
Jonathan V. Last
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