By Kevin
D. Williamson
Monday,
February 06, 2023
Marcus
Aurelius must have gone to a pretty rough gym. The emperor-philosopher
wrote:
In the gymnastic exercises suppose that a man has torn thee with his
nails, and by dashing against thy head has inflicted a wound. We neither show
any signs of vexation, nor are we offended, nor do we suspect him afterwards as
a treacherous fellow; and yet we are on our guard against him, not however as
an enemy, nor yet with suspicion, but we quietly get out of his way. Something
like this let thy behavior be in all the other parts of life: let us overlook
many things in those who are like antagonists in the gymnasium. For it is in
our power, as I said, to get out of the way, and to have no suspicion nor
hatred.
With
Nikki Haley getting set to announce her 2024 campaign for the Republican
presidential nomination, a vexing question is raised—a question that we are
going to have to think about a great deal: What do we do with these products of
the Trump administration?
My own
belief is that the senior figures in the Trump administration—Donald Trump
himself, Mike Pence, the various Cabinet secretaries and agency chiefs,
etc.—should never again hold any position of public trust—or, if not never
again, at least not in the foreseeable future. By “position of public trust” I
mean not only elected office but appointed positions in government, on the
boards of universities and publicly traded corporations, etc. The same is true
for those in Congress who voted against certifying the 2020 election results
and those who were otherwise involved with the attempted coup d’etat of
2020-2021. Trumpworld lawyers such as John Eastman, Rudy Giuliani, and Cleta
Mitchell should be disbarred. (I wasn’t talking about you, Sarah!) This would, of course, much more
than decimate an entire generation of Republican leaders—whether you think of
that as a cost or a benefit will depend very strongly upon your point of view.
If you have a 150-pound healthy person and a 600-pound tumor, there may be some
question about who is removing whom.
I do not
think that any of this should be done in a spirit of vengeance, nor do I
believe that we should work to socially ostracize these people or go out of our
way to ruin them financially, though, of course, their employment prospects
would be narrowed in some cases. Rather, I think that we should think of them
the way Marcus Aurelius thought about his hypothetical sparring partner: We
have had a bad experience with them, and we should take such steps as are
necessary to avoid repeating that experience. Once is enough.
Put
another way: The point of keeping Trump administration veterans out of
positions of public trust is not to punish them—it is to keep
them out of positions of public trust. We should do that because the public
cannot trust them. We have norms, institutions, and procedures designed to
protect the public trust from those who would abuse it or who, having been
invested with some great authority, neglect that trust in the pursuit of
private gains, be those financial or political. These are useful social tools,
and we should use them.
Nikki
Haley presents a particularly irritating—and disappointing—case because she so
clearly knew better. Haley was a trenchant critic of Trump’s and worked openly
against him in 2016: Hailing from what then might have fairly been described as
the Jeb Bush wing of the GOP (a wing that has since been amputated), Haley
considered supporting Ted Cruz but ultimately settled on Marco Rubio as the candidate
most likely to keep Trump away from the GOP nomination. Her sensitivities may
have been heightened by the fact that she is a woman, that she is not white,
and that she is the daughter of immigrants, but none of that was necessary to
see Trump for what he was and is.
Haley
did see him for what he was and said so. And then she didn’t. And then she did
again. And then she kinda-sorta did and didn’t at the same time. And that’s
where she is now.
The
story of Haley’s embrace of Trump might have been taken from an unfinished
Christopher Buckley novel. Her lieutenant governor—a sometime ally, sometime
rival, sometime outright adversary—was Henry McMaster, who was the first public
official of any standing to endorse Trump in any of the key primary states of Iowa,
New Hampshire, or South Carolina. That was a big favor. When Trump won the
White House, he offered to repay McMaster with his choice of roles in the new
administration, but what McMaster wanted was to get
Nikki Haley out of the way so that he could be governor. And so Trump offered her the job
of ambassador to the United Nations, which would allow the governor to put a
little foreign-policy work on her résumé. Haley’s promotion was a gift from one
of her enemies to one of her rivals—she herself was not the principal actor in
the appointment.
Haley
wanted—wants—to be president, and, knowing what she knows about Trump, made a
Trump sycophant governor of her state in order to join the administration and
become a much more significant Trump sycophant herself. The opportunism is
forgivable, but sycophancy becomes a way of life. Haley went from criticizing
the candidate as “everything a governor doesn’t want in a president” to working
for him to lavishing praise on him in her book to defending his absurd election
claims on the grounds that “he believes it” to writing him off as a political
dead-man-walking after January 6 to her current
fence-sitting/difference-splitting approach to Trump.
Whatever
the through-line is there, it isn’t principle or the public interest.
Haley told Tim Alberta, writing in Politico:
“We need to acknowledge he let us down. He went down a path he shouldn’t have,
and we shouldn’t have followed him, and we shouldn’t have listened to him. And
we can’t let that ever happen again.” All true. One of the ways we can make
sure that we don’t let that happen again is by not giving political power to
the people who worked for him and stood by as he violated the public trust in
the grossest fashion–which by no means began on January 6, 2021. We do not need
to put them in prison (we do not need to put many of them in
prison) but we do need to put them in quarantine. Haley has shown herself to be
an extraordinarily poor judge of character when it comes to matters of
executive authority in government—i.e., when it comes to the very position
she now seeks. More precisely, she has shown herself willing to set aside her
better judgment for the sake of career expediency.
