The New Neo

Peggy Noonan writes:

Have you had your 2016 Moment? I think you probably have, or will.

The Moment is that sliver of time in which you fully realize something epochal is happening in politics, that there has never been a presidential year like 2016, and suddenly you are aware of it in a new, true and personal way. It tends to involve a poignant sense of dislocation, a knowledge that our politics have changed and won’t be going back.

I had my 2016 moment in November of 2012, right after the election. Actually, I had it a week before that, when after talking to a series of friends I realized in my gut that the election was almost certainly going to end with an Obama victory. But you get the idea.

However, that doesn’t mean I haven’t had further refinements on the moment this year. I most definitely have. Ever since last summer, I keep losing hope, and then getting hope revived—that somehow the forces of reason will pull this one out. But each time that hope has been short-lived. I’m with Noonan on this one:

We’ve had a lot to absorb””the breaking of a party, the rise of an outlandish outsider; a lurch to the left in the other party, the popular rise of a socialist. Alongside that, the enduring power of a candidate even her most ardent supporters accept as corrupt. Add the lowering of standards, the feeling of no options, the coarsening, and all the new estrangements.

The Moment is when it got to you, or when it fully came through.

But I don’t fully agree with this, at least not exactly:

As she stood watching a video of Reagan speaking, he thought of Reagan and FDR, of JFK and Martin Luther King. His daughter, he realized, would probably never see political leaders of such stature and grace, though she deserved to. Her first, indelible political memories were of lower, grubbier folk. “Leaders with Reaganesque potential no longer go into politics””and why would they, with all the posturing and plasticity that it requires?”

I still see some leaders with “Reaganesque potential” and “stature and grace” in politics. I even have seen people I might describe that way during this election cycle. For example, I saw those things in Carly Fiorina, particularly when I saw her in person. Cruz likewise, when he gives speeches and interacts with crowds. They are not the only ones. Are they Reagan, or up there with Reagan? No. But they have those qualities and that potential, and there is no reason other aspiring politicians of the future couldn’t sometimes exhibit those qualities and have that potential.

The real difference between Reagan’s times and now, as I see it? It’s the American people who have coarsened, who respond to posturing and plasticity positively rather than rejecting it, and who are less likely to elect politicians with those qualities of “stature and grace.” This is true not just in the political world, but in our cultural life across the spectrum. I don’t blame politics or politicians. The problem and the trend goes much much deeper.

Noonan also writes:

Lately conservative thinkers and journalists had taken to making clear their disdain for the white working class.

Well, maybe I don’t read those particular thinkers and journalists. Noonan doesn’t name them or quote them, so I’m not sure who she’s talking about, or what she considers evidence of this disdain—certainly it can’t just be criticism of Trump’s supporters, because criticism is not the same thing as disdain, and besides “Trump supporter” is not even remotely synonymous with “white working class,” because Trump supporters come from many different classes and educational levels (although most, like most Republicans, are white).

Earlier in this post when I wrote, “It’s the American people who have coarsened, who respond to posturing and plasticity positively rather than rejecting it. This is true not just in politics, but in our cultural life across the spectrum,” I was not referring to class at all. In fact, I don’t see the “white working class” as necessarily exhibiting more of these traits than anyone else. It’s not about money. It’s not about race or class. It’s more common across the board, part of public and private life, and it’s been worsening for decades.

I don’t even blame it on the left, although I believe the left has long encouraged and celebrated it. At this point it is bipartisan and pervasive.

Towards the end of her column Noonan writes of her grief that “the great choice in a nation of 320 million may come down to Crazy Man versus Criminal” this year. Well, I feel grief, too, but have felt it for many years. And I find “Crazy Man versus Criminal”—cute, snappy, and memorable—inaccurate. Trump is not a crazy man, not at all. And although Hillary may be guilty of some crimes, “criminal” is not her most salient characteristic, nor her source of appeal. I realize that cute and snappy makes a column that people will quote and remember, but if I had to think of a way to put it I’d say (trying to be a bit cute and snappy myself) something like “Cunning Con Man versus Cunning Con Woman, the first from the world of business and the second from the world of politics.”

It does no good to disrespect working class people, and I don’t think I’ve ever done it (I don’t even like the term “working class,” although I can’t think of a better one to designate a certain group of people). I grew up in a mainly working class community, and although my father was a professional, my parents had a number of working class friends because the community in which they grew up and lived was a tight one where people had mostly known each other since childhood. I’ve lived ever since in mainly working class communities, and I see stupidity of mind and coarseness of thought and culture as equal opportunity qualities, cutting across classes and educational levels. Some of the dumbest people I know are well-educated professionals, some of the smartest are not, and vice versa.

I think something else is going on. I was in a Trader Joe’s the other day, pushing my cart and happily loading up on supplies (including this favorite), when I saw a youngish man in a T-shirt with the F-word on it. He was accompanied by his daughter of about six years old, and as they were talking I stared in realization that years ago—and not all that many years, either—such a thing would be highly unlikely, but now it’s just a matter of course. Years ago, it would be highly unusual for a father to wear such a T-shirt in public at all, much less in the presence of his young daughter, but these days it’s a sort of ho-hum experience for most people. That’s how coarsened our lives are, in small but meaningful ways.

As Andrew Breitbart (not the blog, the man) so memorably said, politics is downstream from culture. Politics can’t be some sort of highfalutin oasis, isolated from the culture and above it all—au contraire—and it never was. What we’re seeing today in politics is not primarily about politics, politics is just one of its manifestations, albeit an important and powerful one.

I’ve been writing about this phenomenon, both in politics and elsewhere, almost since the beginning of my blogging (see this for an early example, and this for a recent one). If Noonan’s “Reaganesque” politician of “stature and grace” came on the scene (particularly on the right), I submit that these days he or she would be considered a big boring yawn, and/or would be attacked by tabloid accusations that needn’t contain a particle of truth to be disseminated widely even by those who don’t write for tabloids. Such a politician would not be a winner—because way too many Americans neither demand nor appreciate such qualities in their leaders or their public figures, nor do they demonstrate them in their own public or private lives.