By Kevin
D. Williamson
Monday,
June 26, 2023
A
classical liberal arts education is not useless, but it is better to approach
such learning as though it were—yes, a good education might make you a better
worker or a better citizen, but the purpose of education is not to make you a
more useful instrument for the Fortune 500 or for the state, or to make you a
tool at all. (Though, goodness knows, our schools have produced some real tools
over the years.) Education may be understood as selfish (it is better to be
cultivated than to remain ignorant, and education opens one up to pleasures that are not
available to the uneducated) or as an act of devotion (God did not make us for complacency and
idleness). Yet once you start judging it primarily on the criterion of usefulness,
you have lost the essence of education and have descended into
mere training. Whenever I hear somebody say that we should care
about Mozart because babies made to listen to Mozart in the crib go on to score
25 points higher on the SAT, the bad part of me thinks that person should have
his ears cut off, because they are not doing him any good.
(My
little one prefers Thomas Tallis, anyway, even if these guys never gave good ol’ English a second
thought.)
None of
that should be read as an invitation to turn up one’s nose at the practical arts,
which are, after all, the things that keep us from starving to death or dying
from smallpox or in general suffering under the material conditions of the
early 13th century, as much as a troll over at the Daily
Wire seem to like the idea of living in 1220. (Presumably, Daily
Wire founder Ben Shapiro is slightly less sanguine about the prospects
of living, if it were possible, in
medieval Europe.)
One of the practical arts is politics, which is less intellectually
demanding than agriculture and less noble than medicine but which is,
unhappily, still difficult to do without entirely. There have been many useful
statements of the practical nature of politics, from Bismarck’s famous proverb
(“Politics is the art of the possible, the attainable—the art of the next-best”)
to the misunderstood and often misrepresented thought of Machiavelli, who argued, long before English
had the term “political science,” that students of politics should take a
scientific approach to the issue—that the problem of politics is not the
pursuit of ideals or idealism but understanding how the world actually works
and using that understanding toward practical ends in behalf of one’s own
people, prince, or republic. The author of The Prince was,
indeed, a republican in his own heart, but he wrote his most famous work with a
direction toward monarchy because, in his time and place, and in the context of
his project—the political unification of Italy—monarchy was what he had to work
with. If you have not read James Burnham’s
The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom, it is a very illuminating book
for our time.
It is
interesting to set Burnham and his Machiavellians alongside such contemporary
political writers as Patrick Deneen, whose latest book has received a great
deal of attention from friends and colleagues of mine such as Jonah Goldberg and Stephanie Slade, or alongside other so-called New
Right (really, New New New New Right, since we get a New Right every 15 years
or so) figures as Sohrab Ahmari, in part because of how the underlying
allegiances have changed—Burnham assumed that conservatives would be “defenders
of freedom,” while Deneen and Ahmari and their kind think we have too much
freedom—but also because doing so illustrates the fundamental, inescapable
problem of that so-called New Right: its lack of intellectual
seriousness.
You
don’t always get intellectual seriousness from a serious intellectual.
Professor Deneen, currently on the faculty of Notre Dame and previously at
Princeton and Georgetown, is an actual academic in a milieu that attracts a lot
of phony intellectuals such as “Dr.” Sebastian Gorka. As such, he has a lot of
interesting things to say about Polybius and Aristotle and even about his
intellectual enemies, who include such arch-villains of philosophical history
as … Adam Smith. But ask him his favorite question from Lenin—“What is to be
done?” and you won’t get much of an answer. As Slade and Goldberg note, Deneen is vague and contradictory
when it comes to actual questions of policy, or even questions of practical
politics. Polybius? Lots to say. Entitlement reform? Well, you know.
This is
the case across most of the so-called New Right. They know who their enemies
are, and they know in whose behalf they have appointed themselves to speak—generally
without consulting the supposed beneficiaries of their grace—but they don’t
know what they want to do. And, to the extent that they do know, it is
preposterous and trivial. Sohrab Ahmari, who bounced around between religious
and political orientations before settling into being kind of newfangled
right-wing Catholic (think William F. Buckley without the charm or the chops)
proposes reviving the “blue laws,” which were intended to protect the sanctity
of the Sabbath—and which were, it is worth emphasizing here, championed by
Puritans who would have burned Sohrab Ahmari at the stake.
No doubt
Ahmari would point out that Constantine had Sabbath laws before the Puritans
did, but our nation wasn’t founded by Constantine. In fact, the Catholic
character of the “integralist” tendency in right-wing politics is—and I write
this as a Catholic—positively hilarious. If you believe that in a country in
which only a minority of Catholics take Catholic social
teaching very seriously—a minority of a minority—the electorate is going to
take up Pope John Paul II and his “Theology of the Body” as a ruling political assumption,
you are higher than Hunter Biden pretending to be Hunter Thompson.
