Things Could Be Worse: Some Thoughts for the New Year

By Kevin D. Williamson

Friday, December 31, 2021

 

This year, I will celebrate New Year’s Eve by keeping an earlier New Year’s resolution and going to bed at 9 p.m. I recommend it.

 

New Year’s Eve is the worst, anyway — even worse than Valentine’s Day when it comes to people desperately pretending to be having a good time. Spare yourself. I’m not saying you have to be a fuddy-duddy on the level I am (if you ever need a quick explainer on how to read lute tablature, I can help) — in fact, I’m not saying you have to do anything — but most of you will be happier if you skip the $1,000 table at the Hilton in Chicago, even if it does come with Red Bull as well as champagne. You can get a pretty good bottle of champagne for $100, have a glass at 8 p.m., and then — here is the important part — go to bed.

 

There are personal benefits to this, of course, but also a related political aspect. I don’t know about you, but most of the worst decisions of my life have been made after 9 p.m. Even if you are living that Eisenhower-era life and starting in with Canadian Club whiskey sours at 5:00, you probably aren’t going to get into too much trouble before 9:00. And as it goes for the citizen, so goes it for the nation. You know who liked to stay up all night dreaming of terrible policy ideas? Barack Obama. And, before him, Bill Clinton was famous for treating the presidency as though he were a college kid cramming for an exam, with all-night sessions powered by fast food and soda. Lyndon Johnson was a night owl.

 

George W. Bush? In bed by 9 p.m. John Quincy Adams? Early to bed, early to rise. Herbert Hoover, too. Calvin Coolidge, a model of conservatism, liked a nap:

 

Calvin Coolidge’s penchant for hourlong naps after lunch earned him amused scorn from contemporaries. But when he missed his nap, he fell asleep at afternoon meetings. He even napped on vacation. Tourists stared in amazement as the president, blissfully unaware, swayed in a hammock on his front porch in Vermont.

 

This, for many Republicans, wasn’t a problem: The Republican Party of the 1920s was averse to an activist federal government, so the fact that Coolidge wasn’t seen as a hard-charging, incessantly busy president was fine.

 

Biographer Amity Shlaes wrote that “Coolidge made a virtue of inaction” while simultaneously exhibiting “a ferocious discipline in work.”

 

Repeat: “This, for many Republicans, wasn’t a problem.” Those Republicans were the good kind.

 

Yes, sometimes Abraham Lincoln stayed up late. You would have had trouble sleeping, too, if you were in his place. But he was a 9-p.m.-er at heart, I think, who served the customary wine at official dinners but himself preferred plain water, because alcohol left him feeling “flabby and undone.” Having no taste for fanaticism, he was not a teetotaler but rather a man of restraint in these matters, like Saint Thomas More and the Count of Monte Cristo. Less fanaticism, more restraint, and more moderation — not the worst idea I have heard in 2021.

 

(Of course, Lincoln the businessman would have been happy to sell you a bottle of whiskey — he didn’t become a Republican by accident.)

 

Big, ambitious, utopian ideas take shape in the wee hours, as do their very near relations, the harebrained schemes. Karl Marx was a night owl. Adolf Hitler, too. Do you want to know what a great idea that comes to you at two o’clock in the morning looks like? This:

Early to bed, early to rise ought to be understood as part of what George Will calls the “conservative sensibility.” A sensibility is not an ideology or a system. It isn’t even, strictly speaking, an idea. It is something in that little corner of the soul that speaks to you in the voice of Dwight Eisenhower, saying: “Get a job. Save some money. Pull your pants up. Look after your family. Don’t get carried away. Be grateful for what you have. Things could be worse — see to it that you do not go out of your way to make them so.”

 

There was a time when Republicans would say, “If everybody else was jumping off a bridge, would you follow?” Now, if everybody is jumping off a bridge, Republicans say: “The people have spoken!” And over the edge they go.

 

The Republican Party in particular may be a lost cause, but I do have some hope that the American people at large still may be able to recover some of that conservative sensibility. My read on the populist madness of recent years is that Americans have come to feel that many of the important things in life are beyond their control, and they are desperately trying to reassert that control. I do sympathize, but, with age and experience, I also have come to understand that many of the most important things in this world never were within my control in the first place, and the words of the hymn “I Can’t Even Walk” mean more to me than they used to. But there are some things that are in my control, and I mean to exercise that control where I can.

 

As William F. Buckley once put it: “I will not willingly cede more power to anyone, not to the state, not to General Motors, not to the CIO. I will hoard my power like a miser, resisting every effort to drain it away from me. I will then use my power, as I see fit. I mean to live my life an obedient man, but obedient to God, subservient to the wisdom of my ancestors; never to the authority of political truths arrived at yesterday at the voting booth.”

 

Keeping an early bedtime is a small personal assertion, maybe even a trivial one. But, as it turns out, keeping Winston Churchill’s daily personal routine doesn’t make you Winston Churchill. And so I currently am very much inclined toward conserving — time, attention, energy, resources, anger — having spent too many years in an ongoing New Year’s Eve celebration, convinced (or almost convinced) that I was having a good time. So I will do what I can do, and take such modest improvements as are available where I find them. I have never understood those strange people who insist they have “no regrets” and have always assumed that they either are too stupid to understand what it is they should regret or that they simply have never really had anything to lose. Lost time is a thing worth regretting, and nations have their poison years just as individuals do. If we are to commit ourselves to a New Year’s resolution, perhaps it should be to work to have no more of those lost years, to do what we can where we can while we can.