250

Pursuing Happiness in old age

I am 80 years old this year of our 250th anniversary…and I find myself a cliche. My life has been a familiar political journey, from left to center. I recently took the Pew political test and found that I was a “pragmatic and polite conservative,” which seemed a rather abstruse basket:

A politically mixed (though Republican-tilting) group, they lean conservative on economics and the role of government, while tilting more liberal on issues related to race and foreign policy. They prize civility and cooperation in politics.

Well, that sounds pretty mushy—and I find it hard to square with the strong opinions I have on many issues. I’ve voted for Democrats in federal elections; but more Republican the closer I get to local politics. Democrats, I’ve found, simply aren’t very good at running things, especially school systems, where they are in the thrall of the teachers unions. My friends joke about my obsession with the unions. They know all my lines: If industrial unions are organized against the power of capital, who are the public employees organized against? The teachers say they want to be treated like professionals, but they negotiate like the teamsters—seniority means more to them than skill. Indeed, skill and accountability mean practically nothing at all.

But enough of that. I’ve ranted that rant too often, and my political journey has been more complicated than that one issue. It has been empirical, based on actual experience—on a lot of reporting and a lot of reading. An early example: I was a journalist with the underground press in Boston at the turn of the 1970s; I considered myself a member of the antiwar and civil rights movements, although a fairly “polite” one. I marched but never got arrested. The first big issue I covered was busing to achieve school integration. And yes, the white bigots were disgusting. But I couldn’t find any black parents who favored the plan, either. Black activists and politicians—and white liberals—were gung ho, but not actual parents of black kids in school. Busing was a form of social engineering imposed from on high, by a Judge—W. Arthur Garrity—who lived in a wealthy liberal suburb. Wealthy liberal suburbs were not affected by the plan, of course. There were, I began to see, limits to what government could do, especially when it came to changing a society’s culture.

An equally valuable lesson came from another Judge Garrity—Paul Garrity, the first judge of the Boston Housing Court. The creation of that court was a populist triumph, a forum where tenants could plead a case against an unscrupulous landlord. It was going to be a people’s court, Garrity decided: no black robes, no “all rise” when the Judge walked in. The tenants hated it. “They wanted a real court,” Garrity told me. “That meant ‘all rise’ and I had to wear a black robe.”

And there it was: my first baby step toward Burkean conservatism, a journey that recently came into focus when I read Yuval Levin’s excellent The Great Debate, about the fundamental differences between Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine. Burke believed that political stability grew from tested habits and ceremonies, from ritual and tradition; Paine believed that humans were endowed with “natural rights” that empowered them to overturn tradition and create new governments of their own devising. “We have it in our power to begin the world over again,” Paine famously wrote.

There were, obviously, elements of truth in both philosophies…and weaknesses. Burke was too soft on hereditary royalty; Paine was too soft on the populist extremists who created the French Revolution. But Burke’s traditionalism—he allowed for gradual change—has proved less messy than Paine’s anarchism. Experience turns out to be more reliable than ideology. The events I’ve witnessed have moved me gradually, but inexorably, toward Burke’s view of the world, though I remain a dogged believer in the possibility of progress. I would have liked a third option in that Pew survey: government should do much of what it does, but better.

The importance of ritual and tradition in a democracy…and in the stability of a culture is not a self-evident truth. It requires—sorry, Citizen Paine—Common Sense. My generation of leftish protesters simply didn’t understand that; indeed, we scorned it. We conducted a stylized rebellion against The Establishment. We dressed differently—working-class denim became the rage—we grew our hair long, we “experimented” with drugs. It was only when I began to report on the closing of steel mills in the midwest that I saw how our rebellion translated down market: it became sullenness, family disintegration, heavy metal music, tattoos and casual intramural violence. The unemployed steelworkers didn't experiment with drugs; they used them. Oh, and another thing: I never met a steelworker who wanted his son to be a steelworker, even though the pay ($18 per hour back then) and benefits were robust. They wanted their kids to graduate college, to become teachers and accountants and computer programmers.

The left-intellectual romance with the working-class, which I’d written about in my first book, a biography of Woody Guthrie, turned out to be a phony. And it remains so to this day. Here’s Andy Kessler in the Wall Street Journal:

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.), said in 2019 that an entire generation “came of age and never saw American prosperity,” and then whined, “I have never seen that, or experienced it, really, in my adult life.”

In fact, the opposite is true. This is the most prosperous country in human history. We are the luckiest people who have ever lived. To believe what AOC and Bernie Sanders—and the bulk of the Democratic Party—believes, you must be tainted by a vestigial conceit of Marxist class warfare and the false god of Equity. But the Progressive Movement and its most adept tribune, Franklin D. Roosevelt, put a Burkean kibosh on that. Capitalism could be modified. Excesses could be regulated. The poor could be protected. Indeed, there is solid evidence nowadays that poverty has become a matter of lifestyle choice. The Washington Post noted a new study of poverty by Richard Burkhauser of the Civitas Institute and Kevin Corinth of the American Enterprise Institute:

Since 1939, the absolute poverty rate fell by at least three-quarters. When including the value of health insurance, poverty fell by up to 97 percent.

