By Jonah Goldberg
Saturday, October 29, 2016
Okay, I’m only three (now four, now seven . . . ) words
into the “substance” of this “news”letter and I already know it’s going to get
weird. That may just be the painkillers talking (Hi little guys!), or it may be
2016 generally. I’ll get to the painkillers in a bit.
This has been a weird
year. But, frankly, things have been getting weird for a while now. For a few
years, I’ve increasingly felt like someone was ransacking the
conventional-wisdom warehouse and throwing away the old standards.
The D&D geek in me likes to imagine there’s some
Gothic keep out there with a grand library full of jars containing the
Unwritten Rules of the Universe, each filled with some kind of pixie or
will-o-the-wisp free-floating within. Alas, a couple of precocious kids broke
in, climbed up the sliding library ladder along the shelves, and then smashed
each ancient jar on the floor. The ephemeral creatures within flew away, and
took their rules with them.
The sci-fi geek in me imagines that maybe the code of the
universal computer has been hacked or corrupted and so the dedicated and
automated programs of daily life are weirdly misfiring. You laugh now, but
let’s see how funny you think this is when Kim Kardashian cracks the formula
for cold fusion or water starts boiling at 200 degrees.
The Lifting Curses
I know none of these things are the actual explanation
for all the weirdness around us anymore than “climate change” explains the rise
of ISIS or the fact that the Cubs and the Indians are in the World Series.
Let’s talk about that for a minute. I want the Cubs to
lose, and not just because I don’t want Hugh Hewitt to start cutting himself
again. I want the Cubs to lose for the same reason I wanted the Red Sox to lose
in 2004: I like curses. No, I don’t mean in the sense of giving someone the
evil eye so that they give birth to a duck or anything like that. I like curses
because they are romantic, in the anti-Enlightenment sense. They defy the
machine thinking of the Scientific Revolution. I wrote about this almost
exactly twelve years ago:
This isn’t sour grapes. I may
technically be a Yankees “fan” but it’s only out of vestigial loyalty sort of
like the way Madonna is still a “Catholic.”
Nevertheless, I do hope the Red Sox
lose in the World Series. There aren’t many curses left in modern society most
people still believe in. We’ve sanitized the culture of such mysticisms. Or
we’ve elevated them to quasi-religions deserving full respect under the rules
of political correctness (“Oh? You’re a Pagan? Isn’t that wonderful! My
hairdresser’s a Druid!”). The BoSox curse is old but it’s not weird. It’s a
comfortable bit of lore which adds drama to life. If it disappears the magic
and mystery of life will be a teeny bit diminished. Except of course for Red
Sox fans, who will be whistling dixie out of every orifice for a year.
Depriving them of such joy seems worth the price.
For entirely understandable reasons, this argument was
not well-received by Red Sox fans. I’m not hugely invested in either team, or
in baseball generally, but if the Curse of the Billy Goat is lifted, a game
more attached to superstition than any other I can think of (save for the
Virgin League “sport” of Quidditch) will be somewhat diminished. The origin
story of George Will be shaved down ever so slightly (though he’ll still have
the tale of how he was bitten by a radioactive Oxford Don).
As a Chestertonian at heart, I like and respect old
things. I like it when stuff beats the law of averages for reasons we cannot
easily fathom. The Hayekian in me thinks old things that last often do so for
good reasons we just don’t — and sometimes can’t — know.
Unfortunately, we live in an age where we take the razor
of reason to every little thing and strain to know the whys of it, as if
knowing the why will empower the how.
For example, we know that kids raised in stable
two-parent, religiously observant families will on average do better than kids
who are not. This holds true despite differences in race, class, and religion.
We all have theories for why this is so — but too many people think that if we
can just isolate the variables, we can take the good bits and discard the husks
we don’t like.
An even worse — and more prevalent — mindset is to not
even bother with the why. If we can’t immediately grasp why some old practice,
some ancient tradition, some venerable custom or Chestertonian fence is
worthwhile, we tend to instantly dismiss it as outdated and old-fashioned.
But again, as Chesterton and Hayek alike understood,
simply because something is “old-fashioned” doesn’t mean it wasn’t fashioned in
the first place. And by fashioned, I mean manufactured and constructed. Customs
are created because they solve problems. But they get less respect in our
present age because they have no identifiable authors. They are crowd-sourced,
to borrow a modern phrase for an ancient phenomenon. The customs and
institutions we take for granted are crammed full of embedded knowledge every
bit as much as prices are. But most intelligent people are comfortable
admitting they can’t know all the factors that go into a price, but we
constantly want to dissect the whys of every custom.
Anyway, back to baseball. The last time the Cubs made it
to the Fall Classic, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton hadn’t been born yet, and
WWII had been over for exactly one month. The last time they won the Series —
1908 — was 20 years before the
invention of sliced bread. Why would I want that gloriously magical losing
streak to end?
