Today Victor Davis Hanson has a piece about America’s delirium that attributes our troubles to “An affluent, bored, and leisured society… [in which] someone or something must be found culpable for the asymmetry in satisfying the appetites” of Americans.
I don’t think so.
I think that the difference between America of 1965 and 2022 is that back in 1965 our educated class sat firmly in the saddle of power constructed thirty years before by Franklin Delano Roosevelt. It could afford to look out over the fruited plain and see that it was good. Today, the educated class, the ruling class feels that its realm is under threat.
And the rulers feel that the threat is getting worse. Back in the day President Obama could descant patronizingly in 2008 about “bitter clingers” in small towns where the jobs went away 25 years ago. In 2016 Hillary Clinton was rather more concerned about the “deplorables.” Today President Biden is giving speeches about “semi-fascism” and “ultra-MAGAs,” and every Democratic supporter worries about “armed insurrectionists.” Of course. Every Democrat can sense that “the natives are restless.”
Look, politics is about the enemy. If there are no enemies in sight then the ruling class can relax and can indulge its domestic opponents and treat them as rather comical rubes. But if the ruling class feels threatened, then it will take action. It will rile up its supporters with reports of threatening enemies. And it will demonize its opponents as enemies and threats to all we hold dear.
There is another factor. A glorious leader, leading his nation against the enemy, cannot make a mistake, cannot suffer a reverse, cannot be seen by his people as anything but the hero leading them to victory. This explains why every nation in a war must censor the news. It is not just to make sure that the letters of active servicemen do not divulge operational details that might be useful to the enemy. It is to maintain the narrative of a triumphant march to victory. If the march is not that triumphant, or maybe even suffering a minor defeat, then the soldiers in the army and the people back home may start to wonder if the war is really such a good idea. We see, for instance, daily reports about low morale and even minor refusals to fight in the Russian army in the Ukraine (But nothing about any problems in the Ukrainian army).
Obviously, it cannot be that any soldier or patriotic citizen should doubt the ability of its leaders in war.
Clearly, we have learned in the last two years, this also applies when the government is courageously fighting a deadly disease. It is just instinctive for the government and its agents to suppress anything that detracts from its analysis of the science and the wisdom of its executive and administrative decisions: such as lockdowns, masks, and vaccines.
It also applies to the many government programs that the educated class has conceived and implemented over the last century. It cannot be that government education is a disaster, that welfare has destroyed the low-income family, that government subsidies of mortgages has pushed house prices out of sight for ordinary people: that government by the educated has Made Things Worse.
Because if the ruling class has Made Things Worse, then what are we paying all those taxes for? And why do we even allow the current incumbents to stay in power?
You can see the problem. The only way things change in politics and government is after defeat: military defeat if we are talking war, electoral defeat if it is time for a change, and regime change if the ruling class is so entrenched that reform is impossible through ordinary democratic means.
Meanwhile the rulers are all telling us that it is doing its best, and that but for the armed insurrectionists and the ultra-MAGAs and the racist-sexist-homophobes, everything would be hunky-dory. It cannot be — IT CANNOT BE — that today’s problems are the direct consequence of mistakes — or even the malevolence — of the ruling class.