The transformation was especially massive for African Americans. In 1939, 93.3 percent of Black children were in poverty. By 2023, it was 5.7 percent.

This should not be news. Various studies have shown that if you do three things: graduate from high school, work a job and wait till marriage before having children—you will have a sliver of a chance (6%) of being poor. The old saw remains true: capitalism has been the best antipoverty program in history. And yet “capitalism” like “zionism”—and maybe even “politeness”—have become a fighting word among the tragically hip. It’s all about the oligarchs (who tend to overlap with, well, Jews). This is what a typical Democratic Socialist, Brad Lander in New York, sounds like:

Voters had made clear that they “want to see people who fight harder for working families,” Mr. Lander said Friday.

Naw. They just wanted angrier candidates, saying more extreme things, no matter how much at variance with reality those causes were. And as for all that “fighting” the Democrats talk about,. ask Claude:

Pew Research's widely cited analysis found the share of Americans in middle-income households fell from 61% in 1971 to 51% in 2023. Over that same period, the share in lower-income households rose from 27% to 30%, and the share in upper-income households rose from 11% to 19% — with the increase in the upper tier larger than the increase in the lower tier. So movement up out of the middle class outpaced movement down.

Ruy Teixeira nails it:

Pining for social democracy and income equality are forms of nostalgia that don’t really affect the way the middle class lives…They reflect a time when support for the working class was considered progressive, when basic Marxist principles were considered gospel kindness and Plain Truth. But there is no essential rectitude in the working class—indeed, in a prosperous society the default working class position is a mean-spirited self-interest, against immigrants, against the unethical poor, against the guilt-ridden professionals who retain the nostalgia for Socialism. They don’t care very much about rich people—except for their dreams of joining them, and their willingness to be entertained by the selfish grotesqueries of the rich and famous. Trump was elected as Entertainer in Chief.

Of course, they want to do better. But Burkauser and Corinth note that wage increases have kept pace with inflation—and there are all these…things that make life so much easier, and more fun, than it used to be: cell phones, microwaves, flat-screen TVs, monster pickup trucks. There is a fundamental misapprehension in current Democratic Party theory:

The problem in America isn’t economic inequality, it is a surfeit of prosperity-induced dyspepsia.

The Democrats, indeed, are barking up a tree that died a century ago:

Fully 66 percent of Democrats tell Gallup they view socialism favorably, while 42 percent say the same of capitalism.

Let them drive Trabants!

In fact, those lefty folks are utter hypocrites—champagne socialists. They are actually in favor of capitalism, but it’s not fashionable to say so. This is a rhetorical conceit only possible in a prosperous country. They love the choices capitalism affords them, and ignore the suffocating restrictions of socialism. They’ll argue that things are better in Scandinavia—that is, in capitalist countries where the state pays for health care (and yes, our health system could certainly use massive reform). But as the World Cup fans from abroad are finding: America is a whole lot of fun.

Democrats should be celebrating the amazing human rights progress over the past 60 years, but they don’t. They should be celebrating capitalism—and its successful 150 year war on poverty—while pushing for necessary restraints, but they don’t. They should be for taxing speculation—Wall Street casino gambling—but also for managing ineffective government programs like Head Start, but they aren’t. They should be pro-patriotism, pro-military, pro-police, pro-traditional family values, but they aren’t.

Does that make me a Republican? Certainly not, not in the current climate. Not with the most corrupt and thuggish President in American history. Republicans have made racism their secret sauce since Richard Nixon’s Southern Strategy. Trumpist Republicans tend to be nativists; their immigration policies are astringent in the long-term, harmful to our economy. We need the diversity and enterprise and fizz that immigrants bring (within the context of strict border control). Ever since Dick Cheney said “Reagan proved deficits don’t matter,” Republicans have been entirely irresponsible—more so than Democrats—about government spending. They favor the short-term absence of pain—refusing to reform entitlement programs, for example—which keeps interest rates high, which makes mortgages less affordable. Republicans want a more boring country and the most obnoxious form of boring, at that. MAGA Republicans want a more brutish and noisy place. That is simply not the American way.

So does that make me a “polite” conservative? Dunno. The great lesson I’ve learned in 60 years of reporting is that ideology fails to grasp human creativity, and idealism fails to grasp human imperfection. Most people tend to learn that over time. I continue to root for progress, but in a careful, traditionalist way. I am, with both Burke and Paine, a classic liberal: free speech, free enterprise, the rule of law. And, of course, the phrase that made this place famous: the pursuit of Happiness.

Our American birthday sale continues: