Saturday, December 21, 2024

Get Us Off This Roller Coaster

By Jonah Goldberg

Friday, December 20, 2024

 

There’s a riff in the movie Parenthood that I’ve always liked, even though the only way it could be less subtle is if Steve Martin turned straight to camera and shouted, “A metaphor is coming your way!” 

 

Here’s the gist. Steve Martin is a stressed-out dad complaining about the burdens of life to his wife, played by Mary Steenburgen. She says, “What do you want me to do? Give you guarantees? Life is messy.” 

 

Martin replies, “I hate messy. It’s so … messy.” Then suddenly his grandma pops in and tells a story. “You know, when I was 19, Grandpa took me on a roller coaster.” She explained how much she loved the ups and downs of the whole thing. It’s so much better than the merry-go-round, which is boring and just goes round and round. Steenburgen understands that the story is about life and, duh, parenthood. But it’s lost on Martin until he’s on an actual roller coaster that he really gets it.  

 

(Oh, I guess I should have said “spoiler alert.” But the movie is 35 years old. If I ruined it for you, that’s a you-problem, not a me-problem. By the way, Rosebud is Luke’s father and Darth Vader is a sled. Wait. Strike that, reverse it.) 

 

I think that’s a nice lesson about family life and, well, the facts of life generally (as the song says, “you take the good, you take the bad, you take them both and there you have the facts of life”). Was it Plato or Judd Nelson who said, “Such are the perils of existence in the metaxy. Screws fall out all the time, the world is an imperfect place.”

 

I often tell new parents that two things can be true at once. Parenthood is perhaps the most stressful, frustrating, messy, complicated, expensive, and exhausting thing you can go through. And it’s totally worth it. Long years, short days, and all that. That’s why I loved that new Volvo ad. Who says industrial capitalism can’t support bourgeois values? 

 

Anyway, even though this is a pretty good setup for a schmalzy meditation on family stuff, I’m going to make a point about politics. But because I feel honor-bound to segue with a forced transition I’m going to stick with this family stuff for a while longer. 

 

Longtime readers will recall how much I like the metaphor of the English garden to describe the proper role of the state in the Anglo-American tradition. Basically, the idea is that while the state is there to protect residents of the garden from external and internal threats, it should otherwise let them grow freely into the best versions of themselves. The gardener isn’t a libertarian, but he’s not that much more than a minarchist. (Shame on Microsoft Word, by the way, for insisting that I spelled “monarchist” wrong. There’s another metaphor in there somewhere.) 

 

Last March, I discovered that psychologist Alison Gopnik has a similar philosophy about child-raising. A lot of parents see themselves as carpenters, she explains. They take that crooked timber of humanity and try to work it into perfectly constructed lives that conform to some predetermined blueprint. “Messiness and variability are a carpenter’s enemies; precision and control are her allies. Measure twice, cut once.” This, by the way, is how Steve Martin sees parenthood before his roller coaster epiphany. Messiness is so messy. Gopnik explains that:

 

Our job as parents is not to make a particular kind of child. Instead, our job is to provide a protected space of love, safety, and stability in which children of many unpredictable kinds can flourish. Our job is not to shape our children’s minds; it’s to let those minds explore all the possibilities that the world allows. Our job is not to tell children how to play; it’s to give them the toys. … We can’t make children learn, but we can let them learn.

 

Now, I don’t subscribe to this entirely. I think we can do a little shaping of our children’s minds because the mind is, and should be, constrained by character and I think parents can play a meaningful role in shaping character. But one needs to be truly humble about such efforts. One also needs to understand that frontal assaults on the minds of children tend to backfire. My dad tried to force me to love pickled herring and opera (though not at the same time). He failed utterly, to his great disappointment. Where he was more successful was in inculcating in me a desire and will to find the answers to questions. When I’d ask him a question he didn’t know the answer to, his invariable reply was, “We can look it up.” He’d put down his cigarette or cigar or newspaper and get up in search of the answer. This caused endless eye-rolling from me, as this was back in the day when looking it up meant searching for and finding an actual book and then scouring it for an answer. But it had a lasting effect on me. I have the habit now. 

 

It drives me crazy that when my daughter asks me a question about something I don’t know, and I say, “We can look it up,” I often get the same eye rolls—even though looking it up means simply typing a question into a phone. But I hope the habit sticks with her. 

 

My only point is that parenting is less about forcing and more about nudging, hinting, encouraging, and nurturing habits of the mind and heart more than anything resembling carpentry. But it’s also about providing a sense of stability, a foundation, a safe harbor—a garden.  

 

Okay now, for the politics. 

