Iconoclasm or the End of Illusion?

I think that Peggy Noonan has a point in her latest Wall Street Journal column:

When Republicans rebel against the status quo, it’s a powerful thing. They produced in their 2016 rebellion something new: They changed the nature of the presidency itself. The pushing back against elites entailed a pushing against standards. It’s always possible a coming presidential election will look like a snap-back to the old days, a senator versus a governor, one experienced political professional against another. But we will never really go back to the old days. Anyone can become president now, anyone big and colorful and in line with prevailing public sentiment.

We have entered the age of the postheroic presidency. Certain low ways are forgiven, certain rough ways now established. Americans once asked a lot of their presidents. They had to be people not only of high competence and solid, sober backgrounds, but high character. In modern presidencies you can trace a line from, say, Harry S. Truman, who had it in abundance, to Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan, who also did.

But the heroic conception of the presidency is over. Bill Clinton and his embarrassments damaged it. Two unwon wars and the great recession killed it. “If you like your doctor you can keep your doctor” buried it. When you deliberately lie like that, you are declaring you have no respect for the people. And the people noticed.

They would like to have someone admirable in the job, someone whose virtues move them, but they’ve decided it’s not necessary. They think: Just keep the economy growing, don’t start any new wars, and push back against the social-issues maximalists if you can.

In the last cycle we spoke of shy Trump voters—those who didn’t want to get in an argument over supporting him. I suspect this cycle we’ll call them closeted Trump voters—those who don’t want to be associated with the postheroic moment, who disapprove of it, but see no realistic alternative.

In time we’ll see you lose something when you go postheroic. Colorful characters will make things more divided, not less. They’ll entertain but not ennoble. And the world will think less of us—America has become a clownish, unserious country with clownish, unserious leaders—which will have an impact on our ability to influence events.

I close with another entity of American life that should be worried about seeming like it doesn’t care about its own country. It is what used to be called big business.

America has always been in love with the idea of success. It’s rewarded the creation of wealth, made household saints of the richest men in the world. We were proud they lived here.

But big business, especially big tech executives and bankers, should be thinking: In this century they’re coming at you left and right.

The left used to say, “You didn’t build that,” while the right said, “You did.” But now there’s a convergence, with both sides starting to think: This country made you. It made the roads you traveled; it made the expensive peace in which your imagination flourished; it created the whole world of arrangements that let you become rich.

You owe us something for that. You owe us your loyalty. And if you allow us to discern—and in this century you have been busy allowing us!—that you do not really care about America, that your first loyalty isn’t to us but to “the world” or “global markets,” then we will come down on you hard.

but it’s as much about our illusions of the presidency as it is about its realities. It’s hard to know where to begin. While I agree that we have entered the age of the postheroic presidency, I think that we ever had one is greatly exaggerated. Harry Truman was a Kansas City haberdasher without a college education and with mob contacts. The presidents prior to him were graduates (in reverse chronological sequence) of Harvard, Stanford, Amherst, Ohio Central, and Princeton, in a time when having a college education more than anything else signaled being a member of the aristocracy. What is most notable is that the Democratic presidents of that age tended to be members of the eastern aristocracy while the Republicans did not. Heroes? Maybe not so much except possibly in retrospect.

If she thinks that this:

America has become a clownish, unserious country with clownish, unserious leaders

is new, she’s mistaken. It goes back to the very foundations of the Republic. We were nouveau riche. Our leaders were not members of the European upper class, we did not go to the right schools, we did not have the right manners or backgrounds. The play that President and Mrs. Lincoln were attending when he was assassinated lampooned that attitude. The Europeans respect our economic and military power, full stop. As we allow the former and maybe the latter to slip, they respect us less. If our military and economic power today were what it was in 1946, there is no president so buffoonish that they wouldn’t kneel to kiss his or her ring. Their respect is as honest and sincere as professional wrestling.

How about Lyndon Johnson? Richard Nixon? Heroic?

I think that what has happened is that over the past 50 years there has been an ongoing decline in standards of public morality and in the presidency. Lyndon Johnson wasn’t anybody’s idea of an aristocrat nor was Nixon, and Nixon’s tapes underscored that. Reagan was divorced, something that was outrageous once upon a time. Clinton was a serial adulterer. That would have been an outright disqualification but Clinton, understanding of his audience, confessed publicly. It’s okay to be a sinner so long as you’re a repentant sinner.

Fast forward to the present day with its 24 hour new cycle, sex tapes, and a videocamera in every individual’s hands. Any distinction between fame and notoriety that ever existed has evaporated. We live in the age of hypocrisy, the tribute that vice pays to virtue.