by Peggy Noonan
The president can’t be a hope purveyor while he’s a doom merchant, and he appears to believe he has to be a doom merchant to justify ramming through his legislation. This particular legislation is not worth that particular price.
All this contributes to a second problem, which is a growing credibility gap. In his speech Wednesday, demanding an “up or down” vote, the president seemed convinced and committed—but nothing he said sounded true. His bill will “bring down the cost of health care for millions,” it is “fully paid for,” it will lower the long-term deficit by a trillion dollars.
Does anyone believe this? Does anyone who knows the ways of government, the compulsions of Congress, and how history has played out in the past, believe this? Even a little? Rep. Bart Stupak said Thursday that he and several of his fellow Democrats won’t vote for the Senate version of the bill because it says right there on page 2,069 that the federal government would directly subsidize abortions. The bill’s proponents say this isn’t so. It would be a relief to have a president who could weigh in believably and make clear what his own bill says. But he seems to devote more words to obscuring than clarifying.
The only thing that might make his assertions sound believable now is if a group of congressional Republicans were standing next to him on the podium and putting forward a bill right along with him. Which, obviously, won’t happen, for three reasons. First, they enjoy his discomfort. Second, they believe the bill is not worth saving, that at this point no matter what it contains—and at this point most people can no longer retain in their heads what it contains—it has been fatally tainted by the past year of mistakes and inadequacies.
And the third reason is that the past decade has taught them what a disaster looks like, and they’ve lost their taste for standing next to one.
CHAPTER 14
A Republic, If We Can Keep It
I saw the crash of ’08 coming. In the years before you could feel it in the vibrations of New York, from jittery downtown to the fat, dumb Hamptons. Two things I will never forget.
I lived at the time at the busy, dangerous cross street of 96th Street and Park Avenue. It’s a route across town, and to the FDR, and to the Triboro Bridge, and is always busy and full of fast-going cars. This is what I remember from the first weeks after the crash, in the fall of 2008: the constant sounds of cars suddenly hitting the brakes, screeching, the sound of honking, quick stops and distress. Everyone was distracted, everyone speeding around. Everything was frantic.
The second thing. I was visiting a friend in a pretty building on Lexington Avenue in the 90s. Waiting for the elevator was a young mother with two children. Next to her was a nanny or babysitter, a woman from the Caribbean. The mother was having some anxious conversation on the phone, her voice was high—money, accounts, the IRA. The babysitter silently watched with a look in her eye and the look said something cold and sad. “Welcome to my world.”
* * *
We Live in an Age of Great Wealth—and Lousy Manners
The Wall Street Journal: October 27, 2007
So we are agreed. We are living in the second great Gilded Age, a time of startling personal wealth. In the West, the mansion after mansion with broad and rolling grounds; in the East, the apartments with foyers in which bowling teams could play. Or, on another level, the week’s vacation in Disneyland or Dublin with the entire family—this in a nation in which, well within human memory, people with a week off stayed home and fixed things in the garage, or drove to the beach for a day and sat on a blanket from one of the kid’s beds and thought: This is the life.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average has hit 14,000. The wealthy live better than kings. There isn’t a billionaire in East Hampton who wouldn’t look down on tatty old Windsor Castle. We have a potential presidential candidate who noted to a friend that if he won the presidency, the quality of his life would go down, not up.
The gap between rich and poor is great, and there is plenty of want, and also confusion. What the superrich do for a living now often seems utterly incomprehensible, and has for at least a generation. There is no word for it, only an image. There’s a big pile of coins on a table. The rich shove their hands in, raise them, and as the coins sift through their fingers it makes… a bigger pile of coins. Then they sift through it again and the pile gets bigger again.
A general rule: If you are told what someone does for a living and it makes sense to you—orthodontist, store owner, professor—that means he’s not rich. But if it’s a man in a suit who does something that takes him five sentences to explain and still you walk away confused, and castigating yourself as to why you couldn’t understand the central facts of the acquisition of wealth in the age you live in—well, chances are you just talked to a billionaire.
* * *
There are good things and bad in the Gilded Age, pluses and minuses. I write here of a minus. It has to do with our manners, the ones we show each other on the street. I think riches, or the pursuit of riches, has made us ruder. You’d think broad comfort would assuage certain hungers. It has not. It has sharpened them.
Here’s a moment in the pushiness of the Gilded Age. I walk into a shop on Madison Avenue daydreaming, trying to remember what it was I thought last week I should pick up, what was it…
“Hi! Let me help you find what you’re looking for!” She is a saleswoman, cracking gum with intensity, about 25 years old, and she has made a beeline to her mark. That would be me.
“Mmmm, actually—”
“We have summer sweaters on sale. What size are you?!” Her style is aggressive friendliness.
In another shop, as soon as I walk in the door, “How are you today? How can I help you?” Those dread words.
“Oh, I’m sort of just looking.”
“I like your bag!”
“Um, thanks.” What they are forcing you to do is engage. If you engage—“Um, thanks”—you have a relationship. If you have a relationship, it’s easier for them to turn you upside down and shake the coins from your pockets.