The Unravelling
I can’t shake the feeling that all sorts of streaks are
coming to an end. Only thrice in the 20th century has a party held on to the
White House for three elections in a row. Harding (1920), Coolidge (1924), and
Hoover (1928) strung together three wins during the Roaring Twenties. FDR did
it because he was essentially president-for-life. George H. W. Bush did it
because he was standing on Reagan’s legacy and running against Michael Dukakis,
a Black Swan of dorkiness. Only two sitting senators were elected president
prior to 2008, when we had no choice but to elect one because both candidates were
senators.
Other streaks are more ephemeral. Ronald Reagan was the
first and only divorced man to be elected president. Even so, there’s been a
rule of thumb, which he adhered to, that having an admirable married life — at
least in public — was essential to getting elected. That ends this year no
matter who wins. The related rule of thumb that you needed to be known as a
person of reasonably good character to win your party’s nomination, never mind
the presidency, has also come crashing down off the shelf — the magical pixie
who guaranteed it has flown out the window.
I could do this all day. It used to be that religious
leaders at least pretended that a politician’s personal character and faith
mattered, even if they were a Republican. It used to be that kowtowing to
foreign despots meddling in our elections was a no-no, particularly for the
GOP. It used to be a vicious slander to suggest that Democrats were socialists
in disguise. But we spent the last year watching Democrats fall all over
themselves to insist there’s no meaningful distinction between them and their socialist
brethren.
The fact that no one wrote such rules down was a sign not
of their weakness but of their dogmatic strength. No one ever bothered to write
down that candidates shouldn’t brag about the size of their penises either. And
I’m sure the jarred-spirit upholding that dictum was more surprised than anyone
when he was liberated from his obligations.
The Clinton Way
If we wanted to play the blame game, I could talk — or
rather type — at great length about how much blame Bill Clinton deserves for all
this. He spent his life, like his presidency, mocking the settled rules and
customs of public life. Countless other presidents have had affairs, taken
bribes, bent and broke the rules. But when caught, they had the decency to be,
against at least publicly, ashamed and slink off the public stage, at least for
respectable period of time. Not Bubba.
Clinton’s problem was twofold. The first is of his own
making: He is and always has been a shameless cad. The second wasn’t his fault
at all: He was born too late. The world changed around him and he couldn’t
adapt. Something similar happened to Nixon. Tricky Dick’s schemes were not very
different from those of LBJ, JFK, and FDR. But the rules changed on him, and
like the slowest player at musical chairs, he was out.
In a sense, Clinton learned from Nixon. But the lesson he
took from his downfall was that it’s always better to simply brazen it out.
Bill forced institutions and people to bend to him — to discard their
principles and integrity — for some fly-swarmed and misbegotten argument about
the “greater good.” Feminists who invested vast sums of argument, time, and
money into a new dogma about sexual relations suddenly started penning articles
in the New York Times about how
politicians deserved “one
free grope.” Today, countless conservatives who decried this and related
hypocrisies have now embraced them as the new rules, all in the name of the
greater good.
Bill’s wife, always his partner in such matters, learned
her lessons too. In the America of the Old Rules, Hillary would have resigned
from public life long ago. But she is equally without shame. She’d prefer to
debase our institutions and those who work in them by making them bend the knee
to the greater good. She put James Comey and the FBI in a no-win situation — so
it’s no surprise he and the Bureau came away losers, reinforcing the suspicion
that our leaders are all shot-through with self-serving corruption. The Old
Rules of probity and the rule of law that Comey continues to sing now clang off
the ear as false notes. The Old Rules are now the rules for little people. Why?
Because Hillary and her junta “wanted to get away with it.”
But blaming one man is misguided. Clinton was a creature
of our age, the first president to break — publicly — the unwritten rules of
character that were already in decline in society at large. After all, it was
candidate Clinton who talked about his underwear in order to seem cool. It’s
not such a long trip to another candidate talking about his d**k. We were
already in that neighborhood.
I still think Donald Trump will lose in at least an
Electoral College landslide. But my thinking may indeed be based on the Old
Rules. We’ve already learned this year that overreliance on such guideposts can
lead you into a ditch. The development economists tell me than an institution,
at its core, is just a rule that binds people to certain practices even when it
may not be in their self-interest.
In that sense, we are where we are because our
institutions are failing, flung off the shelves for fun and profit. It should
be no surprise that weird things happen in such an environment. Weirdness is a
subjective measure based upon what the observer assumes to be normal. And it
looks like we are heading to a new normal — or, at the very least, that the old
one lays in ashes. As a conservative, I must believe we’ll find our way out for
the same reasons that we discovered the Old Rules in the first place. Certain
ways of life are “better” because they work better for most people. The task
for conservatives is to identify, defend, and, when possible, restore those
customs — even when the acolytes of the fierce urgency of now try to tear them
down. On this score, I share David Brooks’s optimism.
Yes, this has been a weird and unpleasant time, but as
Bill Clinton no doubt told many a nervous intern, just because something starts
out weird and unpleasant, doesn’t mean it can’t end well.
Author Update:
Mere minutes before this thing was about to go out in the pneumatic tubes, word
broke that FBI director James Comey is re-opening the investigation of Hillary
Clinton’s e-mails. It’s as if God wanted to prove my point about how weird 2016
is. There will be more to say about all this soon but I don’t think it changes
anything I wrote and it happens to offer a nice segue to what follows.
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