A Certain Idea of America, page 31
Americans have long sort of accepted a kind of deal regarding leadership by various elites and establishments. The agreement was that if the elites more or less play by the rules, protect the integrity of the system, and care about the people, they can have their mansions. But when you begin to perceive that the great and mighty are not necessarily on your side, when they show no particular sense of responsibility to their fellow citizens, all bets are off. The compact is broken: They no longer get to have their mansions. They no longer get to be “the rich.”
For most of the twentieth century the poor in America didn’t hate the rich for their mansions; they wanted a mansion and thought they could get one if things turned their way. When you think the system’s rigged, your attitude changes.
On the right the same wars, the same crash, and a different aspect. In the great issue of the 2016 campaign it became unmistakably clear that the GOP elite did not care in the least how the working class experienced immigration. The party already worried too much about border security—that’s the lesson the elites took from Mitt Romney’s loss in 2012, according to their famous autopsy. They appeared to look after their own needs, their own reputations: We’re not racist like people who worry about the border! They were, as I’ve written, the protected, who looked down on those with rougher lives. The unprotected noticed, and began to sunder their relationship with establishments and elites.
Donald Trump came of that sundering. He was the perfect insult thrown in the establishment’s face. You’re such losers we’re hiring a reality-TV star to take your place. He’ll be better than you.
Conservatives regularly attend symposia to discuss the future of conservatism. Republicans in Washington stumble around trying to figure what to stand for beyond capitalizing on whatever zany thing some socialist said today.
But isn’t their historical purpose clear? Their job—now and in the coming decade—is, in a supple, clever, and concerted way, to save the free-market system from those who would dismantle it. It is to preserve and defend the capitalism that made America a great thing in the world and that, for all its flaws and inequities, created and spread stupendous wealth. The natural job of conservatives is to conserve, in this case that great system.
I’ll go whole hog here. We need a cleaned-up capitalism, not a weary, sighing, acceptance-of-man’s-fallen-nature capitalism. Republicans and conservatives need a more capacious sense of what is needed in America now, including what their own voters need. The party needs a tax-and-spending reality that takes into account an understandable and prevalent mood of great need. They need to be moderate, peaceable, and tactful on social issues, but firm, too. This is where the left really is insane: As the earnest, dimwitted governor of Virginia thoughtfully pointed out, they do allow the full-term baby to be born, then make it comfortable as they debate whether it should be allowed to take its first breath or quietly expire on the table. A party that can’t stand up against that doesn’t deserve to exist.
All this must be done with a sense of how Americans on the ground are seeing things. What they see all around them is cultural catastrophe—drugs, the decline of faith, the splintering of all norms by which they’d lived, schools that don’t teach and that leave their kids with a generalized anxiety. They want more help to deal with this. If you said, “We’re going to have a national program to help our boys become good men,” they would be for it, they would cheer.
If you said, “We’re going to get serious and apply brains and money to what we all know is a mental-health crisis in America,” they wouldn’t care about the cost—and they’d be right not to care. They think as a people we’ve changed, our character has changed, and this dims our future. Make things better on the ground now and we’ll figure out the rest later.
These are not quaint nostalgists pining for the past, they are realists looking at ruin. They know some future crisis will test whether we can hold together as a nation. Whatever holds us together now must be undergirded, expanded.
Much will depend on how the Republican Party handles this epic era, because the Democrats are not only going left, they will do it badly. They will lurch, they will be spurred by anger and abstractions, they will be destructive. They really would kill the goose that laid the golden egg, because they feel no loyalty to it.
Republicans, save that goose. Change yourselves and save capitalism.
You are thinking, “My goodness, that’s what FDR said he was doing!”
Yes.
THE PRESIDENT HAS A PRESENTATION PROBLEM
April 21, 2022
I want to talk about Joe Biden and his unique problems presenting his presidency. You’re aware of his political position and the polls. The latest from CNN has him at 39 percent approval. Public admiration began to plummet during the Afghanistan withdrawal. That disaster came as it was becoming clear the president was handing his party’s progressive caucus functional control of his domestic agenda, which fell apart and never recovered.
James Carville the other night on MSNBC amusingly and almost persuasively said Democrats in the 2022 congressional elections should hit Republicans hard on their weirdo content—candidates who are both extreme and inane, conspiracists in the base. But the Democrats too have their weirdo quotient—extreme culture warriors, members of the Squad—and last summer the president appeared to have thrown in with them. That and Afghanistan were fateful for his position, and then came inflation.
But what struck me this week was a little-noticed poll from the NH Journal. It’s always interesting to know what’s going on in the first presidential primary state, but the Journal itself seemed startled by the answer to its question: If the 2024 election were held today and the candidates were Joe Biden versus Republican Governor Chris Sununu, who would you back? Mr. Sununu trounced the president 53 percent to 36 percent. Mr. Sununu is popular and that unusual thing, a vigorous moderate conservative who appears to have actual intellectual commitments. But Mr. Biden carried New Hampshire in 2020 with 53 percent. He’s cratering.
