A Cry from the Far Middle

by P. J. O'Rourke

  But what I personally had in mind was more like senators and representatives going to payday lenders, cabinet members sleeping under bridges, and the president of the United States selling his wife’s Manolo Blahniks on Shopify to pay the pizza delivery boy at state dinners.

  Instead we got very crabby unpaid TSA agents who would have strip-searched me right in the middle of Dulles Airport if there hadn’t been a long line of people at the security checkpoint begging not to see me naked.

  We got Yellowstone Park rangers pawning the bears to make car payments. National Gallery curators chalking pictures on the sidewalk hoping someone would drop a quarter in their hat. And grade school field trips where the closest the kids came to a tour of the Capitol building was looking at a picture of it on the back of the $50 bills that lobbyists charge per minute.

  Because the lobbyists weren’t closed for business. And neither was any other high muck-a-muck, big noise, or Chief Itch-and-Rub in Washington. Government shutdown? Our government is so bad at everything that it can’t even do nothing right.

  And how did our government get so bad? Bad politics. But how did our politics get so bad? Politics grew worse because politics grew.

  Sometimes when things grow it’s good—when the grown kids finally move out of the house. But sometimes when things grow it’s a growth. It’s a tumor. We have a gigantic political tumor. I’m not optimistic about the biopsy.

  Here I enter a definitional quagmire, and excuse me while I drag you along. The growth of politics is not the same as the growth of government. Our government is a bit of a wide load and a pie wagon and giving it the Peloton Wife treatment would be a good idea. On the other hand, there are about 330 million of us in a country with a $19 trillion GDP. As to bulk, our government will always be more defensive tackle than bag of bones special-teams player kicking punts.

  And government being bad is not so bad as politics being bad. In fact, our government isn’t as bad as I say it is. It’s just a human institution, with all the human failings that entails. (I say it’s bad because I’m a political pundit, with all the human failings that entails.) Our government is probably as good—maybe better—than any other human institution its size. Although there are no other human institutions its size. China’s equivalent to the U.S. federal budget is only slightly more than half of ours. And, much as I dislike Trump, I wouldn’t trade him for Xi Jinping. (Not even if I lived in Miami and the Chinese threw in the really good defensive tackle that the Dolphins need.)

  Government and politics are different. Government is . . . words fail me . . . government. Politics is the fight over who runs the government. And the fix is in because, as you may have noticed, every time politicians stage that fight a politician wins.

  The growth of politics is the opposite of the growth of liberty. When liberty grows we get increased individual enterprise and expansion of free markets. We create more goods, services, and benefits to society. The pie gets bigger.

  But politics is not about creating more goods, services, and benefits to society. Politics is about dividing them up.

  Politics is about promising things to people. “The auction of goods about to be stolen,” as H. L. Mencken put it.

  The promises are lies, of course. But it isn’t just the qualitative untruth of a lie that matters. The quantitative untruth matters too. When politics is a minor contest, a backyard tussle, it promises a few things to a few people. Naturally they’re disappointed. But it’s just a few people, a trifling number of beggars with “will vote for food” signs squatting at the polls looking for political handouts (and batting each other over the head with their pieces of cardboard). If they get a cup of joe when they thought they were going to get a chicken dinner, no big deal. (Or “New Deal.” Or “Fair Deal.” Or “Great Society.”)

  We survived those growths in the size of politics. But politics had just begun to go Baconator. Now politics is at the point of promising everything to everybody.

  And everybody is disappointed. Everybody goes away empty-handed. Everybody feels cheated.

  Does this make us mad at our politicians? Yes. But mostly it makes us mad at each other, because politics is a zero-sum game the way freedom and free markets are not. Zero-sum games are not played for kicks and giggles. Zero-sum games are blood sports.

  Yes, there’s competition in free markets. That’s what makes them work. Competition is the vermouth in the martini. But as it is with martinis, so it is with free markets. For every one part competition vermouth there are six parts of that top-shelf gin called spontaneous cooperation among free people. (Which always seems to leave politicians “shaken, not stirred.”)

  Adam Smith pointed it out, 244 years ago. Among free people, in a free market exchange of goods and services, everyone comes out ahead. Each person gives something he or she values less in return for something he or she values more. Both sides win. I’ve got the Grey Goose. You’ve got the Noilly Prat, the olives, and the crushed ice. Bottoms up!

  But in politics only one side can win. What’s at stake in politics isn’t goods and services, it’s power. Power is always zero-sum. When I sell you goods and services I gain something in return. When I sell you power over myself—and that’s the political exchange—I stand to lose everything.

  Under the condition of liberty, if you have a swimming pool and a Bentley I can get a swimming pool and a Bentley too. Under the condition of politics, you can drown me in your swimming pool and run me over with your Bentley.

  In politics only one side can win. Which is bad. But what’s worse is this means there have to be sides. Faction—angry partisan faction—isn’t a by-product of politics, it is politics. Politics cannot exist without faction. Politics cannot exist without people fighting each other. Put down the free market goods and services pie. Pick up the pie knife of politics.

