By Jonah Goldberg
Wednesday, May 08, 2024
In this “news”letter of all places, I don’t think I
should be required to demonstrate that I have a soft spot for weirdness,
eccentricity, and unconventional ideas—and neither does the life-sized replica
of Tito Puente landing on the moon I’ve made out of marzipan and luncheon meats
that I spend most of my day talking to in Esperanto. (Ĉu ne ĝuste, Tito?)
I bring this up in part because, much like
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., I too have creatures eating my brain. At least I
think that’s what’s going on up there. They make a slight rustling sound, and I
don’t mean like cattle-rustling with the hootin’ and hollerin’ as they ride up
on my medulla oblongata. I mean like the soft susurrating sounds of very
specific cranial termites devouring every trace of anyone named “Todd” from
your long-term memory.
More to the point, when normal Americans said they wanted
an alternative to choosing between a doddering and indecisive incumbent
president and a decadent and deceitful one with a fondness for despots, what
they didn’t have in mind was a loony conspiracy theorist recovering from a
bad—and not entirely metaphorical—case of brain worms.
Look, like RFK Jr. showing you an X-ray of a trilobite, I
want to be transparent about what’s on my mind. I didn’t start out planning to
write about the guy who spent decades insisting that cell phones damage your
brain but left out the fact the actual process involved parasites leaping from
the earpiece. I make a lot of Star Trek references compared to
other pundits, but I did not think Wrath of Khan could
be so relevant.
No, today I wanted to write about normalcy. But I figured
I couldn’t with that elephant in the room.
I got a few paragraphs in and realized that I need to at
least acknowledge the fact that it’s hard to write about normalcy when the New
York Times is telling me Robert F. Kennedy Jr. battled an
invertebrate homunculus. As the guy who just wanted to eat soup while watching
TV without any distractions yelled while pointing at the glowing polar bear
crapping iridescent green graphing calculators in the middle of his living
room, “See, this is precisely the kind of thing I’m talking about.”
Similarly, I don’t want to talk about the GOP
presidential frontrunner having sex with a porn actress (was
she really a star?), nor do I want to hear how said actress who
subsequently extorted money from her momentary paramour was ashamed of having
sex with him. I don’t want any of that crap normalized. But again, what is a
guy supposed to do when the normal headlines are so abnormal?
Indeed, I was going to ease into this by using a good example
of the power of normal. It’s now apparent that most
normal Americans see the protesting college students and their
ideological handlers cheering terrorists—or even pretending to be terrorists—and
say, “That’s weird. I do not like that.” That’s why, all of a sudden, a lot of
promoters, apologists, and appeasers of the campus protests are suddenly chastising
the media for paying so much attention to the protests.
You see, it turns out that most normal people, on the
left and right, don’t like hearing young people yell, “I am Hamas!” or see
cosplaying goons in masks block Jewish kids from classes or the library. And
despite the desperate efforts of many in the media and on the fringe of the
Democratic Party, most college students don’t want anything to do with this
stuff. They don’t even care very much about
the conflict in the Middle East at all. When presented
with nine issues in a recent survey and asked which they considered
“most important” to them, college students collectively ranked the conflict in
the Middle East … ninth.
A recent
Harvard poll found that 80 percent of Americans side with Israel over
Hamas. I understand why Hamas supporters and apologists would consider that
finding disturbing. But frankly, I think most normal people look at that 20
percent support for a group that openly calls for genocide—and proudly boasts
how it will keep raping, torturing, and murdering Jews wherever they find them
whenever they have a chance—and decide that is the more disturbing result.
I suspect a sizable share of that pro-terrorist 20
percent is more normal than it might seem. They may say they side with Hamas
because they think Hamas is just code for “Palestinians.” Or they might have no
idea what Hamas actually wants. I mean, there are some people who
think
Hamas is part of the struggle against transphobia and for LGBTQI rights. When
students who claim to endorse the phrase “From the river to the sea, Palestine
will be free” are informed what that actually means—and what
river and what sea they’re talking about—many say, “Oh I didn’t know that.
Never mind.”
But let’s broaden out. As I was saying, I like weirdness
and eccentricity. But there’s a tension bordering on a contradiction in my
personal preferences and my broader political ones, and I should at least
acknowledge it here. I want America to be normal—admittedly by
American standards. And when I say American standards, I mean bourgeois
standards with American characteristics. I like the ambition of the normal
American (regardless of race, creed, sexual orientation, etc.) who wants to
marry a person they love, settle down, work hard, make money, succeed at their
vocation, and raise as many kids as they want—who grow up to be happy,
successful, normal people, with similar ambitions. Such desires aren’t for
everybody—and that’s fine, too. But I think those normal desires should define
normality and that normality should be defined as generally desirable and good.
What I don’t want is a country where
pursuing these desires is seen as “selling out,” “acting white,” “soulless
conformity,” “square,” “boring,” or some deep violation of some allegedly
higher principles. I like Bohemians, the same way Ron Swanson was entertained
by the hippie at the farmer’s coop.
Bohemianism is entertaining precisely because it uses the broader normal
society as the collective straight man for its schtick. The Romantic spirit
whose rallying
cry was “Shock the Bourgeoisie!” is fine and often funny in small
doses. When the French poet Gérard de Nerval famously walked
his pet lobster through the Tuileries gardens he explained, “It does
not bark and it knows the secrets of the deep.”
