Rod Dreher

Ye Miserable, Crawlin’ British Worms

The Endless Hangover

By Rod Dreher • July 19, 2012, 7:02 AM

Peggy Noonan observes that everybody knows that the country is in a bad way and that we desperately need inspired political leadership. But the Obama-Romney contest seems like a choice between warm Pepsi or warm Coke on a hot day. Excerpt:

Anyway, the next president will have to do that sort of thing, and it will take deep political gifts. We have not seen that genius in Mr. Obama. Whether you will vote for him or not, you know you haven’t seen it. He seems to view politics as his weary duty, something he had to do on his way to greatness.

When he goes over the heads of Congress to the people, it’s like he threw a dead fish over the transom—it lands with a “Thwap!” and makes a mess, and people run away. As for Mr. Romney, it is a commonplace in punditry to implore him to speak clearly of where he’ll go and how and why we should follow.

Well, she’s right. I had to go back the other day into a few months’ worth of postings on my old Beliefnet blog, from 2008 and 2009, looking for a specific post. I was startled by how much more political I was then, by how much more I cared about this stuff. And by how much more anxious I was. It turns out that the world didn’t end. We’re just muddling through, unhappily and uneasily. This boiling frog of a crisis is the new normal. PM David Cameron says that the UK will live with austerity through at least 2020, and Europe and America will continue to have to slog through the endless delevering.

Welcome to the hangover that never seems to end. I see Romney bumper stickers popping up ever so often around town, urging me to “Believe In America.” Oh, I believe in America, Mitt; I just don’t believe in you. Which is not to say I’m not considering voting for you. I don’t believe in the other guy either.

Posted in Economics, Politics, Presidential politics. Tagged Barack Obama, David Cameron, Mitt Romney.

34 Responses to The Endless Hangover

Robert_Burdette says:

July 19, 2012 at 7:47 am

To me it seems rather difficult to be a leader in a nation that lacks a clear notion of what it wants to be led toward. In fact, I don’t think most people want to be led toward anything, but would rather be allowed to return to the period in the past which to them represents the “ideal” way of doing things. Unfortunately, the world doesn’t really work this way, and no leader–no matter how talented–can chart a path to the impossible.

The cheaply constructed, vinyl-sided box located in the next “it” exburb you bought in 2003 wasn’t worth what you paid for it then, let alone what the “experts” said it was worth in 2006. The Constitution does not say Americans have a lifetime right to unlimited quantities of two dollar a gallon gasoline. And there’s no way to recreate the post-war period of high wages and lifetime employment for all.

This is not to say that we should just throw up our hands and say: “There’s no hope, so lets just see what happens.” Rather, we need leaders who are willing to tell the truth, and provide an outline of the possible ways forward. The problem is that America doesn’t exactly reward those that tell the truth.
Liam says:

July 19, 2012 at 8:21 am

And here’s another red flag:

” Speaking the other day to a gathering of businesspeople from across the country, . . .”

Noonan is not a politician. She’s not a policy wonk. She’s doesn’t run an enterprise that produces any goods or software or related services.

She’s a speechwriter turned commentator/pundit. She gets paid to write and to speak, typically to business or political audiences that want her because they already agree with her perspective. She gets paid to reinforce the feedback loop. Her observations based on that reinforcement mean *nothing* outside that loop. But people will pretend they do, because this has become how we talk politics in this country.

* * *

Meanwhile, this country’s real hangover began when the dot.com bubble burst. We tried a couple of stupid wars and some asset bubbles to try to pretend it didn’t happen. But it did. We were well into this by the time the credit crisis occurred in 2007 (the Panic coming in 2008). There’s bears constant repetition because it’s so frequently ignored in our short-term thinking.
Al-Dhariyat says:

July 19, 2012 at 8:38 am

Rod, you’ve definitely moved away from the, sometimes, fire-breathing politics of your earlier writing. You seem more at peace now. Not unconcerned, maybe resigned but also at peace.
Justin St. Giles Payne says:

July 19, 2012 at 8:42 am

I don’t know how you say that Obama doesn’t have those gifts – without question, he’s the most talented politician in my lifetime – but I think people need to rethink the need for “inspired leadership.”

