Are we too lazy and
stupid to keep our democracy?
John Kelly sums up our
story so far: “What’s going on in the country that a single person
thinks this guy would still be a good president when he’s said the things
he’s said and done the things he’s done? It’s beyond my comprehension he has
the support he has… “I came out and told
people the awful things he said about wounded soldiers, and it didn’t have
half a day’s bounce. You had his attorney general Bill Barr come out, and not
a half a day’s bounce. If anything, his numbers go up. It might even move the
needle in the wrong direction. I think we’re in a dangerous zone in our
country.” Ya think? Actually, it’s
worse than that. The Trumpers are becoming more grotesque, more profane, more hateful and atrocious. The Washington Post
reports from Iowa: One of Trump’s
introductory speakers from the Iowa state legislature declared anyone who
kneels for the national anthem is a “disrespectful little s---,” quickly
drawing a roaring response. And outside the packed venue, vulgar slogans
about Biden and Vice President Harris were splashed across T-shirts: “Biden
Loves Minors.” “Joe and the Ho Gotta Go!” One referred to Biden and Harris
performing sexual acts. Trump’s coarseness and
cruelty have come to define the Republican Party since his rise to the
presidency — and many GOP voters relish and emulate the approach, while
others tolerate it. There is a fundamental
law of politics, best enunciated by Bill Clinton: Strong and wrong beats
weak and right. Donald Trump’s campaign
can be summed up by his mug shot: brutal and defiant. He shoots off lies with
the speed and power of an AR-15; he is never in doubt—and, too often, there
is a crude kernel of truth in what he says. The southern border is out of control. The academic left is filled with oversensitive weaklings. Every one of
the 91 felony charges against him is an opportunity for leverage: if they’re
after him so relentlessly, he must be peddling something powerful and true.
He has never seemed stronger. Again, The Washington Post: During his speech
inside a high school gym in Fort Dodge, former president Trump called one GOP
rival a “son of a b----,” referred to another as “birdbrain” and had the
crowd shrieking with laughter at his comments on Rep. Adam B. Schiff
(D-Calif.), who he called “pencil neck” before asking, “How does he hold up
that fat, ugly face?” He brought the house down while mocking Biden, at one
point baselessly suggesting Biden is using drugs and can’t get offstage “by
the time whatever it is he’s taken wears off.” Ahh, poor Biden—he gives
the appearance of weak, even when his words are strong, courageous and true.
He just can’t win. He has lost support from his party’s fatuous left because
of Gaza. He has lost the support of the black community because hasn’t “done
enough” for them. He has lost support from the public because he caved to a
handful of Latino activists—Lord save us from “activists”—on immigration
(which I suspect will be an issue that rivals abortion in 2024). His own
Secretary of State tries to edit him when he accurately calls China’s Xi
Jinping a “dictator.” He is a good man, but obviously a stubborn one. He is
subsiding before our eyes. His voice is a thin wisp of the warm Irish tenor
that once was. He won’t get any younger. I find myself growing more
interested in California Governor Gavin Newsom, even if he kowtows to the
lifestyle left. He seems strong. His debate with the rapidly shriveling Ron
DeSantis on Fox November 30—with Sean Hannity “moderating”—is the sort of
thing that only a confident politician would do. If Newsom wins, Biden loses.
(Biden’s staff is fatally complicit in forcing the President to campaign like
a dormouse: he should challenge Trump to a debate right now.) But back to General
Kelly’s question: What’s going on in the
country that a single person thinks [Trump] would still be a good president
when he’s said the things he’s said and done the things he’s done? What may be going on,
General, is that we’ve slipped into a national stupor of affluence and
selfishness. We’ve lost all sense of propriety, of discipline, of sacrifice
for the greater good—of the need to acknowledge the greater good sometimes
will run against your immediate self-interest. This began with my crowd—and
yes, mea culpa—the baby-boomer protesters; it has become a Gaderene
slide, a rabble of pigs off a cliff. But then, our generation made
self-absorption into a mass movement: See how they run Over the weekend, The
Washington Post ran one of those thumb-suckers about the folks in Door
County, Wisconsin—a classic swing-zone—and how tired and frustrated they are,
sniffle and yawn, with American politics. I’ve written more than a few of
those myself, some prescient, most redundant, all prejudiced by my
prejudices. But the striking thing in this case was how utterly uninteresting
most of the quotes from the civilians were. How defeated they seemed. The
absence of spunk, a great American virtue, was terrifying. It seems the
only spunk on the spectrum exists in Trumpland and there—see above—it has
curdled into witless bile. I am he As you are he As you are me As we are all
together… I was once a populist.
My first book was a biography of Woody Guthrie. But in the ensuing years I
met too many selfish, myopic or just plain stupid people to subscribe to that
romantic notion. The people aren’t always right; they’re just people—and they
slip into chronic wrongness when they denigrate expertise, as has become the
fashion. Democracy was always going to be a reach, as the Founders suspected.
It always has required a certain acuity and perspective. If we ever had such
habits—in the past, they were brought forth in a crisis—they’re long gone in
this everything-now society. As General Kelly suggests, we’re just too numb
to even recognize that we’re in a slump caused by our loss of rigor. I find
myself sympathetic to Vivek Ramaswamy’s idea that you should have to pass a
citizenship test, similar to the naturalization exam my daughter-in-law just
aced, in order to achieve the right to vote. (In the past, yes, such tests
were used to disenfranchise blacks—but maybe passing the naturalization test should
be a national requirement to get a high school diploma.) A citizenship test
would require a modicum of education—and we’re slip-sliding away in that
regard, too. The New York Times is alarmed: The school closures that
took 50 million children out of classrooms at the start of the pandemic may
prove to be the most damaging disruption in the history of American
education. It also set student progress in math and
reading back by two decades and widened the
achievement gap that separates poor and wealthy children. The Times proposes
something I’ve long supported: A study of data from 16 states by the Center for Research on
Education Outcomes at Stanford University shows that the most effective way
to reverse learning loss is to increase the pace at which students learn. One
way is by exposing them to teachers who have had an extraordinary impact on
their students. The center proposes offering these excellent teachers extra
compensation in exchange for taking extra students into their classes. Highly
trained, dedicated teachers have long been known to be the most reliable path
to better educational outcomes, but finding them at any scale has always been
difficult. If creative solutions can be found, it will help reverse learning
gaps from the pandemic and improve American education overall. Or, maybe just create
more charter schoools—which an extensive Stanford study has shown do a better
job educating poor kids. Or maybe just pay better teachers more…and pay them even more to work in poor districts. Or, heaven forfend, get
rid of the teachers who are burned out or incompetent and replace them with
eager, well-trained graduate students who want to pay off their college
loans. And then create a system that stands tenure on its head—a system like
military’s four-years up or out, in which you have to prove, at regular
intervals, that you’re still worthy of the privilege of teaching our kids.
(Or recognize, as the Coleman report did in 1968, that the most important
variable is parental involvement in their children's education.) Oh, but wait a
minute: Who would oppose that? So-called progressives do. The
teachers unions oppose every last one of those proposals—except the last,
parenthetical one…and many leftists tend refuse to acknowledge that intact,
two-parent families produce better results. The unions’ influence on our
democracy over the last 60 years is every bit as ruinous as the more recent
toxic bile of the Trumpers—indeed, it can be argued that the teachers’
shackled self-interest helped create the rampant, aggressive ignorance that
stoked the Trump cult. Once again, the
success of democracy can’t be assumed—it requires ongoing effort to counter
the entropic power of regression to the mean. We are in real danger of losing
this miraculous thing our parents and their parents built. And…we are all
together. |