It is like this in all the shops I go in now, except for the big stores (Macy’s, Duane Reade drugstore), where they ignore you.
There are strategies. You can do the full Garbo: “Leave me alone.” But they’ll think you’re a shoplifter and watch you. Or the strong lady with boundaries: “Thank you, if I need help I’ll ask.” But your reverie is broken. Or the acquiescent person: “Take me under your leadership, oh aggressively friendly salesperson.” But this is bowing to the pushiness of the Gilded Age.
* * *
You leave the floor for the street and meet the woman with the clipboard. “Do you have two seconds for the environment?” Again, not a soft question but a challenge. Her question is phrased so that if you don’t stop and hear her spiel, you are admitting you won’t give two seconds for the environment, or two cents for it, either. You give the half-smile-nod, shake your head, walk on. She looks at you as if you’re the reason the Earth is going to hell.
Do they know they’re being manipulative? If they have a brain they do. Their trainers certainly know. Do they know it’s also why no one quite trusts them? Do they care? Why would they? They’re the manipulators on the street.
Or: I’m in a local restaurant with a friend. We sat down 40 seconds ago and are starting to catch up when: “What do you want to drink?” An interruption, but so what? We order, talk, my friend is getting to the punch line of the story when: “We have specials this evening.” Not “Let me know when you’re ready to hear the specials.” We stop talking, listen. The waiter stands there, pad in hand. “You ready?” If you ask for a minute, he’ll nod and be back in exactly one minute. “Do you know yet?” Again, this is not a request. One is being told to snap to it. Get ’em in, get ’em out. Move ’em.
It’s funny. In a time of recession, you’d think salespeople would be more aggressive, because so much might hinge on the sale—a commission, a job. In a time of relative wealth, you’d think they might be less aggressive. But the opposite s
eems true.
* * *
Technology has not helped in this area. Cellphones are wonderful, but they empower the obnoxious and amplify the ignorant. Once they kept their thoughts to themselves. They had no choice. Now they have cellphones, into which they bark, “I’m on line at Duane Reade. Yeah. Ex-Lax.” Oh, thank you for sharing. How much less my life would be if I didn’t know.
BlackBerrys empower the obsessed. We wouldn’t have them if the economy weren’t high and we weren’t pretty well off. Once, a political figure in New York invited me to a private dinner. I was seated next to him, and as the table conversation took off he leaned back, quietly took out his BlackBerry, and began to scroll. It occurred to me that if I said something live in person, it would not be as interesting to him as if I’d BlackBerryed him. It occurred to me that if I wanted to talk to him I’d have to BlackBerry him and say, “Please talk to me.” And then he’d get the message.
It is possible that we are on the cellphone because we are lonely and hunger for connection, even of the shallowest kind; that we BlackBerry because we hope for a sense of control in a chaotic world; that we are frightened of stillness and must interrupt conversations; that we are desperate to make the sale in the highly competitive environment of the Banana Republic on 86th Street and must aggressively pursue customers.
It’s also possible we have grown more boorish. I think it’s that one. Many things thrive in the age of everything, including bad manners.
The Rise of the White-Collar Big-Money Psychopath
The Wall Street Journal: June 28, 2002
Three scenes.
It is a spring day in the early 1990s and I am talking with the head of a mighty American corporation. We’re in his window-lined office, high in midtown Manhattan, the view—silver skyscrapers stacked one against another, dense, fine-lined, sparkling in the sun—so perfect, so theatrical it’s like a scrim, like a fake backdrop for a 1930s movie about people in tuxes and tails. Edward Everett Horton could shake his cocktail shaker here; Fred and Ginger could banter on the phone.
The CEO tells me it is “annual report” time, and he is looking forward to reading the reports of his competitors.
Why? I asked him. I wondered what specifically he looks for when he reads the reports of the competition.
He said he always flipped to the back to see what the other CEOs got as part of their deal—corporate jets, private helicopters, whatever. “We all do that,” he said. “We all want to see who has what.”
Second scene: It is the mid-’90s, a soft summer day, and I am crossing a broad Manhattan avenue, I think it was Third or Lexington. I am doing errands. I cross the avenue with the light but halfway across I see the switch to yellow. I pick up my pace. From the corner of my eye I see, then hear, the car. Bright black Mercedes, high gloss, brand new. The man at the wheel, dark haired, in his 30s, is gunning the motor. Vroom vroom! He drums his fingers on the steering wheel impatiently. The light turns. He vrooms forward. I sprint the last few steps toward the sidewalk. He speeds by so close the wind makes my cotton skirt move. I realize: If I hadn’t sprinted that guy would have hit me. I think: Young Wall Street titan. Bonus bum.
Third scene, just the other night. I am talking to a shrewd and celebrated veteran of Wall Street and Big Business. The WorldCom story has just broken; he tells me of it. He has a look I see more and more, a kind of face-lift look only it doesn’t involve a face-lift. It’s like this: The face goes blanched and blank and the eyes go up slightly as if the hairline had been yanked back. He looked scalped by history.