Put
another way: The belief that the basis of a meaningful program of political
reform in these United States in 2023 is going to be found in 13th-century
Christian practice or in a neo-Puritan regime that would require banning NBC
Sunday Night Football on penalty of death, then you are not actually
engaged in politics at all. What you are engaged in is eccentricity, a hobby,
like building model ships in bottles or trying to prove who really wrote
the plays attributed to William Shakespeare. (Answer: William Shakespeare.) I
don’t think there necessarily is a lot of harm in it. I probably won’t read the
new Deneen book, because I do not think he is intellectually honest and, for
that reason, do not judge that he is worth the investment of my time, but I do
sometimes enjoy reading things along those lines. I recently read Leftism
Revisited: From De Sade and Marx to Hitler and Pol Pot by Erik Von
Kuehnelt-Leddihn, which is crazy-bananas but also a great read, and, in spite
of its being more than three decades old, probably more relevant to
contemporary politics than much of what is being written right now. By all
means, study Aristotle—but don’t tell me you have magically pulled a 2024
Republican platform out of his Posterior Analytics.
There is
a kind of political and intellectual gulf on the so-called New Right: On one
end, there are the intellectuals and pseudo-intellectuals, who do not have any
real program but who are very, very sure that Polybius would have disapproved
of how the Harvard Management Company administers its endowment. (That is one
of those issues that these “real Americans” we hear about from time to time
apparently are just passionately interested in.) On the other
end are the simple will-to-power types, also without much of a real agenda, or
at least without a real agenda that extends more than 15 minutes into the
future. These are the J. D. Vances of the world, the Steve Bannons and the
Marjorie Taylor Greenes and Andrew Anglins, whose program is only this:
Many of us have student loans on degrees that are worthless.
Many of us fought in wars for Jews.
Many of us have struggled with substance abuse.
Many of us are out of shape.
We feel emasculated.
Many of us feel we have never had power.
We crave power.
We lust after power. We want to be part of a group, which will give us
power. A group that will confirm our worth as men.
We do not have identities.
We want identities.
We want to be productive. All men want to be productive. We want to
build things. We want to build, we want to create, we want to be needed.
We have problems with women. All of us do. We lie to each other and
claim that we don’t.
We are a generation of throwaways, which (((those who write history
before it happens))) have slated to be the last generation of Heterosexual
White Men.
We are angry.
There is an atavistic rage in us, deep in us, that is ready to boil
over.
There is a craving to return to an age of violence.
We want a war.
That’s
from Anglin. Take out the antisemitic stuff and tell me which part you couldn’t
read in the New Right outlet of your choice. Take out the
antisemitic stuff (or maybe don’t take it out) and (maybe) the
three-cheers-for-violence stuff, and tell me which part you couldn’t find a Fox
News mouth-hole to make excuses for—or a writer for one of the more excitable
conservative magazines, for that matter.
And,
really, what is to be done? What are we going to do? Tell the socially
maladjusted incels of Rumble to study Polybius?
Professor
Deneen et al. would tell you that their beef is with liberalism. In fact, their
beef is with modernity. But, in either case, their indictments are like
complaining about the weather. This is the world we live in and, if your political
program entails living in a different world, then it isn’t really politics. It
isn’t political philosophy, either. It is, by the most charitable account,
literature, albeit a bargain-basement genre of literature: right-wing Catholic
fan-fic. And if the talk-radio callers and the comments-section rage-monkeys
are anything to go by, what these people need isn’t a political program, but
therapy. Indeed, there is a reason so much of our modern political discourse,
which isn’t really political discourse, has the feel of a group-therapy
session.
During
the runup to the 2016 presidential election—and, especially, in the aftermath
of that election—we read a great deal about the rage and alienation of
downwardly mobile, white, exurban-to-rural voters, who saw in Donald Trump a
hammer with which to smash institutions they hate, or at least a nettle with
which to irritate people they hate. What was never adequately explained—or even
seriously considered, at least in public—was why the concerns and demands of that
particular demographic subset should play so prominent a role in our politics.
Why not be extra solicitous, when it comes to economic policy,
toward the economically vibrant places and the most productive industries?
Why should national policy be oriented toward the declining
parts of the country, the moribund firms, the stagnant industries? Deneen
argues that we should have elites who are more aligned with “the many”—meaning
the people he thinks should count more politically—but nobody in that camp ever
really says what they think that should mean. Donald Trump claimed to speak for
the poor gormless benighted denizens of middle America—and then proceeded to
absolutely hose many of the most important industries in rural America, e.g.,
absolutely screwing soybean farmers in the course of accomplishing
something—remind me: What did he accomplish?—vis-à-vis China.
J. D. Vance was going to make a big splash helping his former patrons in the
venture-capital world connect with economically ailing parts of Ohio. That
hasn’t borne much fruit, and neither did Vance’s attempt at
nonprofit work. All
that big talk, and what did he do? He took the same job Sherrod Brown
has.
