In fact, our collective eagerness to greet a savior on a white horse speaks to precisely what is most dysfunctional about our public life.
In fact, our collective eagerness to greet a savior on a white horse speaks to precisely what is most dysfunctional about our public life.
I t seems like longer, but it was only 2006 when my friend John O’Sullivan published his book The President, The Pope, and the Prime Minister, a genuinely fascinating survey of the overlapping careers of the three great heroes of the closing years of the Cold War: Ronald Reagan, Pope John Paul II, and Margaret Thatcher. It is a book that retains its interest even today — in many ways, its interest is heightened by the great difference between that era and this one.
Nostalgia must always be resisted, but one might be tempted to give up on politics and public affairs altogether when considering how those three roles have been recast. The descent of the papacy from the sainted John Paul II to the confused and incoherent Pope Francis has left the Catholic world, and the broader Christian world that looks to the pope as an example, bereft of moral leadership; Boris Johnson has shown himself to be a buffoon not fit to carry Mrs. Thatcher’s handbag; and if you are looking for good evidence against the theory of evolution, the drop-off from Ronald Reagan to Joe Biden (preemptively underlined by Donald Trump) offers tantalizing possibilities.
Hyperions to satyrs, and all that.
The president is not the United States — he is not even the majority of the U.S. government — the prime minister is not the United Kingdom, and the pope is not the church or the whole of Christendom. But there is still something in us that wants to vest the legitimacy and authority of key institutions in one man. Republicans already are talking publicly about the 2024 presidential contest (Will it be Ron DeSantis? Will Trump be in the mix?) and Democrats are engaged in mostly private speculation about whether Biden can or should run again.
There is no drama without the dramatis personae, but there are other and more important questions to be considered.
It is likely that what will mostly powerfully shape the U.S. government 100 years from now — if there is a U.S. government 100 years from now — is the vague and unwieldy matter of the internal institutional culture of Congress: not how one representative or senator behaves but the behavior of Congress as a whole. If Congress continues its slide into self-imposed subordination to the executive, then the presidency will continue to grow more imperial, more invasive, more self-aggrandizing, and, as an almost inevitable result, more autocratic as the decades pass — irrespective of which party controls the office most often. A country with an autocratic, strong-man government will have autocratic, strong-man politics, because the campaigning aspect of politics is only instrumental, fitted to whatever facts it finds, its shape and strategies almost always determined by immediate social realities rather than by any long-term philosophical or ideological program. As Barry Goldwater put it, politicians “hunt where the ducks are.”
That raises a second and related question, that of the character of the political parties. Like Congress, these, too, are slowly sinking into irrelevance. This is partly by design, the work of well-intentioned “reformers” who broke up the power of the parties in an effort to “democratize” them without understanding that this would effectively destroy them as functioning institutions. The parties also are diminished by the partisan media (both flavors) that make war on them (the “establishment”), both because they are power competitors and because doing so makes for a compelling storyline: We the People vs. the wicked elites is the theme on MSNBC as much as it is on Fox News and right-wing talk radio. Without parties and other mediating institutions, naked demagoguery almost inevitably becomes the dominant mode of politics.
Are there other institutions that might provide these mediating functions? The churches, which ought to be at the center of our community life, have shown themselves to be extraordinarily bad at politics, and when they have engaged actively with public affairs they have more often debased themselves in the pursuit of power than they have elevated the public discourse, profaning the church rather than sanctifying the political world. The universities fail in almost exactly the same way: Scholars in the public sphere more often abandon or pervert their own intellectual standards than they bring light and rigor to the muddle of politics, and the promises of social-media celebrity and punditry careers have seduced many academics into acting as apologists and marketing men for the worst kind of demagoguery.
The business community, to which conservatives used instinctively to look, is no more able than these — where corporate leaders aren’t engaged in ordinary petty advantage-seeking, they are easily captured by (or bullied into) woke-ism, and their social analysis appears to be stuck at the superficial level of an inspirational Nike commercial. Privately, many of our business leaders exhibit a great fluency in the issues in front of us — if anything, the conversations in Silicon Valley are more rich and realistic than the ones in Washington — but they are unable to convert this understanding into public action, even self-interested public action.
Around the time John O’Sullivan was writing The President, the Pope, and the Prime Minister, George F. Will shared a dismal observation about our failed project in Iraq:
An old baseball joke is pertinent. A manager says, “Our team is just two players away from being a championship team. Unfortunately, the two players are Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig.” Iraq is just three people away from democratic success. Unfortunately, the three are George Washington, James Madison, and John Marshall.
How many people away from enduring success is the United States in 2022? The answer is not one, or a dozen, but thousands. The leaders and the critical workers in the field are still among us — they have not been raptured away to Paradise — but our troubled and dysfunctional institutions do not seem to know how to use them. And that is the great problem that we must solve. It is not a problem with a one-sentence or one-paragraph solution, and not a problem that can be solved by passing one bill or a dozen of them.
It would be very fine if we found ourselves blessed again with leaders such as Reagan, Thatcher, and Pope John Paul II. But we should keep in mind that this will not be sufficient to turn things around for our ailing republic. And the fact that we are so eager to greet a savior on a white horse speaks to precisely what is most dysfunctional in our politics. The work that we need to do is not the work of one man, or one presidential administration, or even one generation. Most of that work will be performed in obscurity, and it will be generally thankless. But it is work that must be taken on.