For years, he said, he had given speeches in Europe on why they should invest in America. We have the great unrigged game, he’d tell them, we have oversight and regulation, we’re the stable democracy with reliable responsible capitalism. “I can’t give that speech anymore,” he said.
* * *
Something is wrong with—what shall we call it? Wall Street, Big Business. We’ll call it Big Money. Something has been wrong with it for a long time, at least a decade, maybe more. Probably more. I don’t fully understand it. I can’t imagine that it’s this simple: A new generation of moral and ethical zeroes rose to run Big Money over the past decade, and nobody quite noticed but they were genuinely bad people who were running the system into the ground. I am not sure it’s this simple, either: A friend tells me it all stems from the easy money of the ’90s, piles and piles of funny money that Wall Street learned to play with. That would be a description of the scandal, perhaps, but not the reason for it.
At any rate it no longer seems like a scandal. “Scandal” seems quaint. It is starting to feel like a tragedy. Not for Wall Street and for corporations—it’s a setback for them—but for our country. For a way of living and being.
Those who invested in and placed faith in Global Crossing, Enron, Tyco or WorldCom have been cheated and fooled by individuals whose selfishness seems so outsized, so huge, that it seems less human and flawed than weird and puzzling. Did they think they would get away with accounting scams forever? Did they think they’d never get caught? Do they think they’re operating in the end times and they better grab what they can now and go hide? What were they thinking?
We should study who these men are—they are still all men, and still being turned in by women—and try to learn how they rationalized their actions, how they excused their decisions or ignored the consequences, how they thought about the people they were cheating. I mention this because I’ve been wondering if we are witnessing the emergence of a new pathology: White-Collar Big-Money Psychopath.
* * *
I have been reading Michael Novak, the philosopher and social thinker and, to my mind, great man. Twenty years ago this summer he published what may be his masterpiece, “The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism.” It was a stunning book marked by great clarity of expression and originality of thought. He spoke movingly of the meaning and morality of capitalism. He asked why capitalism is good, and answered that there is one great reason: Of all the systems devised by man it is the one most likely to lift the poor out of poverty.
But, he asserted unassailably, capitalism cannot exist in a void. Capitalism requires an underlying moral edifice. Without it nothing works; with it all is possible. That edifice includes people who have an appreciation for and understanding of the human person; it requires a knowledge that business can contribute to community and family; it requires “a sense of sin,” a sense of right and wrong, and an appreciation that the unexpected happens, that things take surprising turns in life.
Mr. Novak was speaking, he knew, to an international intellectual community that felt toward capitalism a generalized contempt. Capitalism was selfish, exploitative, unequal, imperialistic, warlike. He himself had been a socialist and knew the critiques. But he had come to see capitalism in a new way.
Capitalism, like nature, wants to increase itself, wants to grow and create, and as it does it produces more: more goods, more services, more “liberation,” more creativity, more opportunity, more possibilities, more unanticipated ferment, movement, action.
So capitalism was to Mr. Novak a public good, and he addressed its subtler critics. What of “the corruption of affluence,” the idea that while it is moral discipline that builds and creates success, success itself tends to corrupt and corrode moral discipline? Dad made money with his guts, you spend it at your leisure. The result, an ethos of self-indulgence, greed and narcissism. The system works, goes this argument, but too well, and in the end it corrodes.
Mr. Novak answered by quoting the philosopher Jacques Maritain, who once observed that affluence in fact inspires us to look beyond the material for meaning in our lives. “It’s exactly because people have bread that they realize you can’t live by bread alone.” In a paradoxical way, said Mr. Novak, the more materially comfortable a society becomes, the more spiritual it is likely to become, “its hungers more markedly transcendent.”
Right now Mr. Novak certainly seems right about American society. We have not become wo
rse people with the affluence of the past 20 years, and have arguably in some interesting ways become better. (Forty years ago men in the New York City borough of Queens ignored the screams of a waitress named Kitty Genovese as she was stabbed to death in an apartment building parking lot. Today men of Queens are famous for strapping 60 pounds of gear on their back and charging into the Towers.)
But it appears that the leaders of business, of Wall Street, of big accounting have, many of them, become worse with affluence. Or maybe it’s just worse with time. I think of a man of celebrated rectitude who, if he returned to the Wall Street of his youth, would no doubt be welcomed back with cheers and derided behind his back as a sissy. He wouldn’t dream of cooking the books. He wouldn’t dream of calling costs profits. He would never fit in.
* * *
Mr. Novak famously sees business as a vocation, and a deeply serious one. Business to him is a stage, a platform on which men and women can each day take actions that are either moral or immoral, helpful or not. When their actions are marked by high moral principle, they heighten their calling—they are suddenly not just “in business” but part of a noble endeavor that adds to the sum total of human joy and progress. The work they do builds things—makes connections between people, forges community, spreads wealth, sets example, creates a template, offers inspiration. The work they do changes the world. And in doing this work they strengthen the ground on which democracy and economic freedom stand.
They are, that is, patriots.