The Unthinkable, Tomorrow

The thought of a world without the Soviet Union was unthinkable. No more news stories about the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, no more arms control summits and detailed graphs in Newsweek about ballistic missile forces in Europe, no more leaked stories of avant-garde plays in communist Czechoslovakia. No more Czechoslovakia.

It was all unthinkable, yet, today, all these once-familiar pillars of world events have disappeared, leaving behind no real sign of their presence. I visit my eldest’s school and look at the map on the wall: the Russian Federation dominating the entire upper right.

It’s funny getting older, in ways you don’t anticipate. I’m old enough now to realize that the very landscape of my life has changed. I see photos from my teen years and its not just old photos, it’s a foreign country, a different world. A friend remarks: we are further away from the 80s of our early adulthood right now than our parents were from the 50s when we were watching “Happy Days.”

So many things have changed, the once unthinkable now commonplace, the once commonplace now completely absent from the consciousness of a new generation. Crime, for example. I’ve realized that an entire new cohort of Americans don’t remember a time when crime ruled our big cities and regular Americans sought refuge in movies like “Dirty Harry” or “Death Wish.”

So it’s not obvious to me that many Americans realize the sea change we’ve seen in American political rhetoric about the viability of our institutions. Today, the unthinkable is commonplace: mainstream commentators assume as a starting point our political institutions simply don’t work and cannot be made to work.

David Brooks at the New York Times:

We can spend the next few years engaging in kabuki bipartisanship, in which each party puts on pseudo-events to show that the other party is rigid and rotten, or somebody can break the mold.

Yes, our politics consists of pseudo-events and empty partisanship. This has been obvious for decades. But, now, it’s spoken of openly, like something everyone knows. Only this obvious conclusion was resisted and denied for as long as I can remember. This recognition of the political reality is new, brand new.

Peggy Noonan at the Wall St. Journal:

Both our political parties continue, even though they know they shouldn't, even though they're each composed of individuals many of whom actually know what time it is, even though they know we are in an extraordinary if extended moment, an ongoing calamity connected to our economic future, our nation's standing in the world, our strength and our safety—even though they know all this, they continue to go through the daily motions, fund raising, vote counting, making ads with demon sheep, blasting out the latest gaffe of the other team. Our political professionals cheapen everything they touch because they are burying themselves in daily urgencies in order to dodge and avoid the big picture.

Yes, they continue along as if nothing was wrong, though everyone with two brain cells to rub together, who is concerned about more than what our great modern economy tells us what is important (Get Laid! Buy This!), knows that the show is coming to an end.

This is new. Brand new in American life. But we don’t notice it because we’re not all the way there yet with our awakening and because the obvious surrounds us the way water surrounds fish.

Having now the benefit of watching this process close up for decades now, it appears to me that what we’re seeing is nothing less than a full-blown crisis of legitimacy of democratic liberalism and the administrative state itself.

It turns out that “each man for himself” doesn’t build political communities. It builds what we see around us, self-interest ethnic and identity groups throwing elbows for status, power and influence.

It turns out that ‘each man making an economic decision for himself” means an ever-coarsening of the public sphere, of morals, and a popular culture that is actively degenerate. Because nothing means nothing except what feels good, what I, a miniature king, a petty tyrant, decide to do that day. Who are you to object to me cussing a storm up on my cell phone? Why shouldn’t I loudly announce to a packed train the details of my sexual exploits?

Manners? Whose? By whose authority?

It turns out men need more than their daily bread to live. They need meaning, solidarity, order and the true freedom born of adherence to something grander than SUVs and ATVs. They need adults in charge and a government that rules, not administers.

Unthinkable?

Today, yes. Tomorrow, no.