¡Viva
la revolución! I
guess.
(NB: All
of this progressive talk about how “blue states subsidize red states” is
economically illiterate, intellectually dishonest, and morally kind of gross.
It also misstates the real politics: Mississippi (which had precisely one Republican
governor in the whole of the 20th century and was run by
Democrats until 2010, following 131 years of interrupted Democratic control of
the state legislature, but never mind that for now, it’s a “red state”) and
Oregon have exactly the same poverty rate among non-Hispanic whites, but
Mississippi has a much higher overall poverty rate, mostly driven by the fact
that Mississippi is 38 percent African-American, while Oregon has fewer black
people than a Bernie Sanders rally, with a smaller African-American population
share than Alaska or West Virginia. African-Americans have a higher poverty
rate than whites basically everywhere in the United States.
Hispanics, too. Do you really want to make the argument that “red states” are
horrible because there are too many poor people—and, in particular, too many
poor black and Hispanic people, and probably too many old people—living in
them? And do you think that Mississippi’s recent Electoral College votes are driven
by the preferences of the poor black voters in that state? Don’t talk to me
about “red states” and “blue states”—talk to me about ZIP codes.)
What we
have is angry populists looking for power or at least paychecks, and similarly
angry academic eggheads offering no kind of intellectual leadership to the
movement they purport to be championing, partly because they don’t have a real
product to sell, and partly because there wouldn’t be any market for such a
product if they did. And so you end up with Victor Davis Hanson, who is happy
to explain to you why this moment in our politics—or any other episode that
comes to mind—is reminiscent of the Peloponnesian War, writing for the same
outlet as Julie Kelly, who claims January 6 was a hoax staged with the aid of
“crisis actors.” The Thucydides guy and the Q-Anon kooks, all singing from the
same hymnal, all doing the same hokey-pokey, all feeding at the same
trough, at least until the Mercer money runs
out.
But, you
know, Polybius.
At the
Trump rallies, you can hear the real chant, if you have the right kind of ears:
“We want power!” Okay, so you want power, what for? To make sure movie theaters
are closed on Sundays? I would have written, “to make America one vast
Chick-fil-A,” but, as I understand it, Chick-fil-A is now too “woke” for the
right kind of people. Charlie Kirk apparently is going through his fridge
trying to figure out whether his ketchup is “woke.” Totally normal people in
totally normal times, these.
The
thing about eccentrics is, they aren’t all interesting. Some of them are just
hideously tedious.
And
Furthermore . . .
To
repeat: I haven’t read the Deneen book and don’t expect to. But as I know from
Stephanie Slade’s review, Deneen writes that he would prefer a system in which
conservative views are “the price of admission to elite status itself.” For a
Polybius man—though maybe not a thoroughgoing
Polybius man—Roman
precedent is always of interest. Cicero, a provincial who wasn’t a proper
Roman, became the most conventional of Romans, the most Roman of Romans, among
the most conservative and orthodox. Conservatism may not have been a condition
to admission to the Roman elite for everybody, but it surely was a condition
for such a man as Cicero, a novus homo—a “new man,” not a man from
a family of senators and consuls. (There was a time when mere
money wasn’t enough.) Cicero’s ally, Cato the Younger, had a reputation as
being no friend to the common man but was, technically, a pleb. He was famously
orthodox in religious matters—but also adopted Stoicism, which his famous
ancestor, Cato the Elder, had opposed as a noxious foreign cult. (The Romans
used to talk about the Greeks the way conservatives circa 2001 talked about the
French—as weaklings who wouldn’t take their own side in a fight and, in the
Roman indictment, “effeminate.”) Julius Caesar, the great populist, was himself
a patrician from an ancient lineage. Everything old is new: Geert Wilders, the
Dutch rightist of partly Indonesian ancestry, bleaches and dyes his hair to
look more classically Dutch. Donald Trump was—not long ago!—a peddler of pride-flag merchandise who made cameos in porn films.
People aren’t always what they seem, or what life seems to have fitted them to
be. And they certainly aren’t always what they claim to be.
Economics
for English Majors
On the
Oren Cass vs. Scott Winship throwdown, the numbers seem pretty clear to be on
Winship’s side. But, by all means, dig in yourself and see what you can make of
it.
Or, to
take another approach, ask yourself: “Who you gonna believe? Angry populists or
your lyin’ eyes?”
