Sitting on a sofa on a Sunday afternoon
Going to the candidates’ debate…
Laugh about it, shout about it, when you’ve got to choose
Every way you look at it, you lose
–Simon and Garfunkel, “Mrs Robinson“

Yesterday was the New Jersey gubernatorial candidates’ debate, pitting Democrat Mikie Sherrill against Republican Jack Ciattarelli. There are third-party candidates in the race, Libertarian and Socialist, but naturally, neither of them appeared on stage.

Here is a sample of Ciattarelli’s thinking, on education:

“The farther away you get from the classroom, the less impact I think any governmental institution has on what’s taking place in the classroom and student learning,” Ciattarelli said. “So I don’t necessarily have a problem with the president and the administration downsizing the Department of Education. Just because they got rid of the Department of Education doesn’t mean they got rid of federal funding.”

Educational impact is measured by educational statistics. Educational statistics are produced through educational research. The gold standard of educational research in the United States is the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which is a program of the Department of Education, which Trump has gutted. So Ciattarelli’s claim here is: if we pay attention to impact, we should do away with the gold standard by which we measure it. In short: impact matters so much that we should fly blind about it. That makes zero sense, which is also a good description of his campaign. 

The underlying premise of Ciattarelli’s claim here is that there should be no federal involvement in education except for federal funding. Funding should be disbursed, but the impact of the funding should go unmeasured, and the process of disbursement should go unsupervised. 

Honesty and consistency would counsel an amendment to Ciattarelli’s approach to education. If there really is an inverse relationship between positive educational outcomes and governmental intervention into education, and positive outcomes are an imperative, then the ideal policy would be to eliminate all governmental intervention into education as quickly as possible, federal, state, and local. We should not only “downsize” but abolish the federal Department of Education, followed by the New Jersey Department of Education, followed by all of the local Boards of Education, followed by all of the public schools themselves, from K-12 to all of the public universities. Ciattarelli therefore can’t answer my earlier objection by saying that NAEP can be replaced by state-level assessments. All he can say is that the market will produce an assessment or not, and that he can’t predict which will happen. 

Once we do away with public schools in New Jersey, we’ll discover that there is no longer any rationale for “home rule” here, since “home rule” is tied to the public school system. So we could then abolish most of the municipalities in New Jersey, starting with Ciattarelli’s own, Somerset and Raritan. Indeed, my suggestion would be to pilot all of Ciattarelli’s policies on his own turf, and let him deal with the consequences.

I don’t know whether the preceding is the view actually taken by the Libertarian candidate, but it is a recognizably libertarian view, and a good reason why the Libertarian candidate should have been invited to the debate. One reason why Americans can’t think straight about politics is that the only politics they ever confront comes from mushmilk thinkers like Jack Ciattarelli. Put some radicals in the debate, and voters would come to grasp where less radically (and less clearly) expressed thoughts actually lead. Naturally, no one questioned the underlying premise of Ciattarelli’s claim. Is there really an inverse relationship between government involvement in schooling and positive outcomes? If so, where is that shown? “The farther away you get from a classroom…” is the way his comment began. Change the “you” to “I,” and end it with “the better off you are,” and that’s where the comment should have ended.

Here is Sherrill:

Sherrill was asked twice during the debate and twice by reporters afterward whether she would keep or repeal the Immigrant Trust Directive, a state policy limiting how often state and local law enforcement can cooperate with federal immigration agents. While she didn’t discuss the policy, she vowed to bar immigration agents from wearing masks and said New Jersey officials should follow the law and the Constitution.

The Immigrant Trust Directive (ITD) has been on the books since 2018, has survived a number of legal challenges, and is the only thing–a minimal thing–that stands between the residents of this state and a complete descent into fascism at the hands of ICE/HSI/CBP/HSA. Most migrant defense advocates back an extended legislative version of the ITD called the Immigrant Trust Act (ITA). Sherrill is on record as opposing the ITA. Now we discover that she’s unwilling even to support the ITD. 

A few days ago, I wrote a semi-joking post about how Mikie Sherrill’s candidacy was like a scene out of the movie “Lionheart,” the one in which Lyon Gauthier is pushed into a “sweatbox.” What we learn from the debate is that it’s not a joke. She really does want to push us into a sweatbox. Ciattarelli has come out and said he wants to repeal the ITD. Sherrill’s silence suggests that she wants to do the same, but lacks the courage to come out and say so.