The problem isn’t that we lack leadership in Washington, the problem is that everyone in Washington thinks they’re the leader. What we need more of in Washington is followership – consensus – not leadership. There’s already a leader, he’s called the “President.” The problem is a Congress that holds the agenda of the majority hostage to the minority party. Elections should matter; Congress should be bipartisan, but bipartisan by alternation.
David J. White says:

July 19, 2012 at 8:45 am

In 1987, when I was living in Philadelphia, the mayor, Wilson Goode, ran for re-election against Frank Rizzo, who had been mayor in the 70s. Steve Lopez, then a columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer, described it as as choice between the Evil of Two Lessers. I find myself thinking about that more and more these days.
icarusr says:

July 19, 2012 at 9:32 am

“It turns out that the world didn’t end.”

That should be tatooed in reverse on the forehead of every soi-disant conservative. Bear in mind that Cato the Elder lamented the onset of Rome’s decline fully three hundred and fifty years before its territorial apogee; and of course Rome lives in the Vatican, still, these 2200 years later. The world didn’t end then, and it will not end with Obama’s re-election.
Steve N says:

July 19, 2012 at 9:50 am

I’m not sure what Obama can do to work with a Republican party that is dominated by Roger Ailes, Grover Norquist, Rush Limbaugh, Bill Kristol, and the Koch brothers. They seem to march in lock step, and always define themselves as being against whatever Obama says he is for. In any case, I also seldom listen to the news because it is boring and infuriating to hear what the Republicans are up to now.
Opinion Pole says:

July 19, 2012 at 10:53 am

Are we tired enough of the “Coke and Pepsi” deadlock to look for something completely different? Neither party has any incentive to be honest, creative or even competent. I’m looking very seriously at Gary Johnson. If nothing else a strong showing by an alternate party might make some of our complacent politicians wake up.
Charles Cosimano says:

July 19, 2012 at 10:57 am

It’s very simple. Leaders are liars. We know that now as a people and we don’t get inspired. We know better.

We do not hire a President or any politician to lead us. We hire them to do a job. They are to be the followers, or they get fired.
Maria says:

July 19, 2012 at 11:20 am

Don’t cast a vote for Mitt just because he’s not as bad as the other guy. He is. In fact, it would be worse to vote for Mitt because it wouldn’t give the Republicans an incentive to choose more wisely in the future. Mitt Romney = John McCain anyway, and he won’t win against Obummer.
No Name says:

July 19, 2012 at 11:39 am

Romney is about as exciting as yesterday’s oatmeal. But the thought of a second Obama administration is terrifying enough to wake me out of my non-voting apathy of the last twelve years and vote against Obama in the elections on every level.
David J. White says:

July 19, 2012 at 11:46 am

The problem isn’t that we lack leadership in Washington, the problem is that everyone in Washington thinks they’re the leader. What we need more of in Washington is followership – consensus – not leadership. There’s already a leader, he’s called the “President.”

In a parliamentary system, the Prime Minister is clearly the leader, as long as he has a majority in Parliament behind him. But in our constitutional system, the preident is not so clearly “the leader”; the presidency and Congress are, for the most part, co-equal branches of government. Congress has every constitutional right not to “follow” the president; they were elected independently of him. The president can try to set an agenda, but then he has to engage in persuasion and deal-making if he wants to see it through. He can’t just tell (or expect) Congress to fall into line. That’s why I can’t understand this fascination with the idea of having a CEO or someone with a business background as president. At the end of the day, a CEO can fire people who won’t go along with his agenda. The president can’t fire Congress.

Actually, it occurs to me that this also factors into the thread about mandatory voting. Perhaps one of the reasons why votor turnout is so low in this country is votor fatigue — there’s just too doggone much to vote fore We vote for a president, two senators, a representative, and that’s just at the federal level. Then there is a whole array of offices at the state and local level that we vote for. Plus ballot issues. In some other countries, voters just have to make one choice: this party, or that party. Over and done. It’s a bit like being confronted with an overwhelming array of choices in a store. Sometimes you look at all the optiona available to you and just say, “The heck with it” and walk out.
thehova83 says:

July 19, 2012 at 11:50 am

I grew up in the 90′s. Looking back, what an awesome decade!!! Maybe I’m romanticizing my childhood. But everything seemed great. It was before 9/11. We just came off the success of Desert Storm. And the economy was booming. And government was fairly functional.

I miss those days.
e says:

July 19, 2012 at 12:01 pm

They will never, ever let any alternate party come to any power that might actually change something.
Lord Karth says:

July 19, 2012 at 12:23 pm

Mr. Dreher writes: “I was startled by how much more political I was then, by how much more I cared about this stuff. And by how much more anxious I was. It turns out that the world didn’t end. We’re just muddling through, unhappily and uneasily. This boiling frog of a crisis is the new normal. ”

This “crisis” we are presently in is the warm-up act, brought on by globalization, the collapse of Communism and the costs of bringing half a continent into the world trading system.

The real Sunday punch comes in about 9 years, when millions upon millions of formerly productive and semi-productive people retire and start clamoring for the (unearned) “benefits” they think they are entitled to. Governments attempting to preserve and expand on those benefits will try just about anything to keep them going.
They might even succeed for a while; you’d be amazed how ingenious really smart thieves and con-artists can be.

Productivity and demographics—functions of arithmetic, fundamentally—will triumph, as they always do. Perhaps Mr. Dreher has come to realize that, and has begun to correctly perceive Reality.

Said Realities being:

a) Financial Gotterdammerung is on its way;

b) It’s going to be a nation-level, civilization-level and very possibly a species-level crash in extent, and

c) There isn’t a damned thing we can do about it.

Your servant,

Lord Karth
Justin St. Giles Payne says:

July 19, 2012 at 1:05 pm

But in our constitutional system, the preident is not so clearly “the leader”; the presidency and Congress are, for the most part, co-equal branches of government.

The President is the head of state and the head of government. He controls the military and represents the nation before foreign governments.

I don’t see how it gets much more “leader” than that. None of this is to assert that “unitary executive” means that we have a dictator or someone who can make law simply by fiat, but we certainly have a unitary executive, and “leader” seems like an appropriate and unambiguous description of that. The Executive, Legislative, and Judicial branches are independent of each other (as they should be) but I don’t see how they can be “co-equal” in any sense of the word, given that their functions are non-overlapping and so extremely different.

Nor am I suggesting that Congress is required to subject themselves to the President’s agenda. The problem is a large number of congresspeople who subject themselves to nobody’s agenda, who reject any attempt at consensus simply because it would be consensus, and would hamper their ability to run, in the next election, as a “Washington outsider.” We’ve allowed politicians – mostly Republicans and Southern Democrats – to turn legislative success into an electoral liability. The notion of a third party coming in to “fix” that, as some others suggest, is ridiculous – a third party would be even less in a position to develop consensus than the other two.

When prominent GOP congresspeople refer to “compromise” as “the opposition coming around to our point of view”, that’s a failure of followership and the responsibility of the minority party to allow elections to matter. The problem in Congress is that almost everybody has learned that if they don’t want to fall in line, the system provides no mechanism by which they can be forced to. That’s actually a big problem, especially if you hate dictators; these were exactly the conditions that prompted the German people to allow their Chancellor to sidestep their legislature, paving the way for autocratic rule and World War II.
W.E.B. Dupree says:

July 19, 2012 at 1:07 pm

The argument that there is no difference between the major party candidates seemed to gain much traction among people my age (at that time, my mid-20′s) during the 2000 election, leading many to vote for Nader. Well, I still find it very hard to believe that President Al Gore would have invaded and occupied Iraq when we were already at war in Afghanistan (yes, even with Joe Lieberman as VP) (and yes, I’m assuming that 9/11 still would have happened with Gore in the White House).

Similarly, I still believe that a re-elected Obama will try everything possible to avoid wrecking his presidency with an invasion/occupation of Iran. Whereas, if we have a President Romney, maybe I can find a mutual fund focusing on oil companies and weapons manufacturers…
EddieInCA says:

July 19, 2012 at 1:10 pm

To you, specifically, Rod, and, secondarily to anyone who wants to answer:

The Bush Years (2000-2008) were an unmitigated disaster. Two wars, unpaid for. Tax Cuts that gutted our surplus. An economy that was shedding 700,000K jobs per month in 2008. This with a GOP controlled house and Senate from 2000-2006.

The last four years have been Obama TRYING to clean up a mess that the GOP created. How on earth can anyone say we need to go back to the Bush years? All Romney is offering up is more Tax Cuts along with Bush’s Foreign Policy (see Bolton, John). Nothing else.

Why would anyone want to go back to the policies of 2000-2008? We’ve gone from shedding jobs to gaining them (albeit it slowly).

Seriously, what would be different in a Romney administration than what transpired during the Bush II administration, except maybe bombing and/or attacking Iran?
Laser says:

July 19, 2012 at 3:10 pm

Rod,

I used to be a lot more politcal, but I just gave up. The biggest reason is that I simply just lost respect for America, and specifically the American people. We had a good thing going in this country, but after 2008 everybody just seemd to quit.

Business leaders quit on their employees, and once things started getting better just sat on their cash. Politicians quit on being leaders and decided to pander and stop compromising.

So if America is going to quit on itself, I decided it wasn’t worth the trouble. I’m loyal to my God and my family and that’s it. The America I grew up in is dead. I mourend it for a few years and moved on. I’m glad I live where I do becasue it’s a pretty place with nice weather but it’s not special because it happens to be in America. When the world is running down you make the best of what’s still around.
Pat says:

July 19, 2012 at 3:28 pm

“Perhaps one of the reasons why votor turnout is so low in this country is votor fatigue — there’s just too doggone much to vote for”

And you don’t get what you do vote for. It really doesn’t matter what most candidates promise; they won’t be able to accomplish it, even if they try.

I think every time a candidate makes a promise, the moderator’s next question should be ‘how will you keep congress from blocking you?’ At the very least, that would make it clear to the audience that if you aren’t voting straight ticket, you shouldn’t bother getting attached to any proposed policy.
stef says:

July 19, 2012 at 3:48 pm

@Lord Karth, if we’re all doomed, might as well party like it’s 1989, right? ; )

@Rod: I have been following Noonan for awhile now with puzzlement. She keeps talking about things like “excitement” and Obama disappointing her because he does his job like it’s a “weary duty.” Well, if she wants excitement, that’s what Fifty Shades of Grey is for.

For the rest of us, it’s far more reassuring to have a president who sees the job as, well, a job, and not a vehicle for personal or world salvation. This is why someone like Santorum revolted people, while Romney just leaves them going, blah. Because Santorum saw himself On a Mission from God. In politics, no thanks.

If he does get elected, Romney is not going to get Obamacare repealed anytime soon, because too many people stand to benefit greatly from it.

Both Romney and Obama are warhawks. The Democratic Congress did nothing to roll back the Patriot Act, or get us out of Iraqistan, or close Gitmo, or stop using drones, or any of that stuff peaceniks like me wanted.

Neither of them can do much about the economy, because the economy is fundamentally diseased *at the roots.* You cannot continue indefinitely, on endless “growth.”

So to me that explains why this election has focused so much on “culture wars,” since those are the points where the two candidates differ the most.
J the second says:

July 19, 2012 at 6:16 pm

Peggy Noonan observes that everybody knows that the country is in a bad way and that we desperately need inspired political leadership.

She’s wrong. I know she’s your buddy but her solution to everything is More Reagan. Reagan is not personally to blame for the present mess yet he enabled and protected the economic regime most immediately responsible for it. It’s not a matter of Reagan cutting a deal with Tip O’Neill anymore- which Peggy forgets was a stopgap back then.

But the Obama-Romney contest seems like a choice between warm Pepsi or warm Coke on a hot day.

They represent two different ways of managing the economy. And not much more. Because nothing else actually matters. Even when one candidate is an AA semi-academic and the other a Mormon near-billionaire.

Welcome to the hangover that never seems to end. I see Romney bumper stickers popping up ever so often around town, urging me to “Believe In America.” Oh, I believe in America, Mitt; I just don’t believe in you. Which is not to say I’m not considering voting for you. I don’t believe in the other guy either.

Well, in the usual partisan-political process of reform the point reached at present is the most dismal. 2012 resembles 1980, 1988, 1996, 2004 in this. You have a moderate-conservative Democrat Presidential candidate who claims responsibility, rigid moderacy, and dreary, slow improvement of the major problem the country has to deal with. Facing him is an activist rightist Republican Presidential candidate who is unreliable and noncredible in various respects. But who senses the country’s misery and impatience and offers some relatively radical change. Usually it’s a policy proposal that is bad, that can never achieve the end it is pretended to achieve. (It tends to be a costly mistake but not disastrously so.)

