Crisis in American Authority
How am I supposed to take this article by Matthew Continetti seriously when it begins like this:
Decades from now, historians are going to fill e-tome after e-tome debating when the crisis in American authority began. A good place to start would be the Clinton era. The president of the United States had a tawdry affair, lied about it, and refused to accept any responsibility for his actions. The Republicans correctly pointed out that the president had acted beneath his office. The problem was that many of them were acting beneath their offices, too. (emphasis added)
How could anyone seriously argue that authority didn’t decline until the Clinton years? If he had placed it during the Watergate scandal of the 1970s, I would say he was too late. A collapse in authority was evident in 1960s, but I would guess it began earlier than that. If anything, Continetti has it backwards: if a crisis in authority hadn’t already existed for decades before he came to power, Clinton’s tawdry little scandal would have never been exposed.
Can anyone doubt that this erosion in what we used to be started with the Kennedy’s.
I think we went off-track with Wilson the Utopian.
Nixon was just applying his own specific talents and temperament to the project he’d inherited from Wilson.
Once the Presidency rose to the pinnacle of our government, and our nation to the center of the world stage, it became a ruinous force that corrupted all who touched it. One man should never have so much power. Should it surprise us that those who were cursed with this lethal dose of power behaved badly?
Matthew Continetti’s historical horizon extends all they way back to his puberty. From his perspective, Clinton is Ozymandias and Reagan is Yahweh. Personally, I think we started down hill after John Quincey Adams.
“Authority” over whom? And by what right?
My sense of the Framers was that except maybe over the Native Americans that wasn’t what they were looking for at all, because they saw no such right.
Cheers,
Historical factors took over. The United States ascended post WW1. England receded. Maybe we’re going down now and China is going to take over. ( Although only psychotic leftists and paleo-con rightists think that this is a good thing, I don’t ) but I digress. The “imperial presidency” was a reaction to events I think. Difficult to run WW2 by committee.
Matt, your comment reminded me of a quote from Walker Percy’s piece called “Diagnosing the Modern Malaise”:
“To state the matter as plainly as possible, I would echo a writer like Guardini who says simply that the modern world has ended, the world, the world, that is, of the past two or three hundred years, which we think of as having been informed by the optimism of the scientific revolution, rational humanism, and that Western cultural entity which until this century it has been more or less accurate to describe as Christendom. I am not telling you anything you don’t already know when I say that the optimism of this age began to crumble with the onset of the catastrophies of the twentieth century. If one had to set a date of the beginning of the end of the modern world, 1914 would be as good as any. . .”
Quoting Walker Percy, Clark wrote:
“I say that the optimism of this age began to crumble with the onset of the catastrophies of the twentieth century. If one had to set a date of the beginning of the end of the modern world, 1914 would be as good as any. . .”
Boy that’s really interesting to me, Clark, given that it reminds me so much of what I always thought was a very deep insight George Kennan had when reviewing the last century. I don’t remember where exactly the passage is but his comment was essentially that when tried thinking about the roots of so many of the horrors and problems of the last century they all somehow seemed to keep coming back to World War I.
The problem is I’m not sure how exactly it affected “authority” and I don’t know what exactly Percy meant by by saying it destroyed “optimism,” and indeed I suspect the word or book encapsulating just what its effects have been haven’t been found or written yet. But they sure seem to have been tectonic, if still oddly subtle.
Thank you so much. I had never seen that Percy quote and just have vast regard for the guy and so was delighted to see his thoughts on this.
Cheers,
My take on the crisis of authority is a generational one. We are firmly in the grip of my fellow Baby Boomers. As such, we are immersed in a mind set peculiar to those raised largely by television sets. We Boomers were such a large cohort of children that instead of being assimilated into the world of work and responsibility as individual youngsters, eager to mature, we could choose to never quite grow up. And most of didn’t.
This curious fact leads to the phenomena I call the Ghost Adult Syndrome. I believe that most of the people of my generation unconsciously think that somewhere behind the scenes, there are still adults who are responsible for cleaning up our follies and establishing order. Of course when things go badly it is they who are at fault not ourselves. After all they were there when we experimented with drugs, and again when we shirked our responsibilities, and dropped out, etc. No matter what we did we were welcomed back into the fold. We could rebel in the knowledge that we would inherit never the less. This is what makes it possible for us to resent authority while wielding authority.
The great but unlikely villain in all this is Walt Disney. Kindly old Walt tried to raise us while our parents were off to work, but in the end he just filled our little brains with fantasy, unbounded entitlement and sentimentality. We were the Generation of Tomorrow, with a bright future and limitless horizons. Walt never realized that by convincing us that anything was possible, he was also telling us that nothing is really necessary.
So here we are, alone in the Land of Tomorrow. It’s not cool to judge each other when the monorail is late or the rocket ship doesn’t lift off, it’s the adults fault. We couldn’t hold Bill Clinton to account because he’s one of us, a real cool dude.
Thomas O. Meehan wrote:
“This curious fact leads to the phenomena I call the Ghost Adult Syndrome. I believe that most of the people of my generation unconsciously think that somewhere behind the scenes, there are still adults who are responsible for cleaning up our follies and establishing order.”
Oh my God is that brilliant. Deserves a book.
Cheers,
TomB, Thanks Tom. Know any publishers?
Thomas O. Meehan wrote:
“Know any publishers?”
Regnery? Whoever published that great book years ago “Amusing Ourselves To Death” (which it would complement amazingly)? Shit, any publisher with a brain. Write up a summary and have TAC publish it.
I read that thesis of yours and it was like firecrackers going off explaining so much. Of *course* you can go buy a house you can’t afford; the Ghost Adult/Giant Pumpkin will come make it right! Of *course* you can carry $15,000 on your credit cards when you make only $50,000 per year! Of *course* congressmen can vote for things they know will bankrupt the country eventually! Of *course* we can support the invasion of a non-threatening state with no repercussions; there’s gotta be *lots* of Ghost Adults out there who will protect us from same…! Of *course* we can just treat everything frivolously, there *must* be some Ghost Adults out there who step in at the last minute and save us from our folly!
After all, life’s just like T.V. shows which *always* end good, right?
Beyond brilliant, Thom. Makes me laugh thinking over the early Transcendentalists like Emerson and etc. who thought that with the arrival of democracy and freedom Americans would become serious, profound citizen-thinkers (in addition to lovers of art). Instead … we’ve all become teenagers!
Cheers,
I agree with the original post 100% (especially the part that says in an authority-based society Clinton’s affair would never have been revealed). But the comments are like a parody of fusty paleoconservatism. Pretty soon we’ll all be agreeing the crisis of authority started with the Reformation. It’s all Martin Luther’s fault, how dare he!
MQ Well now that you mention it, Jan Huss bears some responsibility! Just kidding.