I am not
saying that Nikki Haley and other veterans of the Trump administration
are necessarily villains or dishonorable people or anything
like that. I am saying that they are an avoidable risk—and we should avoid
them.
Maybe we
should insist on going at least one decade without an attempted coup
d’état before veterans of the administration that attempted the last
one think about returning to power. There was a time when troublesome political
figures were sent to a monastery to think on their sins—and, more important, to
be kept far from the reins of power. (Lookin’ at you, Childeric III.) We don’t
have monasteries that are available for that purpose—we have the Kennedy School
of Government at Harvard and other such political purgatories. Is that an
overreaction? Maybe. But a mild fever is a sign that the body’s immune system
is working.
Economics
for English Majors: Jobs Aren’t Enough
Talking
up some piece of big-spending legislation (the American Clean Energy and
Security Act of 2009), Nancy Pelosi said the point of the law could be
summarized in four words: “jobs, jobs, jobs, and jobs.” A normal low-rent
demagogue would have gone with three “jobs,” but Nancy Pelosi is a fancier,
Californiafied demagogue, so we got “jobs, jobs, jobs, and jobs.”
I am a
fan of jobs. I like having a job. I’ve never enjoyed getting fired. (And, when
I get fired from a job, it’s a story in the New York Times.) One of the worst periods of my
life was a relatively brief (it felt a lot longer) period of joblessness (or,
rather, much-diminished income; I never really stopped working) during the
slow-motion failure of a newspaper I had helped to start in Philadelphia many
years ago. All of which is to say: I am not someone who takes having a job
lightly. You know that cartoon conservative who sneers at the guy in the
gutter, “Get a job!”? That guy might be a little callous, given the situation,
but the advice is excellent. Getting a job is a great thing to do if you happen
to find yourself in a situation in which you are not financially equipped to
enjoy a life of extended leisure. Honestly, it’s good advice even if you are so
equipped: What are you going to do all day? Golf? Some of the hardest-working
people I know are billionaires—they don’t need to work, but they don’t want to
spend that much time at the golf course or idly waiting around to die.
So,
three big cheers for the recent news: “U.S. added 517,000 jobs last month
in astonishing labor market growth,” as the Washington Post headline put it. I don’t know
that I’d go with astonishing, but that is a pretty solid number,
and an encouraging one.
And it
is not enough.
Jobs are
not an end—jobs are a means. If the United States started a program tomorrow in
which every American was conscripted into a well-paid make-work job—call it
$200,000 a year to dig ditches and then fill them up—what would the result be?
We’d have full employment and high incomes, and, of course, worldwide economic
catastrophe, starvation, and ruin, because the world relies on Americans to
produce about a quarter of the stuff the human race consumes, making the United
States, among other things, by far the world’s largest exporter of food, as
well as the largest exporter of liquified natural gas,and the largest
producer and third-largest exporter of oil. It is good to have a paycheck, but
what matters most is what work produces.
From
that point of view, the United States is in a slightly strange economic
position: GDP growth has been slowing (down a bit from the third to the fourth
quarter of 2022 and likely headed a little lower still this quarter) even while
unemployment is low. During those recent consecutive quarters of GDP
contraction (that absolutely positively were not a recession no sir you bite
your tongue) job growth was pretty solid, and total hours worked were up:
We were working more but producing less. Not only were Americans producing less,
they were earning less, too: Real wages declined during
2022. “Well, that’s
just inflation!” comes the answer from people looking to buttress the Biden
administration with good economic news—as though that were an excuse and
not a big part of the problem!
Here is
an example that I have used before but that remains very useful as an
illustration. Less than 200 years ago, picking cotton was work mainly performed
by slaves; after the abolition of slavery, picking cotton was work performed by
poor people (including my father and his parents) mostly paid by the pound at
the equivalent of a very low wage; today, picking cotton is a high-tech job
performed with the aid of hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars in
equipment by sophisticated specialists who often enjoy six-figure incomes in
which the first figure is not a one or a two. That’s the basic story of the
Industrial Revolution: Investments in capital make workers’ labor radically more
valuable, to such an extent that we now have people who become
multimillionaires doing a task that once was assigned to slaves. The tradeoff
is that harvesting cotton doesn’t require as many workers as it once did (one
man now can do the work of hundreds) and those jobs require more skills and
training than they once did. What’s true of cotton-picking is true of many
other occupations: I spent the earliest part of my career helping newspapers
equip and train up their copy editors so that five or six people on the copy
desk could do work that had employed dozens of people in the composing room and
the rest of the back of the shop.
Everybody
wants to have more jobs—and nobody wants to pick cotton by hand.