 

As is often the case, I let what was supposed to be a brief allusion—“Hey, remember that bit from Parenthood?”—pull me down a rabbit hole like the housing inspector for Watership Down

 

All I originally intended to do was make a point about how the political roller coaster of the last 72 hours—or eight years—is not how things are supposed to work. Politics can have some roller coaster curves and excitement, but government is supposed to be more like a merry-go-round: boring because it’s predictable. I don’t mean to say that it should just go in circles. Government is supposed to do things, but it’s only supposed to do things it’s supposed to do. It’s not supposed to be a source of excitement. A government that deliberately provides scary thrills is doing it wrong. 

 

I’m actually sympathetic to Donald Trump’s desire to do away with the debt limit, though not necessarily for the reasons he does. He doesn’t want any limits to his desire to spend lots of money (which, ironically, is the opposite agenda of Elon Musk). But threatening constant debt crises to force Congress to curb spending is a really stupid way to guard the fiscal health of the country. We benefit enormously from being the world’s reserve currency and having debt instruments people are willing to buy. Threatening potential default is like Cleavon Little in Blazing Saddles holding a gun to his own head and saying “The next man makes a move, the [deleted] gets it!” Blowing up a spending bill (that you supported) the week before Christmas because Elon Musk wants to wreak havoc isn’t quite as suicidal, but it’s also needlessly chaotic. 

 

I’m also deeply sympathetic to Musk’s stated desire to curb spending. My problem with his antics is that he thinks the skills of being a Silicon Valley disruptor are transferable not just to politics (a defensible belief) but to government. He’s making a 21st century version of a 20th century category error. In the 20th century, lots of people believed that a businessman or engineer could run the government like a business or a public works project. Musk thinks he can just blow stuff up and redesign the government like it’s amenable to start-up tactics and social media political antics. And Musk knows how to do that stuff. He’s good at spotting the Chesterton’s fences in companies. He’s good at fomenting social media mobs. But, just going by his tweets, it’s obvious he doesn’t actually understand how government works—if he did know, he wouldn’t need to lie so much about what government does—and he thinks you can change government with social media the same way you can change politics. If Matt Gaetz believed that “governing” was done from Fox News studios, Musk thinks you can govern via doomscrolling. 

 

The trouble with insurmountable arrogance is that you think your skills transfer to everything else. 

 

There’s much more room for drama, entertainment, and excitement in campaigns and TV studios. Ultimately, though, government is supposed to operate differently than politics. But government cannot be safe, stable, and predictable indefinitely if our politics are bottomlessly crazy. If you have become addicted to politics as a form of entertainment, eventually you’ll treat government as a form of entertainment, too. 

 

People like roller coasters and merry-go-rounds, not to mention haunted houses, moon bounces, etc., because they take it on faith that they are safe. The engineers and architects who create amusement parks can curate a feeling of childlike joy—fun for children of all ages!—precisely because people trust that everything works the way it’s supposed to. They take it for granted that the garden-like—and wildly overpriced—microcosm of the amusement park is stable, safe, and sturdy. You wouldn’t get on a ride if you thought it was designed by the stoned teenagers or sugar-high children in line with you. Nor would you be reassured if you were told the sketchy dude in the Goofy costume was also in charge of maintaining the brakes on the Matterhorn. 

 

But when it comes to our federal government right now, too many people are behaving like the system is stable and safe enough that they can afford to be clowns in the parade. Or to risk another whiplash-inducing change in metaphors, too few people in a position of power want to be Police Chief Brody insisting that the beach be closed because of a shark in the water. They all want to be Mayor Vaughn insisting that the good times continue to roll because there’s no way a shark would dare ruin everyone’s Fourth of July. 

 

The thing is there really are sharks all over the place. The national debt is a shark (and cutting foreign aid won’t kill it). Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping are sharks. And everybody is splashing in the surf like they’re somebody else’s problem. 

 

The weird thing is it’s not like people aren’t amped-up about supposed threats. Heck, they’re addicted to threats. They just want to be amped up about the wrong threats. It’s like they want to be frightened by animatronic dinosaurs and robot pirates on the flume ride precisely because they know these fake threats can’t actually hurt them. Let’s go into the Deep State haunted house or the Washington swamp safari ride! Let’s play whack-a-mole with wrong pronouns! Give me my three throws at the dunk tank, I want to see the dude from the Bud Light ad get soaked! 

 

But nobody wants to grapple with the hard things and hard truths that you have to face when you get home from the amusement park. Because that stuff is actually hard, requiring an attention span that risks the horror of boredom. Everyone wants to stay on the roller coaster—including the people we pay to make sure the roller coaster is safe. 

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