By Charles C. W. Cooke
Thursday, March 14, 2024
Here, courtesy of the New York Times, is a
headline that nicely sums up our political moment: “Biden Promised Calm After
Trump Chaos,” it reads, “but the World Has Not Cooperated.”
Got that? Joe Biden promised that his election would
bring calm, and, as it turns out, that hasn’t happened. But, instead of being
Biden’s fault for having failed to bring about “calm” — or, if such a thing is
impossible to guarantee, for having made vows he evidently could not keep —
it’s the world’s fault. Biden tried, you see, but the world —
dastardly little minx that it is — shockingly declined to cooperate! There we
all were, elatedly watching Biden’s inauguration and assuming in good faith
that the mere act of elevating such a man to the presidency would alter the
fabric of reality itself, and then along came the world to
stick a fork into the toaster. Really, one has to wonder what things are coming
to when the leader of a superpower can’t count on the entire population of the
earth to refrain from throwing obstacles in his path for the duration of his
four- or eight-year term. After all, the history of the past century was one of
unadulterated peace and prosperity until noon on January 20, 2021, at which
moment everything suddenly kicked off, and poor ol’ Joe was left holding the
bag.
I am picking on the Times’ headline because
it was the most recent example of the trend, but, in fairness, it is not only
Joe Biden who gets this treatment. As a matter of fact, an unwillingness to
accept responsibility for one’s failures seems now to be a prerequisite for all
electoral candidates. How else might we regard Donald Trump’s pathetic refusal
to acknowledge that he lost the 2020 election — a refusal that was foreshadowed
in 2016 by Hillary Clinton and in 2018 by Stacey Abrams, and that was echoed in
2022 by Kari Lake? Earlier this month, Representative Katie Porter lost the
California Senate primary in a landslide, and immediately insisted that the election had been
“rigged” in her opponents’ favor via “dishonest means.” What Porter meant by
this, it seems, was that, having noticed that she was one of the most loathsome
people in American political life (and, given that her main rival was Adam
Schiff, that really is saying something), donors in California had declined to
give her as much money as she had hoped they would. A sensible person might
have concluded from this that a little self-reflection was warranted. But not
Porter. She had lost; she didn’t want to have lost; so her
loss must, by definition, have been nefarious.
For all my classical liberalism, I am a stone-cold
conservative when it comes to matters of personal responsibility. Life isn’t
fair. It never has been fair, and it never will be
fair. There are no utopias on earth; there is no such thing as New Soviet Man;
and, for all our technology, human beings remain as flawed and ambitious today
as they were in the time of Julius Caesar. If we want to live virtuous lives,
we ought to accept Reinhold Niebuhr’s injunction to pray for the “serenity to
accept what we cannot help and the courage to change what must be altered,” and
to follow that prayer through to its logical conclusion — which is that we
should hold ourselves accountable in whatever ways we can. There are, indeed,
“systemic” and “environmental” factors at play in the world, just as there is
such a thing as old-fashioned bad luck; but we must be careful not to use those
phenomena as a crutch, or to regard them as wholly deterministic. It is never
the case that one is justified in slapping a woman because of “this
war and that lying son of a bitch, Johnson,” and it is
rarely the case that people who exhibit long patterns of failure do so as the
result of an unbroken string of crummy rolls of the dice. It is, I accept,
rather passé to insist that the “buck stops here.” But it also happens to be
the foundation of Western Civilization. An elite class that considers itself to
be helpless is an elite class that will wipe that civilization off the map.
There are many causes of our current cultural malaise,
but fairly high up on the list is that we have gradually been teaching
ourselves that our fates are more keenly influenced by external factors than by
the choices we have voluntarily made. Sometimes, the least sophisticated rules
are best: Blame yourself for your failures and seek to improve next time; pay
the debts you incur and the bills you run up; take care of you and yours, and
expect others to follow suit; and if you lose an election or squander the
public’s trust, have the good manners to castigate yourself before you claim
that the system has been hijacked by shadowy figures or that Planet Earth is
conspiring against you in some novel or singular way.
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