Defining Presidential Down If this election is so crucial, why have the front-runners been so awful? By Bret Stephens
http://www.wsj.com/articles/defining-presidential-down-1454371480
In 2014 I wrote a book that made the case that the United States, for all of its problems, was not in decline. Now and again I have my doubts.
The results of Monday’s Iowa caucus won’t be known until after this column goes to print. But here’s what we know already about the four top contenders. No prizes for matching names to descriptions:
1) A compulsive liar with a persecution complex, a mania for secrecy, and a bald disdain for rules as they apply to lesser people.
2) A bigoted braggart with a laughable grasp of public policy and leering manners of the kind you would expect from a barroom drunk.
3) A glib moralizer who is personally detested by every single senator in his own party, never mind the other one.
4) A Sixties radical preaching warmed-over socialism to people too young to know what it was or too stupid to understand what it does.
That’s been a topic of earnest commentary ever since it became clear that Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders weren’t just blips on the political horizon. The dominant explanations tend to run to the economic, sociological, technological or generational. You’re in your 50s, the recession hits, you lose your middle-income job and are waylaid by debt. You’re not going to be hired to design apps, so you wind up as a limo driver or restaurant hostess. You’re one of what columnist Stu Bykofsky has movingly described as “Throwaway Americans.”
The Donald? Why not?
There’s surely some truth to this, borne out by historical experiences from Weimar to Buenos Aires. Except life in today’s America is not remotely comparable to Germany in the 1920s or Argentina in the 1970s. There’s no hyperinflation or mass unemployment, no underground armies of left-wing revolutionaries or right-wing reactionaries. Nor is the economy worse now than it was in the 1970s, to say nothing of the 1930s or 1890s. We live in an era of mediocrity and anxiety, not collapse and tragedy.
The real difference, to adapt a line from Daniel Patrick Moynihan, is that we’ve spent the better part of a generation defining “presidential” down. There was a time when some form of military experience or outstanding civilian service was considered a prerequisite for the presidency. Or when first-term senators did not presume to run for the White House without putting in time, paying dues, making friends and authoring some significant piece of legislation. Or when conspicuous character flaws or pending legal jeopardies were automatic and irrevocable disqualifications.
But all that is in the past now, and the moment that happened can be precisely dated. It began with Bubba. It began when America made its first presidential-level accommodation with the mores of the 1960s, and when it made a self-conscious choice to redefine, and demote, the concept of character in the hierarchy of political virtues.
Jimmy Carter came to office promising never to lie; he pledged an American government “as good as its people.” Bill Clinton lied, flagrantly and frequently, and he made us complicit in his lies. With Bubba we became a nation of pseudo-sophisticates, people who believed that the mark of the discerning voter was to see through—and past—the “character” issue. What mattered were results. In the halcyon 1990s, that seemed to work.
Today’s degraded politics is partly a result of that moral accommodation. It’s also the result of an intellectual accommodation. Let’s face it: If Mr. Clinton brought dishonor to the Oval Office, George W. Bush brought shallowness to it. Presidential aspirants were once expected to deliver finely tuned debating points about Quemoy and Matsu. After W, it became pedantic to expect candidates to know the names of the leaders of India and Pakistan.
And now we have Mr. Trump, who lived through the entire Cold War without, it seems, ever hearing of the nuclear triad, or thinking about it, or being embarrassed by the thought that he’d never heard or thought of it. But he thinks he’s fit to be president, and at this writing a plurality of Republican voters seem to agree. Not to worry: President Trump will take that triad, add a prong, make it a nuclear fork, and stab our enemies to death with it. Just you watch, people.
Now we are at the start of an electoral season that Americans say is of the utmost importance even as they make the most flippant choice of front-runners. And while a few thousand voters in Iowa may not be tantamount to the will of the American people, they aren’t immaterial to it, either.
Sober up, America. We’re a republic only for as long as we can keep it.
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