Welcome to the Tuesday, a weekly newsletter about politics, language, and culture, though you may be happy to know that that is not usually the order of priority. The Tuesday is available only to NRPlus members — no scrubs! If you would like to join our happy if sometimes cantankerous community — and I hope you will — you can sign up here.
Fiat Formula
Having experienced a GDP contraction of about 1.5 percent in the last quarter, the United States may be on its way to a formal recession — two or more consecutive quarters GDP contraction — but, even if that turns out not to be the case, many economists forecast that the country is headed for a recession in the near future. As Bloomberg sees it, the spike in consumer prices has the United Kingdom enduring a “recession in all but name,” and you could say as much about the United States.
Of particular concern is the metric of “real” — meaning inflation-adjusted — wages, which declined by 1.7 percent between January of 2021 and January of 2022, and which have continued to decline over the course of this year, most recently falling by 0.6 percent in April. With real wages declining and household wealth being eaten into by declining share prices and home values, Americans’ real standard of living is under siege. It is bad when Americans report that they are feeling uneasy or pessimistic about the economy, as expressed in such metrics as the consumer-confidence index, but it is worse when those subjective evaluations are attested to by the quantifiable aspects of economic life.
I am very cynical about politics and super-double-atomic cynical about the Democratic Party and its operatives. That being said, I don’t think that the Democrats are pretending to care about abortion (they care about abortion more than they care about any other issue) or gun control, but I do expect them to lean into those issues extra heavily as the economic news stays bad or gets worse. Those debates already are ghastly and stupid, and I am confident that they will get more ghastly and more stupid in the coming weeks and months — more violent, too, as the arson attacks on anti-abortion groups and crisis-pregnancy centers suggest.
We maintain a silly, superstitious, and generally dishonest discourse about the relationship between the state of the economy and which party controls federal elected offices, especially the presidency. During the last year of his presidency, Donald Trump saw the worst quarter of economic contraction in U.S. history followed by the best quarter of GDP growth in U.S. history — neither of which had very much to do with the president or the policies of his administration. These were driven by Covid-19 shutdowns and the rollout of the vaccine, which produced a real GDP roller coaster in 2020. The Trump administration had some good economic policies (provided in no small part by Larry Kudlow and Kevin Hassett, National Review’s former economics editor and the senior adviser to NR’s Capital Matters, respectively) and some genuinely dumb policies (provided by cranks and crackpots such as Peter Navarro), but neither the good policies nor the bad ones were the main drivers of economic events in 2020 — or, indeed, throughout the Trump presidency. Presidents do not actually have the ability to enact a great deal of economic policy on their own (that’s why they all end up loving tariffs — tariffs they can do on their own), and don’t get much done when the other party is in full or partial control of Congress, as was the case for most of Trump’s presidency. And the effects of big changes in policy (such as the tax reforms enacted in 2017 by Acting President Paul Ryan) usually take a long time to really show themselves — for good and for ill.
So, it’s a dumb parlor game — but Washington’s favorite parlor game — to cook up narratives assigning credit and blame for dramatic economic events to presidents. The subprime-mortgage meltdown and related credit crisis that unfolded at the end of George W. Bush’s presidency were much more the result of policies enacted between the 1930s and the 1980s than they were anything of Bush’s doing. Ronald Reagan benefitted enormously from a booming economy in the 1980s, but the real beneficiary of Reagan-era economic reforms was Bill Clinton, whose intellectually empty and morally compromised administration was buoyed by the second half of the Long Boom.
Speaking of the Long Boom — long, but no so long as we might have hoped — here is an interesting bit of history: In Wired’s famous 1997 “Long Boom” essay, there were ten “spoiler” scenarios offered that might prevent the emergence of the prosperous, happy future the authors imagined. These included: (1) U.S.–China cold war; (2) Decline of productivity growth from new technology; (3) Russian decline into a mafia-state that menaces Europe; (4) Breakdown in European integration; (5) Ecological crisis that disrupts food supply; (6) Terrorism; (7) Unexpected increase in cancer rates; (8) Spike in energy prices as alternative-fuel sources fail to make up for disruptions in fossil-fuel provision; (9) Epidemic; (10) Revanchist cultural backlash against globalization. Other than being overwhelmed by increased cancer prevalence, we walked into every one of those socioeconomic land mines — nine out of ten! None of those was really the doing of a U.S. president or his administration. Maybe the Bush and Clinton and Bush administrations should have taken al-Qaeda and its predecessors more seriously, maybe the Obama administration should have done a, b, and c on energy instead of x, y, and z, maybe somebody should have given Vladimir Putin a hug back in the day — you can tell yourself any story that makes you feel good, but none of this was the result of any particular president, presidency, or presidential decision.