Ain’t
nobody you know wants a 1980s standard of living—much less a standard of living
from the 1950s, the purported postwar golden age of the American worker. I know
this because I know you can have that standard of living, right now, if you
want it—cheap. But nobody does that. You can go get yourself a house more or
less identical to the one my middle-class grandparents lived in from the 1950s
through the 1980s, only a few miles away from the company town where they
actually lived, for less than the price of a Toyota GR
Corolla. Yeah, it
needs some work—so did a lot of people’s houses in that era. A car built to
1982 specs would be pretty cheap today—if you could legally sell it, which you
couldn’t. Adjusted for inflation, you could almost buy two Mac Studios for what
one Atari 800 personal computer cost when it first hit the market in 1981—and
that computer didn’t have the computing power of a modern smartwatch.
People
were poor in the 1950s—and radically richer than they had been only a few
decades before. All this wealth we have is really, really new. As Brad DeLong put it: “In what matters most, in the warp
and woof of everyday life, our counterparts in the industrial core of the world
economy around 1900 still had more in common in their styles of life with their
predecessors of 1600 or 1700 than with us today.”
Of
course people compete for material goods. One of the interesting features of
the rich world in the past few decades is that everybody has started to
rediscover the fact that while businesses compete for consumers, consumers
compete with one another, too. (Watching people learn can be a hoot.) For practically every product or
experience, there is a super-expensive version of it: That’s because we live in
a connected world with a lot of rich people in it. (I like Momofuku, but with
memories of collegiate poverty still very much with me, it took some time to
come around to $21 ramen.) There’s a reason “limited edition” stuff has got so
big in recent years. There’s a reason everybody is talking about how hard life
is in our time while Rolex dealers can’t keep product in stock.
But that
reason isn’t really what you might think: When a society reaches a certain
level of raw material prosperity, people’s energy shifts away from the
competition for necessities or even quotidian luxuries and toward competition
for status. Nobody in these United States is murdering anybody over
a pair of sneakers because his feet are cold. Nobody is going to commit an
armed robbery and take a watch because he needs to know what time
it is.
(Flava Flav knows what time it is.)
I’ve
been meaning to dig into this for a while, and I promise I will at some point,
but, here’s the thing: What has changed in the past few decades isn’t that it
sucks to be poor—it has always sucked to be poor—or that the middle class has
grown poorer—it hasn’t—but that the lives of the very, very wealthy—your
Silicon Valley billionaire types—have become radically different from those of
ordinary people, even ordinary rich people. Do you know what Howard Hughes
drove? He drove a Buick—a really nice, tricked-out,
customized Buick. But a Buick nonetheless. Jeff Bezos has a spaceship and a
yacht that would have made Thurston Howell III himself retch at the vulgar
display of wealth.
You’ll
notice that our self-appointed class-war generals do not talk very much about
the poor—they talk almost exclusively about the rich, the “allah-garks” of
Bernie Sanders’s imbecilic rhetoric, and how unfair it is that they are so
rich. They would like you to believe that the poor are poor because the rich
are rich—and, more important, that you splendidly numerous middle-class
voters are unhappy because the rich are rich. The rich may be powerful but, as
voters, they are not splendidly numerous. The class-war guys
aren’t counting money—they are counting votes. That “1-percent”
stuff is evil, but it is clever.
I’m not
an economist, and I don’t pretend to have all the solutions to making our
already wondrously prosperous country even more prosperous. But I do have a
sneaking suspicion that eating the seed corn is not a great long-term
strategy.
Words
about Words
Joe
Biden, as everybody knows, talks literal nonsense. Whoever writes his Twitter
does, too. Example: “Juneteenth as a federal holiday is meant to breathe new
life into the essence of America.” This is an example of a sentence that is
grammatical in form but nonsensical in content. Noam Chomsky, the Paul Krugman
of linguistics (a giant in his academic field, an idjit at politics), composed
the textbook example: “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.” (If you have a
French textbook, it may be: “Le silence vertébral indispose la voile licite.”)
Every word in the sentence means something, and the sentence has the form of a
grammatical English sentence, but it is nonsense. Biden’s nonsense is nonsense
with a bias toward that which superficially wounds uplifting—“new life” and
“essence”—but it is nonsense nonetheless.
Literally
meaningless sentences are common enough in political rhetoric, and there is
much political rhetoric that doesn’t seem to mean very much if you think about
it too hard. Consider the ubiquitous cri de cœur: “We’re gonna take
our country back!” From whom? The United States of America is governed by—for
our sins—Americans. If there is a thought attached to that sentence, it
is a thought that few people would be willing to speak aloud: “The United
States should be, effectively, a single-party state, because, in our view, the
government is not legitimate if the other party is in power.” Taking their
country back is what the Indians did in 1947. How strange that so many of the
people who shout “We’re gonna take our country back!” have so little sympathy
for people who are actually trying to do that—the Ukrainians, for
example.
One of
the “tricks”—and it isn’t really a trick—I used to share with my writing
students is to read a sentence aloud and think of the literal meaning of the
sentence and each of its constituent parts. You’d be amazed how that little bit
of mental focus improves the prose of struggling writers.
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