Saturday, October 29, 2016

The Impossible Weirdness of 2016



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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