What is at work in our attitude toward the presidency is the “feudal mentality” as described by Paul Ricoeur in Memory, History, Forgetting:
How could rumor, the false news of the capacity of kings to cure scrofula, spread and impose itself unless with the help of a quasi-religious devotion as regards royalty? What had to be presumed, even while guarding against anachronism, was the force of a specific mental structure, the “feudal mentality.” In contrast to the history of ideas, not rooted in any social ground, history had to make a place for a deliberately historical treatment of “ways of feeling and thinking.” What was important were the collective, symbolic practices, the unperceived mental representations, of different social groups . . . .
Ricoeur was writing in response to his reading of Marc Bloch’s The Royal Touch: Sacred Monarchy and Scrofula in England and France. Everybody who laughs about how our peasant ancestors thought about the magical curative powers of kings should ask themselves why they think that the economy grows only when the president “cares about people like me” or some such related rubbish.
A better account of recession than the economics of the divine presidency is offered by the “Austrian” school of economics, so called because its principal exponents were two Austrian geniuses, F. A. Hayek and Ludwig von Mises, who did their most important work in the United Kingdom and the United States, respectively, owing to the lamentable European habit of chasing its best minds off the Continent. I am not an economist and surely will be guilty here of oversimplification, but the Austrian view of recessions seems to me very useful right now, though it may not be as useful in understanding other recessions. (Every unhappy economy, like every unhappy family, is unhappy in its own way.) The Austrians put money (particularly in the form of credit) at the center of their analysis, and argue that artificially cheap money (artificially low interest rates) causes capital to flow to investments that would be unprofitable in unmanipulated economic conditions — and a recession is what happens when those “malinvestments” are unwound when the manipulation becomes too expensive and the underlying economic reality asserts itself.
Our current trouble with inflation and stagnant growth is a particularly interesting example of this, to my mind at least, because in this situation the real economy — the exchange of physical goods and services — is at the center of the conversation because of supply-chain disruptions. If you can’t get that Ukrainian grain onto ships and get those ships into foreign ports, then it doesn’t matter what kind of clever policy engineering your government agencies or central bankers engage in — the wheat isn’t going to be there, and you cannot fiat it into the grain silos by means of policy or legislation. We have had a lot of very cheap money for a very long time, and negative interest rates are still a thing in some corners of the global economy. We have had oodles of capital sloshing around the economy, but somehow we still have not built the things that are most needed. And so we do not have enough oil and gas pipelines, tanker ships, regassification facilities, and other such unfashionable bits of life-giving infrastructure.
Lots of solar panels on rooftops in California, though.
I have, of course, strayed from the Austrian monetary analysis here, but you didn’t sign up for a retired theater critic’s newsletter for econometrics. The lesson that should be obvious to all of us by this point, however, is not something that you need a doctorate in economics to understand. “The economy” is not a product of government policy, the federal budget, the Department of Commerce, the Small Business Administration, or — thanks goodness — Joe Biden’s best ideas on any given Monday morning. (I am pretty sure President Biden’s best idea on any given Monday morning is: Oatmeal!) The economy is real stuff, real goods and real services that have real value because real people need and demand them. Congress and the president and the whole cabinet can get together and thunder with one voice: “Let there be baby formula!” and this will have no effect.
(“Fiat lux? Fiat formula!”)
We need a good deal less presidential magic in our economic thinking and a good deal more real-world — the real real world! — work. That’s true on both sides of the aisle. If progressives were serious about climate change, they’d be looking to replace coal with natural gas around the world and working to facilitate the expansion of nuclear energy — the obstacles to which are mainly financial and political rather than technical or physical. Conservatives who are serious about long-term growth and economic innovation have to be serious about the acquisition and cultivation of brainpower, which means working to fix what actually ails our universities rather than just using campus “woke” shenanigans to raise money — and it means taking a much more grown-up view of immigration as well.
