Since this will be what I hope is the first of many entries on the We The People Blog, let me introduce you to my philosophy and set forth some of the issues I plan to explore over time. I suppose “philosophy” is too high-falutin’ a term for what I intend to talk about. Let me say instead that I will examine my bugaboos. The Random House Dictionary calls a bugaboo “something that causes fear or worry,” which sounds just about right.
I believe that the nation is in peril. True, it always has been and so far, we have always beyond the current crisis to embrace a new one. We may not move on so easily this time, however. That is one of the things I want to examine. I think that there is an element of self-hatred in our country today which leads certain people to make demented decisions.
I think that this self-hatred can be blamed on the way society at large, conservatives and liberals alike, have learned to look at the world over the last 80 years. This view of the world creates an attitude which affects political, economic and personal decisions by all of us. If the demented decisions tend to be made more by liberals these days, that is because conservatives always look for things of the past which are too valuable to let others destroy. We are, accordingly, less likely to embrace the new simply because it is new.
The first attitude which I question is our concept of intelligence, what it means to be smart. Today, the simple guideline for getting ahead is to do well in school, go to the best college and get the best grades. It is precisely those people following such advice who have given us the Vietnam War, the economic meltdown of the 1970s, the Dot-Com collapse, the Great Recession and a great many more crises. The blame for all of these catastrophes transcends party label and political ideology.
Before the New Deal and the increased incursion of politics into everyday life, society’s notion of success assumed both intelligence and character. Today, character is what you accuse your opponents of lacking, even if you use his ideas, tactics and tools to achieve the same goals (as President Obama did last weekend to kill Osama bin Laden with SEAL Team Six, which the Democrats have often attacked as “Dick Cheney’s Assassination Squad”). In 1912, J.P. Morgan famously told Congress that he wouldn’t make a loan to a man of bad character even if the loan was secured by “all the bonds in Christendom.” These days, far too many people can’t even define what good character constitutes.
And the idea of intelligence included more than just booklearning. Mark Twain said “the trouble with schooling is that it interferes with one’s education.” There are many different types of intelligence, most of them more important than the ability to parrot back to your teacher what he or she wants you to say. Intuition, creativity, common sense, situational awareness, emotional intelligence: there are many kinds of intelligence and no one bothers to even catalog them. It should not be a surprise that so many of the prominent names in the technological revolution dropped out of school. We ignore other and more important forms of intelligence at our peril.
Our notion of “progress” is another fallacy in our thinking which puts us all at risk. We all have a notion of progress as a straight line, a Manichaean notion where the evil conservatives prevent the achievement of utopia. In the last sixty years or so, conservatives have developed a competing notion of progress where the evil liberals prevent the achievement of utopia. This notion is more valid than the liberals’ concept of progress, if only because the liberal notion of progress dominates even while it has become obvious that it is merely a device for favored political groups to profit at the expense of the rest of us. So every economic crisis is accompanied by a complex piece of legislation which is supposed to prevent the recurrence of the next economic collapse, which occurs right on schedule, despite the new legislation, the only effect of which is to require companies to pay millions of dollars to their lawyers.
This brings us to my next bugaboo, what Christopher Lasch called “The Revolt of the Elites.” The people who call the shots in society these days have all too often abandoned America for their own self interest. When my brother was accepted to West Point in 1970, my proud mother told the wife of a wealthy retired State Department official who had taken a post at the University of Wisconsin. Her reaction couldn’t have been more horrified than if my mother had told her he had been killed in a car crash. She mourned the tragedy of a bright young man whose promising career had been destroyed before it had begun. My mother also told the cashier at the grocery store who clapped her hands and congratulated her, telling my mother that that was “every mother’s dream!” There is something very wrong when someone earning minimum wage is prouder of her country than someone at the top of the food chain.
I think that these three elements of “fear and worry” can be traced to four institutions which have fallen down on the job:
• The media – only a fool would suggest that the vast bulk of the media, excepting only The Wall Street Journal and the Fox network among the biggest players in the industry, have their thumb on the scale in favor of liberalism. Some have suggested that the bias of the media gives a ten point advantage to the Democrats come election time. Be that as it may, I think that the damage their bias does to the Democrats is far worse, making them slow to alter their policies and forcing them to over rely on bureaucrats who have their own agenda.
• Academia – for largely the same reasons as the media, academia has undermined its own ideals. Academia as well as the media has forgotten all about “Climategate,” where a handful of prominent climatologists and global warming true believers engaged in a widescale effort to discredit dissenting scientists. To call this McCarthyism is to denigrate Joe McCarthy, who, after all, damaged the lives of Communists, not scientists and publications with a better sense of scientific method.
• The legal profession – the new Robber Barons, who have benefited so greatly from the status quo and who rely on the notion of progress to enrich themselves at the expense of everyone else.
• The Republican Party – the only political party run by grown-ups, but one which suffers from the notion that it is still the party of the rich. It isn’t. The wealthiest people in society have been trending left since the days of Bill Clinton. President Obama won 19 of the 20 richest Congressional Districts in 2008 and gathered more than 60% of all Wall Street money. The Republicans are the party of the aspiring, not the rich. It needs to be a lot more populist than it is. It also turns a blind eye to Democratic scandals, whereas the Democrats are not above manufacturing scandals to score points.
You will notice that in my list of bugaboos, I do not list either President Obama or the Democratic Party. At worst, they are mere symptoms of my bugaboos and in many ways, they are more the victims of these forces than the perpetrators of them.
I hope to make this all clear in future missives. With luck, they will be less wordy than this one.
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