The Republican almost always wins these elections after long long public hesitation, doubts, indecision and not very coherent but very emotional arguments. Usually by a small true margin. Because the election is not actually about the person(s) or the policy change. It’s about a popular willingness to break (or in 2004 in the case of George W. Bush retroactively license a breaking of) the status quo in the major issue area of the day.

The hangover, so to speak, is not going to be alleviated by by electing either Romney or Obama. The American People is going to have to work and pay off the money for years to come. The question is whether they do so cheerfully, with a sense that some proper purpose was achieved by the work and pain, or not.

Objective truth is that for all the noisy Republican, Paulite, libertarian, conservative, etc. yammering about the national debt it’s not that large in historical terms. What makes all the attitudinal difference about it is whether (a) we are paying off or settling some other necessary obligation with that amount of money, and (b) whether some reform or change for the better in our condition results from the present crisis and suffering.

Question (a) seems to me to be answerable in the affirmative. We are funding the rise of countries like China by losing economic sectors and employment to them, forcing us to keep many Americans on UI and welfare. This not so much out of goodness and desire to sacrifice as that the alternative is to keep e.g. China poor and pay for the continued military belligerence, buildups, and standoffs that would cost more.

But perhaps more importantly we’re spending big on the social costs bequeathed us from prior to 1968. Largest are the huge medical and retirement bills of the Greatest, Silent, and Boomer generations plus all the baggage in misery and neglect and incapacity they brought with them across that line in time. In part we younger generations treat them as proxies also for many generations that preceded them. And that is why we willingly or willfully overtreat and overspend on them on the one hand, and blame and punish them to excess on the other. I think those of us on the other side of that line in time know they’re the shrinking remnant of a world that is passing, as do they, and that informs the arguments and decisions powerfully even if subtly.

The current election is about query (b), what we’ll collectively take away from the present misere in the way of reforms. I think electing Romney will be much more productive- in the sense that what he will do will backfire spectacularly, destroying the benefit of the doubt given to the many bad fiscal and economic ideas it will be built upon. Leaving no true doubt whatsoever about what has to be done. Reelecting Obama would spread the pain and decisions and learning curve out over more time and more elections.
Monterey says:

July 19, 2012 at 6:17 pm

Pepsi/coke analogies aside, I’ll take Romney over Obama any day, if those are my choices. Because Romney would never make automatic-disqualifying statements like “The private sector is doing fine” and to businesses “You didn’t build that”.
Obama is really a total disgrace.
Rod Dreher says:

July 19, 2012 at 6:34 pm

I know she’s your buddy but

Actually, she’s not.
Barbara says:

July 19, 2012 at 7:12 pm

Monterey – the private sector is doing fine. Profits are at an all time high as measured by the per share combined earnings of the companies which comprise the S & P 500. Also, when Obama said “you didn’t build that” he was talking about roads and bridges – which I highly doubt businesses built the roads in front of their facilities. Disagree with Obama all you want, but please make sure your facts are correct or quotes are not taken out of context.
Justin St. Giles Payne says:

July 19, 2012 at 8:29 pm

Because Romney would never make automatic-disqualifying statements like “The private sector is doing fine” and to businesses “You didn’t build that”.

Yes, but to be fair, neither did Obama.
Siarlys Jenkins says:

July 19, 2012 at 8:45 pm

The last presidential election I didn’t bother to vote was in 2000. I proclaimed the choice we were offered “Anti-Christ vs. The Blob,” featuring Dameion/Omen III clone, George W. Bush, as the Anti-Christ, and Al Gore, the former conservative Democrat from Tennessee who was anti-abortion and brought Willie Horton to public attention, as The Blob. (Gore has taken EVERY conceivable position on every conceivable issue in the course of his career).

I realized later I was wrong. However unappealing Gore was, he would have done at least one thing right. He would have continued the policy Clinton started, of using unprecedented budget surpluses to pay DOWN the national DEBT. That was the fiscally conservative thing to do. He would not have acted like a kid in a candy store, as Bush did, cluelessly giving “the surplus back to the people” when the people were on the line for a $5 trillion mortgage.

