By Kevin D. Williamson
Sunday, December 06, 2020
Some people have taken comfort in Joe Biden’s emerging
undead administration, in which Biden, who will be 82 years old at the end of
his term and was first elected to office half a century ago, has chosen to
surround himself with such deathless hacks as John Kerry, who first ran for
office in 1972, and Janet Yellen, who took her first job at the Federal Reserve
in 1977. These personalities are intimately familiar, like a persistent
infection.
In truth, Biden might have done worse under the influence
of today’s Democratic party: Janet Yellen may not be Milton Friedman, but she
isn’t Bernie Sanders, either. Incoming National Economic Council director Brian
Deese hasn’t been working at Marxists ’R’ Us since leaving the Obama
administration — he’s been helping BlackRock profitably manage its $7.4
trillion in assets. We’ll even be treated to the return of Jen Psaki, the
witless, feckless, gormless, and generally -less Pippi Longstocking of
self-regarding Democratic hackery. Sure, it’ll be like giving the inmates from One
Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest nuclear weapons and a navy, but that’s
democracy for you. And they’d have to expend a great deal of energy to come off
as weirder than Donald Trump, who
has an imaginary friend for a PR man and a habit of citing a Twitter
philosopher called “Cat Turd.”
So, return to normalcy?
Don’t bet on it.
Americans talk about the postwar years — the Truman,
Eisenhower, and Kennedy years — as though they were a kind of golden age. They
weren’t, and damned few of us would be happy with the political settlement that
existed then: The Left may cheer the high statutory tax rates of the time, but
actual tax collections in those years were almost exactly what they are today,
and as much as 80 percent of that Eisenhower-era tax revenue was spent on the
military and national security, with entitlement and welfare spending kept to a
small share of outlays. There was some movement on civil rights — Eisenhower
signed a civil-rights bill in 1957 and sent the 101st Airborne to Little Rock
to keep the peace as the schools were integrated — but the country remained
segregated by and large. In 1950, a third of U.S. households had no indoor plumbing.
But this is the era that commands the sentimental
attention of the American mind. The postwar years are our national definition
of normal, even though they were anything but that. Of course, there are things
to admire about the ways and means of the past: I have a soft spot for the era
in which it was considered unseemly for gentlemen who wanted to be president to
campaign for the position and the old, retiring style of Calvin Coolidge.
Dueling and dying
from staph infections I can do without.
The postwar liberal consensus was in some ways an
inversion of the current order: Progressives had the political power, and
conservatives had the cultural power. Progressives of course believe they are
naturally entitled to domination in both political and cultural life, and the
election of Joe Biden seems to many of them a step in the direction of the
return to the kind of normalcy they endorse: Progressives in control of the
levers of power, conservatives quietly complaining about it at Rotary Club
meetings. But that is not what has happened, and the old liberal consensus
rested on a foundation that cannot be restored.
What’s
been lost since the Eisenhower years isn’t widely shared prosperity (we are
radically better off today than we were then) or uprightness and honesty in
government (Eisenhower treated his wife shamefully and had Richard Nixon as his
vice president), or even social stability (the anarchy sowed in the 1950s was
reaped in the 1960s), but something altogether different from any of these: trust.
American government had never enjoyed more prestige than
it did at the end of World War II. The corruption and waste of the U.S.
war-mobilization project were Brobdingnagian, but this fact never really
entered the national consciousness. World War II was the good war — if you
can’t feel good about whipping the Nazis, you can’t feel good — and it was
perceived (wrongly, but that hardly matters) as the event that ended the Great
Depression and brought the United States into the new prosperity it began to enjoy
in the postwar years. World War II had convinced many Americans that government
was practically omnicompetent, capable of executing any program to which it
committed itself.
The prestige of American government rose with the
prestige of science, to which Washington had been wed from the Manhattan
Project onward. Scientific and pseudoscientific experts of all kinds — from
nuclear physicists to practitioners of “management science” — were treated with
tremendous deference in the belief that traditional messy democratic fights
about preferences and priorities could be settled on empirical terms. Indeed,
one of the superstitions of the time was that government and science were
destined to become essentially the same thing. Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke,
and Kurt Vonnegut imagined economies or whole worlds run by computers —
dystopias, for the most part, but dystopias based on an expansive view of what
science could in fact accomplish in regulating and regimenting human affairs.
The Olympian scientific attitude — if not the genuine
scientific commitment to dispassionate truth-seeking — found its way into all
of the major institutions. The great business concerns that thrived in the
postwar years, powerhouses such as IBM and Bell Labs, were engaged in groundbreaking
research in addition to seeking profits; history and philosophy were superseded
by “political science”; the formerly partisan press that had given rise to
dozens of newspapers with such names as the Sherman Daily Democrat and
the Springfield Republican gave way to the “objective” reporting of
Walter Cronkite and the revamped Wall Street Journal, which grew from a
relatively small readership of 33,000 New York–area businessmen in 1945 to a
national readership of more than 1 million in only 20 years.
These institutions together formed a mutually dependent
and mutually reinforcing structure of credibility in an environment charged by
victory in the war, the economic boom that followed, and the awesome power of
modern science made urgent and manifest by nuclear weapons. For a moment, these
institutions managed to enjoy and cultivate that credibility and prestige
without being made arrogant, corrupt, or complacent by it.
But what we thought was confidence was in fact hubris,
and the great trust enjoyed by the postwar institutions was not entirely
merited. Yes, we had a kind of national unity founded on shared belief — as do
Scientologists, vegans, QAnon cultists, and kooks of all stripes. We were
unified by shared assumptions that were not true. A pleasant delusion is no
less delusional for its pleasantness.
Human affairs are not an engineering question and cannot
be “solved” like an algebra problem. The physical world is made up of atoms and
energy, but the social world is made up of human beings and the
incomprehensible complexity of their interconnected lives. We did not get
Asimov’s thinking machines — we got Facebook, that vast representation of
original sin in digital form. We asked government to solve problems that cannot
be solved by government or by anybody else, thinking that we could win a “war
on poverty” in the same way we’d won the war on Germany and Japan. (Oh, you
too, Italy — you too.) Political “science” and pragmatism turned out to be new
cloaks for ideology and self-dealing, the trustees of institutions exchanged
their postwar idealism for comfortable careerism, and Walter Cronkite turned
out to be a bigot and a nut.
We aren’t going to revert to the middle of the 20th
century. In some ways, we are reverting to the middle of the 19th century:
populism and agrarian agitation, bitterly partisan media, some pretty terrible
ideas about monetary policy, the political weaponization of antitrust law and
federal regulation, raging sectional divides, distrust of the major political
parties, hostility toward trade — and a general lack of faith in institutions
from the state and local levels to the national and international levels.
Conservatives may take some inspiration from the fact that when confronted with
the fiery populism of young William Jennings Bryan, some Americans may have
thrilled to his “Cross of Gold” speech — but, in the end, they elected William
McKinley. The election was vicious
and was fought partly on culture-war grounds, partly on ethnic grounds, in the
aftermath of a financial panic, and split the country on rural–urban lines.
It was ugly and disruptive, and it changed the country
forever.
And, in many ways, that ugliness and disruption — and not
the brief liberal consensus of the postwar years—is normal: the real
normal, the normal normal.
Two cheers for that.
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