All politics grows from policies, and policies are announced and argued for through presentation, including, crucially, speeches. Joe Biden has a presentation problem. This is worthy of note because his entire career has been about presentation, specifically representing a mood. In fifty years he has cycled through Dashing Youth, the Next JFK, Middle-Class Joe, and Late-Life Finder of His Inner Progressive. But the mood he represents now isn’t a good one. It’s there in the New Hampshire poll. Asked if they thought Biden was “physically and mentally up to the job” if there’s a crisis, “not very/not at all” got 54 percent and “very/somewhat” 42 percent. Here we all use euphemisms: “slowing down,” “not at the top of his game.” If Mr. Biden’s policies were popular, nobody would mind that he seems to be slowing. But they aren’t.
So to the presentation problem. Here are some difficulties when he speaks.
When he stands at a podium and reads from a teleprompter, his mind seems to wander quickly from the meaning of what he’s saying to the impression he’s making. You can sort of see this, that he’s always wondering how he’s coming across. When he catches himself he tends to compensate by enacting emotion.
But the emotion he seems most publicly comfortable with is indignation. An example is his answer to a reporter’s question in November about the administration’s plans to compensate illegal-immigrant parents who’d been separated from their children at the border. Suddenly he was angry-faced; he raised his voice, increased his tempo, and started jabbing the air. “You lost your child. It’s gone! You deserve some kind of compensation, no matter what the circumstances.” Then, catching himself, he added mildly, “What that will be, I have no idea.” He was trying to show presentness, engagement. But there’s often an “angry old man yelling at clouds” aspect to this.
There are small tics that worked long ago. He often speaks as if we are fascinated by the family he came from and that formed him. Thus he speaks of the old neighborhood and lessons. And my mother told me, Joey, don’t comb your hair with buttered toast. This was great for a Knights of Columbus pancake breakfast in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, but not now. For all the mystique of the presidency, people hired you to do a job and want you to be clear and have a plan. They aren’t obsessed with your family, they’re obsessed with their family.
Mr. Biden tends to be extremely self-referential: “I’ll give it to you straight, as I promised that I always would.” Because I’m such a straight shooter. It’s better to shoot straight and not always be bragging. He should lose “Lemme say that again.” When you speak to America you don’t have to repeat yourself for the slow. I don’t think he’s aware he often seems to be talking down. People will tolerate this from a politician when they think he’s their moral or intellectual superior, but they push back when they don’t, as in the polls.
The larger problem for the president is that in his most important prepared speeches there’s a lot of extremely boring faux eloquence, big chunks of smooth roundedness, and nothing sticks. Last April to a joint session of Congress: “America is on the move again, turning peril into possibility, crisis into opportunity, setback into strength.” This sounds as if it means something—it has the rhythm and sound of good thought—but it doesn’t, really. It’s the language of the sixty-second advertising spot, and America tunes it out. Not from malice but from Alice. It’s the sound of the past forty or fifty years, meaning it’s had its day.
Mr. Biden has an opportunity to do something new, reinvent his rhetorical approach. Why not, nothing else has worked. He should commit, when speaking, to Be Here Now. He should be straightforward and modest.
When I think of what is needed at this moment in history, my mind goes to the brisk factuality, the lack of emotionalism, of October 22, 1962. John F. Kennedy from his desk in the Oval Office offering eighteen minutes of fact and thought. “Good evening, my fellow citizens. This government, as promised, has maintained the closest surveillance of the Soviet military buildup on the island of Cuba. Within the past week, unmistakable evidence has established the fact that a series of offensive missile sites is now in preparation on that imprisoned island…. Having now confirmed and completed our evaluation of the evidence and our decision on a course of action, this government feels obliged to report this new crisis to you in fullest detail.”
It was down to the bone, stark, and completely compelling. The military response he explained was persuasive because it was based in fact and clearly put interpretation. He provided complicated information: “The characteristics of these new missile sites indicate two distinct types of installations.” You talk only to the intelligent this way; his listeners were aware of the compliment. He didn’t stoop to them but assumed they’d reach to him.
He wasn’t self-referential: He didn’t say “as I promised,” but “as promised,” because putting himself in the forefront would be vulgar. It was “this government,” not “my government.” He said, “This nation is opposed to war. We are also true to our word.” He was declaring the American position while putting the virtue of it on America, not himself.
You say, Well, that was a crisis, you cut to the chase in crisis. But our political moment is pretty much nonstop crises, and there are more than enough national platforms for emotionalism.
All politicians could learn from this approach. They have no idea how refreshing it would sound, how gratefully it would be received: “I’m not being patronized by my inferiors!” How people might listen again.
WHAT COMES AFTER ACHESON’S CREATION?
February 9, 2017
Let’s look at a big, pressing question. Last fall at a defense forum a significant military figure was asked, If you could wave a magic wand, what is the one big thing you’d give the U.S. military right now?