The current economic troubles are likely to deliver control of Congress to Republicans in 2023 and may contribute to the election of a Republican president in 2024. But while I am confident in the near-term electoral prospects of the Republican Party, I am not at all convinced that Republicans know what to do with power. “The economy sucked under Joe Biden” may get you elected, but it isn’t a real analysis, and it isn’t the basis for a real agenda. People who love to advertise themselves as “patriots” should understand that winning the election is the beginning of the work — and the beginning of their obligation — rather than the culmination of it.
Opportunity!
Do you know the phrase, “’Tis an ill wind that blows no man some good”? The first recorded use is in a book of proverbs compiled by John Heyworth and published in 1546. What is means is that almost every change in circumstances has both winners and losers, that an event that hurts someone’s interests works to someone else’s advantage. The stock market is tumbling right now, and it is likely that house prices will decline, too. That is going to irritate a lot of older, wealthier people with lots of savings (and lots of house), but it is a great opportunity for younger people with less savings. I am not a stock-market forecaster (which is to say, I, like Christine O’Donnell, am not a witch), but the lower stocks go, the better the opportunity to invest. Unfortunately, when the market tanks, the fear often is contagious, and it scares off would-be buyers who should be attracted by the sudden discount. Now, imagine there’s a lawyer in a pinstripe suit standing behind me looking stern and saying, “This is not financial advice” and all that — but, unless you think that companies such as Apple, Google, and Facebook are in a death spiral along with the rest of the publicly traded companies listed on the stock markets, you should be alert to the opportunity presented by a bear market and/or a recession. This is (probably) the real beginning of the “buy low” part of “buy low, sell high.”
In Other News . . .
Politicians have this in common with writers and artists: They often spend a great deal of time thinking about how they will be remembered. They shouldn’t worry about how history will treat them — most of them won’t be remembered at all, at least not for very long.
You can flip through old issues of National Review and see names that once were household words — Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Gore Vidal, Jack Kemp — that already have faded into near-obscurity, even though none of them has been gone for more than 20 years.
Marcus Aurelius, who was the emperor of Rome when he wasn’t busy writing, observed that the cemeteries of his time were full of monuments with famous names on them and the notation, “The last of his name.” He had two good arguments against worrying about the views of posterity: One, posterity is likely to have no view of you at all; and, two, a wise man has very little regard for the opinions of his contemporaries, and there is no reason to think that the opinions of future generations will be any less contemptible. Why should the grandchildren of the rubes and scoundrels we know today be much improved?
Immortality — or at least a long afterlife — is a sneaky thing. When Joey Tempest (the stage name of Rolf Magnus Joakim Larsson) first picked out those four notes that would become the inescapable theme from Europe’s “The Final Countdown,” he surely did not know that he was writing a riff that would go on to be about as well-known as the opening bars of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, a couple of lines of music that would end up being the only thing he is known for. And that isn’t to denigrate his work: Most musicians never write one line of music that anybody cares about or remembers. There are millions of people in this world who know that music who have never heard of the song’s author or his band, who know the music from sporting events and from other contexts. Everybody knows this music. The London Symphony Orchestra plays “The Final Countdown,” though apparently doesn’t love it enough to hire a drummer for the evening. I’m sure Joey Tempest has done a thousand other worthy and interesting things with his life, but years after he is dead and gone, if anybody asks his grandkids what Grandpa Joey did, four notes on a piano (or nine if they’re needed) will suffice.
James Earl Jones has done everything from Stanley Kubrick movies (Dr. Strangelove) to Shakespeare (Hamlet, Coriolanus, King Lear), but, to a certain kind of person, he will always be first and foremost the voice of Darth Vader — a role he is still playing at 91 years of age. Presumably, he commands a higher salary today than the $7,000 he was paid for the original Star Wars movie. Coriolanus will probably outlive Star Wars, but I expect my grandchildren will be trying to Force-choke irritating fellow kindergartners someday decades hence.
Words About Words
Speaking of names that are “household words,” we owe that expression to William Shakespeare, as so often is the case. In the same passage — the famous St. Crispin’s Day speech from Henry V — Shakespeare also gives us “band of brothers.”
