At the beginning of his essay “Thank God for the Atom Bomb,” the literary critic (and World War Two Army veteran) Paul Fussell recalled a poetic advertising slogan he used to see on the sides of city buses.
In life, experience is the great teacher.
In Scotch, Teacher’s is the great experience.
Not having tasted the potation named in the second line, I offer no opinion about the truth of the statement declaring its excellence. About the first line of the couplet, however, I must register a certain skepticism. Is experience “the great teacher” in life? An honest answer, I believe, should begin with the hoary qualification “that depends.”
Fussell wanted to emphasize the importance of “experience, sheer, vulgar experience” in determining one’s attitude toward the morality of dropping atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The more distant one’s experience of the war, he had noticed, the more likely it was that one would wax moralistic about the decision to use those ghastly weapons.
Fussell himself, being part of a group scheduled to invade the Japanese home islands, had a different attitude. Did you know that the US military is still drawing on the store of Purple Hearts it manufactured during the run-up to the planned invasion? War planners estimated that the incursion would take more than a year and cost one million American lives. One million. Fussell and his fellow soldiers, hearing the news that the detonation of two big bombs had caused the Japanese to surrender, were overjoyed. “In general,” he noted, “the principle is, the farther from the scene of horror, the easier the talk.”
Experience suggests that Fussell is right. For confirmation, visit a faculty lounge near you, read the New York Times or the Atlantic, listen to a talking head on CNN.
Nevertheless, there are many cases in which experience, far from being a great teacher, is like the proverbial water sluicing off the back of a duck. It can get no traction. It doesn’t grip. It just dribbles away.
Which leads me to the political principle a friend summed up in a pithy observation: “To be a liberal is to be unable to learn from the past.” Sometimes experience is a great teacher. Sometimes it is hardly more than a distraction. My friend’s point is that Democrats seem to derive no sustenance from their experience. The failure of their policies does not lead them to adjust their expectations or their actions. It causes them to double down on their mistakes.
The history of America’s welfare apparatus since the time of FDR and, especially, since the time of LBJ and the so-called Great Society programs, is a case in point. All that was supposedly a “war on poverty.” But the canny commentator who said the war on poverty did not abolish poverty but rather institutionalized it was correct.
This has been pointed out ever and anon. No matter. The welfare establishment has just continued to grow. In part, its imperviousness to the teachings of experience is a function of the principle of inertia applied to the workings of politics. The object in motion is the bureaucracy, upon which no countervailing force seems to work.
There is also a large element of naivety coursing through the membranes of the Democratic establishment. This may seem odd, since the Democratic machine is famous for its cynicism. But naivety and cynicism can comfortably coexist when they both advance the same agenda. It is an open secret that the Saudis and other oil-rich countries funded the climate change movement in order to slow America’s exploitation of its own energy resources. It was both naive and cynical for Democrats to hop on to the “climate change” bandwagon. They did so anyway.
As I write, there is a great outcry among the credulous and conspiracy-minded about the development of AI data centers. That outcry is enthusiastically supported by China and other countries competing with America in the race to enhance and deploy the tools of artificial intelligence. It is understandable that China should wish to encourage these latter-day Luddites in their protest against novel looms of technology. But you might have hoped that experience would have taught them the folly of succumbing to such politically underwritten protests against the engines of progress and prosperity.
It was both naive and cynical for Democrats to hop on to the ‘climate change’ bandwagon
No such luck. The Democrats are caught in an odd situation. Their more moderate elements are also the least potent. If you want the truth about the agenda of the Democrats, you have to query the socialist, anti-American wing of the party. Some Democrat leaders have sought to distance themselves from the pro-Palestinian, pro-open borders, pro-climate hysteria and race-baiting wing of the party. But that is where the bulk of the party’s energy circulates. Does it represent a winning coalition? Polls are essentially meaningless this far from an election. Or, rather, their meaning inheres in their promotional or propaganda value, not in their accuracy as forecasts.
Conventional wisdom tells us that the Republicans will do poorly in the midterms. That’s the voice of one sort of experience. There are other, competing voices. Democrats are beholden to the interest groups that keep them in power in a more thoroughgoing way than Republicans are. They rarely break ranks. That is one reason they are able to act in concert and enforce conformity more completely than Republicans can.
It is also why Democrats tend to be more ineducable than Republicans. In Four Quartets, T.S. Eliot mournfully wrote: “We had the experience but missed the meaning.” That might be the unacknowledged slogan of the Democrats today. It remains to be seen how that lacuna will play out on the field of practical politics.
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