You say you love Washington as a city. Well, I love New York as a city. New York is money. It is great thrusting towers of money: $4 million apartments, co-op fees, Christmas bonuses, stock options, Madison Avenue, Fifth Avenue, Wall Street. I love all that stuff, and these days money is king. We’re living amidst the greatest age of wealth creation in the history of the world. And not only New York money, but also Palo Alto money and Redmond, Wash., money. Has there ever been a time when business people had higher prestige and fewer sworn enemies? I don’t think so.
The great money tide is even sweeping through Washington. You can hear it like the roar of distant canon coming from outside the Beltway, from out near Dulles Airport where all those AOL and Internet moguls are tapping away in their office parks. They think they are creating a new world. They are certainly creating new subdivisions with river-view McMansions along the Potomac.
I don’t begrudge them any of it. Really. But eventually they are going to find, as every generation of money has found before, that there is more to life. Corniness doesn’t go over well online, but the fact is that the highest aspirations in the human heart have to do with God and public service, and while these two forces are perpetually being written off they always come back. The monuments and heroes, through history and across civilizations, are dedicated to kings, warriors, and leaders–not moguls, millionaires, or even software code writers. Eventually people find meaning in causes larger than their self-interest (now I sound like John McCain). The virtues George Washington and Abraham Lincoln embodied–such as duty, sacrifice, courage and greatness–are public virtues. They are a step up the ladder from the private virtues of Benjamin Franklin–such as industriousness, punctuality, thrift.
You mention the heroic age of American politics, from the Depression to the Cold War. That was an age dominated by men like Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and John F. Kennedy. Those were the sons of millionaires who went into public service because they thought it was loftier than going into banking or bootlegging. We’re constantly honoring those guys, but do we even remember the names of their ancestors who made the family millions in the first place? In most cases we don’t. In the case of Kennedy we have a father who was desperate to see his sons achieve the political prominence he couldn’t achieve.
I can’t believe that human nature has suddenly gone so flat that the children of today’s Internet moguls won’t seek fulfillment in public service, just as the children of past moguls have done. And I can’t believe that the world will have become so perfect that there won’t remain large problems for them to address. Somehow I think the problems will be bigger than the sorts of zoning concerns and traffic management issues that come up before state and local governments–the forms of government you predict are now sufficient for our needs.
Of course you’re right to point out that government no longer seems like the “driver” of the economy the way it did when socialism and Keynesianism were in full flower. I’m not a conservative for nothing: I celebrate that. But that doesn’t mean we should go out to the other extreme and conclude that the course of history is beyond our control. Many of my conservative friends have made exactly that mistake, falling into a kind of fatalism: Economic forces are unstoppable, technological change is unstoppable, cultural change is beyond us. We are just pawns to the great forces of history.
I suspect that we will find limited but energetic ways to use government–as, say, Disraeli did in the 19th century, or Teddy Roosevelt did in the 20th.
Somebody once said that at bottom every dispute is an argument between interpretations of history. You have your interpretation: 60 years of government activism, which has come to a close. I have another. We are living in a temporary anti-political era. Post-war eras are always that: the 1920s after World War I, the 1950s after World War II, and now the 1990s after the Cold War. But anti-political eras end with astonishing swiftness. They do so either because something bad happens, as in the 1930s, or they do so because people long for something better than just making another dollar, as in the 1960s when people responded to the calls of JFK and Martin Luther King. I hope that when we snap out of our anti-political era, as we will, it will be because we want to, not because we are forced to.
