Into a New Age

Lord, protect us from ourselves

I have no desire to compare George W. Bush with Jimmy Carter. I suspect history will view President Bush as a flawed but in many ways noble President, whose accomplishments have a longer wavelength that will resonate much better 40 years hence then they do today. Jimmy Carter was a self-absorbed ass and a buffoon, and remarkably still is. But, differences aside, it is becoming clear that they are bookends to the “Age of Reagan.”

The Carter years – following closely on the chaotic heels of Vietnam and Watergate – sufficiently traumatized the American voting public to make them pay attention to the whacky right-winger Reagan. And they liked what they heard. And thus began the Age of Reagan. A hallmark of those who define a given era is their ability to create the “default template” of the era. In music, The Beatles are the best examples of this. To this day, 90% of songs in any genre that you here adhere to the basic structure perfected by The Beatles. The next “new thing” turns out to be nothing more than “Love Me Do” with dirtier lyrics. President Reagan defined in a similar way – for conservatism specifically and for American politics as a whole – how we ought to think about the problems facing us. The questions we ask and the way we frame them to this day reflect Reagan.

Obviously, the George H. W. Bush Administration was a straight continuation of Reagan. Perhaps not as intuitively, Bill Clinton was a mirror reflection of the first Bush from the other side. But the issues and our way of thinking about them remained largely unchanged. The disaster that was Hillary’s foray into socialist health care made that perfectly clear. It is tempting to view the George W. Bush administration as yet another reflection of the Reagan agenda from a different angle - what with tax cuts, strong defense, etc., but one could see the old framework starting to deteriorate right from the start. While the tax cuts were straight out of the Reagan playbook, the whole notion of “compassionate conservatism” was an explicit effort to begin redefining the old working definition of conservatism, and government-heavy forays into education and immigration reform violated basic tenets of the Reagan framework.

If I had been more perceptive I would have picked up on this back when Al Gore first started bloviating about global warming. Whatever his drawbacks, old Al has a capacity for sniffing the breeze and identifying change in the air. He saw the old consensus starting to break. Now the emergence of Barack Obama and Mike Huckabee makes it clear beyond dispute that we are rapidly moving “past” Reagan. If you doubt this, just think about the fact that Huckabee feels no compulsion to seek the mantle of Reagan. He just went right past Saint Ronald and set about creating his own new set of frames. On the other side, Hillary seems to be running against the ghost of Reagan, while Barack has explicitly jettisoned the past with his “audacity of hope” rhetoric.

This is all just starting, so we cannot begin to understand how the new frames will shake out. But I can predict one thing: just as President George W. Bush is the last president of the Reagan era, the next president will be the transition into the next. Whoever is “lucky” enough to win in November will be our next Jimmy Carter. That will not necessarily be a reflection on the person’s skills or talents, but rather a reflection on the fact that the times have passed him (or her) by. The next president will be out of synch, and will struggle in almost all areas. And will last exactly one term. Then the next “Reagan” will emerge to knit together a new framework that is in synch with the times. Could be on the left or on the right. Whoever it is will feel like the proverbial “breath of fresh air” to enough Americans to make them excited again.

The only current candidate who could even remotely fit that bill five years hence is Obama. But many others will emerge. We can only hope that we have enough of a collective common sense to select wisely.

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