This is an AI-generated image. It makes little sense, and bears little relationship to reality, so it stays

I don’t know how else to explain her refusal to oppose Ciattarrelli on this clear and obvious issue. If she really wanted to uphold the ITD, why the reluctance to say so? If the answer is that she wants to appease right-wing voters, why wouldn’t that strategy then apply to her when she became governor? If so, why wouldn’t it entail appeasing them by giving them what they want, namely the repeal of the ITD? Whatever you say, please don’t expect me to believe that a person unable to back a policy in a campaign will suddenly find the courage to back it when she actually has to face the legislature.

If you’ve just landed on this planet from Mars this morning, and want a quick sense of the stakes involved, I’d suggest four pieces of reading. Start with Jonathan Blitzer’s “Enemies of the State” in the Sept. 15 issue of The New Yorker. Then read Rumeysa Ozturk’s “Even God Cannot Hear Us Here,” co-published this past July in the Tufts University daily and Vanity Fair. Then read Austin Kocher’s Substack posts for August 29 and June 26. Kocher is an academic expert on immigration detentions at Syracuse University. Blitzer is a seasoned reporter; Ozturk is a detainee. No one can honestly describe either The New Yorker or Vanity Fair as far-left radical publications, and you’d have to be an expert to quarrel with Kocher’s expertise–which Mikie Sherrill obviously is not. The cumulative message here is hard to dispute.

Blitzer shows that ICE is out of control. Ozturk shows that detainees are being sent to the functional equivalent of concentration camps. Kocher shows that there’s no end in sight, and that immigration enforcement right now is essentially an unprincipled power grab. If this isn’t enough for you, feel free to tell me what more you’d need to know to grasp that repeal of the ITD is not the answer. As far as I can tell, however, skepticism about ICE’s intentions has now become a game of Skeptical Goalpost Movement. Every time you establish something, it’s erased by someone demanding that you establish something else. 

A person unsure about the value of the ITD at this point hasn’t just forfeited our vote. She’s not in fact on our side at all. If, to quote The New Yorker, we are now “enemies of the state” care of federal immigration enforcement, then Mikie Sherrill is the one making us so. In that case, she is our enemy. We should explicitly call her that, and act accordingly. 

Nobody asked either of these candidates where they stand on the IHRA. This suggests that defamation is just par for the course in this state: if you can accuse someone of anti-Semitism, even on the flimsiest of confabulated evidence, well then, they must be guilty of whatever rubbish you’ve cooked up, and that’s all there is to it.

In a recent email exchange I had with Kayleigh Lavornia, chief of staff for State Senator Andrew Zwicker, Lavornia told me that despite Zwicker’s past support for the IHRA, he at least has re-thought things: “I can share with confidence that, after meeting with many organizations such a J Street and CAIR, we have concerns with the IHRA definition of Antisemitism and the potential consequences for free speech that its passage into law would have.” Zwicker (who’s Jewish) has re-thought things, but neither Ciattarelli nor Sherrill (who are not Jewish) have. Obviously, posturing philo-Semitic non-Jews know best what anti-Semitism is; Jews know nothing, and neither do the prospective targets of the defamations involved. None of this found its way into the gubernatorial debate. Apparently, the prospects for free speech in New Jersey have no bearing on a gubernatorial debate about life in New Jersey.

Lesson: The Republicans favor an incoherent version of libertarian-flavored fascism; the Democrats are reluctant, cringing followers, hoping to “pivot to the center,” but with no real idea what to do except to beat the Republicans because they’re Democrats. This is a re-play from Weimar Germany of the contest between the nationalists and the centrists (the DNVP and Zentrum). It’s what happens when the politics of fascism meets the politics of center-pivoting moderation. What happens, in case you’re still wondering, is the Third Reich, or the Fourth, if you’re counting. I know that the Democratic establishment finds that message “alarmist” and “irresponsible,” but then, so did the Weimar centrists. 

We should stop giving a damn what the Democratic establishment or its propagandists–Ezra Klein, Mark Lilla, et al–have to say about politics. There is no reason to think that they know what they’re talking about. We should instead be centering and platforming the newer, less-widely-known but far more intelligent younger generation of commentators opposing that establishment. If I had to pick just one, I’d pick Rachel Cohen, a thirty-something attorney, activist, and writer based in Chicago. Cohen runs a Substack called “Planting Trees,” which on any day is more informative and entertaining than a whole month’s worth of self-indulgent “Guest Essays” at The New York Times. Her latest piece, “Democratic Talking Heads Are Allergic to Standing for Anything, I Guess,” is exactly on point, and applies perfectly to Sherrill. Give yourself a break from the non-stop bullshit artistry of WaPo and the NYT and read it. The world will at last come into focus. Which is a start.

Thanks to Susan Gordon for the Ozturk piece.