The Great Unlearning

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, November 30, 2023

 

Just three weeks after Joe Biden took the oath of office, the New York Times articulated what posterity may come to regard as a politically fatal recommendation: “Democrats need to shelve the memory of stagflation.”

 

“Inflation Isn’t Lurking Around the Corner. This Isn’t the 1970s,” read the headline of a column by editorial-board member Binyamin Appelbaum in February 2021. Times have changed, he scoffed, and “smart people” recognize it. Those who don’t are haunted by the “ghosts” of the past.

 

The Biden White House embraced Appelbaum’s prescription. What followed was a tragicomic spectacle in which Democrats and their devoted followers wrestled publicly with their own cognitive dissonance as inflation surged.

 

Initially, having internalized Appelbaum’s admonition, Biden and his congressional allies went on a wild spending binge. They compounded the inflationary effect of bipartisan spending packages, designed to address the effects of the pandemic, with profligate giveaways to Democratic constituencies and expensive social-engineering projects. By the summer of 2021, Biden was forced to acknowledge “some price increases,” but he assured the nation that price instability would be “transitory.”

 

As summer lapsed into fall, however, the administration’s irritation with the persistence of inflation began to show. Consumers could expect to feel relief by the “middle to end” of 2022, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen promised. But she echoed Appelbaum, noting that the “series of supply shocks” that fueled inflation in the 1970s were not apparent today. By December, Biden was reduced to a campaign of neurolinguistic programming, insisting, without evidence, that inflation had reached its “peak.” But in July 2022, consumer prices soared to their highest point since 1981. “There is no quick fix,” Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo complained. “If there were a light switch, we would do that.”

 

The administration’s frustration was understandable, but the dilemma was of its own making. Even as Biden officials insisted that supply shocks were not fueling inflation, they argued — accurately, in some ways — that supply-chain constraints lingering from the pandemic were to blame. The White House only made that condition worse by limiting the exploitation of domestic energy reserves via executive fiat, signaling to the markets that supply problems would persist. All the while, congressional Democrats pumped money into the economy with one massive spending bill after another, goading consumers into demanding more goods than the economy could provide.

 

Biden insisted that it was “bizarre” to claim that his policies “caused inflation” but that his fiscal policy bore no resemblance to anything that could be called anti-inflationary. Indeed, given his commitment to stimulating demand, one could be forgiven for concluding that the White House didn’t understand how to curb price instability.

 

We know what doesn’t contain inflation: wage and price controls. Recently, in a series of frenetic gestures that seemed designed to convey his worry over rising consumer expenses, Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau mused about the desirability of price controls to contain food costs. That was the temporary solution to inflation the Nixon administration endorsed, and being seen to do something about price instability was quite popular. But as a policy, it was a disaster.

 

In the wake of Nixon’s price controls, “ranchers stopped shipping their cattle to the market, farmers drowned their chickens, and consumers emptied the shelves of supermarkets,” write Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw in The Commanding Heights: The Battle for the World Economy (2002). On the eve of his ascension to the presidency, Gerald Ford signaled the administration’s creeping suspicion that the money supply contributed more to inflationary pressures than wages or prices did. “The real weapons against inflation are the old-time virtues,” Ford acknowledged, “a sound budget and a sound monetary policy.” 

 

But peddlers of conventional economic wisdom mounted a counter-attack. Tight monetary policy had “failed” to contain inflation, they maintained, because the primary driver of high prices was high prices themselves — the so-called cost-push theory of inflation. The faulty consensus attributed inflation to “special events,” as Milton Friedman disparagingly put it: “bad weather, food shortages, labor-union intransigence, corporate greed, the OPEC cartel,” and so on. Ford relented, bequeathing to his Democratic successor a status quo in which economists and policy-makers attributed inflation to the malign influence of private economic actors and the commercial sectors they controlled.

 

Despite their perverse effects, the price controls persisted in some form until Ronald Reagan abolished them entirely in January 1981. As the economists Robert Schuettinger and Eamonn Butler pithily observed in 1979, “forty centuries” of experiments with price controls should have taught humanity “how not to fight inflation.” If Trudeau’s worst instincts get the better of him, he may have to relearn the lessons of not just modern history but antiquity. 

 

All this confusion is unnecessary. It is a product of willful disregard of the example set by our forebears. We know how to contain inflation, and we know how to pare it back when containment fails.

 

Reducing demand by hiking interest rates, thereby making borrowing more expensive, is one way to do it. But increasing interest rates isn’t enough. A genuinely anti-inflationary fiscal policy requires a regulatory environment with clear rules that provide businesses with more flexibility than would the bureaucrats who prefer to constrain them. A sensible policy would promote growth via stable tax rates that don’t change with every Congress. It would be hypersensitive to the threat of a “wage–price spiral,” in which workers demand ever higher wages to keep up with rising prices and thereby create more upward pressure on prices.