There is
a famous legend about Milton Friedman being shown some big public-works project
in China, where the workers were equipped with hand tools instead of
sophisticated modern construction equipment. “See,” said the Chi-Coms, “we know
how to create jobs!” Friedman, appreciating the absurdity of the scene, asked
in reply: “Why not use spoons?”
Creating
jobs is a great success if you are a politician who sees human beings as
liabilities rather than as assets. If a human being is just a mouth to be fed
or a bank account to be filled up, then a paycheck is all you need—no matter
where it comes from or what it comes in exchange for: If the voter is getting
paid, then the problem is solved–it is a political problem, not an economic
problem. But if you view human beings as assets—as creative and inherently valuable—then
what you are most interested in is making the most out of that human potential,
which requires education, investment, and a stable policy environment in which
that human capital can be most effectively deployed. From that point of view,
more jobs but slowing GDP growth is not a particularly encouraging
indicator.
The
point here isn’t to micturate from a great height upon the Biden
administration’s economic record. (I am not what you would call real invested
in the political success of Joe Biden, but if I were to go out of my way to
undermine him, it would be on somebody’s behalf—and there
ain’t nobody to be that somebody, so far as I can tell.) The point here is to
have a more meaningful understanding of where prosperity actually comes
from—and of what is needed to fortify and expand that prosperity. That means
sorting out the economic issues from the political issues.
Jobs are
great, as a starting point. But: Jobs doing what? Under what circumstances? For
what kind of market? For what kind of return?
Words
About Words
Revisiting
the “reins of power” above: It may be the phrase “reins of power” that causes
us to conflate reins—as in, “Giddyup, horse!” with reigns—as
in what King Charles theoretically does.
Reign, as you might guess, comes to us
from the Latin rex/regnum, rex meaning king and regnum meaning
royal power. Rex was, of course, a kind of political dirty word for
the Romans, who cultivated a glorious contempt for kings and for the idea of
kings. (As longtime readers of the Chicago
sports pages know.) Rein,
on the other hand, is related to the similar-sounding word retain,
from the Latin retinere.
Rain, on the other other hand—the
third hand?—is from the side of the English family with Germanic roots. It has
often been noted that English retains traces of Norman-era class divisions,
with the words that refer to the interests of the high and mighty coming from
Latin via French while the words that refer to the burdens of the lowly and
poor come from old Germanic roots through various Anglo-Saxon channels. Beef comes
from French, but cow has Anglo-Saxon roots; diplomacy is
French, but war is Anglo-Saxon; a mansion is
Latinate, a hut is Germanic; etc.
But back
to rex, for a second.
One of
the great ironies of political history is that populism and democracy are,
taking their derivations literally, nearly synonyms: Populism is people-ism and democracy is people-power.
But just as in our time the populists are the most significant
enemies of democracy (and liberty), the great populist leader
in the end days of the Roman republic was Julius Caesar, who hoped to make
himself a king, even if the populist rabble-rouser Mark Antony says otherwise,
at least in Shakespeare’s version:
You all did see that on the Lupercal
I thrice presented him a kingly crown –
which he did thrice refuse! Was this ambition?
Yet, Brutus says he was ambitious;
and surely he is an honorable man.
(The
Lupercal, or Lupercalia, was a Roman spring festival, the name of which refers
to the legend of the she-wolf who suckled Rome’s legendary founders, Romulus
and Remus. Lupercalia is coming up on February 15, in fact, if you’re into the
whole f’n’-pagan-idolatry thing. In the ancient world,
political power often was thoroughly mixed up with fertility in such festivals,
and, of course, we still speak of a great political man such as George
Washington as “the father of his country.” There’s all sorts of weird
pagan-fertility stuff attached to the Washington legend, for example, a
colonial-era miniature that incorporates the “Washingtons’ intermingled chopped
hair to symbolize their bodies joined forever, like the two hearts crowned with the wreath of immortality and wedded on the
altar to Hymen, the
Roman god of marriage.” Etc.)
The two
famous Roman political tendencies—the typically conservative optimates or boni and
the redistributionist populares—were not organized political
parties the way we think of them, or even factions, exactly. (Many modern
scholars reject the use of the terms at all as ahistorical.) That being
written, Julius Caesar represents in many ways a familiar type: He was the
child of an ancient aristocratic family that had married outside of the
patrician ranks for money, who presented himself as a champion of the common
people, whose interests he would secure if only he were given what he needed to
do the job: absolute power. That is the perverse incentive structure of
demagoguery: It is the people who derive their power and their status from the
suffering of the poor and the marginalized who have the strongest incentive to
prevent measures that would effectively relieve that suffering–it is too
valuable to them. That is why there are few areas in American life in which we
tolerate monopolies, much less insist that a monopoly is the only morally
acceptable option—except for the public schools, the dysfunction of which
serves many ends, though not those of the students or their families. Why do
public-school superintendents get million-dollar contracts? For the sake of the
poor children, of course.
In any
case, the example of Julius Caesar offers a useful reminder: It is always the
people who claim to speak passionately on behalf of the people who will make
themselves kings and make the people subjects and serfs. Nothing really
ever changes.
If those
who reign hold the reins, you know who it is who
has the bit in his mouth: It’s you, pleb.
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