That’s funny—and harmless.
The problem with the Bohemian mindset is that it is
dangerous when given power. That’s because Bohemianism as a philosophy is
radical, seeking to not just shock, but tear down the bourgeois order.
Radicalism is the stuff of dreams, of imaginary alternatives to practical,
tested, reality. And when people governed by dreams are given the power to
impose their vision, they ride roughshod over reality. As Michael Oakeshott observed,
“The conjunction of ruling and dreaming generates tyranny.”
That’s why I want normal politicians, not visionary ones.
I want politicians who care about making sure the streets are safe while also
caring that the police do not abuse their power. I want politicians who see
clearing snow, collecting garbage, building roads, educating normal kids
normally, and stuff like that as their primary jobs, not politicians who see
such functions as a means to creating jobs for allies. I want less “vision”
from the left and the right and more sound accounting principles and business
practices.
The role of ideological vision in my kind of politics is
to defend the vision we inherited, not to replace it or to “transform” America.
There’s always room for improvement. There’s always a need for reform,
somewhere. But improvements and reforms, whether of the left or the right,
should be informed by a certain realism about not just what is possible, but
what is good. “The man of conservative temperament,” writes Oakeshott,
“believes that a known good is not lightly to be surrendered for an unknown better.”
Yeah, yeah. I’ve been doing this long enough to realize a
lot of people will say that my definition of normal is both self-serving and
amorphous. Guilty as charged. As Danny Ocean says when accused
of having a conflict of interest when giving his ex-wife relationship advice,
“Yes, but that doesn’t mean that I’m wrong.”
What constitutes normal? Reasonable people can debate
this. My parameters are probably narrower than some folks, but a lot wider than
others. But, heck, that’s normal. Which is to say normal countries
have normal disagreements about normal things.
And I can be persuaded to adjust my parameters. The
paradigmatic example of this was the argument over gay marriage. I was
initially against it because it struck me as really abnormal. And, be fair: It
is pretty abnormal as a historical matter. But so are equal rights for women,
and I’m for those too. But the winning argument for gay marriage—at
least for me and a lot of Americans—was that legalizing gay marriage was a step
toward normalcy. No coincidence Andrew Sullivan—an avowed Oakeshottian—titled
his book, Virtually Normal. I completely understand why some people
don’t see it that way, but I’m not going to revisit that argument here, in part
because it’s settled. That’s another thing I like: settled arguments.
What I mean by that is, I don’t think it’s useful or
fruitful to talk about overturning our system of government. I don’t care
whether such arguments come from right-wingers or left-wingers. Think of it
this way: I think “real” socialism is incredibly stupid on empirical grounds.
In other words, it does not work. Moreover, it really wouldn’t work here. And
because those things are true, trying to impose the “dream” of real socialism
would require, from the normal American’s standpoint, real tyranny.
Of course, when I say that, some people roll their eyes
and say “What about Sweden or Denmark?” To which I respond, what about them?
Those countries aren’t really socialist in the way the ideologues claim. Yes,
they have more robust welfare states, but most of the defining characteristics
of “real” socialism aren’t there.
They’re mixed economies that respect private property with robust
entrepreneurial sectors. Moreover, the way they pay for their welfare states is
by taxing
the hell out of the middle class. The American leftists who champion Nordic
socialism reject the idea of paying for it with anything other than the wealth
of “millionaires and billionaires” as Bernie Sanders would say. Whenever normal
conservatives say that the only way to pay for our existing entitlement
regime—never mind an expanded one—is by taxing the non-rich, they get outraged.
But at least there’s a long tradition of left-wingers
being wrong about economics. Today, more and more people on the right have
embraced Elizabeth Warren’s economics, but want them to be part of some weird
“nationalist” or “post-liberal” program. Warren’s math isn’t wrong because
she’s left-wing, her math is wrong because the math is wrong. Some even look to
Russia as some kind of model for America, which is as stupid as looking to
Castro’s Cuba as a model. I have zero problem with people who say that X country
does Y better than we do. But if X doesn’t represent the relative handful of
advanced industrialized democracies, they’re probably wrong or ignorant. We
have nothing to learn from Russia or Venezuela or any of those countries.
If you think that Hamas has the right theory of the case,
in any regard, about anything—including Israel itself—you’re weird and wrong.
Normal people have good B.S. detectors. And when they hear someone defending
gang rape and the slaughter of families in their beds, they’re like, “Naw, dog.
That doesn’t sound right.” And when they’re told that their kid’s college
graduation has been canceled because a bunch of people are defending—or
celebrating—such things, and breaking the law in the process, the normal response
is to recoil at the indecency of the position and to be disgusted by the
cowardice and appeasement of the administrators who made it possible and
subsidized it.
But I’m straying far afield. My most basic point is where
I began. Our politics are so stupid right now because the elites with the
loudest voices in academia, politics, and media don’t like the idea of normalcy
and normal politics. Elite universities are in this mess because they got high
on their own supply in the faculty lounge. Political elites—on the left and
right—get high on their own supply in cable TV green rooms and on Twitter. Both
parties trade power in Washington, because they win by promising to be more
normal than the other party. But once in power, they don’t behave normally. So
the voters throw them out and give the other party a chance at failing at
normalcy.
The silent majority in America is neither a reserve army
of would-be socialist or nationalist proletariats. It’s a vast sea of normal
people wanting politicians to be normal, too.
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