It’s fairly safe giving George Will a certain amount of credit, on the whole he delivers a worthwhile column. It usually makes more sense than whatever else is taking up op-ed space that day. There are exceptions. A few years back he pitched a curve that had me tugging at the whiskers. Joining the onslaught against the dastardly evils of populism, Will recalled William Jennings Bryan’s “Cross of Gold” speech as a futile also ran’s idea that was going nowhere. If you don’t know that famous oration, Bryan was pleading to loosen up the money supply. “The Great Commoner,” as he was known, thought the gold standard kept all the real jack in the hands of fat-cats.
The gilded professoriate, that hears revolting lese-majeste in the word “Brexit,” has been proven wrong time and again.
Three years before the Democratic Convention of 1896, when the speech was delivered in Chicago, John Pierpont Morgan was engaged by President Cleveland to broker gold purchases for the U.S. government. It wasn’t a good look; in 1869 Jay Gould and Jim Fisk sold the idea that rising gold prices would improve farmers’ bottom lines to the Grant administration. Going along with the theory the Treasury began buying a lot of gold. Unsurprisingly, Gould and Fisk held long positions in the commodity at the time. Finding that out soon clued President Grant in to what was going on. A panic occurred when the government reversed course and sold. Many investors were wiped out in a single day. Voters in the 1890’s, only 14 years later, had good reason to raise their guards when government involvement in gold trading became news.
But none of that history is helpful in making sense of Will’s perspective on Bryan’s iconic speech. Modern monetary policy far exceeds anything Bryan ever had in mind. The puritanical progressive was demanding “bimetallism,” which meant the “free coinage of silver.” Nixon took us off any “metallism” altogether, by abandoning the gold standard in 1971. By that time U.S. coin had already been debased with baser metals than silver for years. Once the dollar was detached from Fort Knox, ink and paper replaced any metal defining currency’s value. We are at a point now where most of the money isn’t physical at all, it is represented in electrons.
History is laden down with strange twists and turns. Today, it tends to be those cursed “populists” who want the gold standard back. Bryan ran three times on the Democratic ticket and got enormous support from the short-lived Populist Party of the fin-de-siècle era. What was ruled kooky stuff by all the right people circa 1900 is viewed as gospel by the economic sages of the 21st century. Warren Buffett once called gold “barbaric” as an investment, so it’s safe assuming he wouldn’t back the money supply with it. Should we then conclude that the peasants with pitchforks of the McKinley days knew better than Morgans, Rockefellers, Harrimans et al?
George Bernard Shaw said: “Democracy substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.” Does evidence exist to support faith in the competence of the “corrupt few”? Going over the entirety of Shaw’s opinions, he seemed to think there was. At one point or another he was on board with Mussolini, Hitler, and Stalin, given more time Pol Pot might have taken him in. Does that render GBS leaning toward corrupt or incompetent? Political decisions would be a lot simpler if the game could be reduced to axioms. They never work. Walter Lippmann described the sticking points in an Atlantic article, The Basic Problem of Democracy, over 100 years ago: “No man has ever thought out an absolute or a universal ideal in politics, for the simple reason that nobody knows enough, or can know enough, to do it.”
What looks like good sense and valid opinion can shift drastically as time goes by. Back in 1846 Polish nobility in Galicia wanted the ruling Austrian Empire out of their bailiwick. They tried rousing the serfs to the rebellious cause with promises of rights, land, and fair treatment. The ones tilling fields weren’t, as the saying goes, “as stupid as they looked.” Plowmen turned on the boyars who had applied the lash and ravished their daughters. Anti-Habsburg conspirators who weren’t massacred or managed to escape were turned over to Austrian authorities. It wasn’t because Polish peasantry had some peculiar keenness for the ruling dynasty. They simply felt safer in the clutches of the empire than at the mercy of local princes.
Once the Soviets, who had teamed up with the Nazis to seize half of Poland in 1939, relinquished their grasp on that country, dreaded “populism” reared its head again. Poles wary of the new, improved empire hailing from Brussels were speaking up before the USSR’s fall. No sooner had Warsaw signed on to the Treaty of Accession in 2004 and the Euro-skeptics were at it again. EU-o-philes were aghast, they saw a swastika tattooed on the hind quarters or embroidered on the underwear of anyone second guessing the enlightened Empire. Those Poland firsters have been subdued, for the moment, proximity to Putin’s military adventurism has them slugging EU-phorian elixirs with a shuddery wince … a beverage choice that may not last forever.
Were Polish “populists” right or wrong to turn on native princes and stand with Austro-Hungary in 1846? You can read all the books and your answer still might be, you’d have to be there. Were the ex-GIs who took McGinn County, Tennessee by force and bloodshed in 1947 right or wrong? Same answer applies. Local rule is no political panacea. Gangsters have been known to curtail certain crimes on their turf. What the local citizenry owes for this service is not subject to referendum. The so-called “social contract,” that maintains you have acceded to who has power over you, is never a simple concept to rationalize. Feds, mostly, took down the mob. The question now is how much of our legal tradition they took down with it.