 

Ronald Reagan set the right tone: one of hostility toward 11,000 striking air-traffic-control workers, whom he fired. As Yergin and Stanislaw observed, this move “helped change the character of labor relations, contributing to the muting of inflationary psychology.” In stark contrast, Biden has encouraged strikers on picket lines, assuring unionized workers that they’ve “earned a hell of a lot more” than they’re getting paid now.

 

The stage Reagan set in his first term helped policy-makers maintain low rates of inflation throughout the next three decades. By not overly subsidizing demand, not spending at rates that radically outpace economic growth, encouraging innovation and entrepreneurialism in the tax code, and establishing a navigable federal regulatory environment, his administration held inflation in check. And for decades after Reagan left office, the monetary and fiscal policies he left behind allowed his successors to preside over low rates of inflation amid stable growth and relatively low unemployment. But then we decided to forget these hard-learned lessons.

 

***

 

It’s not difficult to understand why policy-makers would blanch at these remedies to inflation. They are painful, and they can foment a political backlash. That risk only illustrates why our exercise in forgetting has been and will be costly. But it’s not the only example of society-wide amnesia. Many of America’s great cities are collapsing into squalor and depravity, in part because of the maladministration that a year-zero mentality produces. A crisis has befallen America’s cities. They’ve become, the Atlantic’s David Graham observed earlier this year, “ungovernable.”

 

The country’s major metros are beset by competing interests, all of which are contributing to their decline. The patronage networks that once preserved a stable balance between elected officials, public-sector unions, business officials, police superintendents, and so on have broken down. The petty criminality that makes cities unpleasant is on the rise, creating environments conducive to the violent criminality that makes cities unlivable. In response to these conditions, the cities’ most productive residents are leaving. The threat of a vicious cycle looms large. And nobody seems to know what to do about it. Indeed, observers of the urban crisis can’t even properly diagnose the problem.

 

“Can Removing Highways Fix America’s Cities?” one especially obtuse New York Times headline read. Another item in the Times asked, Can cities really contain violent criminality and still be desirable places to live? Probably not, the author concluded: “Those who study the question say any declines in crime have to be weighed against the downsides of adding more police officers,” including negative experiences associated with interactions between police and the policed. And do cities even really need their tax base? “When cities struggle, it’s only because they’re set up on the backs of rich people’s whims,” a tantrum published in Vice read. “Good riddance.”

 

“The idea of a city really dying,” Syracuse University professor Carl Schramm wrote in 2020, “is difficult to contemplate.” His study of 17 major U.S. cities examined how population loss and rising poverty rates perpetuate each other and must be tackled in tandem. “I term these ‘dying cities’ because there is no evidence that we have devised any effective interventions that can reverse their downward course,” Schramm continued. “There is as yet no known cure for their continuing collapse.”

 

Schramm cited Baumol’s law as a factor in this decline. That describes the dynamic whereby wages in sectors with stagnant productivity, such as municipal services, rise to compete for workers in more-productive sectors. But even as wages in unproductive sectors increase, the output from these sectors and the quality of the services they provide do not. They just eat up an ever-larger portion of a city’s tax revenues. The result is a spike in the cost of living that either cannibalizes high-caliber workers in the private sector or pushes them outside the cities to environments that are more business-friendly.

 

This is not a phenomenon that researchers just discovered. William J. Baumol and his partner, William G. Bowen, codified this economic law in the 1960s. Indeed, from malaise to criminality to blight, so much of the modern urban experience seems to mirror what cities went through in that fraught decade.

 

Critics of utopian progressivism long ago diagnosed what ails the American city. In a 1993 lecture, sociologist Nathan Glazer offered one such diagnosis. “New York stopped trying to do well the kinds of things a city can do, and started trying to do the kinds of things a city cannot do,” he observed. A city, Glazer said, knows how to repair its infrastructure, construct new facilities, pick up the trash, and fight crime. “Among the things it can’t do,” he continued, “are redistributing income on a large scale and solving the social and personal problems of people who, for whatever reason, are engaged in self-destructive behavior.” Add to that list controlling the weather and extirpating the scourge of racism from men’s hearts, and Glazer’s description of urban maladministration is still relevant 30 years later.

 

We know how to prevent rampant lawlessness in cities. As NPR reported with palpable amazement amid the ideological fervor of the “defund the police” movement, researchers “find serious crimes fall after the average city expands its police force,” and they “find that arrests for serious crimes also fall” (emphasis in original). The visible presence of law enforcement reduces both the incidences of crime and deters criminals from testing the limits of the law. Imagine that!

