[Vision2020] Paul Krugman: "Where Have all the Grown-Ups Gone?"

[Nicholas Gier]

NY Times, 5/28/19
“Be a mensch,” my parents told me. If your ethnic or social background was
different, your parents might have told you to “man up,” be a stand-up guy,
or whatever. And yes, the notion used to be gendered. But one imagines and
hopes that many parents are saying something equivalent to their daughters.
Whatever the words used, the values our elders were trying to instill were
clear: To be a good person — maybe even more to the point, to be a grownup
— you had to be willing to take responsibility. You would do what needed to
be done. You would be honest about and learn from your failures. A bit of
pride in your achievements was O.K., but boasting and grandiosity weren’t.
And you should never, ever whine.
Obviously few people ever lived up fully to this ideal. But many tried, and
even those who didn’t at least pretended to be mensches. This was
especially true of people who aspired to leadership positions. Who, after
all, would follow a strutting, whining liar who wears his immaturity and
insecurity on his sleeve, who boasts about imaginary successes while
constantly blaming others for his very real failures?
The answer, unfortunately, seems to be a lot of Americans.
So what happened to us? How did we become the kind of society in which
large numbers of people not only accept but admire Donald Trump, surely the
least mensch-like person ever to occupy the White House, possibly the least
mensch-like public figure in American history?
The ascendancy of the toddler-in-chief
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didn’t
come out of nowhere. Way back in 2006 I wrote about the Bush
administration’s “mensch gap
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its officials’ inability to accept responsibility for the botched
occupation of Iraq, the botched response to Hurricane Katrina, and so on.
Readers of a certain age may go back even further, and remember how
shocking it seemed at the time when a self-centered blowhard like Newt
Gingrich became speaker of the House. But with Trump the demenschification
of American leadership has reached its apotheosis.
The infantilization of our politicians presumably has deeper cultural
roots, although I can’t claim any special understanding of what those roots
may be. What I will say is that something has gone very wrong with at least
that aspect of American values — and to me, at least, this particular kind
of moral collapse seems far more important than any of the things most
pundits who rant about declining values like to talk about.
The good news is that this hasn’t happened to everyone in political life.
In case you hadn’t realized this already, one thing made very clear by the
events surrounding last week’s Trump infrastructure tantrum was that Nancy
Pelosi is every bit the mensch Trump isn’t: self-possessed, disciplined,
someone who is trying to do her job rather than gratify her ego. The whole
disgusting tale of the doctored video
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purporting
to show Pelosi drunk was in a way a tribute to her virtues; even to pretend
to bring her down to Trump’s level the right had to engage in outright
fraud.
And as far as I can tell, all the leading candidates for the Democratic
nomination are also adults. I’d like to think that this will matter in the
general election. But to be honest, I’m not sure that it will.


-- 

A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they
shall never sit in.

-Greek proverb

“Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity.
Immaturity is the inability to use one’s understanding without guidance
from another. This immaturity is self- imposed when its cause lies not in
lack of understanding, but in lack of resolve and courage to use it without
guidance from another. Sapere Aude! ‘Have courage to use your own
understand-ing!—that is the motto of enlightenment.

--Immanuel Kant
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