America the Incompetent

By Kevin D. Williamson

Sunday, November 01, 2020

 

I tend to agree with National Review editor Rich Lowry that Donald Trump’s main appeal always has been his (generally) unspoken seven-letter campaign platform, which begins with an “F” and ends with a “U.” But Trump promised something else in 2016 that appealed in a trans-partisan way to many Americans: competence.

 

It seems preposterous in retrospect — and, indeed, appeared preposterous to many of us at the time — but Trump’s reputation as a businessman and a getter-done-of-things was critically important to his story in 2016. The Trump proposition last time around was that what Washington really lacks isn’t creative new ideas, which can be had for a dime a dozen at sundry think-tanks and wonk-shops, but a strong, shrewd leader who can evaluate those proposals, apply an intelligent cost-benefit analysis, put together a leadership team and a solid business plan, and get stuff done. Ross Perot offered a similar promise, but Trump had the marketing sense to run the Perot campaign inside the Republican Party rather than in competition against it.

 

Populists like the git-’er-done stuff, but the purportedly “pragmatic” and “empirical” model of progressivism is very little more than the well-heeled version of the same idea. This is an attractive position for many reasons, the most important of which is that it transforms (as a matter of rhetoric, at least) values debates, including messy debates about tradeoffs and priorities, into more tractable questions of purported fact. America’s scientists and business leaders enjoy tremendous and (generally) well-earned prestige, and associating political ideas with winning business propositions or with scientific endeavor is a way to raise the status of one’s own camp — “We believe in science!” — and one’s own agenda. That this kind of thinking fails generation after generation, owing to the fact that government is neither a business nor a science, does not much reduce its popular appeal.

 

It is easy to see the advantage of offering not ideology or even innovation but bare competence —competence is an increasingly rare commodity in American life. Consider the 21st century so far: the intelligence and security failures that led to 9/11, the failure to secure American military and political priorities in Afghanistan and Iraq, the subprime-mortgage boom that sparked the financial crisis of 2008–09 and the subsequent recession, business bailouts, the failures and abuses of American police departments and the riots and arson that have accompanied them, the COVID-19 epidemic, the troubles in the universities, the fecklessness and mischief of the big technology companies, the political failure to deal with serious issues from illegal immigration to environmental degradation, American frustration at the rise of China as a world power and the geopolitical resurgence of such backward countries as Turkey and Russia, the remorseless piling up of the national debt and unfunded entitlement liabilities, bankrupt and nearly bankrupt cities and public agencies — the list goes on. Americans are not wrong to question the competence of American government and American institutions, nor are they alone in doing so: The rest of the world is reevaluating longstanding presumptions of American competence, too.

 

American credibility had been brought low before the election of Donald Trump — that is, in part, why he was elected. His promises to solve complex problems with ruthlessly simplistic and simplistically ruthless solutions — e.g. build a wall and create a new police force to round up 12 million illegal immigrants for deportation — spoke to how low American credibility had sunk. He has, of course, brought it lower still: Simply throwing up a wall and somehow extorting Mexico into paying for it was always a crude and dopey project, but Trump can’t even get that done, having failed to secure the necessary border-security resources while his party controlled both houses of Congress.

 

If things go wonky on Tuesday, if the presidential election goes unresolved and the subsequent contest is marked by political violence and civil disorder, American credibility will slide further still. In the event of an electoral crisis, we will be forced to rely on institutions that already have been tested and found wanting: Congress, many state governments, the news media, the professional political caste. And Americans will turn for information and insight . . . where, exactly? Twitter? Facebook? Fox News? Talk radio? The New York Times? Even the police upon whom we rely for basic physical security have shown themselves all too often unable or unwilling to perform their most basic duties.

 

Donald Trump’s critics are correct that it will take the United States years to recover its reputation. What they do not sufficiently appreciate is that there is much more than Trump from which to recover.