By Michael Brendan Dougherty
Wednesday, October 20, 2021
Well, it happened to me. I went searching for a toy that
I thought I would get my son for Christmas, and the website that sold it put
the ominously unspecific “Shipping in December” tag underneath the purchase
button. Of course I did what any red-blooded American dad would do and ordered
more ammunition (finally back in stock!) to prepare for the supply-chain
apocalypse this holiday season. You’ll have this Godzilla figurine when you pry
it from my cold dead hands.
The funniest thing about the supply-chain crisis is that
it is not, as it has been billed, an “everything shortage.” Quite the opposite:
It is an everything deluge. COVID-era stimulus, rising wages at the bottom end,
and supersized unemployment relief have restored the balance sheet of the
American household. Some industries — travel and hospitality — are still down.
Instead of those vacations and meals out, Americans are buying stuff for
their homes, and for their home offices. They are buying stuff for
their new businesses; new start-ups, which had been declining for decades,
suddenly took off in the pandemic. The container ships idling outside the port
of Long Beach are standing still not just because of labor shortages, container
shortages, and California’s truck regulations — as crazy as those are. They are
there because more ships are coming into port than ever before. And America’s
just-in-time warehouses can barely handle all the incoming traffic.
Empty shelves, like inflation, can become a
self-fulfilling prophecy. And so we should expect more of those. It’s hard not
to detect a little bit of judgmentalism from the columnists writing about all
this. In the Washington Post, one columnist writes that “American consumers might have been spoiled”
with quick delivery of all they wanted in the recent past. But we should buck
up and deal with shortages, just as our forebears did with oil in the ’70s,
rationing in World War II, or housing in the 1920s.
In a moralizing piece about how mean Americans are to service workers, a contributor to The Atlantic explains
that “American shoppers have been trained to be nightmares.” And that “the
pandemic has shown just how desperately the consumer class clings to the feeling
of being served.” The thrust of the piece is that the remnants of the American
middle class have no other meaningful pursuits in life and are so stressed out
by economic insecurity that they throw themselves into the project of
tyrannizing, tormenting, and otherwise hassling service and retail workers, in
a degrading and macabre imitation of the true holders of capital.
Each in its own way, these pieces demonstrate a strange
relationship Americans have to plenty and to privation. The left-wing
conscience has lately turned to the idea of “abundance agenda”– where
guaranteed universal incomes win the consent of the voters for massive
de-carbonization of the economy. At the same time, when people do get a little
extra money — as from the COVID-era stimulus — something about how Americans
spend it disgusts progressives. Soon, we may see a return of small-is-beautiful
sentimentalizing, and a de-carbonization agenda that is premised on moral
hatred of Mammon, and on retching at the softness of modern life.
To be honest, this double-mindedness afflicts more than
just progressives. Count me among the Millennial conservatives who think
Jimmy Carter’s malaise speech had a point. Initial polling — such as it was —
showed Americans responded positively to the speech, which had basically called
out the country for becoming soft and selfish. A speech in which the president
presumed to diagnose “a moral and spiritual crisis.”
The confidence that we have always
had as a people is not simply some romantic dream or a proverb in a dusty book
that we read just on the Fourth of July. It is the idea which founded our nation
and has guided our development as a people. Confidence in the future has
supported everything else — public institutions and private enterprise, our own
families, and the very Constitution of the United States. Confidence has
defined our course and has served as a link between generations. We’ve always
believed in something called progress. We’ve always had a faith that the days
of our children would be better than our own.
Our people are losing that faith,
not only in government itself but in the ability as citizens to serve as the
ultimate rulers and shapers of our democracy.
This part of the speech was right, although almost in a
damning way. One can sense that Carter was meeting this spiritual crisis with
more secularism. Was it really confidence in the future, or was it trust in
Providence that motivated our forebears? It was the latter. But secularization
was well under way at the start of the 20th century, and indeed at that time it
was this much less specific confidence that held America
together. The people living in the 1970s had either experienced, or had parents
who experienced, the nation pick itself up from the Great Depression and then
win a mighty world war before becoming the global economic powerhouse. Carter
named the shocks that dislodged this confidence: the assassinations of John F.
Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., “the agony of Vietnam,” and the scandal of
Watergate. And yet, Carter’s recommendations were that the American people had
to join in a great struggle for freedom, and their contribution to the nation
would be to not take needless car trips. It wasn’t really going to work, and
instead Carter helped the United States to embark on its decades-long Middle
Eastern adventure, securing the oil supplies that made the 1980s and 1990s
possible.
But to everything there is a season. The COVID-19 era was
one of chastisement and privation — mainly the privation of social contact and
connection. Zoom was an austerity program, and I want to splurge on black-tie
events again. I want to be out late in the night again. I’m ready for my
roaring ’20s and the crazy 1980s. There was a few-weeks period where New York
got into this mood, before the Delta variant crashed the emerging party. And I
want my child to have that giant, overpriced Godzilla figure underneath a tree
that is almost totally obscured by the gifts Santa brought us. Yes, I’ll
overpay — we already have overpaid for it all.
Jimmy Carter said that the energy crisis was a moral
crisis. I say our supply-chain crisis is a social crisis. We are buying stuff
in part because we haven’t dared to meet each other IRL, to buy drinks, and
rent rooms, and play loud music until your throat is sore, and your feet are
throbbing in your brand-new shoes. It’s time to get out there.
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