He that shall live this day, and see old age,
Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours,
And say ‘To-morrow is Saint Crispian:’
Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars.
And say ‘These wounds I had on Crispin’s day.’
Old men forget: yet all shall be forgot,
But he’ll remember with advantages
What feats he did that day: then shall our names.
Familiar in his mouth as household words
Harry the king, Bedford and Exeter,
Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester,
Be in their flowing cups freshly remember’d.
This story shall the good man teach his son;
And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remember’d;
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.
If you’re wondering whether it is St. Crispin or St. Crispian or St. Crispin Crispian, it is St. Crispin and St. Crispinian — the two were twin brothers martyred in the late third century.
Harry’s glorious victory at Agincourt is not the only battle to happen on St. Crispin’s Day, October 25 — the catastrophic “Charge of the Light Brigade” happened on the same day in 1854, and that one went the other way. We also owe a famous figure of speech to that battle, which inspired Tennyson’s famous poem:
“Forward, the Light Brigade!”
Was there a man dismayed?
Not though the soldier knew
Someone had blundered.
Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die.
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
Call me a reactionary (you would not be the first), but I think we really lost something when we stopped using the liturgical calendar for secular purposes. At many English schools the academic terms are Michaelmas, Hilary, and Trinity (the fall, winter, and spring terms, respectively), named for the feasts of Michaelmas (September 29), St. Hilary (January 13), and the Feast of the Holy Trinity (falling this year on June 12). Michaelmas and Hilary terms begin with the feasts days whose names they bear, while Trinity term ends on Trinity Sunday. The English court system begins its year with Michaelmas as well.
Of course, we still note when a battle falls on a significant day, but the significance of most religious holidays has faded, or at least the religious character of those holidays has faded. But the relics of that time remain with us. The British official calendar (used for civil, legal, and business purposes) was organized around the “quarter days” of Annunciation, Midsummer, Michaelmas, and Christmas, with the civil year beginning in April and the academic year beginning in September. That old protocol is the reason the English tax year ends in April and, like English courts, the U.S. Supreme Court term starts in October, right after Michaelmas.
And Furthermore . . .
You have probably already read me complaining about the abuse of the word iconic, as in this recent New York Times profile of Tom Hanks, inevitably described as an “iconic actor.” Iconic is, of course, the opposite of what an actor should be: An actor should be able to inhabit many different roles and show many different faces, as, indeed, Tom Hanks does. An icon can be only one thing.
But reading about Tom Hanks reminds me of something: There has been a kind of unofficial debate here at National Review, running for many years now, about the film Forrest Gump. The film once appeared at No. 4 on National Review’s list of great conservative movies, while Kyle Smith has argued, persuasively, that “everybody is wrong about Forrest Gump.”
Beneath the film’s takedown of flower power there is an irony: Gump isn’t really an avatar of patriotism, hard work, and clean living because he isn’t bright enough to make informed choices. His success is flat-out dumb luck. He strikes it rich not because he’s particularly good at shrimping but because, by chance, his is the only shrimp boat to survive a storm. The Apple shares fall into his lap. He isn’t even really a war hero; he is seen willingly traipsing into Viet Cong hidey-holes because he’s too dumb to know they’re dangerous, and when he rescues several men under fire, he isn’t aware of what the stakes are. When he gets shot in the butt, he thinks he’s been bitten by an animal. You can’t display courage under fire if you don’t understand fire in the first place, and Gump, who is mentally on the level of a toddler, shouldn’t even have been allowed to put on the uniform.
. . . The implication is that, whether we’re talking about war heroes or entrepreneurs, luck plays a bigger role in life than we like to acknowledge. The subtext of this seemingly conservative movie is as anti-conservative as an Elizabeth Warren speech: Don’t be too proud; you just got lucky. Life isn’t a meritocracy; it’s a crapshoot. Being pure of heart has nothing to do with Gump’s success unless you think God went out of his way to help him by trashing all of his competitors’ shrimp boats.
National Review’s misanthropic Florence King had mixed feelings about the novel but positively detested the film, seeing it as sentimental hogwash that raised idiocy to a virtue.
In that, as with much else, I’m in the Florence King camp.
But Forrest Gump is not the idiot-pilgrim story for our political era — that honor belongs to Being There.