 

But police merely enforce a stable social covenant. They don’t create one. For guidance on how those covenants are established, we might look to the public-policy consensus that brought New York City back from the brink. The city was poised to become a burnt-out husk of itself (literally, in the case of the Bronx) — an archipelago of needle parks overrun by intrepid squeegee men, thugs, and pornographers — when it was resuscitated under Rudy Giuliani, who received the credit for expanding social and policing policies that in many ways predated his administration.

 

The earliest efforts to clean up the city were the work of “business-improvement districts.” The Bryant Park Restoration Corporation, the Grand Central Partnership, the Downtown Lower Manhattan Association, and other entities embarked on block-by-block efforts to police the streets in their neighborhood in the late 1970s and early ’80s. The “broken windows” theory of public order, which encourages the vigorous policing of quality-of-life crimes as a deterrent against more serious criminality, was an idea promulgated by James Q. Wilson and George Kelling. It won over the Atlantic’s editors before it was tested in the field. The rampant smut that blighted Times Square and the constellation of lowlifes who orbited around it were tackled in that neighborhood in the mid ’90s. But it was in the ’80s when  such conditions were first fought successfully, by a consortium of private interests who fought similar blight under the Queensboro Bridge. Their successful strategy was later exported throughout the boroughs.

 

By the time Giuliani took office, in 1994, a bottom-up consensus had emerged around a comprehensive revitalization strategy. This incrementalist approach took years to develop because that is how durable consensuses form: incrementally.

 

An additional dynamic has recently contributed to the new level of dysfunction in America’s cities. In years past, far-left activists issued nonsensical, unworkable, or even politically suicidal demands that were dutifully ignored by Democratic lawmakers. In dismissing the activists, lawmakers got to look like responsible public servants. The activists postured in turn as spurned but uncompromising warriors for progress. And behind the curtain, everyone scratched each other’s back. But this unspoken compact was broken when lawmakers started taking the activists seriously and putting their fringe ideas to the test.

 

You don’t need a doctorate to understand that declaring your city a “sanctuary” for illegal immigrants will attract more illegal immigrants. We should expect a civic-minded citizenry to intuit the consequences of allowing the mentally unwell to, as one legal activist proudly suggested, “avoid psychiatric hospitalizations and the revolving door of jail.” But that is the policy that in many cities has led to an increasing number of dangerous interactions between the public and the mentally disturbed. The elimination of cash bail and pre-trial-detention requirements for crimes ranging from arson to manslaughter doesn’t advance anyone’s idea of social justice. It just ensures that social and civic dysfunction will become a way of life.

 

These truths do not need rediscovery. They just need not to be forgotten. That’s a struggle, given the industrial-scale media and academic apparatus devoted to our collective memory loss. But the decline of America’s cities, as consequential as it is, pales in comparison with the threat posed by the withering of our national instinct for self-preservation. That, too, is a result of our decision to consign the lessons of the past to oblivion.

 

***

 

So much of the great unlearning is a function of pride. It is a national enterprise dedicated to bulldozing the past and erecting monuments to ourselves in its place. The effort to “decolonize” the Western canon — not to expand the sum of human knowledge but, often explicitly, to anathematize the philosophical fundaments of the liberal tradition — is one such act of vandalism.

 

For years, media favorably chronicled the campaign to strip college syllabi of coursework that was “too heavily focused on white male thinkers from the United States and Europe” — as New York Times reporter Stephanie Saul put it, sympathetically characterizing the views of “some professors.” Philosophy departments have been drafted into “decolonizing” the curricula to either free students from the study of Plato, Descartes, Hume, and Kant or at the very least to teach their works from “a critical standpoint.” The project of applying modern standards to our forebears to aggrandize ourselves has also taken aim at some of the giants of Western political history. And through shame and intimidation, America’s citizens are being drafted into this campaign of desecration.

 

The retired U.S. Navy captain and NASA astronaut Scott Kelly felt the need to publicly apologize for the sin of favorably quoting Sir Winston Churchill. “I will go and educate myself further on his atrocities, racist views,” Kelly promised the mob. Thomas Jefferson “embodied some of the most shameful parts” of America’s history, said one New York City councilwoman ahead of the city’s unanimous decision to purify New York City Hall of a statue of the author of the Declaration of Independence. “Uprooting the problematic names and symbols that currently clutter buildings, streets throughout the city is a worthy endeavor,” said one San Francisco functionary of his mission to purge from public spaces the name of Abraham Lincoln.

 

Even the bedrock conventions upon which the United States was established are under attack. “This country was founded on white supremacy,” said Beto O’Rourke to the applause of his co-partisans. “To me, capitalism is irredeemable,” Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has insisted. The jury system, the evidentiary standards required for a criminal conviction, the right to confront your accuser in court — “this is English jurisprudential culture, a white man’s culture, and it’s got to change,” Joe Biden said in 2019.

