A Reckless Age.

Innocence that unnerves.

The following piece was originally posted at Political News Items. It is re-posted here to try to entice you to test drive Political News Items for 14 days, free of charge. Click here to do so. Or here. Have a look around. See if it’s of interest.

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The best piece I’ve read about the current political moment in the United States was written in 2018, by the Financial Times columnist Janan Ganesh. I think the FT won’t mind if I reprint most of it here. The column was a reflection on the passing of former President George H.W. Bush.

As Americans pore over the feats of the late George H.W. Bush, so extensive that you half-expect “Fields Medalist 1950” to pop up, it is still the first that stands out. He was the youngest pilot in the US Navy. He remains the last US president with combat experience. Wednesday’s memorial service is for one man, but also, by proxy, for a generation that lost its best years to the second world war.

Of all the theories behind the spurt in populism — the 2008 crash, immigration — the passing of the “greatest” generation from both high office and the electorate is under-discussed.

Experience of trauma does not instill risk aversion as a matter of course. But having lived through the near ruin of civilization, that cohort of westerners did not trifle with dangerous ideas after 1945. Obituaries that attribute Bush’s caution to high-born Waspery or the Episcopalian Church miss the formative effect of war.

To see what happens when societies become incautious, look around. What unites Donald Trump’s former adviser Steve Bannon with France’s rioting gilets jaunes and the UK’s fiercest Brexiters is not just their will to upturn the existing order. It is their belief that transient economic strife is the worst that could possibly happen.

None of these people actively desires civilizational meltdown. They just under-rate the prospect of it happening as an inadvertent result of their actions. How could they not? Unintended consequences, the precariousness of order, the independent momentum of ideas: to keep these dangers in mind takes a bitterer experience of history than is available to most people under 90.

How telling that the populist fever in US politics flared in the 1990s, when power passed from the war generation to its children. Newt Gingrich, that smash-it-all-up merchant, was the first Speaker of the House of Representatives born after the Depression. What his predecessors saw as a concert of grown-ups against the extremes, he saw as a venal, backslapping Washington ripe for “revolution”. Again, it is not so much the malevolence as the innocence that unnerves: the assumption that real life comes with a fuse or fail-safe that will shut down an ideological adventure if it ever runs out of control.

It would be nice to condemn the rashness of these populist leaders and leave it at that. The trouble is that people vote for them by the bushel. The generational loss of caution is a mass phenomenon, not just an elite one.

In a sense, Bush did have what he once mocked as the “vision thing”. It takes vision to see the fragility of order. Even in moments of ostensible triumph he sensed the potential for tragedy, which is why he did not humiliate the Soviets in 1989 or sack Baghdad in 1991.

The question is where such vigilance came from. It takes a Freud or a Shakespeare to divine human motivation. Perhaps the obituary writers are right to dwell on the Yankee prudence of his childhood. It is just that millions of his generational peers had no such rearing and still voted, in nation after nation, decade after postwar decade, for various flavors of stability. What they shared was youthful experience of ideology run amok.

That generation is already revered to the point of mawkishness. Bush should not be. A nuanced account must reckon with his initial foot-dragging on civil rights and his sometimes tawdry bid for the White House in 1988. But these trips to the darker edges of politics stand out precisely because they are uncharacteristic. In the main, he had a taste for moderation that is consistent with formative encounters with its opposite. Crash or no crash, plentiful immigration or none, perhaps the west was always going to be suggestible to extremists once his generation faded and took its instructive experiences with it.

Social order is to some extent self-cancelling. The longer people have it, the more they take it for granted. Historic events that warn them against such complacency pass from living memory to folklore to something more like rumor. Ideas that would have made their forebears shiver become credible, even exciting. Think of the antic glee at the prospect of war in Britain in 1914. It defies understanding, until you remember the country’s inexperience of mass-mobilized conflict since Napoleonic times.

We might be living through a (so far milder) version of the same phenomenon: an openness to political extremes born of historic distance from their last trial and error. The implication of this argument is as bleak as the argument itself. For the west to rediscover its aversion to wild ideas, perhaps they must be tested to failure. (Source: ft.com)

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Mr. Ganesh’s column, 6 years later, seems exact. We’ve traveled from the age of anxiety to an age of recklessness. The president of the United States is running for re-election to perform duties he will no longer be able to perform. The previous president of the United States and leader of the opposition is running for re-election to avenge a defeat he has yet to acknowledge. The people who served in many of the highest positions in his administration, including the Attorney General, the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defense, the National Security Advisor, his chief of staff (among many, many others), describe him as unfit to hold high office.

That’s the choice. Everything you need to know about the two major political parties in the United States is described by the choice. It is the best they can do.

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According to the most recent ABC News/IPSOS poll, 86% (!) of the nation’s voters believe Mr. Biden is too old to serve as president for another four years. They are 100% correct about that. Anyone who looks at YouTube videos of Mr. Biden debating Paul Ryan in the 2012 vice presidential debate and Mr. Biden answering questions today see his visible and quite dramatic decline.

It’s not his fault. He’s 81 years old. He is at fault for pretending that he can do his job as ably as the world requires. He can’t. His enablers are perhaps more at fault for indulging him, running out for Sunday talk show appearances to deny the apparent, to insist that what is evident is not. It is certainly true that the Special Counsel’s report was a number of steps over the line of his brief and expertise. But the evidence upon which the report is based is on tape. It’s not a matter of interpretation.

As for Mr. Trump, he seems to delight in his recklessness — a feature, not a bug, accretive to his brand. Oddly, it’s not Mr. Trump’s recklessness that now causes the greatest concern. We’ve long since priced that in. It’s those who enable it; who explicitly or implicitly endorse it. For them, with Trump, there are no “uncrossable” lines. They will countenance almost anything to curry his favor, expecting the rest of us to understand that it’s something they have to do, not something they want to do.

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It would be nice if recklessness of this kind was confined to politics, but of course it’s not. We see it in our media (most everywhere), our financial markets (most everywhere), our technology companies (especially), our academic institutions (also especially), to name but four. And those four pale in comparison to the reckless pursuit of artificial intelligence; the most dangerous technology in the history of mankind, unregulated, barely understood, much of its code freely available.

The leaders in each of these “sectors” assure us that we needn’t be alarmed — self correction, if needed, will occur. About those assurances, as Mr. Ganesh puts it: “it is….the innocence that unnerves: the assumption that real life comes with a fuse or fail-safe that will shut down an ideological adventure if it ever runs out of control.”

What we know, now, is that it is running out of control. Whether there’s a fuse box is an open question.