We’d all been talking about the effects of the sequester and reform of the procurement system and I expected an answer along those lines. Instead he said, We need to know what the U.S. government wants from us. We need to know the overarching plan because if there’s no higher plan we can’t make plans to meet the plan.
This was freshly, bluntly put, and his answer came immediately, without pause.
The world is in crisis. The old order that more or less governed things after World War II has been swept away. The changed world that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall is also over.
We’ve been absorbing this for a while, since at least 2014, when Russia invaded Crimea. But what plan are we developing to approach the world as it is now?
I always notice that a day after a terrible tornado hits the Midwest the television crews swarm in and film the victims picking through what’s left. People literally stand where their house was, their neighborhood was. In shock, they point at some flattened debris and say, “That was our living room.” They rummage around, find a photo. “This was my son’s wedding.”
That’s sort of what a lot of those interested in foreign policy have been doing in recent years—staring in shock at the wreckage.
But something has to be rebuilt. Everyone now has to be an architect, or a cement-pourer, or a master craftsman carpenter.
It’s been instructive the past week to reread a small classic of statecraft, Present at the Creation by Dean Acheson, published in 1969. As undersecretary and then secretary of state he was involved in the creation of the postwar order.
After the war the world was in crisis, much of it in collapse. “The period was marked by the disappearance of world powers and empires, or their reduction to medium-sized states, and from this wreckage emerged a multiplicity of states…all of them largely undeveloped politically and economically. Overshadowing all loomed two dangers to all—the Soviet Union’s new-found power and expansive imperialism, and the development of nuclear weapons.” The Cold War had begun. China was in civil war, about to fall to communism. Europe’s economy had been destroyed. Europe and Asia were “in a state of utter exhaustion and economic dislocation.” The entire world seemed to be “disintegrating.”
What came after the crisis was the Marshall Plan, in which the U.S., itself exhausted by the war, helped its allies, and enemies, survive and resist communism. The objective, as the Truman administration declared it, was not relief but revival—spending American money to bring back agriculture, industry, and trade. New financing was needed from Congress, in amounts then thought impossible—hundreds of millions that became billions.
It was an effort appropriate to its time. Apart from its essential good—millions didn’t die of starvation, nations such as Greece did not fall to communism—it brought America more than half a century of the world’s sometimes grudging but mostly enthusiastic admiration. They now knew we were not only a powerful nation but a great people. This was not unhelpful in times of crisis down the road.
It is exciting at a time like this to read of the development of a successful foreign-policy effort from conception to execution. And—how to say it?—Acheson’s first-rate second-rateness is inspiring. This was not a deeply brilliant man, not a grand strategist, but more a manager who was a good judge of others’ concepts. He could see facts—he had sturdy sight—and spy implications. He had the gift of natural confidence. He could also be clueless: One of his most respected aides was the Soviet spy Alger Hiss.
But Acheson was gutsy, willing to throw the long ball, and a first-rate appreciator of the gifts of others. He thought George Marshall, who preceded him as secretary of state, the greatest American military figure since George Washington. He is moving on the subject of Harry Truman. You are lucky if you can love a president you serve, and he did. Unlike FDR, Truman was not devious but plain in his dealings; also unlike FDR, he was not cold at the core but available. After Truman left office, a friend of Acheson’s, visiting the new White House, was told as a man went into the Oval Office, “Oh, he’s going in to cheer up the president.” Acheson’s friend replied, “That’s funny, in our day the president used to cheer us up.”
Acheson: “Harry S. Truman was two men. One was the public figure—peppery, sometimes belligerent, often didactic, the ‘give-’em-hell’ Harry. The other was the patient, modest, considerate, and appreciative boss, helpful and understanding in all official matters, affectionate in any private worry or sorrow.” Truman “learned from mistakes (though he seldom admitted them), and did not waste time bemoaning them.”
What is inspiring about Acheson’s first-rate second-rateness is that he’s like a lot of those we have developing foreign policy right now.
Acheson, though he did not present it this way, provides useful lessons for future diplomats in future crises.
Everyone’s in the dark looking for the switch. When you’re in the middle of history the meaning of things is usually unclear. “We all had far more than the familiar difficulty of determining the capabilities and intentions of those who inhabit the planet with us.” In real time most things are obscure. “We groped after interpretations of [events], sometimes reversed lines of action based on earlier views, and hesitated before grasping what now seems obvious.” “Only slowly did it dawn upon us that the whole world structure and order that we had inherited from the nineteenth century was gone.”
Don’t mess things up at the beginning. Acheson’s insight was that it wouldn’t work to put forward the Marshall Plan and then try to sell it to the public. The way to go was to explain to Congress and the public the exact nature of the crisis. This, he believed, would shock both into facing facts. While they were doing that, a plan to deal with the crisis was being developed. “We could not afford a false start.”