 

The rise of the vainglorious delusion that this generation is history’s most humane and sophisticated complements another: the notion that we have finally evolved beyond the petty contests between nations. On September 6, 2013, President Barack Obama (while on a diplomatic trip to Russia, of all places) declared an end to the Great Game. The smaller-bore conflicts among isolated rogue nations, failed states on the frontier, and stateless terrorist groups — “these are going to be the kinds of national-security threats that are most likely to recur over the next five, ten years,” Obama insisted. The age of zero-sum geostrategic competition that had defined international affairs since the Peloponnesian War was behind us. After all, the president said, “there’s been a recognition” among America’s peers that no one “benefits from that kind of great-power conflict.”

 

Not six months later, in 2014, Russia invaded Ukraine and annexed Crimea, making a mockery of Obama’s pie-eyed pronouncement. This was the first forceful annexation of sovereign European territory since the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s. You’d think that would have been enough to convince Obama’s Republican opponents not to adopt his preening myopia. Instead, the American Right succumbed to its own version of the cult of self.

 

Long before 2020, Donald Trump sold a receptive Republican audience on the idea that America’s institutions were “rigged” against the “forgotten men and women” whom the nation “ignored, neglected, and abandoned.” The United States was beset by a comfortable class of parasites who sapped it of its vitality and left “carnage” in their wake. After 2020, all bets were off, and the former president’s grievances extended even to the nation’s founding charter. Saving the country “allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution,” Trump tweeted in December 2022.

 

Lacquered with a superficially patriotic gloss, the rhetoric mirrors sentiments expressed by leftists such as Heidi Schreck, acclaimed for her 2017 play What the Constitution Means to Me. In this Broadway hit, a finalist for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize, Schreck savages the Constitution as a document designed “to protect the interest of a small number of rich white men.” It shouldn’t be read as a document that demands civic propriety and restraint from us but as a dated obstacle standing between us and what we want.

 

Like the Obama era, the Trump years were overseen by a president who considered America a spent force abroad. “Why do we always have to do everything?” the 45th president complained in 2015. It should be left to Moscow to combat Islamist terrorists in the Middle East. Who cares if we sacrifice American influence in the region and shake the faith of America’s allies in the process? “There are a lot of killers. We have a lot of killers,” he said in 2017, when asked about Russia’s habit of murdering domestic dissidents. “You think our country is so innocent?” The Trump administration’s record rarely reflected the president’s subversive rhetoric, but his anxious introspection left its mark on Republican voters.

 

For years, Americans nursed their parochial grievances and told themselves fables about the new world they had inherited. But the old world — or, rather, the world as it always was — has reemerged. The European continent is once against host to a war of territorial conquest amid Russia’s pursuit of lost empire. The oldest hatred has reemerged following the massacre of over 1,200 Jews who were killed for being Jews, a shock only to those who have deliberately overlooked increasingly violent expressions of antisemitism in the streets of Europe and America. Iran and its proxies stand ready to plunge Israel into another existential war after the decade that Obama and his associates spent fruitlessly pursuing the predictably faulty strategy of appeasement. And the Chinese Communist Party looks poised to violently extend its reach into the South China Sea. Beijing’s success in that endeavor would reacquaint us with inviolable spheres of influence and put an end to the global maritime-trade system that has blessed the civilized world with the peace and prosperity we take for granted.

 

That word — civilization — is what is in the balance. The enemies of the unnatural liberal order that the Western world carved out of the tribal wilderness are united in their effort to thrust us back into the Hobbesian state of nature. If we lie to ourselves about the scale of this challenge, we will perpetuate the willful blindness that led us here in the first place.

 

***

 

There is a remedy for our collective amnesia. We must take stock of the hard-won victories our forebears secured at great personal cost. We must support our partners, imperfect though they might be, who prefer the existing order to one that awaits us on the other side of civilization. Domestic conflicts over distinct cultural identities and competing social compacts are, we must recall, luxuries. We must summon the courage to repudiate what passes for sophistication in the academy and renounce the trite moral relativism that cannot distinguish between the Western world and its enemies.

 

We must rediscover the virtues of frugality and prudence, the practice of delayed gratification that tempers wanton hedonism, and regain the humility to recognize that the institutions we inherited are more valuable than our own ambitions. Wisdom and cynicism are not synonymous, we must remind ourselves, and those who peddle the latter are often compensating for their lack of the former. We must break the stranglehold on enlightened thought claimed by the modernizers, the avant-gardists, the technocrats, and the imperious busybodies whose highest ambition is to move fast and break things. We must seek advancement and navigate new challenges but without forgetting the old ways that worked.

 

This is not so daunting a challenge as it may seem. Our responses to the crises that plague us will be intuitive once we commit to the first, hardest part: remembering.