The People's Republic of Me

July 25, 2007—I mentioned Toynbee in my last post, and I'll admit I'm a bit of a sucker for that style of macro-history. Whether my enjoyment of Isaac Asimov's Foundation trilogy was a cause or an early manifestation of that enthusiasm, I don't know. If pressed, though, I'd speculate that one's affection for history varies directly with one's weakness for such stories. The enthusiast likes to see patterns in what he enjoys—they help him see, describe, and explain it to himself. I suspect that the kind of people who regard history as some kind of Humean debacle—just one damn thing after another—don't much care for the subject. Or maybe they just don't like the way history has turned out.

All that being said, not all theories of history amuse me. I suppose I really ought to read Strauss and Howe's Generations and their related works before saying cutting things about them. Nonetheless, I'll admit that the kind of things I've read them as saying strike me, in my ignorance, as being at about the same level of clever astrology: predictions that sound very specific but which can be interpreted in almost any manner so as to go unfalsified. So, is the upcoming generation going to be more "conformist" than previous ones? Sure it will: depending upon your theory of conformity, of course. By my lights, for instance, the short-term professional radicals that afflict college campuses are some of the most oppressively conformist people around, locked in a group-think and official uniform even more constrictive than that of the Young Republicans.

Say what you will about Toynbee or Spengler, they at least made their predictions the old-fashioned way: their cheats took the form of predictions of futures so distant that none of their contemporaries would be on hand to carp when they failed to come to pass.

I gather from this post at Chicago Boyz that the next "crisis" (do Strauss and Howe really tip their hat to Hari Seldon that way?) is yet to befall us, but that it is fast approaching, and may hit when the next president is in his or her second term. As the next crisis will play the same formal role as the Depression and World War II, would that make the next president into FDR? If so, does that cast the Bush/Clinton/Bush trilogy as Harding-Coolidge-Hoover? Was Reagan our Woodrow Wilson, Jimmy Carter our William Taft, and Richard Nixon (liberal betrayer of conservative values) our Teddy Roosevelt? See how much trouble you can get into if you start looking for patterns?

On the other hand, W. looks a lot more like Truman than Hoover; he belongs to that class of pugnacious bantam presidents (like Truman and Polk) who walked through history on the balls of their feet, looking for something to punch. Meanwhile Clinton compared himself to the Republican Eisenhower. So maybe we are due for a Roosevelt because we've been going backwards for awhile. And why not? If J. S. Bach could write a canon in contrary motion, why can't Clio?

The W.-Truman comparison is an old one, of course, and it's only going to gain more currency. Truman ended his presidency as a widely despised figure who'd gotten us into an intractable war for ideological reasons. Those who've kept faith with this president draw comfort from the fact that Truman is today widely respected and admired, and forecast that W. will be similarly remembered for his clear-eyed determination to confront and best a dangerous adversary. Well, maybe.

But presidential reputations rest on more than just the way they handled events during their administrations. It's not just that later events cast retrospective light on previous ones, the way that the Depression took so much luster off the presidencies of Harding and Coolidge. Presidents are hostage to the decisions of their successors, too, and their successors' willingness to pursue policies that could vindicate their predecessors. Truman looks good in retrospect, in large measure, because most of the presidents that came after basically followed his lead. Had Jimmy Carter and not Ronald Reagan—and his ideological supporters—been managing the 1980s and 1990s, Truman would probably be remembered today as a hot-tempered little ignoramus who set the stage for two foreign policy debacles (the Korean and Vietnam wars) out of a blinkered contempt for a plausible alternative economic and political model. Similarly, if Lincoln had not been elected, there's some chance that Fillmore, Pierce and Buchanan might be remembered not as grotesque incompetents but as wise and cautious statesmen who kept the Union going during a rough patch before ... what? I don't know; some nonviolent solution to the intra-Union strains ... evolved.

Remember, attempts to burnish the reputation of contemporaries by imagining how "history" will remember them are just an exercise in trying to bring about a preferred future by reinforcing or foreclosing alternate policies as imaginable or unimaginable. There's nothing wrong with such attempts, per se, but don't be seduced by them.

Finally, on an optimistic note, I surmise that, if Professor. J. Richard Gott III is correct, Mr. Madison's constitutional regime will almost certainly survive the first four years of the next presidential administration. On the other hand, it is unlikely to see the year AD 11,000. There's a science-fiction conceit for a humorist with an interest in history and politics: life in the decrepit federal republic circa AD 10,827, as the administration of the last president but one tries to manage public reaction to a psychohistorian's prediction of the imminent collapse of a nine-thousand-year-old institution. Isaac Asimov having passed on to the Foundation in the sky, I will ask: Are you listening, Mr. Reilly?

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July 22, 2007