Ordinary Failures in Ordinary Times

T he COVID-19 era has been a time of extraordinary challenges, and it has been encouraging to see how remarkably well Americans have dealt with those challenges.

There is much room for criticism and for improvement, but there is also much to admire: the rapid development and deployment of vaccines took far less time in the United States than in most of Europe, not to mention the generally well-governed countries of Australia and New Zealand, which still lag with vaccination rates that are one-half and one-third of the U.S. rate, respectively; the economic constriction caused pain and upheaval that should not be minimized, but it is something close to a miracle that the U.S. economy suffered only a 3.5 percent contraction in 2020 with retail sharply curtailed and travel and hospitality effectively suspended; we conducted a national election under the pressure of the epidemic, and our constitutional processes withstood Donald Trump’s attempts to subvert them; there was a period of stress for the health-care system, but the hospitals were not overrun; critical services continued to function and the supply chain held up even if toilet-paper shoppers found themselves in Venezuela for a couple of weeks; we got a good look at what works, from Amazon and FedEx to university-based scientific research and — call me a heretic — the Federal Reserve.

A wise man once told me that the hard part about being a good man isn’t putting women and children on the lifeboats first as the Titanic goes down — it’s taking out the garbage, going to work every day, and a thousand other ordinary, tedious, and often thankless tasks that not only have to be done but have to be done, if their full benefit is to be realized, cheerfully and promptly and easily.

Good government is a lot like that.

The world is grateful when Dwight Eisenhower gets it done at Normandy and awed when Neil Armstrong steps out onto the moon, and it is reassuring that American government, as vicious and corrupt as it can be at times, can more or less get done what needs doing in an unexpected viral emergency. But while monarchies and empires are built on heroic exploits, heroic government is the wrong thing for a republic most of the time — in fact, getting yourself into a situation in which you need heroic government often is a sign of government failure. What a republic mostly needs is government that works like software: Other than regularly scheduled updates, you never really even notice it when it is doing what it is supposed to be doing.

We have seen extraordinary performances in extraordinary times, and three cheers for that. But we need ordinary competence for ordinary times, too.

And that we lack. You can list examples all day, from rising crime to the anarchy at our southern border to public-school performance in any big, Democrat-run city you’d like to name. But there are basic issues that go unremarked-upon because we are so used to them.

Dallas is at the center of the nation’s fourth-largest metro area, but you need an off-road vehicle to navigate its chaotic Third World-style streets, to the point where it is now the most dangerous city in America in which to drive. The city’s annual traffic-fatality rate is a bit over 14 per 100,000. (Its murder rate is about the same.) The city is talking up a plan to eliminate all traffic deaths by 2030 — the usual pipe-dream stuff offered up as an analgesic against the pain of the city’s inability to competently manage its affairs in the here and now.

In Washington, a city grown fat and sleek as the federal government continues to evolve in the direction of Leviathan, the murder rate was up 20 percent in 2020 over 2019, and 2021 does not look likely to offer an improvement.

Metropolitan Washington is a splendidly provided-for place: The Census-designated Washington-Arlington-Alexandria Metropolitan Division enjoys a higher per-capita income than any other metropolitan division in the United States, far outpacing No. 2 San Jose-Santa Clara-Sunnyvale at the heart of Silicon Valley. It enjoys almost twice the per-capita income of happy and prosperous Austin. But Washington, D.C., proper has some of the worst schools in the country and a murder rate that puts it among the nation’s 15 most-dangerous cities, alongside the significantly less affluent likes of Cleveland and Memphis.

San Jose, Calif., the single wealthiest American city (as opposed to metropolitan area), has for years been on the verge of going broke, and at times has shown itself unable to keep up with basic things like police and street maintenance. Like many cities, it is preaching the poor-mouth today because of COVID-19, but its finances, along with those of many other California cities, were in trouble for years before the word “coronavirus” entered the popular lexicon.

Austin is in most ways a thriving city. But its local government cannot manage its enduring vagrancy problem.

That’s the local level. But the national scene is, if anything, more inured to dysfunction. Conservatives delusionally and irresponsibly rallied behind Donald Trump even as he flatly refused even to consider the possibility of entitlement reform. As a consequence of that, the financial position of the federal government worsened by more than $8 trillion in 2019 alone — before the COVID-19 epidemic was an economic or fiscal factor. That’s going to keep happening year after year while Republicans spend their days making oogedy-boogedy noises about “cultural Marxism” and flattering conspiracy kooks.

The COVID-19 epidemic did not do us in. It is unlikely that any virus will. Our problem is not the extraordinary challenges but the ordinary ones — our ordinary failures in ordinary times. “How did you go bankrupt?” one character asks another in The Sun Also Rises. “Two ways,” comes the answer.

“Gradually, then suddenly.”