I think much more highly of President Obama than I ever did of Clinton or Gore. I think he’s missed some opportunities to be a much greater president than he has been, but he thinks before he acts, and if he is ever in a position to get anything through Congress again, his emphasis on revitalizing infrastructure is right on the money.

But everybody who says we’re in for a long malaise is probably right. We ran our economy on consumer debt and a housing bubble for twenty years. We’re going to have to work our way out of that.
Surly says:

July 20, 2012 at 12:41 am

I had an epiphany a few months ago when a series of polls reported that the respondents were OK with the tenets of Obamacare by a huge margin, were like 65/35 in favor of those in the top 1-5% paying a higher marginal tax rate, were in favor of the specific regulations the toughest dems were proposing, etc. etc. etc.

Politicians used to be demonized for flitting from poll to poll. The epiphany is that polls don’t matter. Voters don’t matter. It is better for a Congressman or Senator or Presidential candidate to be in favor of whatever their contributors want than what their constituents want. Now that the evil genie of Citizens United has been released, the balance of money vs. electorate has been obliterated in favor of money.

We no longer live in a Republic. We now live in a dictatorship and we get what the money allows us to have. It kind of looks like a Republic because the dictators aren’t running the government–they are like the Wizard of Oz behind the curtain of the government.
Siarlys Jenkins says:

July 20, 2012 at 10:25 pm

But then, people may tire of incessant commercials, or start to see through them. A small but well placed commercial that neatly foils a massive mud slinger might work better than getting all wrapped up in who has more money in their war chest. It doesn’t have to be a slugging match.

I’ve often thought that a candidate could get a ten point lead in the polls by promising on June 1 to run NO television commercials until after Labor Day.

That goes against the conventional wisdom, but case in point, Jerry Brown had a much smaller campaign fund than Meg Whitman. He saved his money until September, against all the expert advice, and won. (I don’t even like Jerry Brown).

The dictatorship is a jury-rigged one, assuming that the electorate is infinitely manipulable. What if they gave a media blitz and nobody came? The Koch Brothers didn’t keep Scott Walker in office… the Democratic Party of Wisconsin did.
Art Deco says:

July 21, 2012 at 10:48 am

Meanwhile, this country’s real hangover began when the dot.com bubble burst. We tried a couple of stupid wars and some asset bubbles to try to pretend it didn’t happen. But it did. We were well into this by the time the credit crisis occurred in 2007 (the Panic coming in 2008). There’s bears constant repetition because it’s so frequently ignored in our short-term thinking.

That is economic nonsense.
Art Deco says:

July 21, 2012 at 10:55 am

Mr. Dreher, you might ask yourself what it is about your writing that collects such a crank cavalcade.
Siarlys Jenkins says:

July 21, 2012 at 7:35 pm

Art Deco, your one-liners are clearly delineated, but are utterly without foundation. Do you really expect us to take your word for it because you pronounce, ex cathedra as it were, that what everyone else says is nonsense?

Offer substantive argument and factual foundation, and you might be worth debating.
Abelard Lindsey says:

July 22, 2012 at 5:50 pm

Noonan’s wrong. We do not need any more “inspired political leadership”. What we need is for the government to get out of the way, get rid of excessive regulation and taxation, so that private individuals and business can get on with real wealth creation (and creating a real economy).
Siarlys Jenkins says:

July 22, 2012 at 10:45 pm

Abelard, when I go to a supermarket run by a multi-state chain, corporately owned, offering foods that have arrived via supply chains 1500 or even 12,000 miles long, through a variety of industrial processes that may or may not have been sanitary, offering chemical content that may or may not be what it says on the label, I deeply appreciate all the government regulation that makes it at least somewhat more likely that what I buy won’t kill me.

And frankly, I see plenty of wealth creation going on — only it isn’t generating any productive employment. Maybe we need a little more creative taxation or regulation.

My favorites:

The wage paid to the lowest paid worker in any enterprise shall be no less than 1% of the total compensation package of the highest paid executive. I would have said 10%, that seems entirely fair to me, but that would mean if the CEO makes $7 million, the janitor would make $700,000. I’ll settle for the janitor making $70,000. Or, maybe if executive pay were lowered, more would be invested in new production.

We also need a tax bracket paying 50% on income over the first one or five million — exactly where to draw the line could be negotiated.