There are, no doubt, Americans who would prefer a single Ministry of Public Security like China’s, rather than the federated system of policing we have. The necessity of “qualified” human forces having physical power over the population is always in precarious balance. The fact of that necessity will always result in occasional, and under some regimes frequent, ugly consequences hard for decent people to abide. Any organization whose methods include resort to physical force, whether a street gang, tiered coat and tie criminal syndicate, local constabulary or federal agency, relies on omerta to maintain esprit de corps. After dwelling in this ideological environment for a few years, it’s easy to discard the notion that “civilians” are your peers, as silly. It’s even sillier believing someone arriving in the Magic Mountain region of Switzerland on a private jet to hobnob and opine on international regulation is your political equal.
You can fight city hall and usually have some idea who you are up against. Taking on more imperial forces isn’t so clear cut. Is it really delusional, or as some have it “fascist,” to ask where academic, corporate, and governmental policies you might find repugnant originated? Is it believable that mass demonstrations simply erupt simultaneously? Is attachment to the culture that defines you a species of “hatred”? When the world’s most powerful wine and dine at one big table to fix what’s wrong is it ever anything less than a way around the principle of one-man-one-vote?
The Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt, whose fellow Nazi’s began to cool on before the war started, supposedly told us: “Everything important was said before 1848.” Schmitt, like Martin Heidegger, was a Hitlerite that enlightened academia can’t quite let go of as a thinker. The ideas, reviled as the revolutionary “populism” in 1848, are what eventually took Europe — after gaining enormous momentum from the devastation of WWI — from theistic monarchy to constitutionalism. Where that so-called continent is now is a question of worldwide fate. Had the demands of “radicals” been met in 1848 would The Great War have ever happened?
Without British and French forces staking claims and laying down law in the Levant in 1915 would Western service men be shedding blood there in the 21st century? After the Sykes-Picot agreement amidst two floundering post-Versailles treaties the RAF was deployed to force Arabs and Kurds together in Mesopotamia to form a “nation” high command had constructed out of whole cloth. Ordinary citizens of the UK suddenly found themselves enemies of Kurds who hadn’t attacked them and they never heard of. It’s hard to imagine a Welsh coal miner or a London book merchant finding any benefit coming their way by bombing shepherds in the Zagros and Taurus mountains. Can anyone think of a long, or even short, term gain that crypto-war ever had for either the UK or Iraqis?
Throughout 20th century newspapers had features, post jump vignettes, snippets, and stubs referring to wars — often called something else in copy — and rumors of wars that the funding public learned of post-carnage. Compiling a good summary of what the people in “democracies” ever got out of any of them is a challenge that the authors from high academia have yet to meet.
In the meantime, domestic policy making is often influenced — and even decided — by unelected elites attending conclaves in faraway places. Media distracts the public from concerns about the opacity of such clambakes by calling the suspicious “far-right’ or the “F” word. Some writers have expressed ambivalence about the definition of a “populist.” Are they ones who believe ideology should not disfigure literally accurate descriptions of physical reality? Joseph Goebbels’ contempt for such nuisances was equal to legacy media’s today.
We now know with certainty that when the Federal Reserve prints currency on fiat, without metallic backing, Wall Street insiders are always first at the trough. “Quantitative easing” invariably widens the slice on the wealth pie chart for those richest pre-QE. Meanwhile, government secrecy is no secret. What we don’t know about how our fate is decided inside the beltway gets classified by the reams daily. When Bill Clinton said “there is nothing patriotic in hating your country, or pretending you can love your country and despise your government,” he evoked a question. Are government and country synonymous? How can it be “your country,” much less your government, when so much of how their business is conducted is kept from you? In the prevalence of these conditions you are ignorant of how you are ruled and administered. If there is anything less than “patriotic” in demanding more intelligence on ruling action, let’s make the most of it.
Pope may not have approved, but I paraphrase his most famous lines from an An Essay on Criticism, “a little learning is a dang’rous thing, drink deep or taste not the Pierian Spring” this way: If you want to know you can find out more, if you already know you can find out nothing. Giving a long, careful look at 20th century annals now, leaves me asking who really knows what makes sound policy? The gilded professoriate, that hears revolting lese-majeste in the word “Brexit,” has been proven wrong time and again. I’m not sure at all that those doggoned “populists” don’t have a better long-run record. In any case Will was right about one thing: our “cross” at the moment, isn’t made of gold. It’s constituted of flimsy, multi-culturally misappropriated stuff which has long proved toxic.
READ MORE from Tim Hartnett:
The Industry of Hate and the Tyranny of Manufactured Virtue
Ivory Towers and the Volume of Women