  Freedom brings us all together in the marketplace (although admittedly in a sometimes grumpy way when we see the cash register total). But politics carves us up. Politics pits us against each other. Politics turns us into warring tribes.

  Politics hands us the spear of outrage at the slightest perceived slight to our primitive political clan, smears us with the war paint of identity politics, gives us the shield of political correctness, and tells us that we’re not naked savages squatting around a smoldering fire of resentment and envy but noble Social Justice Warriors.

  Politics pits one ethnic group against another. And it does it for free. It doesn’t even charge us the way 23andMe or Ancestry.com do.

  Politics pits men against women—as if we didn’t have the institution of marriage doing a fine job of that already.

  Politics pits immigrants against . . . Against whom? We’re all immigrants. Even Native Americans just got here from the old country, twenty or thirty thousand years ago, which is about a minute before last call on the human migration clock. There’d been people in Africa for a million years.

  Finally—and most dangerously—politics pits one generation of Americans against another. The millennials are mad at the baby boomers for soaking up all the Social Security and Medicare gravy while, at the same time, refusing to retire, leaving the millennials to work in a “gig economy” where they make a living by driving each other around for Uber.

  There are now more millennial voters than there are OK boomers. And they’ve got Uber to take them to the polls while I’m still trying to figure out how that app works and whether I should get into a car driven by someone who braids her beard.

  The younger generation is attracted to an expansion of politics. Partly this is because so many politicians have worked so hard to be assholes, and they obviously need to be politically defeated. But also this is because other politicians have worked so hard to convince millennials that life, like politics, is a zero-sum game. Millennials can’t get more unless they use an expansion of politics (“socialism”) to take more away from . . . if book-sales demogra
phics are anything to go by . . . everybody reading this.

  And politics is attracted to an expansion of politics. Indeed, politics, by its own internal logic, is driven to expand. Yet politics fails because it expands.

  Politics is like a balloon. Or, rather, it’s like a rolled-up and inflatable latex item all sixteen-year-old boys of my era carried in our wallets (more in hope than in expectation).

  Politics at that scale can be a kind of “useful safeguard to liberty.” Even then it doesn’t always prove reliable. A hasty wedding just before high school graduation may ensue.

  But, make like a politician instead of a Romeo, and blow a lot of hot air into that inflatable latex item, it gets more fragile yet.

  Actually, with politics, it’s worse than the fragility that spawns the occasional bastard. The expansion of politics is hubris, and hence tragic. To overinflate politics is to start out with a Trojan, safe and secure in a little foil pack of constitutionalism, and wind up with the Hindenburg. “Oh the humanity!”

  Socialism? It’s not a form of government. In a free country, government may—to a greater or lesser degree­—­tax, spend, administrate, regulate, provide benefits, and impose stipulations, according to the will of the governed, under the rule of law. Socialism is a law unto itself. Socialism is the politicization of everything. Socialism is when the stakes in the political battle are so high that they include control of the entire socioeconomic system. In this kind of boxing match it’s the referee—the sovereign people of the United States—who’s down for the count.

  Socialism has been tried. And tried. We have a proven track record of how it goes. A track record that’s more than a century long as of the October 2017 one hundredth anniversary of the Russian Revolution. That went well.

  So how is it that so many young, fresh, new voters and so many politicians—not so young but full of fresh, new ambition—are suddenly in love with socialism and unworried about its consequences?

  Ed Crane, founder of the libertarian think tank the Cato Institute, emailed me a joke swiped from the Internet that explains it as well as anything does.

  A libertarian walks into a bar at 9:58 p.m., and happens to sit down on a bar stool next to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The libertarian stares up at the bar’s TV screen as the 10 o’clock news comes on. The news crew has its camera on a man standing on a ledge of a tall building, getting ready to jump.

  Alexandria looks at the libertarian and says, “Do you think he’ll jump?”

  The libertarian says, “I bet he will.”

  Alexandria says, “Well, I bet he won’t.”

  The libertarian puts $20 on the bar and says, “You’re on.”

  Just as Alexandria puts her own money on the bar the man on the TV screen jumps off the ledge and falls to his death. Alexandria is very upset but she hands her $20 to the libertarian, saying, “Okay, here’s your money.”

  The libertarian says, “I can’t take your money. I saw this earlier on the five o’clock news, and I knew he would jump.”

  Alexandria says, “I saw it too. But I didn’t think he’d do it again.”

  But Thank You Anyway, Partisan Politicans

  There is an oft-cited apothegm credited to the Spanish mystic and Carmelite nun St. Teresa of Avila (1515–82): “There are more tears shed over answered prayers than over unanswered prayers.”

  Likewise—let us hope to heaven—there are more smiles spread by things that we had prayed would never happen.

  And certainly, if we’re people of conscience and faith, we prayed that American politics wouldn’t become as bad as they are at the moment.

  But bad politics do have a few good aspects. (Or such is my fervent wish in this otherwise bleak political season.)

  First, let us be thankful that, in our domestic politics, we are a bitterly divided nation. This sounds like an oxymoronic kind of gratitude, but highly polarized partisanship about internal political issues is, in fact, a sort of luxury. It shows that America is blessed with not being under grave external threat.

  When America is under grave external threat, Americans unite in a jiffy—the way we did after Pearl Harbor or 9/11. This unity is an awesome thing to behold. Also it’s a “shock and awesome” thing to behold if you’re an enemy of America. If you’re someone who’s caused the grave external threat we’re going to come and get you whether you’re in Berlin, Tokyo, Abbottabad, or a hole in the ground in Idlib, Syria.

  But when America is not under grave external threat, we Americans can go back to our tradition of indulging ourselves in a wild extravagance of bickering with each other, the way we’ve been doing since 1776.

  Of course these internal political contretemps can get out of hand. The Civil War comes to mind. However, as heated as America’s arguments may be at the moment, 2020 is not 1861. Fort Sumter is not taking any incoming. Our political battles are all smoke and no lethal fire.

  (Except from a few fringe lunatics, of course. But we’ve always had those. President James A. Garfield, a chief executive who was unpolarizing to the point of complete obscurity, was assassinated by one. The killer was Charles Guiteau, who must have been some kind of nut even to have known that James A. Garfield was president.)

  These days our weapons are just TV shows and other such media pie fights and the cannonballs don’t land with lethal effect, they land with stupid splats like Sean Hannity and Rachel Maddow.

  A second thing to be thankful for is how bad politics are a healthy reminder that politics are bad. Being a “good” politician actually, specifically, requires committing every single one of the Seven Deadly Sins.

  Pride foremost, naturally. What kind of too-big-for-your-britches swell-headed grandstander has the flash-the-brass conceit to come right out and claim that he or she ought to be president of the United States? Let alone is capable of the task? It’s a nearly impossible job, and anyone who doesn’t admit this is unqualified for the position. The only kind of people we should want to be president are the kind of people we’d have to drag, cursing and kicking, into the Oval Office. (Anyone know Clint Eastwood’s current whereabouts?)

  Envy is pride’s inevitable twin. Even the most successful politician is always envious of someone whose britches are more widely split at the seams, whose head has a more pronounced case of mumps above the ears, whose bleachers are jammed with a larger crowd of ripe sucks. Hillary Clinton’s green glow of envy still shines so brightly that you can use it to read newspaper stories about Donald Trump at midnight across the street from her house in Chappaqua.

  Wrath is the defining emotion of politics today. All the participants, elected and electorate alike, are furiously shouting at each other.

  It’s like the time that a bunch of Boston Irish, down in Southie, decided to start a rowing club to compete with the Ivy League.

  The Irishmen were big, strong men, and they practiced hard every day, but they kept losing. They lost to Yale. They lost to Princeton. They lost to Dartmouth. Finally the Irish team captain says, “Sure and the Harvard rowing team’s been winning all year. Seamus, you go sneak over to Cambridge there and hide in the bushes by the Harvard boathouse and see how it is that they’re doing it.”

  So Seamus sneaks over to Cambridge and hides in the bushes by the Harvard boathouse and watches the Harvard crew team.

  And Seamus comes back and he says, “Begorrah, but I think I know where we’re going wrong. We’re supposed to have one fellow screaming and yelling and the other eight are supposed to be rowing.”

  Greed, Gluttony, and Lust play vital roles in politics. And I’m not referring to money, food, and romps between the sheets. Although what with corruption, $1,000-a-plate campaign fund-raising dinners, and #MeToo stalking the halls of power, those transgressions do abound. But the true mortal sin of politics is greed, gluttony, and lust for power. The avaricious, the voracious, and the horny may be forgiven, but people whose deepest desir
e is to lord it over others go to hell.

  And let us not forget Sloth. Politics might seem to be a busy and active profession with laziness rare among politicians. But politicians can be indolent, idle do-nothings when it comes to answering the needs of the American people. To give just one sinful example: The Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution was ratified on February 3, 1870.

  Section 1. The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.

  Section 2. The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

  Then came ninety-five years of Jim Crow state and local lawmaking until the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was passed.

  Lastly, let us give thanks that our bad politics provide our terrible politicians with something relatively harmless to do. They’ve been spending most of the past two years campaigning on their godawful political platforms. This has kept them out of our hair and away from the rest of us in remote places like Iowa, New Hampshire, and the Twittersphere.

  It could be worse. They could be engaged in ordinary day-to-day life nearby. For example, if Joe Biden hadn’t been being driven from place to place on the campaign trail he might have been driving his own car in typical elderly fashion at 15 mph the wrong way down one-way streets while leaving his turn signal on for half an hour.

  And anyone with any money invested in real estate can feel thankful that Donald Trump has been too busy to send more real estate development into bankruptsy.

  Speaking of which, Elizabeth Warren’s specialty as a law school professor was bankruptcy law. If she’d been in private practice she might have been working for Google or Amazon or Microsoft, and Google or Amazon or Microsoft would be bankrupt.

  And South Bend, Indiana, might as well be, with a poverty rate of 25.4 percent compared to the national average of 12.3 percent. Plus the city’s violent crime rate is 157 percent higher than the nation’s. Whatever Pete Buttigieg was doing as South Bend’s mayor, South Bend residents must be thankful that he took some time off to do it to Iowans.