Rampant Prescriptivism
“Whither tolerance?” asks the Wall Street Journal, which raises the question: “Whither whither?”
Because whither sounds like wither, some people, including some Wall Street Journal editors, have started to use it to suggest that something has declined and withered away, rather than using it to ask toward what end something is bound. Whither does not mean, “Whatever happened to?” It means, “Where is this going?”
Don’t let whither wither.
Also . . .
From the New York Times: “Capturing the Joyful Spirit of a Montana General Store: The state’s oldest continually [sic] open general store serves customers in Fishtail from all walks of life, from ranchers and miners to doctors and C.E.O.s.”
Continually means regularly or periodically, e.g., “I am irritated by the New York Times’s continually misusing common adverbs.” The word that means without interruption is continuous. “The General Wayne Inn was once thought to be the oldest continuously operated restaurant in the country,” or “The following periods will break an employee’s continuous service with their employer and may result in a new period of employment for re-engaged employees.”
The Cambridge English Dictionary defines continual as “happening repeatedly, usually in an annoying or not convenient way.”
Send your language questions to TheTuesday@NationalReview.Com
New Phone, Who Dis?
“The Hotel Is 642 Feet Tall. Its ‘Architect’ Says He Never Saw the Plans.”
We Get Feedback
The thing is, Mia, here at National Review, we think that facts matter. If you don’t think so — why?
Home and Away
You can buy my most recent book, Big White Ghetto: Dead Broke, Stone-Cold Stupid, and High on Rage in the Dank Wooly Wilds of the ‘Real America,’ here.
My National Review archive can be found here.
Listen to Mad Dogs & Englishmen here.
My New York Post archive can be found here.
My Amazon page is here.
To subscribe to National Review, which you really should do, go here.
To support National Review Institute, go here.
Recommended
You have probably heard a great deal about Matthew Continetti’s new book The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism, recently excerpted here in National Review. It is an interesting feature of our political life that conservatives care more about the history of conservatism than progressives care about the history of progressivism, and also that conservatives know more about the history of progressivism than progressives know about the history of conservatism or progressivism. Continetti’s book is very interesting and useful, and conservatives who wish to understand more about the movement with which they are aligned will benefit from reading it.
In Closing
It was a long time ago — 1781 — when Thomas Jefferson confessed, “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just.” There is more to that passage:
I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep for ever: that considering numbers, nature and natural means only, a revolution of the wheel of fortune, an exchange of situation, is among possible events: that it may become probable by supernatural interference!
On Sunday, I heard a very good sermon on the subject of Providence, based on the episode in the Book of Samuel in which David has a chance to assassinate Saul, who is trying to murder him, but declines to do so. It was a dilemma for David: Providence had delivered his enemy into his hands, but to raise his hand against God’s anointed king was a sacrilege.
What to do?
What is to be understood, the preacher argued, is that God’s design is not a riddle to be solved or a divine needle in the haystack of daily life and history but a framework in which to conduct our affairs and make decisions — including our political affairs and our political decisions: David’s dilemma was not only a personal moral matter but a profound political challenge as well. What the kingdom required was not a sudden flash of divine intervention — This is the moment! — but an enduring moral superstructure of honesty, decency, goodness, good order, regard for that which is sanctified and that which is of surpassing value. Tim Keller, the famous pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City, makes a related observation about the question of wisdom: We are not very often in our daily lives confronted with dramatic moral binaries but instead encounter complicated entanglement: Whom should I marry? What kind of work should I do? What is most important to me as a citizen? And most of these questions cannot easily be answered by means of a Thou shalt or a Thou shalt not. We have to be educated to handle these questions — we cannot simply rely on the moral intuition of untrained people, and even the best-educated are sometimes seduced into mistaking advantageous temporary circumstances for Providence.
I have often written that I do not think future historians will look back on this period as particularly important or interesting, and I still suspect that most of the domestic events between 9/11 and Covid will be judged to be of relatively little long-term consequence. But there also are times when I think that we might with Jefferson detect the “revolution of the wheel of fortune” in our own time, with the January 6 committee telling us one thing and the Dobbs opinion telling us something else. “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just” — and not just my country.
Pay the Belly Tax
Pancake has demands.
To subscribe to the Tuesday, follow this link.